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Question: What were the team's thoughts on distributing the corpus, Grad A's explanation of his vectors for the support vector machine, the future of data alignments, high mismatch, and evaluation? Article: Can you , say your name and talk into your mike one at a time ? phd c: This is Eric on channel three , I believe . postdoc e: Oh , darn , what am I doing wrong ? undergrad d: Can you see me on channel four ? Really ? grad a: Yeah , I s undergrad d: My lucky day . postdoc e: screen no , it is , oh , maybe it just warmed up ? grad a: No . postdoc e: Oh , darn , can you can't see channel five yet ? grad a: well , the mike isn't close enough to your mouth , so . postdoc e: Oh , this would be k OK , is that better ? grad a: S , try speaking loudly , undergrad d: I like the high quality labelling . grad a: so , postdoc e: Hello , grad a: OK , good . undergrad d: David , can we borrow your labelling machine to improve the quality of the labelling a little bit here ? postdoc e: hello . phd b: One t undergrad d: How how many are there , one to five ? phd b: One five , yeah . postdoc e: Would you like to join the meeting ? grad a: Well , we don't wanna renumber them , postdoc e: I bet grad a: cuz we 've already have like , forms filled out with the numbers on them . grad a: OK , Dan , are you on ? phd b: I 'm on I 'm on two and I should be on . undergrad d: Want to join the meeting , Dave ? Do we do do we have a spare , grad a: And I 'm getting lots of responses on different ones , so I assume the various and assorted P Z Ms are on . undergrad d: We ' r we 're we ' r This is this this is a meeting meeting . postdoc e: This is abou we 're we 're mainly being taped but we 're gonna talk about , transcription for the m future meeting meetings . grad a: Right , Dan ? undergrad d: So , I don't understand if it 's neck mounted you don't get very good performance . grad a: What are you doing ? undergrad d: Cuz when you do this , you can Rouww - Rouww . postdoc e: Why didn't I you were saying that but I could hear you really well on the on the transcription on the , tape . grad a: Well , I m I would prefer that people wore it on their head phd b: I I don't know . grad a: It 's very badly designed so it 's phd b: It 's very badly designed ? undergrad d: What do you mean it doesn't go over the ears ? phd b: Why ? It 's not s It 's not supposed to cover up your ears . grad a: Yeah but , there 's nowhere to put the pad so it 's comfortable . phd b: it 's only badly postdoc e: So that 's what you 're d He 's got it on his temples so it cuts off his circulation . grad a: Well , you know , I 'm just that sort of digit - y g sorta guy . phd b: We didn't postdoc e: Now , just to be sure , the numbers on the back , this is the channel ? phd b: That 's the microphone number . phd b: Transcript number phd c: OK , this is Eric on microphone number three , undergrad d: This is Beck on mike four . Should I turn off the VU meter Dan ? Do you think that makes any difference ? phd b: Oh , God . grad a: Why ? Are you gonna do something other than hit " quit " ? phd b: No , but I 'm gonna look at the , logs as well . postdoc e: you said turn off the what ? grad a: The VU meter which tells you what the levels on the various mikes are and there was one hypothesis that perhaps that the act of recording the VU meter was one of the things that contributed to the errors . undergrad d: Yeah , but Eric , you didn't think that was a reasonable hypothesis , right ? postdoc e: I See . grad a: That was me , undergrad d: Oh , I 'm sorry y grad a: I thought that was undergrad d: That was malarkey . undergrad d: Are - are yo are you recording where the table mikes are by the way ? phd b: No . undergrad d: Why not ? phd b: I think , I s I spoke to somebody , Morgan , about that . undergrad d: Why don't you just do this ? grad a: that 's what we 've done before . phd b: I know what they they 're they 're four , three , two , one . grad a: Which means we need to move this thing , and sorta decide how we 're actually going to do things . phd b: It 'll be a lot easier if we have a if we have them permanently in place or something like that . undergrad d: Is this b is this being recorded ? grad a: That 's right . undergrad d: I think Lila actually is almost getting r pretty close to even getting ready to put out the purchase order . grad a: OK , so , topic of this meeting is I wanna talk a little bit about transcription . , I 've looked a little bit into commercial transcription services and Jane has been working on doing transcription . , and so we wan wanna decide what we 're gonna do with that and then get an update on the electronics , and then , maybe also talk a little bit about some infrastructure and tools , and so on . , you know , eventually we 're probably gonna wanna distribute this thing and we should decide how we 're gonna how we 're gonna handle some of these factors . phd b: Distribute what ? grad a: ? phd b: The data ? grad a: Right . , so we 're we 're collecting a corpus and I think it 's gonna be generally useful . grad a: and so we will undergrad d: u Using , like , audio D V Ds or something like that ? grad a: Excuse me ? phd b: Yes . Yeah , audio D V C Ds , undergrad d: Or t grad a: you know . grad a: And and so how we do we distribute the transcripts , how do we distribute the audio files , how do we how do we just do all that infrastructure ? phd c: Well , I think , for that particular issue ther there are known sources where people go to to find these kind of things like the LDC for instance . postdoc e: Yeah , grad a: Right , but but so should we do it in the same format as LDC postdoc e: that 's right . grad a: and what does that mean to what we 've done already ? phd b: Right . The It 's not so much the actu The logistics of distribution are secondary to preparing the data in a suitable form for distribution . So , as it is , it 's sort of a ad - hoc combination of stuff Dan set and stuff I set up , which we may wanna make a little more formal . phd b: And the other thing is that , University of Washington may want to start recording meetings as well , grad a: Right . phd b: in which case w w we 'll have to decide what we 've actually got so that we can give them a copy . So I have a bunch of scripts with X Waves , and some Perl scripts , and other things that make it really easy to extract out and align where the digits are . And if U d UW 's going to do the same thing I think it 's worth while for them to do these digits tasks as well . grad a: And what I 've done is pretty ad - hoc , so we might wanna change it over to something a little more standard . undergrad d: An - and there 's interest up there ? grad a: What 's that ? undergrad d: There 's interest up there ? grad a: Well they they certainly wanna collect more data . grad a: And I would like that just to get a disjoint speaker set and a disjoint room . , one of the things Morgan and I were talking about is we 're gonna get to know this room really well , phd c: undergrad d: Did you notice the fan difference ? phd b: Oh , now you 've touched the fan control , now all our data 's gonna be undergrad d: Hear the difference ? grad a: Oh , it 's enormous . undergrad d: Do you wanna leave it off or not ? postdoc e: That 's better . phd b: That 's undergrad d: Yeah , the You sure ? phd b: Oh , yeah . phd b: So it could be that it 's not actually wired backwards undergrad d: That 's right . phd c: It would you know , it would real really mean that we should do short meetings when you turn off the turn off the air conditioning , grad a: Carbon monoxide poisoning ? undergrad d: Short meetings , that 's right . undergrad d: Actually , the a th air the air conditioning 's still working , that 's just an auxiliary fan . grad a: So phd c: So , in addition to this issue about the UW stuff there was announced today , via the LDC , a corpus from I believe Santa Barbara . phd c: And I don't know exactly how they recorded it but apparently there 's a lot of different styles of speech and what not . phd c: And postdoc e: They had people come in to a certain degree and they and they have DAT recorders . Right ? postdoc e: I I assume so , actually , I hadn't thought about that . Unless they added close field later on but , I 've listened to some of those data and I , I 've been I I was actually on the advisory board for when they set the project up . phd b: What 's it sound like ? postdoc e: I 'm glad to see that it got released . grad a: Yeah , I I wish postdoc e: So it it 's a very nice thing . grad a: I wish we had someone here working on adaptation phd c: S grad a: because it would nice to be able to take that stuff and adapt it to a meeting setting . You know phd c: But it may be it may be useful in postdoc e: How do you mean do you mean mechanical adaptation or grad a: No , software , to adapt the speech recognition . phd c: Well , what I was thinking is it may be useful in transcribing , if it 's far field stuff , grad a: phd c: right ? In doing , some of our first automatic speech recognition models , it may be useful to have that kind of data postdoc e: Great idea . grad a: Well that 's not good , right ? phd c: That 's that 's not great . postdoc e: It sounds undergrad d: Tr postdoc e: well but what is that , undergrad d: But far field means great distance ? grad a: Just these . undergrad d: And so that 's why they 're getting away with just two channels or something , or are they using multiple DATs ? postdoc e: oh , good question and I can't ans answer it . grad a: So we can get that just with , media costs , undergrad d: Still a point . grad a: is that right ? phd c: in fact we get it for free grad a: Oh . phd c: So , I can I can actually arrange for it to arrive in short order if we 're postdoc e: The other thing too is from from a grad a: Well , it 's silly to do unless we 're gonna have someone to work on it , so maybe we need to think about it a little bit . postdoc e: The other thing too is that their their jus their transcription format is really nice and simple in in the discourse domain . Maybe we should maybe we should get a copy of it just to see what they did phd b: Yeah , absolutely . grad a: OK , why don't you go ahead and do that then Eric ? phd b: Absolutely . postdoc e: but , phd c: Well they 're postdoc e: this is clever . phd c: Apparently this was like phase one postdoc e: Got it through the LDC . phd c: and the there 's still more that they 're gonna do apparently or something like that unless of course they have funding issues postdoc e: Great . phd c: and then then it ma they may not do phase two but from all the web documentation it looked like , " oh , this is phase one " , whatever that means . Yeah , that , they 're really well respected in the linguistics d side too and the discourse area , phd c: OK . phd c: But , it it would also maybe help be helpful for Liz , if she wanted to start working on some discourse issues , you know , looking at some of this data and then , grad a: Right . grad a: Actually , that 's another thing I was thinking about is that maybe Jane should talk to Liz , to see if there are any transcription issues related to discourse that she needs to get marked . undergrad d: That would be a meeting meeting meeting ? grad a: A meeting meeting meeting . But maybe we should , find some day that Liz , Liz and Andreas seem to be around more often . phd c: So maybe we should find a day when they 're gonna be here and and Morgan 's gonna be here , and we can meet , at least this subgroup . grad a: Well , I was even thinking that maybe we need to at least ping the U - dub to see phd c: We need we need to talk to them some more . grad a: you know , say " this is what we 're thinking about for our transcription " , if nothing else . So , well w shall we move on and talk a little bit about transcription then ? phd b: What we 're using right now is a tool , from this French group , called " Transcriber " that seems to work very well . , so it has a , nice useful Tcl - TK user interface and , undergrad d: Thi - this is the process of converting audio to text ? grad a: Right . So all all so what you have to do is just identify a segment of speech in time , and then write down what was said within it , and identify the speaker . And so the things we that we know that I know I want are the text , the start and end , and the speaker . , and then things like repairs , and false starts , and , filled pauses , and all that other sort of stuff , we have to decide how much of that we wanna do . My my view on it was when you have a repair then , it seems , we saw , there was this presentation in the one of the speech group meetings about how grad a: postdoc e: and I think Liz has done some stuff too on that , that it , that you get it bracketed in terms of like well , if it 's parenthetical , which I know that Liz has worked on , then y y you 'll have different prosodic aspects . postdoc e: And then also if it 's a r if it 's a repair where they 're like what I just did , then it 's nice to have sort of a sense of the continuity of the utterance , the start to be to the finish . And , it 's a little bit deceptive if you include the repai the pre - repair part and sometimes or of it 's in the middle . Anyway , so what I was doing was bracketing them to indicate that they were repairs which isn't , very time - consuming . undergrad d: I is there already some sort of plan in place for how this gonna be staffed or done ? Or is it real is that what we 're talking about here ? grad a: Well , that 's part of the thing we 're talking about . So what we wanted to do was have Jane do basically one meeting 's worth , you know , forty minutes to an hour , postdoc e: undergrad d: It this is this is like five times real time or ten times real time postdoc e: Yeah , as a pilot study . grad a: Ten times about , is and so one of the things was to get an estimate of how long it would take , and then also what tools we would use . And so the next decision which has to be made actually pretty soon is how are we gonna do it ? So . undergrad d: And so you make Jane do the first one so then she can decide , oh , we don't need all this stuff , just the words are fine . postdoc e: I wanna hear about these , we have a g you were s continuing with the transcription conventions for s grad a: R right , so so one one option is to get linguistics grad students and undergrads to do it . , it will require a post pass , people will have to look at it more than once to make sure that it 's been done correctly , but I just can't imagine that we 're gonna get anything that much better from a commercial one . undergrad d: Can't we get Joy to do it all ? grad a: Yeah right . postdoc e: No , that 's grad a: We will just get Joy and Jane to do everything . undergrad d: Is tha wasn't that what she was doing before ? Yeah , that 's right . grad a: But , you know , that 's what we 're talking about is getting some slaves who who need money undergrad d: Right . grad a: and , duh , again o postdoc e: I object to that characterization ! phd b: Oh , really . And so again , I have to say " are we recording " postdoc e: Oh , thank you . grad a: and then say , Morgan has has consistently resisted telling me how much money we have . Right ? undergrad d: Well , we already we already We already have a plan in place for the first meeting . undergrad d: Right ? That 's postdoc e: Well th there is als Yeah , really . There is also the o other possibility which is if you can provide not money but instructional experience or some other perks , you can you could get people to to , to do it in exchange . undergrad d: Well , i b but seriously , I , Morgan 's obviously in a bind over this and thing to do is just the field of dreams theory , which is we we go ahead as though there will be money at the time that we need the money . grad a: So at any rate , Jane was looking into the possibility of getting students , at is that right ? Talking to people about that ? postdoc e: I 'm afraid I haven't made any progress in that front yet . So , undergrad d: I d do So until you actually have a little experience with what this this French thing does we don't even have postdoc e: And I do have grad a: She 's already done quite a bit . So that 's where you came up with the f the ten X number ? postdoc e: yeah . undergrad d: Or is that really just a guess ? postdoc e: Actually that 's the the one people usually use , ten X . phd c: How fast are you ? postdoc e: And I haven't really calculated How fast am I ? undergrad d: Yeah i postdoc e: I haven't done a s see , I 've been at the same time doing kind of a boot strapping in deciding on the transcription conventions that that are you know , and and stuff like , you know , how much phd b: Mmm . postdoc e: There 's some interesting human factors problems like , yeah , what span of of time is it useful to segment the thing into in order to , transcribe it the most quickly . postdoc e: Cuz then , you know , you get like if you get a span of five words , that 's easy . And then there 's the issue of it 's easier to hear it th right the first time if you 've marked it at a boundary instead of somewhere in the middle , phd b: postdoc e: cuz then the word 's bisected or whatever and And so , I 've been sort of playing with , different ways of mar cuz I 'm thinking , you know , if you could get optimal instructions you could cut back on the number of hours it would take . undergrad d: D does this tool you 're using is strictly it doesn't do any speech recognition does it ? grad a: No . undergrad d: But but is there anyway to to wire a speech recognizer up to it and actually run it through postdoc e: That 's an interesting idea . grad a: We 've we 've thought about doing that postdoc e: Hey ! grad a: but the recognition quality is gonna be horrendous . undergrad d: First of all the time marking you 'd get you could get by a tool . undergrad d: And so if the if if the issue really postdoc e: That 's interesting . undergrad d: I 'm think about the close caption that you see running by on on live news casts . And in a lot of them you see typos and things like that , grad a: undergrad d: but it but it occurs to me that it may be a lot easier to correct things than it is to do things from scratch , no matter how wonderful the tool is . Yeah , we undergrad d: But if if there was a way to merge the two phd c: Well , but sometimes it 's easier to type out something instead of going through and figuring out which is the right grad a: we 've talked about it postdoc e: That 'd be fun . grad a: but phd c: it depends on the error rate , right ? undergrad d: Well s but but again the timing is for fr should be for free . grad a: We don't care about the timing of the words , just of the utterances . postdoc e: No , the the boundary phd c: We cut it s s phd b: We don't we don't know , actually . phd b: We haven't decided which which time we care about , and that 's kind of one of the things that you 're saying , is like you have the option to put in more or less timing data and , be in the absence of more specific instructions , we 're trying to figure out what the most convenient thing to do is . grad a: Yeah , so so what what she 's done so far , is sort of more or less breath g not breath groups , sort of phrases , continuous phrases . grad a: And so , that 's nice because you you separate when you do an extract , you get a little silence on either end . postdoc e: Although I was I you know , the alternative , which I was sort of experimenting with before I ran out of time , recently was , that , you know , ev if it were like an arbitrary segment of time i t pre - marked cuz it does take time to put those markings in . postdoc e: It 's really the i the interface is wonderful because , you know , the time it takes is you listen to it , and then you press the return key . But then , you know , it 's like , you press the tab key to stop the flow and and , the return key to p to put in a marking of the boundary . But , you know , obviously there 's a lag between when you hear it and when you can press the return key phd b: Yeah . postdoc e: so it 's slightly delayed , so then you you listen to it a second time and move it over to here . undergrad d: i a postdoc e: Now if it could all be pre - marked at some , l you know , good undergrad d: ar but grad a: . undergrad d: Are are those d delays adjustable ? Those delays adjustable ? See a lot of people who actually build stuff with human computer interfaces understand that delay , phd b: Yeah . undergrad d: and and so when you by the time you click it it 'll be right on because it 'll go back in time to put the postdoc e: Yeah . postdoc e: It has other grad a: couldn't we Dan ? Yeah , mis Mister TCL ? phd b: Yeah . grad a: But , postdoc e: it 's not bad grad a: But , if we tried to do automatic speaker ID . phd b: Yeah , yeah , but grad a: But that would be phd b: But we 've got we 've got the most channel data . postdoc e: Oh , good point ! Ah ! grad a: Yeah , I guess the question is how much time will it really save us versus the time to write all the tools to do it . but the chances are if we if we 're talking about collecting ten or a hundred hours , which is going to take a hundred or a thousand hours to transcribe undergrad d: If grad a: But undergrad d: if we can go from ten X to five X we 're doing a big grad a: We 're gonna need we 're gonna need ten to a hundred hours to train the tools , and validate the tools the do the d to to do all this anyway . phd b: If we 're just doing silence detection postdoc e: But but it op grad a: I knew you were gonna do that . , it it 's it 's maybe like a week 's work to get to do something like this . postdoc e: Could you get it so that with so it would it would detect volume on a channel and insert a marker ? And the the format 's really transparent . postdoc e: It 's just a matter of a very c clear it 's XML , isn't it ? grad a: postdoc e: It 's very , I looked at the the file format and it 's just it has a t a time a time indication and then something or other , and then an end time or something or other . phd c: and undergrad d: Is this already in the past or already in the future ? phd c: Already in the past . undergrad d: You 've already you 've already done some ? grad a: She 's she 's done about half a meeting . phd c: She she 's done one she 's one postdoc e: Yes I have . grad a: About half ? phd c: I 'm go postdoc e: S I 'm not sure if it 's that 's much but anyway , enough to work with . And then go through , and go through and and try and re - transcribe it , given that we had perfect boundary detection . undergrad d: And forgetting all the words because you 've been thr postdoc e: Yeah , that 's what I was thinking . phd c: Yeah , that 's part of the problem is , is that what we really need is somebody else to come along . phd b: Well , no , you should do it you should do it Do it again from scratch and then do it again at the boundaries . undergrad d: And so you 'll get you 'll get down to one point two X by the time you get done . undergrad d: No , but the thing is the fact that she 's she 's did it before just might give a lower bound . undergrad d: It 's And if the lower bound is nine X then w it 's a waste of time . postdoc e: Well , but there 's an extra problem which is that I didn't really keep accurate phd b: Oh ! postdoc e: it wasn't a pure task the first time , phd b: Yeah . So I think though it 's a good proposal to be used on a new a new batch of text that I haven't yet done yet in the same meeting . phd b: The point we where do we get the the the oracle boundaries from ? phd c: Right . grad a: Yeah , one person would have to assign the boundaries and the and the other person would have to postdoc e: Well , but couldn't I do it for the next phd b: We we we could get fake grad a: that 's easy enough . postdoc e: Well , but the oracle boundaries would come from volume on a partic specific channel wouldn't they ? grad a: No , no . You wanna know given Given a perfect human segmentation , you wanna know how well postdoc e: Yeah . phd c: the the question is , is it worth giving you the segmentation ? postdoc e: Oh , I see what you mean . grad a: I could generate the segmentation and and you could do the words , and time yourself on it . grad a: That would at least tell us whether it 's worth spending a week or two trying to get a tool , that will compute the segmentations . undergrad d: And the thing to keep in mind too about this tool , guys is that sure , you can do the computation for what we 're gonna do in the future but if if UW 's talking about doing two , or three , or five times as much stuff and they can use the same tool , then obviously there 's a real multiplier there . postdoc e: And the other thing too is with with speaker identification , if if that could handle speaker identification that 's a big deal . postdoc e: That 's a major that 's like , one of the two things that phd c: there 's gonna there 's gonna be in the meeting , like the reading group meeting that we had the other day , that 's it 's gonna be a bit of a problem phd b: OK . grad a: That undergrad d: But you didn't say anything worth while anyway , right ? grad a: That 'll s phd b: Right . phd b: So I I need to we need to look at what what the final output is but it seems like we it doesn't it seems like it 's not really not that hard to have an automatic tool to generate the phrase marks , and the speaker , and speaker identity without putting in the words . I 've already become pretty familiar with the format , postdoc e: That 'd be so great . grad a: If you 'd tell me where it is , huh ? postdoc e: We didn't finish the the part of work already completed on this , did we ? , you you talked a little bit about the transcription conventions , grad a: postdoc e: and , I guess you 've mentioned in your progress report , or status report , that you had written a script to convert it into So , I when I i the it 's quickest for me in terms of the transcription part to say something like , you know , if if Adam spoke to , to just say , " A colon " , Like who could be , you know , at the beginning of the line . postdoc e: and E colon instead of entering the interface for speaker identification and clicking on the thing , indicating the speaker ID . So , and then he has a script that will convert it into the the thing that , would indicate speaker ID . , I looked at Cyber Transcriber postdoc e: Yeah , well that 's true , but grad a: which is a service that you send an audio file , they do a first - pass speech recognition . postdoc e: What i just approximately , what did you find out in terms of price or or whatever ? grad a: Well , for Cyber Transcriber they don't quote a price . postdoc e: Or of action ? grad a: For thirty dollars an hour for of their work . Oh , of their grad a: So so if it 's ten times it 's three hundred dollars an hour . postdoc e: Oh ! phd c: So that 's three that 's three hours . undergrad d: D did you talk to anybody that does closed captioning for for , TV ? phd c: Right . undergrad d: Cuz they a usually at the end of the show they 'll tell what the name of the company is , the captioning company that 's doing it . undergrad d: Well , you know , the the thing the thing about this is thinking kind of , maybe a little more globally than I should here but that really this could be a big contribution we could make . , we 've been through the STP thing , we know what it what it 's like to to manage the manage the process , and admittedly they might have been looking for more detail than what we 're looking for here but it was a it was a big hassle , right ? phd b: Yeah . And it 's it 's only our time , where " our " of course includes Dan , Dan and you guys . j Just seems like phd b: Yeah , I don't know if we 'd be able to do any thing f to help STP type problems . But certainly for this problem we can do a lot better than undergrad d: Bec Why ? Because they wanted a lot more detail ? grad a: Right . Because they had because they only had two speakers , right ? , the the segmentation problem is grad a: Trivial . So what took them so long ? grad a: mostly because they were doing much lower level time . grad a: And so we 're w we decided early on that we were not gonna do that . But there 's still the same issue of managing the process , of of reviewing and keeping the files straight , and all this stuff , that which is clearly a hassle . And so so what I 'm saying is that if we hire an external service I think we can expect three hundred dollars an hour . phd c: And who who knows if they 're gonna be able to m manage multal multiple channel data ? phd b: Yeah , they won't . phd b: No , but , they they they won't they won't they will refuse to transcribe this kind of material . postdoc e: And then there 's the problem also that phd b: That 's not what they 're d quoting for , right ? grad a: Yes , it is . undergrad d: Well , they might they might quote it phd b: For quoting meetings ? grad a: Sev - several of them say that they 'll do meetings , and conferences , and s and so on . undergrad d: Th - th the th there may be just multiplier for five people costs twice as much and for ten people co Something like that . So what they had is , if it 's an easy task it costs twenty - four dollars an hour and it will take maybe five or six times real time . And what they said is for the hardest tasks , bad acoustics , meeting settings , it 's thirty - two dollars an hour and it takes about ten times real time . undergrad d: A lot of companies I 've worked for y the , the person leading the meeting , the executive or whatever , would sort of go around the room and and mentally calculate h how many dollars per hour this meeting was costing , grad a: So . But you know , it 's a lot like , " he 's worth fifty an hour , he 's worth " And so he so here we 're thinking , " well let 's see , if the meeting goes another hour it 's going to be another thousand dollars . " You know ? It 's grad a: Yep , we have to have a short meeting . But at any rate , so we we have a ballpark on how much it would cost if we send it out . undergrad d: And we 're talking about do doing how many hours worth of meetings ? grad a: Thirty or forty . phd c: So it 's thirty dollars an hour , essentially , right ? undergrad d: Yeah . And the question is what 's the difference phd b: How how much lower are they ? phd c: or ei eight dollars . What do you know what the going rate is ? It 's it 's on the order of eight to ten . postdoc e: yeah , I was gonna say eight you 'd say ten ? phd c: Let 's say ten . undergrad d: The - these are not for engineering graduate students , right ? grad a: Right , these are linguistics grad students . phd c: Yeah , I I I don't I don't know what the I don't know what the standard undergrad d: That 's right . phd c: so that means that even if it takes them thirty times real time it 's cheaper to to do graduate students . grad a: that 's why I said originally , that I couldn't imagine sending it out 's gonna be cheaper . postdoc e: The other thing too is that , if they were linguistics they 'd be you know , in terms of like the post editing , i tu content wise they might be easier to handle cuz they might get it more right the first time . grad a: we can't tell them , you know , " for this meeting we really wanna mark stress postdoc e: Good point . grad a: And and they 're not gonna provide they 're not gonna provide stress , they 're not gonna re provide repairs , they 're not gonna provide they they may or may not provide speaker ID . undergrad d: Just hypoth hypothetically assuming that that we go ahead and ended up using graduate students . I who who 's the person in charge ? Who 's gonna be the Steve here ? grad a: I hope it 's Jane . undergrad d: You ? grad a: Is that alright ? postdoc e: Oh , interesting . , now would this involve some manner of , monetary compensation or would I be the voluntary , coordinator of multiple transcribers for checking ? grad a: I would imagine there would be some monetary involved but we 'd have to talk to Morgan about it . See ? postdoc e: Oh , undergrad d: That 's why Dave should have been here . grad a: Well , I would like you to do it because you have a lot more experience than I do , postdoc e: Oh , cool . grad a: but if if that 's not feasible , I will do it with you as an advisor . undergrad d: W we 'd like you to do it and we 'd like to pay you . phd c: That 's a undergrad d: And and then postdoc e: OK . undergrad d: an an an and be and be sure and say , would you like fries with that when you 're thinking about your pay scale . Yeah , no , that I I would be interested in that in becoming involved in the project in some aspect like that grad a: OK . grad a: any more on transcript we wanna talk about ? phd b: What s so what are you so you 've done some portion of the first meeting . phd b: To carry on doing it ? postdoc e: What Well , you know what I thought was right now we have p So I gave him the proposal for the transcription conventions . And so my next plan would be phd b: What what do they what do they cover ? postdoc e: They 're very minimal . postdoc e: and this is a way which meshes well with with , making it so that , you know , on the At the phd b: Yeah . When you when you get the , you you get the speech signal you also get down beneath it , an indication of , if you have two speakers overlapping in a s in a single segment , you see them one displayed one above each other . And then at the same time the top s part of the screen is the actual verbatim thing . You can clip click on individual utterances and it 'll take you immediately to that part of the speech signal , and play it for you . undergrad d: Is there a limit to the number of speakers ? grad a: the user interface only allows two . And so , using this the convention that Jane and I have discussed , you can have as many overlapping speakers as you want . undergrad d: Th - this is the French software , right ? grad a: Yeah , French . phd b: Oh , really ? undergrad d: did you ask them to change the interface for more speakers ? postdoc e: Oh . grad a: Yes , and they said that 's on in in the works for the next version . grad a: Multichannels was also Well , they said they wanted to do it but that the code is really very organized around single channels . undergrad d: Do - do you know what they 're using it for ? Why 'd they develop it ? grad a: For this exact task ? phd c: For transcription . undergrad d: Are they linguists ? phd c: It 's undergrad d: But , are they are they linguists or are they speech recognition people ? grad a: I think they 're linguists . phd c: They 're they have some connection to the LDC cuz the LDC has been advising them on this process , the Linguistic Data Consortium . grad a: And they have they 've actually asked if we are willing to do any development and I said , well , maybe . grad a: So if we want if we did if we did something like programmed in a delay , which actually I think is a great idea , I 'm sure they would want that incorporated back in . You know , they they do have So you have when you when you play it back , it 's it is useful to have , a a break mark to se segment it . But it wouldn't be strictly necessary cuz you can use the , the tabbed key to toggle the sound on and off . And then also once you 've put a break in then you have the option of cycling through the unit . undergrad d: Loop it ? Yo - you n you know , there 's al also the the user interface that 's missing . postdoc e: Or or or undergrad d: It 's missing from all of our offices , and that is some sort of analog input for something like this . It 's something that wh when you move your hand further , the sound goes faster past it , like fast forward . You know , like a joy stick or a , you could wire a mouse or trackball to do something like that . postdoc e: Why , that 's That 's not something I wanted to have happen . undergrad d: No , but I 'm saying if this is what professionals who actually do this kind of thing for for for m for video or for audio where you you need to do this , postdoc e: I see . undergrad d: and so you get very good at sort of jostling back and forth , rather than hitting tab , and backspace , and carriage return , and enter , and things like that . grad a: Yeah , we talked about things like foot pedals and other analog phd c: Yeah . grad a: So , tho those are things we could do but I I just don't know how much it 's worth doing . postdoc e: They thought about and also it 'll go around the c the , I wanna say cursor but I 'm not sure if that 's the right thing . postdoc e: Anyway , you can so they thought about different ways of having windows that you c work within , phd b: postdoc e: and But so in terms of the con the conventions , then , basically , it 's strictly orthographic which means with some w provisions for , w , colloquial forms . So if a person said , " cuz " instead of " because " then I put a an apostrophe at the beginning of the word and then in in double ang angle brackets what the full lexical item would be . postdoc e: And this could be something that was handled by a table or something but I think to have a convention marking it as a non - standard or wha I don't mean standard but a a a non , ortho orthographic , whatever . And and there would be limits to how much refinement you want in indicating something as non - standard pres pronunciation . phd c: How are you handling backchannels ? postdoc e: Backchannels ? grad a: Comments . postdoc e: you know oh , yes , there was some in my view , when i when you 've got it densely overlapping , I didn't worry about I didn't worry about s specific start times . phd c: What do you mean by du postdoc e: I sort of thought that this is not gonna be easily processed anyway and maybe I shouldn't spend too much time getting exactly when the person said " no " , or , you know , i " immediate " . postdoc e: And instead just sort of rendered " within this time slot , there were two people speaking during part of it phd b: Yeah . postdoc e: and if you want more detail , figure it out for yourself " , phd b: grad a: Well , I think what w what Eric was talking about was channels other than the direct speech , phd c: I see . postdoc e: was sort of the way I felt @ @ grad a: right ? phd c: Well , yeah , what is wh , when somebody says " - huh " in the middle of , a @ @ grad a: Yep . phd c: Oh , cuz I was I was listening to Dan was agreeing a lot to things that you were saying as you were talking . Well , if it if there was a word like " right " , you know , then I wou I would indicate that it happened within the same tem time frame grad a: Yeah , there 's an overlapping mark . grad a: when when no one i when we 're not actually in the meeting , and we 're all sort of separated , and and doing things . But even during the meeting there 's a lot of overlap but it it 's marked pretty clearly . , some of the backchannel stuff Jane had some comments and but I think a lot of them were because you were at the meeting . grad a: Yeah , but someone who , was just the transcriber wouldn't have known that . grad a: Or when Dan said , " I wa I wasn't talking to you " . undergrad d: So you take a bathroom break in the middle and and keep your head mount grad a: You have to turn off your mike . postdoc e: Well he was so so he was checking the meter levels and and we were handling things while he was labeling the the whatever it was , the PDA ? grad a: postdoc e: And and so he was in sort of you were sort of talking you know , so I was saying , like " and I could label this one left . grad a: But postdoc e: But really , no , w you know in the context if you know he can't hear what he 's saying grad a: but when you w when you listen to it undergrad d: he he It was a lot funnier if you were there though . postdoc e: yeah , grad a: Well what what it what happens is if you 're a transcriber listening to it it sounds like Dan is just being a total totally impolite . grad a: But but if you knew that that I wasn't actually in the room , and that Dan wasn't talking to me , it it became OK . undergrad d: So th postdoc e: And that 's w that 's where I added comments . postdoc e: The rest of the time I didn't bother with who was talking to who but but this was unusual circum circumstance . undergrad d: So this is this is gonna go on the meeting meeting transcriber bloopers tape , right ? grad a: Yes . postdoc e: Well and part of it was funny , reason was because it was a mixed signal so you couldn't get any clues from volume that , you know , he was really far away from this conversation . I should rewrite the mix tool to put half the people in one channel and half in the other . I have a auto - gain - mixer tool that mixes all the head mounted microphones into one signal postdoc e: That 's a good idea . postdoc e: But I thought it would be you know , I I didn't wanna add more contextual comments than were needed but that , it seemed to me , clarified that the con what was going on . And , OK , phd c: So , s postdoc e: so normalization phd c: I was just gonna ask , so I just wanted to c sort of finish off the question I had about backchannels , phd b: Mmm . phd c: which which was , so say somebody 's talking for a while postdoc e: Yeah . phd c: and somebody goes " - " in the middle of it , and and and what not , does the conversation come out from the or the person who 's speaking for the long time as one segment and then there 's this little tiny segment of this other speaker or does it does the fact that there 's a backchannel split the the the it in two . postdoc e: OK , my my focus was to try and maintain conten con content continuity and , to keep it within what he was saying . Like I wouldn't say breath groups but prosodic or intonational groups as much as possible . So if someone said " - " in the middle of a of someone 's , intonational contour , I I indicated it as , like what you just did . postdoc e: then I indicated it as a segment which contained @ @ this utterance plus an overlap . phd b: But that 's but there 's only one there 's only one time boundary for both speakers , phd c: OK . And you know , it could be made more precise than that phd c: I see , postdoc e: but I just thought phd c: I see , OK . undergrad d: I think whenever we use these speech words we should always do the thing like you 're talking about , accent , postdoc e: Oh , I see what you mean . OK , and so then , in terms of like words like " " and " " I just wrote them because I figured there 's a limited number , and I keep them to a , limited set because it didn't matter if it was " mmm " or " " , you know , versus " " . It 'd be good to have that in the in the conventions , what 's to be used . grad a: I I did notice that there were some segments that had pauses on the beginning and end . undergrad d: Well , what 's that mean ? postdoc e: Yeah , OK . phd b: We have to mark those ? postdoc e: So I had phd b: Don't they d can't we just leave them unmarked ? postdoc e: I d Well , you see , that 's possible too . grad a: Well , I wanna leave the marked I don't want them to be part of another utterance . Now that 's refinement that , maybe it could be handled by part of the part of the script or something more phd b: yeah , it seems like it seems like the , tran the transcription problem would be very different if we had these automatic speaker detection turn placing things . Because suddenly , I don't know , actually it sounds like there might be a problem putting it into the software if the software only handles two parallel channels . Well you were saying , I think it can read grad a: It can read and write as many as you want , it 's just that it postdoc e: - huh . phd b: But what if you wanna edit it ? Right ? , the point is we 're gonna generate this transcript with five five tracks in it , but with no words . , and if there are five five people speaking at once , grad a: Right , i it 's I didn't explain it well . If we use the the little the conventions that Jane has established , I have a script that will convert from that convention to their saved convention . postdoc e: And it can be m edited after the fact , grad a: Yes . postdoc e: can't it also ? But their but their format , if you wanted to in indicate the speakers right there instead of doing it through this indirect route , then i they a c window comes up and it only allows you to enter two speakers . undergrad d: But you 're saying that by the time you call it back in to from their saved format it opens up a window with window with five speakers ? postdoc e: So . undergrad d: Oh ! That is sort of f grad a: It 's just user interface . undergrad d: They didn't quite go the whole grad a: So i it 's undergrad d: Yeah , they didn't go the whole route , grad a: the the the whole saved form the saved format and the internal format , all that stuff , handles multiple speakers . undergrad d: did they ? They just grad a: It 's just there 's no user interface for specifying multiple any more than two . So your your script solves Doesn't it solve all our problems , postdoc e: And that grad a: Yep . undergrad d: cuz we 're always gonna wanna go through this preprocessing grad a: Yep . Oh , yes , I I wanted to have So sometimes a pers I in terms of like the continuity of thought for transcriptions , it 's i it isn't just words coming out , it 's like there 's some purpose for an utterance . And sometimes someone will do a backchannel in the middle of it but you wanna show that it 's continued at a later point . So I have I have a convention of putting like a dash arrow just to indicate that this person 's utterance continues . And then when it , catches back up again then there 's an arrow dash , and then you have the opposite direction to indicate continuation of ones own utterance versus , sometimes we had the situation which is you know , which you which you get in conversations , of someone continuing someone else 's utterance , phd b: Mmm . postdoc e: and in that case I did a tilde arrow versus a arrow tilde , to indicate that it was continuation but it wasn't Oh , I guess I did equal arrow for the for the own for yourself things phd b: postdoc e: And then you could track whether it was the same speaker or not by knowing you know , at the end of this unit you 'd know what happened later . grad a: So phd b: But the only time that becomes ambiguous is if you have two speakers . Like , if you If you only have one person , if you only have one thought that 's continuing across a particular time boundary , you just need one arrow at each end , and if it 's picked up by a different speaker , it 's picked up by a different speaker . I guess if you have more than one thread going , then you then you need to know whether they were swapped or not . You know , undergrad d: It l ou grad a: if you were trying to do a remembrance agent . grad a: But , a lot of these issues , I think that for , from my point of view , where I just wanna do speech recognition and information retrieval , it doesn't really matter . I you know I did this I did this transcription and I marked that , I marked it with ellipsis because it seemed like there was a difference . It 's something you wanted to indicate that it that I this was the end of the phrase , this was the end of that particular transcript , but it was continued later . Well that 's you know , I that 's why I didn't I didn't do it n , that 's why I thought about it , and and re - ev phd b: Yeah , yeah . postdoc e: and it didn't do I didn't do it in ten times the the time . grad a: Well , so anyway , are we interested then in writing tools to try to generate any of this stuff automatically ? postdoc e: Yeah . postdoc e: I also wanted to ask you if you have a time estimate on the part that you transcribed . Do you have a sense of how long phd b: Yeah , it took me half an hour to transcribe a minute , but I didn't have any I didn't even have a postdoc e: OK . So I was doing it by typ typing into a text file and trying to fit It was horrible . postdoc e: Well , that 's that 's because you didn't have the segmentation help and all the other grad a: But I think for a first try that 's about right . phd b: Is it phd c: So so if we hired a who if we hired a whole bunch of Dan 's undergrad d: That 's right . phd b: It was actually it was quite it was a t undergrad d: a grad a: If we hire an infinite number of Dan 's phd b: it w undergrad d: It 'd b a a postdoc e: And there 's always a warm up thing of grad a: Are we gonna run out of disk space by the way ? phd b: Yeah . undergrad d: d Doesn't it beep in the other room when you 're out of disk space ? phd c: So Is there grad a: No . phd c: Maybe we should s consider also , starting to build up a web site around all of these things . phd b: We could have like business - to - business E - commerce as well ! phd c: That 's right . No , but I 'm it would be interesting it would be interesting to see grad a: Can we sell banner ads ? undergrad d: Get get paid for click - throughs ? grad a: What a good idea , phd b: Yeah . phd c: I want to introduce I I want to introduce the word " snot - head " into the conversation at this point . phd b: We can have undergrad d: You wanna word that won't be recognized ? phd c: You see , cuz , cuz Exactly . Alright , see here 's here 's here 's my thought behind it which is that , the the stuff that you 've been describing , Jane , I gu one has to , of course indicate , i is very interesting , postdoc e: Alright . phd c: and I I 'd like to be able to to pore through , you know , the the types of tr conventions that you 've come up with and stuff like that . postdoc e: OK , now , w the alternative to a web site would be to put it in Doctor speech . postdoc e: Cuz cuz what I have is a soft link to my transcription that I have on my account phd c: Either 's fine . undergrad d: Web site 's what ? phd b: We could actually maybe we could use the TCL plug - in . See he said the word TCL and and that 's undergrad d: But he does such a good job of it . But I should be allowed to but undergrad d: If you just did a crappy job , no nobody would want you to do it . phd b: I sh I shouldn't be allowed to by m by my own by my according to my own priorities . grad a: And we have we have quite a disparate number of web and other sorts of documents on this project sort of spread around . grad a: and phd c: Right , so we can add in links and stuff like that to other things . phd c: The phd b: Well so then th grad a: Try try to s consolidate . phd c: Well , we could put we could put sort of a disorganized sort of group gestalt undergrad d: Why ? What what 's what 's the issue ? phd b: No one owns the project . undergrad d: W well Do But grad a: It 's mine ! All mine ! phd b: Well then you have to do the web site . undergrad d: But grad a: " Wah - hah - hah - hah - hah - hah . undergrad d: b but but but what are you what are you talking about for web site hacking ? phd b: No undergrad d: You 're talking about writing HTML , right ? grad a: Yeah , I I 'm talking about putting together all the data in a form that that is legible , and pleasant to read , and up to date , and et cetera , et cetera , et cetera . undergrad d: But , is it against the law to actually use a tool to help your job go easier ? grad a: Absolutely . undergrad d: You y grad a: It 's just as easy to use to edit the raw HTML as anything else . undergrad d: No kidding ? phd b: That 's obviously not true , grad a: It 's obviously not true . phd b: but you have undergrad d: No , it it it 's obviously true that he hasn't found any he likes . postdoc e: Which one do you use Jim ? undergrad d: I use something called Trellix . grad a: Now , I guess if I were if I were doing more powerful excuse me more complex web sites I might want to . postdoc e: Well , would this be to document it also for outside people or mainly for in house use ? grad a: But . phd b: I I I I grad a: OK , well , send me links and I wi send me pointers , rather , and I 'll put it together . I don't think we should say , " oh , it 's internal therefore we don't have to make it very good " . phd b: therefore we can put data in it that we don't we don't have to worry about releasing " . postdoc e: Yeah , it is true , that is it benefits to undergrad d: Cuz you 're gonna have to wor do the work sooner or later . undergrad d: d we we out of tape out of disk ? phd b: No , we 're doing we 're doing great . undergrad d: I I was looking for the actual box I plan to use , but I c all I could I couldn't find it at the local store . And it 's two by two , by one , and it would fit right under the right under th the the the the lip , grad a: Yeah , does everyone know about the lip on the table ? It 's great . undergrad d: And , it oc I p especially brought the bottom along to try and generate some frequencies that you may not already have recorded . grad a: Clink ! Clink ! undergrad d: Let 's see see what it does to the But this was the just just to review , and I also brought this along rather than the projector so we can put these on the table , and sort of w push them around . grad a: And and crinkle them and phd b: What ? postdoc e: And th " that " being a diagram . phd b: What ? undergrad d: That that 's the six tables that we 're looking at . phd b: th undergrad d: Well why not ? , cuz this is what 's gonna happen . And and and you So this is the box 's grad a: Get your paper off my PDA ! phd b: Yeah . And so the the two head set jacks would be in the front and then the little LED to indicate that that box is live . The the important issue about the LED is the fact that we 're talking about eight of these total , which would be sixteen channels . And , even though we have sixteen channels back at the capture , they 're not all gonna be used for this . undergrad d: So there 'd be a subset of them used for obviously j just use the ones at this end for for this many . you 'd like a a way to tell whether your box is live , so the LED wouldn't be on . undergrad d: So if you 're plugged in it doesn't work and the LED is off that 's that 's a tip off . And then the , would wire the all of the cables in a in a bundle come through here and o obviously collect these cables at the same time . undergrad d: so this this notion of putting down the P Z Ms and taking them away would somehow have to be turned into leaving them on the table grad a: Right . undergrad d: and even though there 's eight cables they 're not really very big around so my model is to get a a a p piece of grad a: Sleeve . undergrad d: yeah , that that stuff that people put with the little you slip the wires into that 's sort of shaped like that cross section . I 'm I 'm r a I 'm going up and then I 'm going down . grad a: Whoo ! phd b: Speed bump ! postdoc e: Sleeping pol phd b: Speed bump . grad a: Speed A " sleeping policeman " ! undergrad d: Yeah , it 's like a speed bum An postdoc e: Speed bump . undergrad d: And they 're ac they 're actually ext extruded from plastic . phd c: What does that mean ? phd b: That 's the s that 's British for speed bump , phd c: Is it a speed bump ? undergrad d: So that the wires go through here . postdoc e: Ah ! grad a: OK , so that undergrad d: s So it would c basically go on the diagonal here . grad a: So why do we have sixteen channels instead of like some fewer number ? phd b: Yeah . undergrad d: because the phd b: How else are you gonna distribute them around the tables ? undergrad d: Because they 're there . Why two each ? phd b: Oh , because then you don't have to just have one each . So that if t if you have two people sitting next to each other they can actually go into the same box . undergrad d: And to See , thi this is really the way people sit on this table . phd b: Only if you had Well it depends on this box , right ? undergrad d: Oh , true enough . grad a: Oh , I didn't understand undergrad d: This this box Thi - thi thi this box is a one off deal . And , it 's function is to s to , essentially a wire converter to go from these little blue wires to these black wires , plus supply power to the microphones cuz the the he the , cheap head mounteds all require low voltage . grad a: So so you 'd imagine some sort of in some sort of patch panel on top to figure out what the mapping was between each d of these two and each of those one or what ? phd b: ! undergrad d: Well I w I I the simplest thing I could imagine , i which is really , really simple is to quite literally that these things plug in . And there 's a there 's a plug on the end of each of these these , ei eight cables . undergrad d: An - and there 's only there 's only four slots that are you know , in in the first version or the version we 're planning to to build . undergrad d: So that that was the whole issue with the LED , that you plug it in , the LED comes on , and and and you 're live . undergrad d: Now the the the subtle issue here is that tha I I haven't really figured out a solution for this . What happens if somebody unplugs this because they plug in more of something else ? grad a: undergrad d: Well the there 's no clever way to let the up stream guys know that you 're really not being powered . So th there will be a certain amount of looking at cables has to be done if people , rewire things . phd b: But there are actually that you know , there 's an extra there 's a mix out on the radio receiver ? undergrad d: phd b: So there are actually six XLR outs on the back of the radio receiver and only five cables going in , I had the wrong five , so I ended up not recording one of the channels and recording the mix . undergrad d: Wonder whether it works any phd b: But I subtracted the four that I did have from the mix and got a pretty good approximation of the @ @ . undergrad d: Is it is phd b: It 's not bad , grad a: Wow . grad a: So what 's the schedule on these things ? undergrad d: So phd b: But , you always postdoc e: Wow . undergrad d: well I was wrestling with th with literally the w number of connectors in the cable and the the , powering system . And I I was gonna do this very clever phantom power and I decided a couple days ago not to do it . So I think the other thing I 'd like to do is , do something about the set up phd b: See grad a: so that it 's a little more presentable and organized . Dan - Dan and I have sort of gone around on this , and we were thinking about something that opened up in the top to allow access to the mixer for example . undergrad d: But there 's these things sticking out of the mixer which are kind of a pain , so you end up with this thing that if if you stuck the mixer up here and the top opened , it 'd be it 'd be fine . You wouldn't necessarily Well , you s understand what I 'm grad a: Yeah , I understand . undergrad d: the the you can you can start start s sketching it out , grad a: So . undergrad d: and I can certainly build it out of oak no problem , would it you know , arb you know , arbitrarily amount of grad a: I need a desk at home too , alright ? Is that gonna be a better solution than just going out and buy one ? undergrad d: Well , the as we found out with the the thing that , Jeff bought a long time ago to hold our stereo system the stuff you buy is total crap . Works fine for holding a Kleenex , grad a: Right , Kleenex and telephones . grad a: so yeah , I g I guess it 's just a question , is that something you wanna spend your time on ? undergrad d: Oh , I I 'm paid for . phd b: Oh , yeah ! grad a: I 'm telling you , I 'm just gonna cart one of them away if they stay there much longer . undergrad d: let the record show at at f four thirty - five Adam Janin says postdoc e: Wow . grad a: So , j , then the other question is do we wanna try to do a user interface that 's available out here ? phd b: Sorry ? undergrad d: Slipped almost slipped it by Dan . grad a: And how do we want to do that ? postdoc e: You mean like see see meter readings , from while sitting here . undergrad d: What 's wrong with yours ? If we bought you a a phd b: Oh , a Applecard . phd c: Well undergrad d: What ? grad a: I have an IRAM machine I 've borrowed and we can use it . phd b: I or the undergrad d: N no , I 'm I 'm I 'm serious . Does does the wireless thing work on your grad a: Wait , isn't that an ethernet connection or is that a phone ? phd b: that 's an ethernet connection . grad a: We jus undergrad d: I 'm serious , that that it it phd b: Yeah . T to have it , just undergrad d: It 's very convenient especially if Dan happens to be sitting at that end of the table to not have to run down here and and look in the thing every so often , phd b: Yeah . And given given that we 've got a wireless that we 've got a we got the field . undergrad d: Y , we need obviously need to clear this with ACIRI but , how tough can that be ? There it you 'd all you need 's web access , isn't it ? phd b: W we don't need X access undergrad d: In in theory . That 's that 's what it does , undergrad d: OK , phd b: yeah . grad a: phd b: So grad a: right , so it 's just a question of getting a laptop and a wireless modem . phd b: With a with a with a w undergrad d: No , and he he had , reque @ @ my my proposal is you have a laptop . undergrad d: If if we bought you the thing would you mind using it with i the the phd b: No , I would love to but I 'm not sure if my laptop is compatible with the wave LAN thing they 're using . phd b: Well Apple has their own thing , right ? phd c: He 's undergrad d: Your new one ? grad a: Airport . phd b: Yeah , I think what I think you I think it just plug plugs in a PC card , so you could probably make it run with that , but . grad a: The question is , is there an Apple driver ? undergrad d: I e phd b: Yeah , I 'm sure . But anyway there are there are abs there are a bunch of machines at ICSI that have those cards undergrad d: But the two t phd b: and so I think if w if it doesn't we should be able to find a machine that does that . I I know that doesn't don't don't the important people have those little blue VAIOs that undergrad d: Well , b that to me that 's a whole nother . undergrad d: The the idea of con convincing them that we should use their network i is fairly straight forward . undergrad d: The idea of being able to walk into their office and say , " oh , can I borrow your machine for a while " , is is is a non - starter . So , either either we figure out how to use a machine somebody already in the group already owns , a a and the idea is that if it 's it perk , you know , it 's an advantage not not a disadvan or else we we literally buy a machine e exactly for that purpose . undergrad d: Certainly it solves a lot of the problems with leaving a monitor out here all the time . undergrad d: I I I I 'm I 'm not a big fan of doing things to the room that make the room less attractive for other people , grad a: Right . undergrad d: right ? Which is part of the reason for getting all this stuff out of the way grad a: Yeah . undergrad d: and and , so a monitor sitting here all the time you know people are gonna walk up to it and go , " how come I can't get , you know , Pong on this " or , whatev grad a: I 've I 've borrowed the IRAM VAIO Sony thingy , phd c: Well grad a: and I don't think they 're ever gonna want it back . undergrad d: Well , the certainly , u you should give it a shot first See whether you you can get compatible stuff . Who knows , they might have an extra hardware s phd b: I 'd trade them a flat panel display for it . phd c: What is the , projector supposed to be hooked up to ? undergrad d: Good . There 's gonna be actually a a plug at the front that 'll connect to people 's laptops so you can walk in and plug it in . undergrad d: So people sitting here are going " testing , one , two , three " ! phd c: But , that 's another that 's another possibility that , you know , solves undergrad d: It a phd b: Yeah . phd b: That 's an end undergrad d: But but but I think the idea of having a control panel it 's that 's there in front of you is really cool . phd b: I think and , having having it on wireless is is the neatest way neatest way to do it . undergrad d: R grad a: I had undergrad d: As long as you d as l as long as you 're not tempted to sit there and f keep fiddling with the volume controls going , " can you talk a bit louder ? " phd b: Yeah . grad a: I had actually earlier asked if I could borrow one of the cards to do wireless stuff phd b: Yeah . undergrad d: And and it 's a a PCMCIA card , right ? grad a: Yep . undergrad d: right ? In your new machine ? phd c: It 's it really come down to the driver . phd c: grad a: Right , and if and if his doesn't work , as I said , we can use the PC . undergrad d: Right , i it 'll it 'll work It 'll work the first time . phd b: grad a: So phd b: well , that sounds like a d good solution one way or the other . grad a: So Jim is gonna be doing wiring and you 're gonna give some thought to cabinets ? undergrad d: y yeah . phd b: We 'd I think undergrad d: Hey , what are those green lights doing ? grad a: They 're flashing ! phd b: - oh ! - oh ! Does that it means it means it 's gonna explode . undergrad d: Cut the red wire , the red wire ! phd b: grad a: When people talk , it they go on and off . phd b: using using these undergrad d: And it and the f the five thousand for the wires , so if I 'm gonna do No . phd b: that 's true undergrad d: I have to do phd b: but we haven't spent that , right ? But once we once we 've done the intellectual part of these , we can just knock them out , right ? grad a: Cheap . phd b: And then we could Washington could have a system that didn't have any wireless but would had what 's based on these undergrad d: phd b: And that 's about cuz you wouldn't even need the mixer if you didn't have the Oh th the P Z undergrad d: Right . But anyway you 'd save , on the seven seven or eight thousand for the for the wireless system . undergrad d: What ? postdoc e: It 's nice it 's nice to be thinking toward that . grad a: There 's a speech compression program that works great on things like this , cuz if the dynamic range is low it encodes it with fewer bits . phd c: Now , shorter words wouldn't would induce more dynamics , right ? You want to have phd b: Yeah , but if the words are more predictable . postdoc e: That 's a long word ! grad a: How do you spell that ? postdoc e: I don't know . grad a: OK , can you do one more round of digits ? Are we done talking ? undergrad d: Well it 's a choice if we get a choice , let 's keep talking . grad a: Are you done ? postdoc e: I 'm done , grad a: I 'm done . Like , you know , candy bars or something , grad a: I 'll I 'll remember to bring M and M 's next time . undergrad d: or or or or or a little , you know , toothbrushes like they give you at the d dentist . postdoc e: We don't know that for sure , do we ? grad a: I should have mentioned that s , to pause between lines but undergrad d: No , I know . grad a: It 's it 's only a hard time for the transcriber not for the speech recognizer . phd b: Tha - tha postdoc e: But I also think you said channel four grad a: Me . phd b: But they 're in order ! undergrad d: But real phd b: They start , six , seven , eight , nine , zero , one , two , three , four , five , six , eight , nine . undergrad d: Where 'd they come from ? phd b: And they 're in order because they 're sorted lexically by the file names , which are have the numbers in digits . phd b: And so they 're actually this is like all the all utterances that were generated by speaker MPJ or something . phd b: It doesn't matter ! It 's like Cuz you said " six , seven , eight " . If I if not I undergrad d: But the real question I have is that , why bother with these ? postdoc e: Oh , interesting . undergrad d: Why don't you just ask people to repeat numbers they already know ? Like phone numbers , you know , social security numbers . phd b: Cuz we have these writt written down , right ? grad a: Because Right . phd b: That 's why grad a: If we have it , undergrad d: I know . undergrad d: Credit card numbers , grad a: We don't have to tran undergrad d: yeah . undergrad d: Yeah , so you just say say your credit card numbers , say your phone numbers , say your mother 's maiden name . undergrad d: This grad a: Actually , this I got this directly from another training set , from Aurora . postdoc e: I was I the reason I made my mistake was grad a: What ? postdoc e: Wa - was this ? phd b: There were no there were no direct driver errors , by the look of it , which is good <doc-sep><doc-sep>professor c: so you get to phd d: Yeah , I will try to explain the thing that I did this this week during this week . phd d: Well eh you know that I work I begin to work with a new feature to detect voice - unvoice . phd d: What I trying two MLP to to the with this new feature and the fifteen feature from the eh bus base system phd e: The the mel cepstrum ? phd d: No , satly the mes the Mel Cepstrum , the new base system the new base system . phd d: And I 'm trying two MLP , one one that only have t three output , voice , unvoice , and silence , professor c: And I tried to do some experiment of recognition with that and only have result with with the MLP with the three output . professor c: What what feeds the the three - output net ? phd d: Voice , unvoice , and si professor c: No no , what feeds it ? What features does it see ? phd d: The feature the input ? The inputs are the fifteen the fifteen bases feature . And the other three features are R , the variance of the difference between the two spectrum , professor c: - huh . phd d: the variance of the auto - correlation function , except the the first point , because half the height value is R - zero professor c: professor c: You wouldn't do like R - one over R - zero or something like that ? usually for voiced - unvoiced you 'd do yeah , you 'd do something you 'd do energy phd d: Yeah . professor c: but then you have something like spectral slope , which is you get like R - one ov over R - zero or something like that . phd d: Auto - correlation ? Yes , yes , the variance of the auto - correlation function that uses that professor c: Ye - Well that 's the variance , but if you just say " what is " , to first order , yeah one of the differences between voiced , unvoiced and silence is energy . phd d: Yeah , I I 'll The spectral shape , professor c: Yeah , and so R - one over R - zero is what you typically use for that . No , I don't use that I can't use professor c: No , I 'm saying that 's what people us typically use . professor c: See , because it because this is this is just like a single number to tell you " does the spectrum look like that or does it look like that " . professor c: So if it 's if it 's if it 's low energy but the but the spectrum looks like that or like that , it 's probably silence . professor c: but if it 's low energy and the spectrum looks like that , it 's probably unvoiced . professor c: So if you just if you just had to pick two features to determine voiced - unvoiced , you 'd pick something about the spectrum like R - one over R - zero , and R - zero phd d: - , OK . professor c: or i i you know you 'd have some other energy measure and like in the old days people did like zero crossing counts . , phd d: Bec - because the result are a little bit better but we have in a point that everything is more or less the similar more or less similar . professor c: Right , but it seemed to me that what you were what you were getting at before was that there is something about the difference between the original signal or the original FFT and with the filter which is what and the variance was one take on it . Then in that case , if you have two nets , Alright , and this one has three outputs , and this one has f phd d: professor c: if you were to sum up the probabilities for the voiced and for the unvoiced and for the silence here , we 've found in the past you 'll do better at voiced - unvoiced - silence than you do with this one . professor c: So phd d: No phd e: So you 're saying take the features that go into the voiced - unvoiced - silence net and feed those into the other one , as additional inputs , rather than having a separate professor c: w W well that 's another way . professor c: That wasn't what I was saying but yeah that 's certainly another thing to do . No I was just trying to say if you b if you bring this into the picture over this , what more does it buy you ? phd e: Mmm . professor c: And what I was saying is that the only thing I think that it buys you is based on whether you feed it something different . And so the kind of thing that that she was talking about before , was looking at something ab something about the difference between the the log FFT log power and the log magnitude F F - spectrum and the filter bank . professor c: And so the filter bank is chosen in fact to sort of integrate out the effects of pitch and she 's saying you know trying So the particular measure that she chose was the variance of this m of this difference , but that might not be the right number . professor c: Right ? maybe there 's something about the variance that 's that 's not enough or maybe there 's something else that that one could use , but I think that , for me , the thing that that struck me was that you wanna get something back here , so here 's here 's an idea . What about it you skip all the all the really clever things , and just fed the log magnitude spectrum into this ? phd d: Ah I 'm sorry . professor c: This is f You have the log magnitude spectrum , and you were looking at that and the difference between the filter bank and and c c computing the variance . professor c: What if you stopped being clever ? And you just took this thing in here because it 's a neural net and neural nets are wonderful phd d: professor c: and figure out what they can what they most need from things , and that 's what they 're good at . professor c: So you 're you 're you 're trying to be clever and say what 's the statistic that should we should get about this difference but in fact , you know maybe just feeding this in or or feeding both of them in phd e: . professor c: you know , another way , saying let it figure out what 's the what is the interaction , especially if you do this over multiple frames ? phd d: professor c: Then you have this over time , and and both kinds of measures and you might get something better . phd e: So so don't don't do the division , but let the net have everything . , it seems to me , if you have exactly the right thing then it 's better to do it without the net because otherwise you 're asking the net to learn this you know , say if you wanted to learn how to do multiplication . professor c: you could feed it a bunch of s you could feed two numbers that you wanted to multiply into a net and have a bunch of nonlinearities in the middle and train it to get the product of the output and it would work . But , it 's kind of crazy , cuz we know how to multiply and you you 'd be you know much lower error usually if you just multiplied it out . phd e: How long does it take , Carmen , to train up one of these nets ? phd d: Oh , not too much . grad a: What are what are your f frame error rates for for this ? phd d: Eh fifty - f six no , the frame error rate ? grad a: O phd d: Fifty - six I think . grad a: Fif - fifty - six percent accurate for v voice - unvoice phd d: The accuracy . No for , yes f I don't remember for voice - unvoice , grad a: Oh , OK . phd d: But I think that fifty - five was for the when the output are the fifty - six phone . phd d: That I look in the with the other nnn the other MLP that we have are more or less the same number . professor c: I think at the frame level for fifty - six that was the kind of number we were getting for for reduced band width stuff . phd d: I think that I I I think that for the other one , for the three output , is sixty sixty - two , sixty three more or less . , if you 're getting fifty - six percent over here , that 's in noise also , right ? phd d: Yeah , yeah , yeah . If you 're getting fifty - six here , try adding together the probabilities of all of the voiced phones here and all of the unvoiced phones phd d: will be professor c: and see what you get then . phd d: Well I don't know , but I th I I think that we I have the result more or less . I don't I 'm not sure but I remember @ @ that I can't show that . professor c: OK , but that 's a That is a a good check point , you should do that anyway , phd d: Yeah . professor c: OK ? Given this this regular old net that 's just for choosing for other purposes , add up the probabilities of the different subclasses and see see how well you do . But phd e: The targets for the neural net , they come from forced alignments ? phd d: no . Well there 's gonna be it looks like there 's gonna be a noisy some large vocabulary noisy stuff too . phd e: Oh ! professor c: Yeah , so the , the issue is whether people make a decision now based on what they 've already seen , or they make it later . And one of the arguments for making it later is let 's make sure that whatever techniques that we 're using work for something more than than connected digits . phd e: When are they planning When would they do that ? professor c: Mmm , I think late I think in the summer sometime . phd d: and also mmm I H Hynek last week say that if I have time I can to begin to to study well seriously the France Telecom proposal professor c: phd d: to look at the code and something like that to know exactly what they are doing because maybe that we can have some ideas professor c: Look insi look i carefully what they are doing with the program @ @ and I begin to to work also in that . But the first thing that I don't understand is that they are using R - the log energy that this quite I don't know why they have some constant in the expression of the lower energy . professor c: Oh , at the front it says " log energy is equal to the rounded version of sixteen over the log of two " phd d: This Yeah . professor c: Well , this is natural log , and maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is I I have no idea . phd e: Is that some kind of base conversion , or ? professor c: Yeah , that 's what I was thinking , but but , then there 's the sixty - four , I don't know . phd d: Because maybe they 're the threshold that they are using on the basis of this value phd e: Experimental results . phd d: I don't know exactly , because well th I thought maybe they have a meaning . phd e: So they 're taking the number inside the log and raising it to sixteen over log base two . If we ignore the sixteen , the natural log of t one over the natural log of two times the natu I don't know . Well , maybe somebody 'll think of something , phd e: professor c: but this is It may just be that they they want to have for very small energies , they want to have some kind of a phd d: Yeah , the e The effect I don't @ @ I can understand the effect of this , no ? because it 's to to do something like that . professor c: Well , it says , since you 're taking a natural log , it says that when when you get down to essentially zero energy , this is gonna be the natural log of one , which is zero . professor c: So it 'll go down to to the natural log being So the lowest value for this would be zero . I I will look to try if I move this parameter in their code what happens , maybe everything is Maybe they tres hole are on basis of this . professor c: it they they probably have some fi particular s fixed point arithmetic that they 're using , phd d: I don't know . professor c: and then it just phd e: Yeah , I was just gonna say maybe it has something to do with hardware , professor c: Yeah . I think you 're supposed to on this stuff anyway , and and so maybe that puts it in the right realm somewhere . phd e: Well it just , yeah , puts it in the right range , or professor c: Yeah . I think , given at the level you 're doing things in floating point on the computer , I don't think it matters , would be my guess , phd d: OK , and wh when did Stephane take off ? He took off phd d: I think that Stephane will arrive today or tomorrow . professor c: Oh , he was gone these first few days , and then he 's here for a couple days before he goes to Salt Lake City . I I don't know if there are many people who are going to ICASSP phd d: Yeah . phd e: Do have Have people sort of stopped going to ICASSP in recent years ? professor c: people are less consistent about going to ICASSP and I think it 's still it 's still a reasonable forum for students to to present things . , it 's I think for engineering students of any kind , I think it 's it 's if you haven't been there much , it 's good to go to , to get a feel for things , a range of things , not just speech . But I think for for sort of dyed - in - the - wool speech people , I think that ICSLP and Eurospeech are much more targeted . And then there 's these other meetings , like HLT and and ASRU phd e: professor c: so there 's there 's actually plenty of meetings that are really relevant to to computational speech processing of one sort or another . So Wanna talk a little bit about what we were talking about this morning ? grad a: Oh ! Yeah . I I guess some of the progress , I I 've been getting a getting my committee members for the quals . And so far I have Morgan and Hynek , Mike Jordan , and I asked John Ohala and he agreed . Then I talked a little bit about continuing with these dynamic ev acoustic events , and we 're we 're we 're thinking about a way to test the completeness of a a set of dynamic events . , completeness in the in the sense that if we if we pick these X number of acoustic events , do they provide sufficient coverage for the phones that we 're trying to recognize or or the f the words that we 're gonna try to recognize later on . And so Morgan and I were discussing s s a form of a cheating experiment where we get we have a chosen set of features , or acoustic events , and we train up a hybrid system to do phone recognition on TIMIT . So i i the idea is if we get good phone recognition results , using these set of acoustic events , then that that says that these acoustic events are g sufficient to cover a set of phones , at least found in TIMIT . so i it would be a a measure of " are we on the right track with with the the choices of our acoustic events " . And also , just working on my final project for Jordan 's class , which is professor c: Actually , let me grad a: Yeah . The the other thing I was suggesting , though , is that given that you 're talking about binary features , maybe the first thing to do is just to count and count co - occurrences and get probabilities for a discrete cuz that 'd be pretty simple because it 's just Say , if you had ten ten events , that you were counting , each frame would only have a thousand possible values for these ten bits , and so you could make a table that would say , if you had thirty - nine phone categories , that would be a thousand by thirty - nine , and just count the co - occurrences and divide them by the the occ count the co - occurrences between the event and the phone and divide them by the number of occurrences of the phone , and that would give you the likelihood of the of the event given the phone . And then just use that in a very simple and you could do phone recognition then and wouldn't have any of the issues of the training of the net or , it 'd be on the simple side , but phd e: professor c: you know , if the example I was giving was that if if you had onset of voicing and and end of voicing as being two kinds of events , then if you had those a all marked correctly , and you counted co - occurrences , you should get it completely right . So If you just do this by counting , then you should be able to find out in a pretty straightforward way whether you have a sufficient set of events to to do the kind of level of of classification of phones that you 'd like . And then the other thing that we were discussing was was OK , how do you get the your training data . professor c: Cuz the Switchboard transcription project you know was half a dozen people , or so working off and on over a couple years , and similar similar amount of data to what you 're talking about with TIMIT training . So , it seems to me that the only reasonable starting point is to automatically translate the current TIMIT markings into the markings you want . And it won't have the kind of characteristic that you 'd like , of catching funny kind of things that maybe aren't there from these automatic markings , phd e: professor c: but but it 's phd e: It 's probably a good place to start . professor c: Yeah and a short short amount of time , just to again , just to see if that information is sufficient to determine the phones . phd e: Yeah , you could even then to to get an idea about how different it is , you could maybe take some subset and you know , go through a few sentences , mark them by hand and then see how different it is from you know , the canonical ones , professor c: Right . phd e: just to get an idea a rough idea of h if it really even makes a difference . professor c: my my guess would be that this is since TIMIT 's read speech that this would be less of a big deal , phd e: professor c: And the other thing would be , say , if you had these ten events , you 'd wanna see , well what if you took two events or four events or ten events or t and you know , and and hopefully there should be some point at which having more information doesn't tell you really all that much more about what the phones are . professor c: you could , but the thing is , what he 's talking about here is a a translation to a per - frame feature vector , so there 's no sequence in that , I think . I think it 's just a phd e: Unless you did like a second pass over it or something after you 've got your professor c: Yeah , but we 're just talking about something simple here , yeah , to see if phd e: Yeah . The idea is with a with a very simple statistical structure , could you could you at least verify that you 've chosen features that are sufficient . professor c: OK , and you were saying something starting to say something else about your your class project , or ? grad a: Oh . grad a: So for my class project I 'm I 'm tinkering with support vector machines ? something that we learned in class , and basically just another method for doing classification . And so I 'm gonna apply that to compare it with the results by King and Taylor who did these using recurrent neural nets , they recognized a set of phonological features and made a mapping from the MFCC 's to these phonological features , so I 'm gonna do a similar thing with with support vector machines and see if phd e: So what 's the advantage of support vector machines ? What grad a: . grad a: and so if you if you give it less data it still does a reasonable job in learning the the patterns . grad a: and professor c: I guess it yeah , they 're sort of succinct , and and they grad a: Yeah . phd e: Does there some kind of a distance metric that they use or how do they for cla what do they do for classification ? grad a: . So , the the simple idea behind a support vector machine is , you have you have this feature space , right ? and then it finds the optimal separating plane , between these two different classes , phd e: grad a: and and so , what it i at the end of the day , what it actually does is it picks those examples of the features that are closest to the separating boundary , and remembers those phd e: So , given these these features , or or these these examples , critical examples , which they call support f support vectors , then given a new example , if the new example falls away from the boundary in one direction then it 's classified as being a part of this particular class phd e: Oh . phd e: So why save the examples ? Why not just save what the boundary itself is ? grad a: professor c: You know , it it goes back to nearest - neighbor sort of thing , phd e: professor c: right ? , i i if is it eh w When is nearest - neighbor good ? Well , nearest - neighbor good is good if you have lots and lots of examples . but of course if you have lots and lots of examples , then it can take a while to to use nearest - neighbor . So a long time ago people talked about things where you would have a condensed nearest - neighbor , where you would you would you would pick out some representative examples which would be sufficient to represent to to correctly classify everything that came in . professor c: I I think s I think support vector stuff sort of goes back to to that kind of thing . So rather than doing nearest neighbor where you compare to every single one , you just pick a few critical ones , and professor c: Yeah . professor c: And th the You know , neural net approach or Gaussian mixtures for that matter are sort of fairly brute force kinds of things , where you sort of you predefine that there is this big bunch of parameters and then you you place them as you best can to define the boundaries , and in fact , as you know , these things do take a lot of parameters and and if you have only a modest amount of data , you have trouble learning them . , so I I guess the idea to this is that it it is reputed to be somewhat better in that regard . I it can be a a reduced parameterization of of the the model by just keeping certain selected examples . professor c: But I don't know if people have done sort of careful comparisons of this on large tasks or anything . grad b: S do you get some kind of number between zero and one at the output ? grad a: Actually you don't get a you don't get a nice number between zero and one . , there are there are pap Well , basically , it 's it 's you you get a distance measure at the end of the day , and then that distance measure is is is translated to a zero or one . professor c: But that 's looking at it for for classification for binary classification , grad a: That 's for classification , right . professor c: right ? phd e: And you get that for each class , you get a zero or a one . grad a: You have the distances to work with , professor c: Cuz actually Mississippi State people did use support vector machines for speech recognition and they were using it to estimate probabilities . Yeah , they they had a had a way to translate the distances into into probabilities with the with the simple sigmoidal function . professor c: Yeah , and d did they use sigmoid or a softmax type thing ? grad a: Yeah , professor c: And didn't they like exponentiate or something grad a: there 's some there 's like one over one plus the exponential or something like that . professor c: and then divide by the sum of them , or ? Oh it i Oh , so it is a sigmoidal . phd e: Did the did they get good results with that ? professor c: they 're OK , I I don't I don't think they were earth earth shattering , but I think that this was a couple years ago , phd e: . professor c: I remember them doing it at some meeting , and and I don't think people were very critical because it was interesting just to to try this and you know , it was the first time they tried it , so so the you know , the numbers were not incredibly good phd e: . grad b: s So Barry , if you just have zero and ones , how are you doing the speech recognition ? grad a: Oh I 'm not do I 'm not planning on doing speech recognition with it . grad a: So for example , this this feature set called the sound patterns of English is just a bunch of binary valued features . Let 's say , is this voicing , or is this not voicing , is this sonorants , not sonorants , and stuff like that . phd e: Did you find any more mistakes in their tables ? grad a: Oh ! I haven't gone through the entire table , yet . Yeah , yesterday I brought Chuck the table and I was like , " wait , this is Is the mapping from N to to this phonological feature called " coronal " , is is should it be shouldn't it be a one ? or should it should it be you know coronal instead of not coronal as it was labelled in the paper ? " So I ha haven't hunted down all the all the mistakes yet , professor c: - huh . grad a: but professor c: But a as I was saying , people do get probabilities from these things , grad b: OK . professor c: and and we were just trying to remember how they do , but people have used it for speech recognition , and they have gotten probabilities . professor c: There 's you have you have the paper , right ? The Mississippi State paper ? grad a: professor c: Yeah , if you 're interested y you could look , grad b: And OK . grad a: yeah , our phd e: So in your in in the thing that you 're doing , you have a vector of ones and zeros for each phone ? grad a: phd e: Is that what you 're grad a: Right , Right , right f so for every phone there is there is a a vector of ones and zeros f corresponding to whether it exhibits a particular phonological feature or not . And so when you do your wh I 'm what is the task for the class project ? To come up with the phones ? grad a: phd e: or to come up with these vectors to see how closely they match the phones , grad a: Oh . Right , to come up with a mapping from MFCC 's or s some feature set , to w to whether there 's existence of a particular phonological feature . grad a: And yeah , basically it 's to learn a mapping from from the MFCC 's to phonological features . C phd e: I guess , I 'm not sure what you what you 're what you get out of your system . Do you get out a a vector of these ones and zeros and then try to find the closest matching phoneme to that vector , grad a: Just it 's it 's basically it 's it 's really simple , basically a detection of phonological features . grad a: and cuz the So King and and Taylor did this with recurrent neural nets , phd e: Yeah . grad a: and this i their their idea was to first find a mapping from MFCC 's to phonological features phd e: grad a: and then later on , once you have these phonological features , then map that to phones . grad a: So I 'm I 'm sort of reproducing phase one of their stuff . I wo did they compare that , what if you just did phone recognition and did the reverse lookup . phd e: So you recognize a phone and which ever phone was recognized , you spit out it 's vector of ones and zeros . phd e: professor c: That 's probably not what he 's going to do on his class project . professor c: So have you had a chance to do this thing we talked about yet with the phd e: Insertion penalty ? professor c: . No actually I was going a different That 's a good question , too , but I was gonna ask about the the changes to the data in comparing PLP and mel cepstrum for the SRI system . Well what I 've been " Changes to the data " , I 'm not sure I professor c: Right . So we talked on the phone about this , that that there was still a difference of a of a few percent phd e: Yeah . And I was asking if you were going to do redo it for PLP with the normalization done as it had been done for the mel cepstrum . phd e: What I 've been doing is trying to figure out it just seems to me like there 's a well it seems like there 's a bug , because the difference in performance is it 's not gigantic but it 's big enough that it it seems wrong . professor c: Yeah , I agree , but I thought that the normalization difference was one of the possibilities , phd e: and Yeah , but I don't I 'm not professor c: right ? phd e: Yeah , I guess I don't think that the normalization difference is gonna account for everything . phd e: So what I was working on is just going through and checking the headers of the wavefiles , to see if maybe there was a a certain type of compression or something that was done that my script wasn't catching . phd e: Which would you know cause it to perform OK , but , you know , the the models would be all messed up . So I was going through and just double - checking that kind of think first , to see if there was just some kind of obvious bug in the way that I was computing the features . phd e: Looking at all the sampling rates to make sure all the sampling rates were what eight K , what I was assuming they were , professor c: Yeah . So I was doing that first , before I did these other things , just to make sure there wasn't something professor c: Although really , a couple three percent difference in word error rate could easily come from some difference in normalization , I would think . But phd e: Yeah , and I think , hhh I 'm trying to remember but I think I recall that Andreas was saying that he was gonna run sort of the reverse experiment . which is to try to emulate the normalization that we did but with the mel cepstral features . professor c: Yeah , he 's probably off at at his meeting now , phd e: Yeah , he 's gone now . But yeah phd e: But professor c: the I sh think they should be roughly equivalent , again the Cambridge folk found the PLP actually to be a little better . professor c: the other thing I wonder about was whether there was something just in the the bootstrapping of their system which was based on but maybe not , since they phd e: Yeah see one thing that 's a little bit I was looking I 've been studying and going through the logs for the system that Andreas created . And his the way that the S R I system looks like it works is that it reads the wavefiles directly , and does all of the cepstral computation stuff on the fly . phd e: And , so there 's no place where these where the cepstral files are stored , anywhere that I can go look at and compare to the PLP ones , so whereas with our features , he 's actually storing the cepstrum on disk , and he reads those in . phd e: But it looked like he had to give it even though the cepstrum is already computed , he has to give it a front - end parameter file . Which talks about the kind of com computation that his mel cepstrum thing does , professor c: - huh . phd e: so i I I don't know if that it probably doesn't mess it up , it probably just ignores it if it determines that it 's already in the right format or something but the the the two processes that happen are a little different . I 've been , I 've been working with Jeremy on his project and then I 've been trying to track down this bug in the ICSI front - end features . phd e: So one thing that I did notice , yesterday I was studying the the RASTA code professor c: - huh . phd e: and it looks like we don't have any way to control the frequency range that we use in our analysis . We basically it looks to me like we do the FFT , and then we just take all the bins and we use everything . We don't have any set of parameters where we can say you know , " only process from you know a hundred and ten hertz to thirty - seven - fifty " . professor c: Yeah , I don't think it 's in there , I think it 's in the the filters . So , the F F T is on everything , but the filters , for instance , ignore the the lowest bins and the highest bins . And what it does is it it copies phd e: The the filters ? Which filters ? professor c: The filter bank which is created by integrating over F F T bins . Yeah , it 's bark scale , and it 's it it it actually copies the the second filters over to the first . So the first filters are always and you can s you can specify a different number of features different number of filters , I think , as I recall . So you can specify a different number of filters , and whatever you specify , the last ones are gonna be ignored . Y you can't do it without I think changing the number of filters , but phd e: I saw something about that looked like it was doing something like that , but I didn't quite understand it . So maybe professor c: Yeah , so the idea is that the very lowest frequencies and and typically the veriest highest frequencies are kind of junk . professor c: And so you just for continuity you just approximate them by by the second to highest and second to lowest . professor c: And and so if you h phd e: But so the but that 's a fixed thing ? professor c: Yeah , I think that 's a fixed thing . phd e: There 's nothing that lets you professor c: But see see my point ? If you had If you had ten filters , then you would be throwing away a lot at the two ends . professor c: And if you had if you had fifty filters , you 'd be throwing away hardly anything . professor c: I don't remember there being an independent way of saying " we 're just gonna make them from here to here " . professor c: But I I I don't know , it 's actually been awhile since I 've looked at it . phd e: Yeah , I went through the Feacalc code and then looked at you know just calling the RASTA libs and thing like that . And I didn't I couldn't see any wh place where that kind of thing was done . But I didn't quite understand everything that I saw , professor c: Yeah , see I don't know Feacalc at all . I guess for some particular database you might find that you could tune that and tweak that to get that a little better , but I think that in general it 's not that critical . professor c: You can You can throw away stuff below a hundred hertz or so and it 's just not going to affect phonetic classification at all . phd e: Another thing I was thinking about was is there a I was wondering if there 's maybe certain settings of the parameters when you compute PLP which would basically cause it to output mel cepstrum . So that , in effect , what I could do is use our code but produce mel cepstrum and compare that directly to professor c: Well , it 's not precisely . professor c: what you can do is you can definitely change the the filter bank from being a trapezoidal integration to a a a triangular one , phd e: professor c: And some people have claimed that they got some better performance doing that , so you certainly could do that easily . But the fundamental difference , there 's other small differences phd e: There 's a cubic root that happens , right ? professor c: Yeah , but , you know , as opposed to the log in the other case . the fundamental d d difference that we 've seen any kind of difference from before , which is actually an advantage for the P L P i , I think , is that the the smoothing at the end is auto - regressive instead of being cepstral , from cepstral truncation . professor c: and that 's that 's why when people started getting databases that had a little more noise in it , like like Broadcast News and so on , that 's why c Cambridge switched to PLP I think . professor c: So That 's a difference that I don't think we put any way to get around , since it was an advantage . professor c: but we did eh we did hear this comment from people at some point , that it they got some better results with the triangular filters rather than the trapezoidal . phd e: Yeah just it just seems like this kind of behavior could be caused by you know s some of the training data being messed up . phd e: You know , you 're sort of getting most of the way there , but there 's a So I started going through and looking One of the things that I did notice was that the log likelihoods coming out of the log recognizer from the PLP data were much lower , much smaller , than for the mel cepstral stuff , and that the average amount of pruning that was happening was therefore a little bit higher for the PLP features . professor c: Oh - huh ! phd e: So , since he used the same exact pruning thresholds for both , I was wondering if it could be that we 're getting more pruning . professor c: Oh ! He he He used the identical pruning thresholds even though the s the range of p of the likeli phd e: Yeah . phd e: Yeah , professor c: I would think that you might wanna do something like you know , look at a few points to see where you are starting to get significant search errors . Well , what I was gonna do is I was gonna take a couple of the utterances that he had run through , then run them through again but modify the pruning threshold and see if it you know , affects the score . But you could if if if that looks promising you could , you know , r run the overall test set with a with a few different pruning thresholds for both , phd e: So . professor c: and presumably he 's running at some pruning threshold that 's that 's , you know gets very few search errors phd e: Right . , yeah , generally in these things you you turn back pruning really far , professor c: and phd e: so I I didn't think it would be that big a deal because I was figuring well you have it turned back so far that you know it professor c: But you may be in the wrong range for the P L P features for some reason . And the the the run time of the recognizer on the PLP features is longer which sort of implies that the networks are bushier , you know , there 's more things it 's considering which goes along with the fact that the matches aren't as good . I guess this was a little bit off topic , I guess , because I was I was thinking in terms of th this as being a a a a core item that once we once we had it going we would use for a number of the front - end things also . professor c: Wanna grad b: That 's as far as my stuff goes , professor c: What 's what 's on grad b: yeah , well I tried this mean subtraction method . Due to Avendano , I 'm taking s six seconds of speech , I 'm using two second FFT analysis frames , stepped by a half second so it 's a quarter length step and I I take that frame and four f the four I take Sorry , I take the current frame and the four past frames and the four future frames and that adds up to six seconds of speech . And the I tried that with HDK , the Aurora setup of HDK training on clean TI - digits , and it it helped in a phony reverberation case where I just used the simulated impulse response the error rate went from something like eighty it was from something like eighteen percent to four percent . And on meeting rec recorder far mike digits , mike on channel F , it went from forty - one percent error to eight percent error . phd e: On on the real data , not with artificial reverb ? grad b: Right . grad b: And that that was trained on clean speech only , which I 'm guessing is the reason why the baseline was so bad . And professor c: That 's ac actually a little side point is I think that 's the first results that we have of any sort on the far field on on the far field data for recorded in in meetings . professor c: Did he ? On the near field , on the ne grad b: On the far field also . What kind of numbers was he getting with that ? grad b: I I 'm not sure , I think it was about five percent error for the PZM channel . , clean TI - digits is , like , pretty pristine training data , and if they trained the SRI system on this TV broadcast type stuff , I think it 's a much wider range of channels and it professor c: No , but wait a minute . I I I th I think he What am I saying here ? Yeah , so that was the SRI system . So So probably it should be something we should try then is to is to see if is at some point just to take i to transform the data and then and then use th use it for the SRI system . grad b: b You me you mean ta professor c: So you 're so you have a system which for one reason or another is relatively poor , grad b: Yeah . professor c: and and you have something like forty - one percent error and then you transform it to eight by doing doing this this work . So here 's this other system , which is a lot better , but there 's still this kind of ratio . It 's something like five percent error with the the distant mike , and one percent with the close mike . professor c: So the question is how close to that one can you get if you transform the data using that system . grad b: r Right , so so I guess this SRI system is trained on a lot of s Broadcast News or Switchboard data . grad b: Do you know which one it is ? phd e: It 's trained on a lot of different things . It 's trained on a lot of Switchboard , Call Home , grad b: - huh . phd e: a bunch of different sources , some digits , there 's some digits training in there . grad b: O one thing I 'm wondering about is what this mean subtraction method will do if it 's faced with additive noise . Cuz I I it 's cuz I don't know what log magnitude spectral subtraction is gonna do to additive noise . professor c: Yeah , grad b: That 's that 's the professor c: well , it 's it 's not exactly the right thing grad b: - huh . So grad b: OK , so it 's then then it 's it 's it 's reasonable to expect it would be helpful if we used it with the SRI system and professor c: Yeah , as helpful , so that 's the question . Yeah , w we 're often asked this when we work with a system that that isn't isn't sort of industry industry standard great , grad b: - huh . professor c: and we see some reduction in error using some clever method , then , you know , will it work on a on a on a good system . I think , you know , one one percent word error rate on digits is digit strings is not you know stellar , but but given that this is real digits , as opposed to sort of laboratory grad b: professor c: you know , if you 're doing a a sixteen digit credit card number you 'll basically get it wrong almost all the time . So I don't think I can do the digits , but , I guess I 'll leave my microphone on ? phd e: yeah <doc-sep>professor b: OK , so We we had a meeting with , with Hynek , in in which , Sunil and Stephane , summarized where they were and and , talked about where we were gonna go . phd e: D did did you guys get your code pushed together ? phd d: Oh , yeah . professor b: What was the update ? phd a: What was the update ? So there is th then the all the new features that go in . These are the phd e: Is the , the CVS mechanism working well ? phd a: Yeah . phd e: Are are people , up at OGI grabbing code , via that ? phd d: I don't think I don't think phd e: Or ? phd a: I don't know if they use it , but . phd d: Yeah , I I don't think anybody up there is like working on it right now . professor b: I think it more likely that what it means is that when Sunil is up there he will grab it . professor b: But what 'll happen is is he 'll go back up there and , Pratibha will come back from from , the east coast . professor b: And , and and I guess actually , after Eurospeech for a little bit , he 'll go up there too . So , actually everybody who 's working on it will be up there for at least a little while . phd e: So has Has anybody tried remotely accessing the CVS using , SSH ? professor b: Yeah . phd a: I don't know if Hari did that or You d phd d: I can actually do it today . , I can just log into phd e: Have you tried it yet ? phd d: No , I didn't . phd a: Actually I I tried wh while when I installed the repository , I tried from Belgium . phd a: I logged in there and I tried to import phd e: Yeah ? It worked good ? phd a: Yeah , it works . phd e: Oh , good ! phd a: But it 's So , right now it 's the mechanism with SSH . phd e: Great ! phd a: I don't s I didn't set up You can also set up a CVS server on a new port . phd e: right ? phd a: But I didn't do that because I was not sure about security problems . I I would have to phd e: So w when you came in from Belgian Belgium , using SSH , was it asking you for your own password into ICSI ? So if yo you can only do that if you have an account at ICSI ? phd a: Right . phd e: Cuz there is an a way to set up anonymous CVS right ? phd a: Yeah , you ha in this way you ca you have to set up a CVS server but then , yeah , you can access it . phd e: So the anonymous mechanism phd a: You can access them and mostly if you if y the set the server is set up like this . Because a lot of the open source stuff works with anonymous CVS and I 'm just wondering , for our transcripts we may want to do that . professor b: Yeah , for this stuff I don't think we 're quite up to that . So , phd e: What 's new ? professor b: Well , I think maybe the thing to me might be I me I 'm sure you 've just been working on on , details of that since the meeting , right ? And so phd a: Mmm , since the meeting , well , I I 've been I 've been train training a new VAD and a new feature net . professor b: But I guess maybe the thing since you weren't yo you guys weren't at that that meeting , might be just just to , sort of recap , the the conclusions of the meeting . Cuz that was sort of , we we 'd sort of been working up to that , that that , he would come here this week and and we would sort of phd e: - huh . professor b: Since he 's going out of town like now , and I 'm going out town in a couple weeks , and time is marching , sort of , given all the mu many wonderful things we could be working on , what what will we actually focus on ? phd e: professor b: And , and what do we freeze ? And , you know , what do we ? So , . So then there 's something central and there aren't at least a bunch of different versions going off in in ways that differ trivially . professor b: and then within that , I guess the idea was to freeze a certain set of options for now , to run it , a particular way , and decide on what things are gonna be experimented with , as opposed to just experimenting with everything . So we 've been working like six weeks on on the noise compensation and we end up with something that seems reasonable . phd e: Are you gonna use which of the two techniques ? phd a: So finally it 's it 's , Wiener filtering on FFT bins . And it uses , two steps , smoothing of the transfer function , the first step , that 's along time , which use recursion . And after this step there is a further smoothing along frequency , which use a sliding window of twenty FFT bins . And , phd e: So this is on the , before any mel scaling has been done ? phd a: Yeah , yeah . phd e: This is phd a: It was professor b: This this smoothing is done on the estimate , of what you 're going to subtract ? Or on the thing that has already had something subtracted ? phd a: Yeah . So we are going to fix this for the moment and work on the other aspects of the whole system . phd a: So professor b: Actually , let me int eh , Dave isn't here to talk about it , but let me just interject . This module , in principle , i , you would know whether it 's true in fact , is somewhat independent from the rest of it . , well you don't I guess you don't re - synthesize speech , but you could phd a: We we do not fo professor b: but you could . phd a: Well well , we do , but we don't don't re - synthesize . In in the program we don't re - synthesize and then re - analyze once again . professor b: But you have a re - synthesized thing that you that 's an an option here . professor b: Yeah , I gu I guess my point is that , i in some of the work he 's doing in reverberation , one of the things that we 're finding is that , it 's it 's for the for an artificial situation , we can just deal with the reverberation and his techniques work really well . But for the real situation , problem is , is that you don't just have reverberation , you have reverberation in noise . So in fact it might be a very nice thing to do , to just take the noise removal part of it and put that in front of what he 's looking at . And , generate new files or whatever , and and , and then do the reverberation part . He 's , e phd e: I guess he 's busy with professor b: Yeah , prelims , right . professor b: but but , you know , that 'll , it 's clear that we , we are not with the real case that we 're looking at , we can't just look at reverberation in isolation because the interaction between that and noise is is considerable . And that 's , in the past we 've looked at , and this is hard enough , the interaction between channel effects and and , and additive noise , so convolutional effects and and additive effects . And we have , the , LDA stuff that in principle is doing something about convolutional effects . i i There 's all these interactions between these two and that 's part of why these guys had to work so hard on on juggling everything around . But now when you throw in the reverberation , it 's even worse , because not only do you have these effects , but you also have some long time effects . And , so Dave has something which , is doing some nice things under some conditions with with long time effects but when it 's when there 's noise there too , it 's it 's it 's pretty hard . So we have to start Since any almost any real situation is gonna have , where you have the microphone distant , is going to have both things , we we actually have to think about both at the same time . professor b: So , So there 's this noise suppression thing , which is sort of worked out and then , maybe you should just continue telling what what else is in the the form we have . phd a: Yeah , well , the , the other parts of the system are the the blocks that were already present before and that we did not modify a lot . professor b: So that 's again , that that 's the Wiener filtering , followed by , that 's done at the FFT level . And then the mel and then the log , and then the phd a: Then the LDA filter , professor b: LDA filter . phd a: mmm , then the downsampling , professor b: And then downsample , phd a: DCT , professor b: DCT , phd a: then , on - line normalization , professor b: on - line norm , phd a: followed by upsampling . phd a: And finally frame dropping , which , would be a neural network also , used for estimated silence probabilities . And the input of this neural network would be somewhere between log mel bands or one of the earlier stages of the processing . So that 's sort of most of this stuff is yeah , is operating parallel with this other stuff . So the things that we , I guess we sort of , There 's there 's some , neat ideas for V A So , in I think there 's sort of like There 's a bunch of tuning things to improve stuff . There 's questions about various places where there 's an exponent , if it 's the right exponent , or ways that we 're estimating noise , that we can improve estimating noise . But structurally it seemed like the things the main things that that we brought up that , are are gonna need to get worked on seriously are , a a significantly better VAD , putting the neural net on , which , you know , we haven't been doing anything with , the , neural net at the end there , and , the , opening up the second front . phd e: The other half of the channel ? professor b: Yeah , yeah , cuz we we have we have , half the the , data rate that they allow . phd e: That what you mean ? professor b: And , so the initial thing which came from , the meeting that we had down south was , that , we 'll initially just put in a mel spectrum as the second one . We probably will go to something better later , but the initial thing is that cepstra and spectra behave differently , phd e: phd e: So if you took the system the way it is now , the way it 's fro you 're gonna freeze it , and it ran it on the last evaluation , where it would it be ? phd a: It , phd e: In terms of ranking ? phd a: Ri - right now it 's second . professor b: Although you you know , you haven't tested it actually on the German and Danish , have you ? phd a: No , we didn't . phd e: So on the ones that you did test it on it would have been second ? professor b: Yeah . Would it But When you 're saying second , you 're comparing to the numbers that the , that the best system before got on , also without German and Danish ? phd a: Yeah , yeah . professor b: Well ranking didn't before , but I 'm just asking where this is to where theirs was without the German and Danish , phd a: Yeah . phd e: Where where where were we actually on the last test ? professor b: Oh , we were also esp essentially second , although there were there were , we had a couple systems and they had a couple systems . And so , I guess by that we were third , but , there were two systems that were pretty close , that came from the same place . phd e: We 're so this second that you 're saying now is system - wide second ? professor b: See , no I think it 's also institutional , isn't it ? phd e: Still institutionally second ? professor b: Right ? , I think both of their systems probably phd a: we are between their two systems . professor b: And and , you know , in some sense we 're all doing fairly similar things . , one could argue about the LDA and so forth but I I think , you know , in a lot of ways we 're doing very similar things . But what what phd e: So how did they fill up this all these these bits ? , if we 're u professor b: why are we using half ? Well , so you could you c phd e: Yeah . Or how are they using more than half , I guess maybe is what I professor b: Yeah , so I I think , you guys are closer to it than me , so correct me if I 'm wrong , but I I think that what 's going on is that in in both cases , some kind of normalization is done to deal with convola convolutional effects . And they seem to comple complement each other enough and be different enough that they both seem to help help us . phd e: So th So professor b: So that if you throw away high modulation frequencies , then you can downsample . professor b: So phd e: So what if you didn't So do you explicitly downsample then ? Do we explicitly downsample ? professor b: Yeah . phd e: And what if we didn't do that ? Would we get worse performance ? phd a: Yeah , not better , not worse . professor b: I think it doesn't affect it , does it ? phd e: I see . So I think the thing is , since we 're not evidently throwing away useful information , let 's try to put in some useful information . professor b: And , so I you know , we we 've found in a lot of ways for quite a while that having a second stream , helps a lot . So that 's that 's put in , and you know , it may even end up with mel spectrum even though I 'm saying I think we could do much better , just because it 's simple . And you know , in the long run having something everybody will look at and say , " oh , yeah , I understand " , is is very helpful . phd e: So you would you 're You 're thinking to put the , mel spectrum in before any of the noise removal stuff ? or after ? professor b: Well , that 's a question . It looks like it 'd be straightforward to to , remove the noise , and , phd e: Cuz that happens before the mel conversion , right ? professor b: Yeah . There 's even a question in my mind anyhow of whether th you should take the log or not . phd d: Well , it it it it so it actually makes it dependent on the overall energy of the , the frame . professor b: If you do or don't normalize ? phd d: If yo if you don't normalize and if if you don't normalize . And then if if normalization helps , then y you have something to compare against , and say , " OK , this much effect " , you don't want to change six things and then see what happens . And then saying , oh particularly because we 've found in the past there 's all these these these different results you get with slight modifications of how you do normalization . So , I would think you would wanna have some baseline that says , " OK , we don't normalize , this is what we get " , when we do this normalization , when we do that normalization . phd e: So this second stream , will it add latency to the system professor b: No , it 's in parallel . phd e: or ? grad c: Para professor b: We 're not talking about computation time here . grad c: So with this , new stream would you train up a VAD on both both features , somehow ? phd d: No , I guess the VAD has its own set of features . that 's phd d: which could be this one of these streams , or it can be something derived from these streams . phd a: And there is also the idea of using TRAPS , maybe , for the VAD , which , phd d: Yeah , that 's also phd a: Well , Pratibha apparently showed , when , she was at IBM , that it 's a good idea . grad c: Would would that fit on the handset , or ? Oh ! phd a: I have no idea . phd d: Well , it has t the th phd a: It would have to fit but Yeah . And so I guess the issue there is , are we are we using neural - net - based TRAPS , and and how big are they ? So that 'll that 'll be , you know , an issue . grad c: Cuz she also does the , the correlation - based , TRAPS , with without the neural net , just looking at the correlation between professor b: Right . professor b: Or a simple neural net , right ? , the thing is , if you 're doing correlation , you 're just doing a simple , dot product , you know , with some weights which you happened to learn from this learn from the data . professor b: And so , putting a nonlinearity on it is , you know , not that big a deal . professor b: So , the question is , how complex a function do you need ? Do you need to have an added layer or something ? In which case , potentially , you know , it could be big . phd e: So the meeting with Hynek that you guys just had was to decide exactly what you were gonna freeze in this system ? Is that ? Or was there ? Were you talking about what t new stuff , or ? professor b: What to freeze and then what to do after we froze . And like I was saying , I think the you know , the basic directions are , there 's lots of little things , such as improve the noise estimator but the bigger things are adding on the neural net and , the second stream . phd d: So , I 'll , I 'll actually after the meeting I 'll add the second stream to the VAD and maybe I 'll start with the feature net in that case . It 's like , you 're looking at the VAD , right ? phd a: yeah . phd d: OK , so just figure how to take the features from the final phd a: Yeah . But , yeah , I think there are plenty of issues to work on for the feature net @ @ . phd e: What about the , the new part of the evaluation , the , Wall Street Journal part ? professor b: Right . Well you you may be called upon to help , on account of , all the work in this stuff here has been , with small vocabulary . So what how is the , interaction supposed to happen ? , I remember the last time we talked about this , it was sort of up in the air whether they were going to be taking , people 's features and then running them or they were gonna give the system out or phd d: Yeah . professor b: Do we already have it ? phd d: Yeah , th I I guess it 's almost ready . phd e: So we 'll have to grab this over CVS or something ? phd d: It - no , it 's just downloadable from their from their web site . professor b: Cuz one of the things that might be helpful , if you 've if you 've got time in all of this is , is if if these guys are really focusing on improving , all the digit stuff , maybe and you got the front - end from them , maybe you could do the runs for the phd e: OK . professor b: and and , you know , iron out hassles that that you have to , tweak Joe about or whatever , phd e: Sure . professor b: S phd d: So I 'll point you to the web site and the mails corresponding . So I phd e: And it but it 's not ready yet , the system ? phd d: I I think they are still , tuning something on that . So they 're like , d they 're varying different parameters like the insertion penalty and other stuff , and then seeing what 's the performance . phd e: Are those going to be parameters that are frozen , nobody can change ? Or ? phd d: w I guess there is , time during which people are gonna make suggestions . phd d: So these sugges these this , period during which people are gonna make suggestions is to know whether it is actually biased towards any set of features or professor b: Yeah , so I th th certainly the thing that I would want to know about is whether we get really hurt , on in insertion penalty , language model , scaling , sorts of things . professor b: in which case , H Hari or Hynek will need to , you know , push the case more about about this . phd e: And we may be able to revisit this idea about , you know , somehow modifying our features to work with professor b: Yes . , some of that may be , a last minute rush thing because if the if our features are changing . Yeah , the other thing is that even though it 's months away , it 's starting to seem to me now like November fifteenth is right around the corner . And , if they haven't decided things like this , like what the parameters are gonna be for this , when " deciding " is not just somebody deciding . , in fact there should be some understanding behind the , deciding , which means some experiments and and so forth . phd e: So wha what 's the significance of November fifteenth ? professor b: That 's when the evaluation is . So , yeah , so after But , you know , they may even decide in the end to push it off . But , due to other reasons , like some people are going away , I 'm I 'm hoping it 's not pushed off for a l a long while . There 's there 's not anybody OGI currently who 's who 's , working with this and and phd e: Is is this part of the evaluation just a small part , or ho how important is this to the overall ? professor b: I I think it 's it 's , it depends how badly you do . phd d: b phd e: This is one of those things that will be debated afterwards ? professor b: Yeah . Well , it 's it 's Conceptually , it my impression , again , you guys correct me if I 'm wrong , but my impression is that , they want it as a double check . That you haven't come across you haven't invented features which are actually gonna do badly for a a significantly different task , particularly one with larger vocabulary . professor b: the truth is , most of the applications they 're looking at are pretty small vocabulary . phd e: Seems to me that if it 's a double check , they should give you a one or a zero . Y you passed the threshold or you didn't pass the threshold , and they shouldn't even care about what the score is . , but in in the current thing , for instance , where you have this well - matched , moderately - matched , and and mis highly - mismatched , the emphasis is somewhat on the on the well - matched , but it 's only a a marginal , phd e: Yeah . professor b: right ? It 's like forty , thirty - five , twenty - five , or something like that . So you still if you were way , way off on the highly - mismatched , it would have a big effect . So again , if you 're if you get If it doesn't help you much , for noisy versions of this of large vocabulary data , then , you know , it may not hurt you that much . professor b: But if it if you don't if it doesn't help you much at all , or to put it another way , if it helps some people a lot more than it helps other people , if their strategies do , then phd e: So is this , ? , Guenter was putting a bunch of Wall Street Journal data on our disks . phd e: So that 's the data that we 'll be running on ? professor b: Yeah . professor b: well there 's training and test , right ? phd e: I I guess , I 'm not sure . professor b: No , if it 's like the other things , there 's there 's data for training the H M Ms and and data for testing it . phd e: I just professor b: So I wouldn't So it it 's phd e: OK . But I think it 's trained on clean and Is it trained on clean and and test on ? phd d: The Wall Street ? professor b: Yeah . It 's training on a range between ten and twenty DB , I think , and testing between five and fifteen . phd d: It 's , It 's like a medium medium - mismatch condition , sort of . phd a: and So the noise is There is a range of different noises also which are selected randomly and added randomly , to the files . When did they estimate that they would have that system available for download ? phd d: I guess I guess one some preliminary version is already there . phd e: Oh , so there 's w something you can download to just learn ? phd d: Yeah , it 's already there . phd e: OK , phd d: But they 're actually parallel - y doing some modifications also , I think . phd d: So I guess the f final system will be frozen by middle of , like , one more week maybe . grad c: Is this their , SVM recognizer ? phd d: No , it 's just a straightforward . professor b: You know , their their They have a lot of options in their recognizer and and the SVM is one of the things they 've done with it , but it 's not their more standard thing . phd d: Yeah , this is a g yeah , this i professor b: what ? phd d: yeah . phd e: So , just so that I understand , they 're providing scripts and everything so that basically , you you push a button and it does training , and then it does test , and everything ? Is that the idea ? phd d: I I I think yeah , I I guess something like that . phd d: is what Do they provide all the scripts , everything , and then Just , phd e: I see . Somehow yo there 's hooks to put your features in and phd d: ju Yeah , I th I think . In fact , if you look into it a little bit , it might be reasonable You know Joe , right ? Yeah . professor b: Just to sort of ask him about the issue of , different features having different kinds of , scaling characteristics and so on . So that , you know , w w possibly having entirely different optimal values for for the usual twiddle factors and what 's what 's the plan about that ? phd e: OK . phd d: So sh shall we , like , add Chuck also to the mailing lists ? It may be better , in that case if he 's going to professor b: Yeah . phd d: Yeah , I guess maybe Hari or Hynek , one of them , has to send a mail to Joe . phd d: Well , yeah , to add or maybe wh phd e: I I know him really well . professor b: Do you have Hari 's , ? phd e: I have Hari 's professor b: Yeah , so maybe just CC Hari and say that you 've just been asked to handle the large vocabulary part here , and , you know , phd e: OK . Why don't you just ask Joe but CC Hari , and then in the note say , " Hari , hopefully this is OK with you " . professor b: That way you can get started asking Joe quickly while he 's while he 's maybe still , you know , putting in nails and screws and Yeah . phd d: And there is an , archive of all the mails that has been gon that has gone , between these people among these people . phd d: So , like like , it 's , like professor b: Have you thought about how long would be , most useful for you to go up to OGI ? phd a: I don't know , . professor b: Oh , so you 're you 're imagining more that you would come back here first for a while and then and then go up there ? phd a: I professor b: it 's to you . professor b: I ju you guys are Well , y anyway , you don't have to decide this second but thi think about it about what what you would think would be the the best way to work it . And , I was looking at some of the work that , Sangita was doing on these TRAPS things . So she has , she has temporal patterns for , a certain set of phonemes , from from TIMIT , right ? the most common phonemes . , so she has , a TRAP for each one of the phonemes , times fifteen , for each of the fifteen critical bands . And , she does this agglomerative hierarchical clustering which which basically , is a clustering algorithm that , starts with many , many , many different points many different clusters , corresponding to the number of data , patterns that you have in the data . phd e: And then you can pick , values anywhere along that tree to fix your set of clusters . grad c: Right , usually it 's when , when the sol similarity measures , don't go down as much . And what she found was , sh , was there were five broad , broad categories , corresponding to , things like , fricatives and , vocalic , and , stops . , and , I was thinking about ways to to generalize this because w you 're it 's sort of like a it 's not a completely automatic way of clustering , because yo beforehand you have these these TRAPS and you 're saying that that these frames correspond to this particular phoneme . , and that 's that 's constraining your your clustering to to the set of phonemes that you already have . , whereas maybe we want to just take take a look at , arbitrary windows in time , of varying length , and cluster those . grad c: And I 'm thinking if we if we do that , then we would probably , at some point in the clustering algorithm find that we 've clustered things like , OK , thi this is a transition , this is a relatively stable stable point . grad c: and I 'm hoping to find other things of of similarity and maybe use these things as the intermediate , intermediate categories that , I 'll later classify . F , I 'm professor b: Cuz that 's what you 're gonna be using , right ? grad c: Yeah , yeah . I I haven't exactly figured out , the exact details for that but , the the representation of the data that I was thinking of , was using , critical band , energies , over different lengths of time . professor b: Yeah , it seems somehow that needs th , there 's a couple things that I wonder about with this . professor b: if you 're going for this sort of thing where you have , little detectors that are looking at narrow bands , then what you 're going to be looking for should be some category that you can find with the narrow bands . , and then the other thing , is that I wonder about with it , and and don't take this in the wrong way , like I I know what I 'm doing or anything , grad c: Right . professor b: the sort of standard answer about this sort of thing is that if you 're trying to find the right system in some sense , whether you 're trying by categories or or parameters , and your goal is discrimination , then having choices based on discrimination as opposed to , unsupervised nearness of things , is actually better . professor b: and I don't know if that , since you 're dealing with issues of robustness , you know , maybe maybe this isn't right , but it 'd be something I 'd be concerned about . Because , for instance , you can imagine , i i if you remember from from , from your your quals , John Ohala saying that , " buh " and " puh " differed , not really cuz of voicing but because of aspiration . professor b: So , if you looked if you were doing some coarse clustering , you probably would put those two sounds together . And yet , I would gue I would guess that many of your recognition errors were coming from , pfft , screwing up on this distinction . professor b: So , in fact , it 's a little hard because recognizers , to first order , sort of work . And the reasons we 're doing the things we 're doing is because they don't work as well as we 'd like . And since they sort of work , it means that they are already doing if you go and take any recognizer that 's already out there and you say , " how well is it distinguishing between schwas and stops ? " grad c: professor b: Boy , I bet they 're all doing nearly perfectly on this , right ? grad c: professor b: So these these big categories that differ in huge obvious ways , we already know how to do . So , what are we bringing to the party ? , in fact what we wanna do is have something that , particularly in the presence of noise , is better at distinguishing between , categories that are actually close to one another , and hence , would probably be clustered together . , I understand that there 's this other constraint that you 're considering , is that you wanna have categories that , that would be straightforward for , say , a human being to mark if you had manual annotation . But I think it 's also essential that you wanna look at what are the confusions that you 're making and how can you come up with , categories that , can clarify these confusions . professor b: So , the standard sort of way of doing that is take a look at the algorithms you 're looking at , but then throw in some discriminative aspect to it . Y y this is more like , you know , how does LDA differ from PCA ? , they 're the same sort of thing . professor b: But , you know and and , this is a little harder because you 're not just trying to find parameters . , well W actually , you stopped thinking about it for a long time , but you used to think about it a lot . phd e: I guess I don't I don't , it 's not clear to me how to reconcile , you know , what you 're saying , which I think is right , with the way I 've been looking at it . But it seems to me that the desire the desirable feature to have is something that , is bottom - up . phd e: And and so I guess what I don't understand is how to do that and still be discriminative , because to be discriminative you have to have categories and the only categories that we know of to use are sort of these human human sig significant categories that are significant to humans , like phonemes , things like that . professor b: Well , here 's a here 's a , Here 's a generic and possibly useless thought , which is , what do you really , in a sense the only s s systems that make sense , are ones that that have something from top - down in th in them . Right ? Because if e even the smallest organism that 's trying to learn to do anything , if it doesn't have any kind of reward for doing or penal penalty for doing anything , then it 's just going to behave randomly . professor b: So whether you 're talking about something being learned through evolution or being learned through experience , it 's gotta have something come down to it that gives its reward or , you know , at least some reinforcement learning , phd e: Right . professor b: right ? phd e: So the question is , how far down ? professor b: And phd e: We could stop at words , but we don't , right ? We go all the way down to phonemes . professor b: Right , but I me I I think that maybe in some ways part of the difficulty is is trying to deal with the with these phonemes . You know , and and and i it 's almost like you want categories if if our if our , metric of of goodness , i if our phd e: professor b: correction if our metric of badness is word error rate then , maybe we should be looking at words . professor b: for for for very nice , reasons we 've looked for a while at syllables , and they have a lot of good properties , but i i i if you go all the way to words , that 's really , d w In many applications you wanna go further . You wanna go to concepts or something , or have have have concepts , actions , this sort of thing . And and phd e: Yeah , so the common right , the common wisdom is you can't do words because there 's too many of them , right ? So you have to have some smaller set that you can use , and and so everybody goes to phonemes . But the problem is that we we build models of words in terms of phonemes and these models are are really cartoon - ish , right ? So when you look at conversational speech , for example , you don't see the phonemes that you that you have in your word models . See , so her here 's maybe where If the issue is that we 're trying to come up with , some sort of intermediate categories which will then be useful for later stuff , then maybe it doesn't matter that we can't have enough phd e: professor b: what you wanna do is is build up these categories that are that are best for word recognition . professor b: And and somehow if that 's built into the loop of what the categories , we do this every day in this very gross way of of running o a thousand experiments phd e: Right . In some ways it 's really not a bad bad thing to do because it tells you in fact how your adjustments at the very low level affect the the final goal . professor b: so maybe there 's a way to even put that in in a much more automatic way , phd e: Right . professor b: where you take , you know , something about the error at the level of the word or some other it could be syllable but in some large unit , phd e: - huh . professor b: and yeah , you may not have word models , you have phone models , whatever , but you sort of don't worry about that , and just somehow feed it back through . professor b: You know , so that 's , wh what I called a useless comments because I 'm not really telling you how to do it . But , it 's a it 's it 's , you know it phd e: No , but I think the important part in there is that , you know , if you want to be discriminative , you have to have , you know , categories . If you can put the words in to the loop somehow for determining goodness of your sets of clusters professor b: Now , that being said , I think that that if you have something that is , i Once you start dealing with spontaneous speech , all the things you 're saying are are really true . professor b: If you have read speech that 's been manually annotated , like TIMIT , then , you know , i i you the phones are gonna be right , actually , for the most part . Yeah , professor b: So so , it doesn't really hurt them to to do that , to put in discrimination at that level . professor b: if you go to spontaneous speech then it 's it 's trickier and and and , the phones are , you know , it 's gonna be based on bad pronunciation models that you have of phd e: professor b: and , And it won't allow for the overlapping phenomenon phd e: Mmm . So it 's almost like there 's this mechanism that we have that , you know , when when we 're hearing read speech and all the phonemes are there you know , we we deal with that , but but when we go to conversational , and then all of a sudden not all the phonemes are there , it doesn't really matter that much to us as humans because we have some kind of mechanism that allows for these word models , whatever those models are , to be munged , you know , and and it doesn't really hurt , and I 'm not sure how how to build that in . professor b: Yeah , I guess the other thing i is is to think of a little bit , we when y when you start looking at these kind of results I think it usually is is pretty intuitive , but start looking at , what are the kinds of confusions that you do make , you know , between words if you want or or or , even phones in in in in read speech , say , when there is noise . You know , so is it more across place or more across manner ? Or is it cor you know , is it ? grad c: professor b: I know one thing that happens is that you you you , you lose the , low energy phones . And if that if that is if it , if that turns it into another word or or different you know , or another pair of words or something , then it 's more likely to happen . But , I don't know , I w I would I would guess that you 'd grad c: Anyway , that 's phd e: I think part of the difficulty is that a l a lot of the robustness that we have is probably coming from a much higher level . phd e: You know , we understand the context of the situation when we 're having a conversation . And so if there 's noise in there , you know , our brain fills in and imagines what what should be there . professor b: but , even if you do , diagnostic rhyme test kind of things , you know , where there really isn't an any information like that , people are still better in noise than they than they are in in , than the machines are . If we 're not working on that then we should work on something else and improve it , but especially if it looks like the potential is there <doc-sep>grad e: I think it 's actually phd d: What is what is that ? grad e: it depends on if the temp files are there or not , that at least that 's my current working hypothesis , phd d: Ah . grad e: that I think what happens is it tries to clear the temp files and if they 're too big , it crashes . phd b: When the power went out the other day and I restarted it , it crashed the first time . grad e: no , it doesn't it doesn't clear those necessarily , phd d: Oh wait It it doesn't clear them , OK . grad e: It 's i they 're called temp files , but they 're not actually in the temp directory they 're in the scratch , so . phd d: But that 's usually the meeting that I recorded , and it neve it doesn't crash on me . phd b: Well this wasn't Actually , this wasn't a before your meeting , this was , Tuesday afternoon when , Robert just wanted to do a little recording , grad e: Oh well . professor c: I don't know when would be a good excuse for it , but I just can't wait to be giving a talk t and and and use the example from last week with everybody t doing the digits at once . You know ? You wanted to pe keep people from listening in , you could like have that playing outside the room . Everybody give the reports about what they were doing at exactly the same time , phd d: And we 'll just all leave , phd b: And then we 'll we 'll go back later and review the individual channels , professor c: yeah . phd b: If you wanna know what professor c: Actually isn't that what we have been doing ? phd d: Yeah . professor c: What are we doing ? grad e: I Since I 've been gone all week , I didn't send out a reminder for an agenda , so . professor c: Yeah , and I 'm just grad e: Do we have anything to talk about or should we just read digits and go ? phd b: I wouldn't mind hearing how the conference was . professor c: What conference ? phd d: I had one question about grad e: Yeah , really . The next , phd d: Next weekend ? grad e: Next weekend , week from phd f: right ? professor c: That is right . phd d: Sorry , not not not the days coming up , but phd f: It 's like the grad e: A week from Saturday . phd d: So , are we do we have like an agenda or anything that we should be professor c: No , but that would be a good idea . professor c: Why don't we w phd f: So so the deal is that I can , I can be available after , like ten thirty or something . I don't know how s how early you wanted to professor c: They 're not even gonna be here until eleven or so . grad e: Eurospeech is due on Friday and then I 'm going down to San , San Jose Friday night , so , if you know , if we start nice and late Saturday that 's a good thing . grad e: They 're flying from somewhere to somewhere , professor c: Yeah , and they 'll end up here . professor c: So , i I I will be , he 's taking a very early flight phd f: Oh . professor c: and we do have the time work difference running the right way , but I still think that there 's no way we could start before eleven . grad e: But , yeah maybe an agenda , or at least some things to talk about would be a good idea . professor c: Well we can start gathering those those ideas , but then we we should firm it up by next next Thursday 's meeting . postdoc a: Will we have time to , to prepare something that we in the format we were planning for the IBM transcribers by then , or ? grad e: Oh yeah . grad e: So have you heard back from Brian about that , Chuck ? phd b: Yes , he 's I I 'm sorry , I should have forwarded that along . , oh I I think I mentioned at the last meeting , he said that , he talked to them and it was fine with the beeps they would be That 's easy for them to do . So , oh , though Thi - Thilo isn't here , but , I I have the program to insert the beeps . What I don't have is something to parse the output of the channelized transcripts to find out where to put the beeps , but that should be really easy to do . So do we have a meeting that that 's been done with , postdoc a: He 's he 's grad e: that we 've tightened it up to the point where we can actually give it to IBM and have them try it out ? postdoc a: He generated , a channel - wise presegmented version of a meeting , but it was Robustness rather than EDU so I guess depends on whether we 're willing to use Robustness ? phd b: Well for this experiment I think we can use pre pretty much anything . phd b: This experiment of just grad e: Well we had we had talked about doing maybe EDU as a good choice , though . phd b: Well we 've talked about that as being the next ones we wanted to transcribe . phd b: But for the purpose of sending him a sample one to f grad e: Yeah , maybe it doesn't matter . phd b: I I don't think it matte postdoc a: I 'll I 'll I 'll , get make that available . grad e: OK , and has it been corrected ? postdoc a: Oh , well , wait . grad e: Hand - checked ? Cuz that was one of the processes we were talking about as well . phd b: Right , so we need to run Thilo 's thing on it , postdoc a: That 's right . postdoc a: I think they 're coming phd b: And we probably don't have to do necessarily a whole meeting for that if we just wanna send them a sample to try . What would be a good number of minutes ? phd b: I don't know , maybe we can figure out how long it 'll take @ @ to to do . grad e: I don't know , it seems to me w we probably should go ahead and do a whole meeting because we 'll have to transcribe the whole meeting anyway sometime . professor c: Yes except that if they had if there was a choice between having fifteen minutes that was fully the way you wanted it , and having a whole meeting that didn't get at what you wanted for them It 's just dependent of how much grad e: Like I I guess if we have to do it again anyway , but , professor c: Yeah . phd b: I guess , the only thing I 'm not sure about is , how quickly can the transcribers scan over and fix the boundaries , postdoc a: phd b: and , is it pretty easy ? grad e: I think it 's gonna be one or two times real time at Wow , excuse me , two or more times real time , right ? Cuz they have to at least listen to it . professor c: Can we pipeline it so that say there 's , the transcriber gets done with a quarter of the meeting and then we you run it through this other other stuff ? , grad e: Well the other stuff is I B I 'm just thinking that from a data keeping - track - of - the - data point of view , it may be best to send them whole meetings at a time and not try to send them bits and pieces . So the first thing is the automatic thing , and then it 's then it 's then it 's the transcribers tightening stuff up , grad e: Right . professor c: OK , so you might as well ha run the automatic thing over the entire meeting , and then and then , you would give IBM whatever was fixed . postdoc a: And have them fix it over the entire meeting too ? grad e: Right . professor c: Well , yeah , but start from the beginning and go to the end , right ? So if they were only half way through then that 's what you 'd give IBM . The I guess the question on my mind is do we wait for the transcribers to adjust the marks for the whole meeting before we give anything to IBM , or do we go ahead and send them a sample ? Let their professor c: Why wouldn't we s @ @ w i if they were going sequentially through it , why wouldn't we give them i are we trying to get something done by the time Brian comes ? phd b: Well I I , I don't know . professor c: So if we if we were , then it seems like giving them something , whatever they had gotten up to , would be better than nothing . grad e: Well , I don't think , h they they typically work for what , four hours , something like that ? postdoc a: I gue . grad e: I think the they should be able to get through a whole meeting in one sitting . I would think , unless it 's a lot harder than we think it is , which it could be , certainly . postdoc a: If it 's got like for speakers then I guess if phd b: We 're just doing the individual channels , grad e: Or seven or eight . phd b: So it 's gonna be , depending on the number of people in the meeting , postdoc a: I guess there is this issue of , you know , if if the segmenter thought there was no speech on on a particular stretch , on a particular channel , grad e: Well postdoc a: and there really was , then , if it didn't show up in a mixed signal to verify , then it might be overlooked , so , the question is " should should a transcriber listen to the entire thing or can it g can it be based on the mixed signal ? " And I th eh so far as I 'm concerned it 's fine to base it on the mixed signal at this point , and grad e: That 's what it seems to me too , in that if they need to , just like in the other cases , they can listen to the individual , if they need to . postdoc a: What what aspect ? professor c: So you 're talking about tightening up time boundaries ? phd b: Yeah . professor c: So how do you grad e: So , they have the normal channeltrans interface where they have each individual speaker has their own line , phd b: Yeah . grad e: but you 're listening to the mixed signal and you 're tightening the boundaries , correcting the boundaries . grad e: Right , so so you 'll have to I phd d: It will miss them . It will it will miss grad e: - huh ! phd d: Yeah , you have to say " - huh " more slowly to to get c grad e: Sorry . phd d: So it will miss stuff like that which phd b: I grad e: Well , so so that 's something that the transcribers will have to have to do . postdoc a: Yeah , but presumably , most of those they should be able to hear from the mixed signal unless they 're embedded in the heavil heavy overlap section when in which case they 'd be listening to the channels anyway . phd b: That 's that 's what I 'm I 'm concerned about the part . phd b: Can't we couldn't we just have , I don't know , maybe this just doesn't fit with the software , but I guess if I didn't know anything about Transcriber and I was gonna make something to let them adjust boundaries , I would just show them one channel at a time , with the marks , and let them adju postdoc a: Oh they can grad e: Well , but then they have to do but then they for this meeting they would have to do seven times real time , and it would probably be more than that . grad e: Right ? Because they 'd have to at least listen to each channel all the way through . postdoc a: And if phd b: But i but it 's very quick , postdoc a: - huh . postdoc a: w Well , the other problem is the breaths grad e: I just don't think postdoc a: cuz you also see the breaths on the waveform . I 've I 've looked at the int , s I 've tried to do that with a single channel , and and you do see all sorts of other stuff besides just the voice . grad e: Yeah , and I I think that they 're going much more on acoustics than they are on visuals . postdoc a: What you the digital what the digital task that you had your interface ? , I know for a fact that one of those sh she could really well she could judge what th what the number was based on the on the waveform . Yeah , I found the same thing that when I was scanning through the wave form I could see when someone started to read digits just by the shapes . professor c: So I don't I 'm I 'm now entirely confused about what they do . grad e: But professor c: So , they 're they 're looking at a mixed signal , or they 're looking what what are they looking at visually ? postdoc a: Well , they have a choice . But I 've I 've tried looking at the single signal and and in order to judge when it when it was speech and when it wasn't , grad e: Oh . postdoc a: but the problem is then you have breaths which which show up on the signal . professor c: But the procedure that you 're imagining , people vary from this , is that they have the mixed signal wave form in front of them , postdoc a: Yes . professor c: and they have multiple , well , let 's see , there isn't we don't have transcription yet . So but there 's markers of some sort that have been happening automatically , postdoc a: Yes . professor c: and those show up on the mixed signal ? postdoc a: Oh , professor c: There 's a @ @ clicks ? grad e: N the t postdoc a: they show up on the separate ribbons . postdoc a: and and i i it 'll be because it 's being segmented as channel at a time with his with Thilo 's new procedure , then you don't have the correspondence of the times across the bins across the ribbons you could have professor c: And is there a line moving across the waveform as it goes ? grad e: Yes . professor c: OK , so The way you 're imaging is they kind of play it , and they see oh this happened , then this happened , then and if it 's about right , they just sort of let it slide , postdoc a: Yeah . professor c: and if it if it there 's a question on something , they stop and maybe look at the individual wave form . professor c: They they might look at it , right ? grad e: Well , the problem is that the the interface doesn't really allow you to switch visuals . grad e: The problem is that that the Tcl - TK interface with the visuals , it 's very slow to load waveforms . grad e: And so when I tried that that was the first thing I tried when I first started it , postdoc a: Oh , oh . You can you can switch quickly between the audio , grad e: right ? postdoc a: but you just can't get the visual display to show quickly . So you have to It takes , I don't know , three , four minutes to Well , it takes it takes long enough phd d: Yeah , it 's very slow to do that . postdoc a: It takes long enough cuz it has to reload the I I don't know exactly what it 's doing frankly cuz but it t it takes long enough that it 's just not a practical alternative . phd d: That w grad e: Well it it does some sort of shape pre - computation so that it can then scroll it quickly , grad g: But you can cancel that . grad g: Oh , really ? postdoc a: Now you could set up multiple windows , each one with a different signal showing , and then look between the windows . grad e: we we could do different interfaces , grad g: What if you preload them all ? grad e: right ? , so so we could use like X Waves instead of Transcriber , postdoc a: Yeah . grad g: What if you were to preload all the channels or or initially grad e: Well that 's what I tried originally . grad g: like doesn't grad e: So I I actually before , Dave Gelbart did this , I did an interface which showed each waveform and ea a ribbon for each waveform , grad g: grad e: but the problem with it is even with just three waveforms it was just painfully slow to scroll . So you just scroll a screen and it would , you know go " kur - chunk ! " grad g: Oh , OK . postdoc a: You know , I am thinking if we have a meeting with only four speakers and , you know , you could fire up a Transcriber interface for , y you know , in different windows , multiple ones , one for each channel . And it 's sort of a a hack but it would be one way of seeing the visual form . grad e: I think that if we decide that we need that they need to see the visuals , we need to change the interface so that they can do that . professor c: So phd d: That 's actually what I thought of , loading the chopped up waveforms , you know , that that would make it faster grad e: An But isn't grad g: . phd b: The problem is if if anything 's cut off , you can't expand it from the chopped up phd d: So . phd d: Right , but if you a at some point grad e: And wouldn't that be the same as the mixed signal ? phd d: No , the individual channels that were chopped up that it 'd be nice to be able to go back and forth between those short segments . phd d: Cuz you don't really nee like nine tenths of the time you 're throwing most of them out , but what you need are tho that particular channel , or that particular location , grad e: Yeah . phd d: might be nice , cuz we save those out already , to be able to do that . But it won't work for IBM of course , it only works here cuz they 're not saving out the individual channels . postdoc a: Well , I I do think that this this will be a doable procedure , professor c: Yeah . postdoc a: and , then when they get into overlaps , just have them systematically check all the channels to be sure that there isn't something hidden from from audio view . Yeah , hopefully , The mixed signal , the overlaps are pretty audible because it is volume equalized . The only problem is is , you know , counting how many and if they 're really correct or not . phd d: I don't know that you can locate them very well from the mixed signal , grad e: Right but but once once you know that they happen , you can at least listen to the close talking , phd d: but you would know that they were there , and then you would switch . professor c: But right now , to do this limitation , the switching is going to be switching of the audio ? Is what she 's saying . professor c: So grad e: Right , so so professor c: so they 're using their ears to do these markings anyway . grad e: did Dave Did Dave do that change where you can actually just click rather than having to go up to the menu to listen to the individual channels ? postdoc a: Yes . postdoc a: I 'm not sure what click what click on the ribbon ? Yeah , you can get that grad e: Yeah . postdoc a: oh , oh , get you can get the , you can get it to switch audio ? , not last I tried , grad e: Yeah . grad e: We should get him to do that because , I think that would be much , much faster than going to the menu . There 's a reason I disagree , and that is that , you it 's very good to have a dissociation between the visual and the audio . There 're times when I wanna hear the mixed signal , bu but I want to transcribe on the single channel . postdoc a: Maybe , I just don't I don't see that it 's a grad e: Just something so that it 's not in the menu option so that you can do it much faster . postdoc a: Well , that 's the i I I think that might be a personal style thing . grad e: Well it just seems to me that if you wanna quickly " well was that Jane , no , was that Chuck , no , was that Morgan " , right now , you have to go up to the menu , and each time , go up to the menu , select it , listen to that channel then click below , and then go back to the menu , select the next one , and then click below . postdoc a: Yeah , it could be faster , but , you know , th in the ideal world Yeah . grad e: What ? postdoc a: No I I agree that 'd be nice . professor c: So , Done with that ? Does any I forget , does anybody , working on any any Eurospeech submission related to this ? grad e: I would like to try to do something on digits but I just don't know if we have time . Yeah there was that we that 's right , we had that one conversation about , what what what did it mean for , one of those speakers to be pathological , was it a grad e: Right , and I haven't had s chance to sit down and listen . phd f: Oh , I haven't I haven't listened to them either , grad e: I was going to do that this afternoon . phd f: but there must be something wrong , grad e: Well , Morgan and I were were having a debate about that . phd f: unless our grad e: Whereas I think it it 's probably something pathologic and actually Stephane 's results , I think confirm that . He s he did the Aurora system also got very lousy average error , like fifteen or or , fifteen to twenty percent average ? But then he ran it just on the lapel , and got about five or six percent word error ? So that that means to me that somewhere in the other recordings there are some pathological cases . So I 'll I 'll listen to it and find out since you 'd actually split it up by segment . phd b: Did you run the Andreas the r SRI recognizer on the digits ? grad e: Oh , I thought he had sent that around to everyone , phd f: Yeah . grad e: did you just sent that to me ? phd f: No , I d I didn't . phd b: I it wasn't phd f: But , yeah , if you take grad e: It was bimodal . phd f: So if you Yeah , it 's actually , it it was trimodal , actually grad e: Oh , was it trimodal , OK . phd f: trimodal , so professor c: There 's zero , a little bit , and a lot . phd f: there were t there was there was one h one bump at ze around zero , which were the native speakers , professor c: Yeah . phd b: This is error you 're talking about ? professor c: Oh was it fifteen ? phd f: whe phd b: OK . And then there was another distinct bump at , like , a hundred , which must have been some problem . phd f: I can't imagine that grad g: What is patho what do you mean by pathological ? grad e: Just just something really wrong with grad g: I 'm sorry , I don't grad e: A bug is what , phd f: In the recording grad g: Oh . phd f: And there was this one meeting , I forget which one it was , where like , six out of the eight channels were all , like had a hundred percent error . grad e: Which probably means like there was a th the recording interface crashed , grad g: Right . grad e: or there was a short you know , someone was jiggling with a cord phd f: But grad e: or , I extracted it incorrectly , phd f: But grad e: it was labeled grad g: grad e: it was transcribed incorrectly , something really bad happened , and I just haven't listened to it yet to find out what it was . phd f: So , if I excluded the pathological ones , by definition , those that had like over ninety - five percent error rate , and the non - natives , then the average error rate was like one point four or something , professor c: What we 're calling . phd f: which which seemed reasonable given that , you know , the models weren't tuned for for it . phd b: And it didn't matter whether it was the lapel or whether it was the phd f: It was just a @ @ . I haven't split it up that way , phd d: But there 's no overlap during the digit readings , so it shouldn't really matter . professor c: No , but there 's a little difference , phd f: So it should grad e: There 's a lot . professor c: And so , cuz because what he was what I was saying when I looked at those things is it it I was almost gonna call it quadrimodal because because there was a whole lot of cases where it was zero percent . But if you p if you actually histogrammed it , and it was a nice , you know , it it was zero was the most of them , professor c: Yeah . phd f: And then there was the bump for the non - natives and then the pathological ones , professor c: I see . postdoc a: You did you have , something in the report about , about , for f , forced alignment ? professor c: Yeah . postdoc a: Have you have you started on that ? phd f: Oh , well , yeah , so I 've been struggling with the forced alignments . So the scheme that I drew on the board last time where we tried to , allow reject models for the s speech from other speakers , most of the time it doesn't work very well . So , and the I haven't done , the only way to check this right now was for me to actually load these into X Waves and , you know , plus the alignments , and s play them and see where the professor c: . phd f: And it looks And so I looked at all of the utterances from you , Chuck , in that one conversation , I don't know which You probably know which one , it 's where you were on the lapel and Morgan was sitting next to you and we can hear everything Morgan says . phd f: But and and some of what you , you also appear quite a bit in that cross - talk . So , I actually went through all of those , there were I think fifty - five segments , in in X Waves , and and sort of did a crude check , and more often than not , it it gets it wrong . So there 's either the beginning , mostly the beginning word , where th you , you know , Chuck talks somewhere into the segment , but the first , word of what he says , often " I " but it 's very reduced " I , " that 's just aligned to the beginning of someone else 's speech , in that segment , which is cross - talk . So , I 'm still tinkering with it , but it might well be that we can't get clean alignments out of this out of those , channels , so . phd d: Right , but that 's , that was our plan , phd f: Yeah , right . phd d: but it 's clear from Dan that this is not something you can do in a short amount of time . phd d: So so we you know , we had spent a lot of time , writing up the HLT paper and we wanted to use that , kind of analysis , professor c: Yeah . phd d: but the HLT paper has , you know , it 's a very crude measure of overlap . It 's not really something you could scientifically say is overlap , it 's just whether or not the , the segments that were all synchronized , whether there was some overlap somewhere . phd d: And , you know , that pointed out some differences , so he thought well if we can do something quick and dirty because Dan said the cross - cancellation , it 's not straight - forward . If it were straight - forward then we would try it , but so , it 's sort of good to hear that it was not straight - forward , thinking if we can get decent forced alignments , then at least we can do sort of a overall report of what happens with actual overlap in time , but , phd b: I didn't think that his message said it wasn't straight - forward . grad e: Well if we 'd just professor c: Well phd b: I thought he 's just saying you have to look over a longer time window when you do it . phd d: and the but there are some issues of this timing , in the recordings professor c: Yeah . phd d: and phd b: So you just have to look over longer time when you 're trying to align the things , you can't you can't just look grad e: Well . are you talking about the fact that the recording software doesn't do time - synchronous ? Is that what you 're referring to ? professor c: grad e: That seems to me you can do that over the entire file and get a very accurate phd f: I don't thi I d I don't think that was the issue . phd f: The issue was that you have to you have have you first have to have a pretty good speech detection on the individual channels . phd d: And it 's dynamic , so I guess it was more dynamic than some simple models would be able t to so so there are some things available , and I don't know too much about this area where if people aren't moving around much than you could apply them , and it should work pretty well if you took care of this recording time difference . phd d: but then if you add the dynamic aspect of adapting distances , then it wasn't I guess it just wasn't something that he could do quickly and not in time for us to be able to do something by two weeks from now , so . So , so I don't know what we can do if anything , that 's sort of worth , you know , a Eurospeech paper at this point . phd b: Well , Andreas , how well did it work on the non - lapel stuff ? grad e: Yeah . phd f: we would really need , ideally , a transcriber to time mark the you know , the be at least the beginning and s ends of contiguous speech . , and , you know , then with the time marks , you can do an automatic comparison of your of your forced alignments . phd b: Because really the the at least in terms of how we were gonna use this in our system was to get an ideal an idea , for each channel about the start and end boundaries . phd b: We don't really care about like intermediate word boundaries , so phd f: No , that 's how I 've been looking at it . phd f: I don't care that the individual words are aligned correctly , phd b: Yeah . phd f: but you don't wanna , infer from the alignment that someone spoke who didn't . So that 's why I was wondering if it phd f: so , so phd b: maybe if it doesn't work for lapel stuff , we can just not use that phd f: Yeah . phd b: and phd f: I haven't I ha just haven't had the time to , do the same procedure on one of the so I would need a k I would need a channel that has a speaker whose who has a lot of overlap but s you know , is a non - lapel mike . grad e: ! phd f: So , I grad e: So a meeting with me in it . phd f: maybe someone can help me find a good candidate and then I would be willing to phd b: We c you know what ? Maybe the best way to find that would be to look through these . phd f: you know , hand phd b: Cuz you can see the seat numbers , and then you can see what type of mike they were using . And so we just look for , you know , somebody sitting next to Adam at one of the meetings phd d: Actually y we can tell from the data that we have , phd f: From the insertions , maybe ? phd d: yeah , there 's a way to tell . phd f: fr fr from the phd d: It might not be a single person who 's always overlapping that person but any number of people , phd f: Right . phd d: and , if you align the two hypothesis files across the channels , you know , just word alignment , you 'd be able to find that . So so I guess that 's sort of a last ther there 're sort of a few things we could do . Another one was to try to get somehow align Thilo 's energy segmentations with what we have . But then you have the problem of not knowing where the words are because these meetings were done before that segmentation . phd b: What what is why do you need the , the forced alignment for the HLT for the Eurospeech paper ? phd d: Well , I guess I I wanted to just do something not on recognition experiments because that 's ju way too early , but to be able to report , you know , actual numbers . Like if we if we had hand - transcribed pe good alignments or hand - checked alignments , then we could do this paper . But without knowing where the real words are , in time phd b: So it was to get it was to get more data and better to to squeeze the boundaries in . phd d: To to know what an overlap really if it 's really an overlap , or if it 's just a a a segment correlated with an overlap , phd b: Ah , OK . phd d: and I guess that 's the difference to me between like a real paper and a sort of , promissory paper . So , if we d it might be possible to take Thilo 's output and like if you have , like right now these meetings are all , grad e: Ugh ! I forgot the digital camera again . phd d: grad e: Every meeting ! phd d: you know , they 're time - aligned , so if these are two different channels and somebody 's talking here and somebody else is talking here , just that word , if Thilo can tell us that there 're boundaries here , we should be able to figure that out grad e: phd d: Yeah , if you have two and they 're at the edges , it 's like here and here , and there 's speech here , then it doesn't really help you , so , phd b: Thilo 's won't put down two separate marks in that case phd d: Well it w it would , but , we don't know exactly where the words are because the transcriber gave us two words in this time bin grad e: Thilo 's will . phd d: and we don't really know , postdoc a: Well it 's a merging problem . If you had a if you had a s if you had a script which would phd d: yeah it 's postdoc a: I 've thought about this , and I 've discussed I 've discussed it with Thilo , phd d: if you have any ideas . I would postdoc a: the , I I in principle I could imagine writing a script which would approximate it to some degree , but there is this problem of slippage , grad e: Well maybe Maybe that will get enough of the cases to be useful . grad e: You know s cuz it seemed like most of the cases are in fact the single word sorts , or at least a single phrase postdoc a: Well they they can be stretched . postdoc a: I wouldn't make that generalization cuz sometimes people will say , " And then I " and there 's a long pause phd d: Yeah . postdoc a: and finish the sentence and and sometimes it looks coherent and and the it 's it 's not a simple problem . But it 's really And then it 's coupled with the problem that sometimes , you know , with with a fricative you might get the beginning of the word cut off and so it 's coupled with the problem that Thilo 's isn't perfect either . , we 've i th it 's like you have a merging problem plus so merging plus this problem of , not grad e: Right . ! postdoc a: y i i if the speech - nonspeech were perfect to begin with , the detector , that would already be an improvement , but that 's impossible , you know , i that 's too much to ask . postdoc a: And so i and may you know , it 's I think that there always th there would have to be some hand - tweaking , but it 's possible that a script could be written to merge those two types of things . I 've I 've discussed it with Thilo and in terms of not him doing it , but we we discussed some of the parameters of that and how hard it would be to in principle to write something that would do that . phd d: I guess in the future it won't be as much as an issue if transcribers are using the tightened boundaries to start with , then we have a good idea of where the forced alignment is constrained to . postdoc a: Well , it 's just , you know , a matter of we had the revolution we had the revolution of improved , interface , one month too late , phd d: So I 'm no I don't know if this grad e: Oh . postdoc a: but it 's like , you know , it 's wonderful to have the revolution , phd d: Oh it 's it 's a postdoc a: so it 's just a matter of of , you know , from now on we 'll be able to have things channelized to begin with . grad e: I was just thinking about the fact that if Thilo 's missed these short segments , that might be quite time - consuming for them to insert them . phd d: But he he also can adjust this minimum time duration constraint and then what you get is noises mostly , postdoc a: Yeah . phd d: but that might be OK , an grad e: It might be easier to delete something that 's wrong than to insert something that 's missing . And you can also see in the waveform exac grad e: What do you think , Jane ? phd d: yeah . professor c: If you can feel confident that what the yeah , that there 's actually something phd d: Yeah . Cuz then then you just delete it , and you don't have to pick a time . phd d: I think it 's postdoc a: Well the problem is I you know I I it 's a it 's a really good question , and I really find it a pain in the neck to delete things because you have to get the mouse up there on the t on the text line and i and otherwise you just use an arrow to get down , i it depends on how lar th there 's so many extra things that would make it one of them harder than the other , or or vice versa . But , you know , in principle , like , you know , if one of them is easier then to bias it towards whichever one 's easier . grad e: Yeah , I guess the semantics aren't clear when you delete a segment , right ? Because you would say You would have to determine what the surroundings were . phd d: You could just say it 's a noise , though , and write , you know , a post - processor will just all you have to do is just grad e: If it 's really a noise . phd d: or just say it 's just put " X , " you know , like " not speech " or something , postdoc a: I think it 's easier to add than delete , frankly , phd d: and then you can get Yeah , or postdoc a: because you have to , maneuver around on the on both windows then . grad e: But I think it 's the semantics that are that are questionable to me , that you delete something So let 's say someone is talking to here , and then you have a little segment here . Well , is that part of the speech ? Is it part of the nonspeech ? , w what do you embed it in ? phd d: There 's something nice , though , about keeping , and this is probably another discussion , keeping the stuff that Thilo 's detector detected as possible speech and just marking it as not speech than deleting it . Because then when you align it , then the alignment can you can put a reject model or whatever , grad e: Oh , I see . So then they could just like put Oh that 's what you meant by just put an " X " there . phd d: and you 're consistent with th the automatic system , grad e: that 's an interesting idea . phd d: whereas if you delete it grad e: So so all they So that all they would have to do is put like an " X " there . phd d: Yeah , or some , you know , dummy reject mod grad e: So blank for blank for silence , " S " " S " for speech , " X " " X " for something else . That 's actually a better way to do it cuz the a the forced alignment will probably be more consistent than postdoc a: Well , like , I think there 's a complication which is that that you can have speech and noise in s phd d: if it 's just as easy , but postdoc a: you know , on the same channel , the same speaker , so now sometimes you get a ni microphone pop and , there 're these fuzzy hybrid cases , and then the problem with the boundaries that have to be shifted around . phd d: Anyway , quick question , though , at a high level do people think , let 's just say that we 're moving to this new era of like using the , pre - segmented t you know , non - synchronous conversations , does it make sense to try to take what we have now , which are the ones that , you know , we have recognition on which are synchronous and not time - tightened , and try to get something out of those for sort of purposes of illustrating the structure and the nature of the meetings , or is it better to just , you know , forget that and tr , it 's grad e: Well , I think we 'll have to , eventually . grad e: But if we can't phd d: And maybe we can for the non - lapel , but grad e: But if we can't , then maybe we just have to phd d: is it worth if we can't then we can fake it even if we 're we report , you know , we 're wrong twenty percent of the time or ten percent of the time . grad e: Well , I 'm thinking are you talking about for a paper , or are talking about for the corpus . grad e: cuz for the corpus it would be nice if everything were phd d: Actually that 's a good question because we 'd have to completely redo those meetings , and we have like ten of them now . grad e: We wouldn't have to re - do them , we would just have to edit them . postdoc a: Well , and also , I still haven't I still haven't given up on forced alignment . phd d: No , you 're right , actually postdoc a: I think that when Brian comes , this 'll be an interesting aspect to ask him as well b grad e: When postdoc a: when Brian Kingsbury comes . And it 's like , " Who 's Ryan ? " postdoc a: Yeah , good question . phd d: no , that 's a good point , though , because for feature extraction like for prosody or something , the meetings we have now , it 's a good chunk of data grad e: Yep . postdoc a: That 's what my hope has been , phd d: So we should at least try it even if we can't , postdoc a: and that 's what that 's what you know , ever since the the February meeting that I transcribed from last year , forced alignment has been on the on the table as a way of cleaning them up later . phd d: right ? grad e: On the table , right ? postdoc a: And and so I 'm hopeful that that 's possible . I know that there 's complication in the overlap sections and with the lapel mikes , phd f: There 's postdoc a: but phd f: Yeah . phd d: we might be able , at the very worst , we can get transcribers to correct the cases where , you sort of have a good estimate where these places are because the recognition 's so poor . Right ? phd b: Yeah , we were never just gonna go with these as the final alignments . phd d: So we need some way to push these first chunk of meetings into a state where we get good alignments . phd f: I 'm probably going to spend another day or so trying to improve things by , by using , acoustic adaptation . , the Right now I 'm using the unadapted models for the forced alignments , and it 's possible that you get considerably better results if you , manage to adapt the , phone models to the speaker and the reject model to the to to all the other speech . , so phd b: Could you could you at the same time adapt the reject model to the speech from all the other channels ? professor c: That 's what he just said . phd b: Oh , not just the speech from that of the other people from that channel , phd f: Right . I don't think that would work , phd f: No , it grad e: right ? Because you 'd A lot of it 's dominated by channel properties . phd d: But what you do wanna do is take the , even if it 's klugey , take the segments the synchronous segments , the ones from the HLT paper , where only that speaker was talking . phd f: So you want to u phd d: Use those for adaptation , cuz if you if you use everything , then you get all the cross - talk in the adaptation , and it 's just sort of blurred . I thought it was higher than that , that 's pr phd d: It really it depends a lot . professor c: Well I know what we 're not turning in to Eurospeech , a redo of the HLT paper . professor c: That I don't wanna do that , grad e: Yeah , I 'm doing that for AVIOS . phd d: I think Morgan 's talk went very well it woke postdoc a: Excellent . phd d: you know , it was really a well presented and got people laughing postdoc a: Yeah . phd f: Some good jokes in it ? grad e: Especially the batteried meter popping up , phd d: Yeah . professor c: You know , that wa that was the battery meter saying that it was fully charged , grad e: It 's full . grad e: He he he was onto the bullet points about talking about the you know the little hand - held , and trying to get lower power and so on , phd f: Po - low power grad e: and Microsoft pops up a little window saying " Your batteries are now fully charged . grad e: I 'm thinking about scripting that for my talk , you know , put put a little script in there to say " Your batteries are low " right when I 'm saying that . No , i in in your case , you were joking about it , but , your case the fact that your talking about similar things at a couple of conferences , it 's not these are conferences that have d really different emphases . Whereas HLT and and Eurospeech , pretty pretty pretty similar , so I I I can't see really just putting in the same thing , grad e: Are too close , yeah . phd d: No , I d I don't think that paper is really professor c: but phd d: the HLT paper is really more of a introduction - to - the - project paper , and , professor c: Yeah . phd d: Well , yeah , it it 's probably wouldn't make sense , professor c: Or some or some , I would see Eurospeech if we have some Eurospeech papers , these will be paper p p , submissions . phd d: but professor c: These will be things that are particular things , aspects of it that we 're looking at , rather than , you know , attempt at a global paper about it . I had , one of the transcribers go through and tighten up the bins on one of the , NSA meetings , and then I went through afterwards and double - checked it so that one is really very very accurate . I sent You know that one ? phd d: Oh , so grad g: The which one ? I 'm sorry . postdoc a: I 'm trying to remember I don't remember the number off hand . grad e: Those are all postdoc a: It 's one of the NSA 's . postdoc a: I 'm sure that that one 's accurate , I 've been through it myself . phd f: oh , Darn ! grad g: Yeah , that 's the problem with the NSA speakers . phd d: And e and e and extremely hard to follow , like word - wise , grad e: So . phd d: I bet the transcri , I have no idea what they 're talking about , grad g: Yeah . phd d: so , postdoc a: I 'm sure that , they 're they 're accurate now . grad e: oh , before you l go I guess it 's alright for you to talk a little without the mike I noticed you adjusting the mike a lot , did it not fit you well ? Oh . postdoc a: Well I won I noticed when you turned your head , it would it would tilt . grad e: Maybe it wasn't just tightened enough , or phd d: Maybe the yeah , the s thing that you have tightened @ @ , phd b: Actually if if you have a larger head , that mike 's gotta go farther away which means the the balance is gonna make it wanna tip down . grad e: Cuz , I 'm just thinking , you know , we were we 're we 've been talking about changing the mikes , for a while , grad g: postdoc a: Yeah . grad e: and if these aren't acoustically they seem really good , but if they 're not comfortable , we have the same problems we have with these stupid things . postdoc a: I think it 's com This is the first time I 've worn this , I find it very comfortable . grad e: I find it very comfortable too , but , it looked like Andreas was having problems , and I think Morgan was saying it professor c: Well , but I had it on I had it on this morning and it was fine . phd b: Can I see that ? grad e: Oh , oh you did wear it this morning ? professor c: Yeah . phd b: I yeah , I don't want it on , I just I just want to , say what I think is a problem with this . If you are wearing this over your ears and you 've got it all the way out here , then the balance is gonna want to pull it this way . phd b: Where as if somebody with a smaller head has it back here , grad e: It 's more balanced . postdoc a: Oh ! phd b: Then it then it falls back this way so it 's phd d: So we have to grad e: Well wh what it 's supposed to do is the backstrap is supposed to be under your crown , and so that should be should be postdoc a: Ah . grad e: if it 's right against your head there , which is what it 's supposed to be , that balances it so it doesn't slide up . grad e: Yep , right right below if you feel the back of your head , you feel a little lump , phd b: Yeah . phd d: So I 'm not saying anything about bias towards small headsize , grad e: About heads ? phd d: but does seem , phd b: It would be an advantage . postdoc a: Well , wonder if it 's if if he was wearing it over his hair instead of under his hair . professor c: Well , we should We shou we should work on compressing the heads , and grad e: I think probably it was Yeah . , so the directions do talk about bending it to your size , which is not really what we want . phd b: The other thing that would do it would be to hang a five pound weight off the back . professor c: that 's good ! postdoc a: What did you say ? phd d: A little , grad e: wh professor c: Hang a five pound weight off the off the back . grad e: We at Boeing I used I was doing augmented reality so they had head - mounts on , and we we had a little jury - rigged one with a welder 's helmet , phd b: Counter - balance . grad e: and we had just a bag with a bunch of marbles in it as a counter - balance . If people those who talk a lot have to wear heavier weights or something , and grad e: Yeah ! professor c: and , grad e: Anyway . professor c: so , what was I gonna say ? Oh , yeah , I was gonna say , I had these , conversations with NIST folks also while I was there and and , so they they have their their plan for a room , with , mikes in the middle of the table , and , close - mounted mikes , grad e: Yep . professor c: and they 're talking about close - mounted and lapels , just cuz phd d: And arrays , professor c: sort of and the array . grad e: And arrays , professor c: Yeah , so they were phd d: which is the i interesting grad e: yep . professor c: And yeah , like multiple multiple video cameras coverin covering every everybody every place in the room , phd d: and video , right . professor c: the yeah the the mikes in the middle , the head - mounted mikes , the lapel mikes , the array , with well , there 's some discussion of fifty - nine , grad e: Fifty - nine elements . professor c: they might go down to fifty - seven Because , there is , some pressure from a couple people at the meeting for them to use a KEMAR head . professor c: but what it is is it 's dummy head that is very specially designed , grad e: Oh , that 's right . professor c: and and and , so what they 're actually doing is they 're really there 's really two recording systems . professor c: So they may not be precisely synchronous , but the but there 's two two recording systems , one with , I think , twenty - four channels , and one with sixty - four channels . And the sixty - four channel one is for the array , but they 've got some empty channels there , and anyway they like they 're saying they may give up a couple or something if for for the KEMAR head if they go go with that . grad e: Yeah , h , J Jonathan Fiscus did say that , they have lots of software for doing calibration for skew and offset between channels phd d: - grad e: and that they 've found that 's just not a big deal . I was thinking phd d: But they 're still planning to do like fake grad e: Scenario - based . grad e: But it sounded like they were pretty well thought out phd d: Yeah , th that 's true . grad e: and they 're they 're gonna be real meetings , postdoc a: grad e: it 's just that they 're with str with people who would not be meeting otherwise . phd b: Did did they give a talk on this or was this informal ? phd d: phd b: What was the , the paper by , Lori Lamel that you mentioned ? professor c: yeah , we sh we should just have you have you read it , but , I mea ba i i , we 've all got these little proceedings , postdoc a: Mmm , yeah . professor c: but , basically , it was about , going to a new task where you have insufficient data and using using data from something else , and adapting , and how well that works . , so in in fact it was pretty related to what Liz and Andreas did , except that this was not with meeting stuff , it was with grad e: Right . professor c: like I think they s didn't they start off with Broadcast News system ? And then they went to grad e: The - their Broadcast News was their acoustic models and then all the other tasks were much simpler . phd b: What was their rough what was their conclusion ? grad e: Yeah , read Wall Street Journal . phd d: Well , it 's it 's a good paper , professor c: Yeah , yeah . phd d: Bring the grad e: That It not only works , in some cases it was better , which I thought was pretty interesting , but that 's cuz they didn't control for parameters . phd b: Did they ever try going going the other direction from simpler task to more complicated tasks , grad e: acoustic models were a lot more complex . grad e: Yeah , well , one of the big problems with that is is often the simpler task isn't fully doesn't have all the phones in it , professor c: Yeah . grad e: like for the spr speech proxy thing that I did ? That 's what I did . Yeah , and they have they have better adaptation than we had than that that system , grad e: Yep . professor c: yeah , we should probably what would actually what we should do , I haven't said anything about this , but probably the five of us should pick out a paper or two that that , you know , got our interest , and we should go around the room at one of the Tuesday lunch meetings and say , you know , what what was good about the conference , grad e: Present . phd d: Well , the summarization stuff was interesting , I don't know anything about that field , but for this proposal on meeting summarization , it 's sort of a far cry because they weren't working with meeting type data , but he got sort of an overview on some of the different approaches , grad e: Right . phd b: Do you remember who the groups were that we 're doing ? phd d: so . phd d: but , there 's that 's a huge field and probably the groups there may not be representative of the field , I I don't know exactly that everyone submits to this particular conference , phd b: Was were there folks from BBN presenting ? phd d: but yet there was , let 's see , this was on the last day , Mitre , BBN , and , Prager grad e: Mitre , BBN , IBM . phd d: no it was grad e: Wasn't Who who who did the order one ? phd d: this was Wednesday morning . The sentence ordering one , was that Barselou , and these guys ? grad e: Ugh ! I 'm just so bad at that . phd d: Anyway , I I it 's in the program , I should have read it to remind myself , but that 's sort of useful and I think like when Mari and Katrin and Jeff are here it 'd be good to figure out some kinds of things that we can start doing maybe just on the transcripts cuz we already have professor c: postdoc a: Well , I like the idea that Adam had of of , z maybe generating minutes based on some of these things that we have because it would be easy to to to do that just , you know , and and phd d: Right . postdoc a: it has to be , though , someone from this group because of the technical nature of the thing . grad e: Someone who actually does take notes , I 'm very bad at note - taking . phd d: But I think what 's interesting is there 's all these different evaluations , like just , you know , how do you evaluate whether the summary is good or not , grad e: I always write down the wrong things . phd d: and that 's what 's was sort of interesting to me is that there 's different ways to do it , grad e: A judge . phd d: and phd b: Was SRA one of the groups talking about summarization , no ? grad e: Yep . One of those w grad e: And as I said , I like the Microsoft talk on scaling issues in , word sense disambiguation , phd d: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , that was an interesting discussion , grad e: The professor c: I grad e: It it it was the only one It was the only one that had any sort of real disagreement about . phd d: The data issue comes up all the ti professor c: Well , I didn't have as much disagreement as I would have liked , grad e: So . professor c: but I didn't wanna I wouldn I didn't wanna get into it because , you know , it was the application was one I didn't know anything about , grad e: Yep . professor c: it just would have been , you know , me getting up to be argumentative , but but , the missing thi so so what they were saying it 's one of these things is you know , all you need is more data , sort of But I mea i wh it @ @ that 's that 's dissing it , improperly , it was a nice study . , they were doing this it wasn't word - sense disambiguation , it was phd d: Yeah yeah yeah grad e: Well , it sort of was . grad e: But it was it was a very simple case of " to " versus " too " versus " two " and " there " , " their " , " they 're " phd d: And there and their and professor c: Yeah , yeah . phd d: and that you could do better with more data , that 's clearly statistically professor c: Right . professor c: And so , what they did was they had these different kinds of learning machines , and they had different amounts of data , and so they did like , you know , eight different methods that everybody , you know , argues about about , " Oh my my kind of learning machine is better than your kind of learning machine . " And , they were started off with a million words that they used , which was evidently a number that a lot of people doing that particular kind of task had been using . And then they had this log scale showing a you know , and and naturally everything gets grad e: Them being beep , they went off to a billion . professor c: they well , it 's a big company , I didn't I didn't mean it as a ne anything negative , grad e: Yeah . professor c: but i i i phd d: You mean the bigger the company the more words they use for training ? grad e: Well , I think the reason they can do that , is that they assumed that text that they get off the web , like from Wall Street Journal , is correct , and edit it . Of course there was the kind of effect that , you know , one would expect that that you got better and better performance with more and more data . , but the the real point was that the the different learning machines are sort of all over the place , and and by by going up significantly in data you can have much bigger effect then by switching learning machines and furthermore which learning machine was on top kind of depended on where you were in this picture , so , phd b: This was my concern about the recognizer in Aurora . professor c: That phd b: That the differences we 're seeing in the front - end is b professor c: Yeah . phd d: If you add more data ? Or phd b: You know ? professor c: Yeah . So so , that was that was kind of , you know , it 's a good point , but the problem I had with it was that the implications out of this was that , the kind of choices you make about learning machines were therefore irrelevant which is not at n t as for as I know in in tasks I 'm more familiar with @ @ is not at all true . What i what is is true is that different learning machines have different properties , and you wanna know what those properties are . And someone else sort of implied that well we s you know , a all the study of learning machine we still don't know what those properties are . We don't know them perfectly , but we know that some kinds use more memory and and some other kinds use more computation and some are are hav have limited kind of discrimination , but are just easy to use , and others are phd b: But doesn't their conclusion just sort of you could have guessed that before they even started ? Because if you assume that these learning things get better and better and better , professor c: You would guess phd b: then as you approach there 's a point where you can't get any better , right ? You get everything right . phd d: It 's just no grad e: But phd b: So they 're all approaching . phd b: But what I 'm saying is that th they have to , as they all get better , they have to get closer together . phd b: But they 're all going the same way , right ? So you have to get closer . phd b: Oh they didn't ? professor c: Well grad e: They just switched position . professor c: well that 's getting cl , yeah , the spread was still pretty wide that 's th that 's true , grad e: Yep . professor c: but but , I think it would be irntu intu intuition that this would be the case , but , to really see it and to have the intuition is quite different , I think somebody w w let 's see who was talking about earlier that the effect of having a lot more data is quite different in Switchboard than it is in in Broadcast News , phd d: Well it 's different for different tasks . phd d: So it depends a lot on whether , you know , it disambiguation is exactly the case where more data is better , right ? You 're you 're you can assume similar distributions , professor c: Yeah . phd d: but if you wanted to do disambiguation on a different type of , test data then your training data , then that extra data wouldn't generalize , grad e: Right . w , I think one of them was that " Well , maybe simpler algorithms and more data are is better " . Right ? Because their simplest , most brain - dead algorithm did pretty darn well professor c: Why are you sticking with a million words ? " , their point was that this million - word corpus that everyone uses is apparently ten or fifteen years old . But anyway , I I I think it 's it 's just the the i it 's it 's it 's not really the conclusion they came to so much , as the conclusion that some of the , commenters in the crowd came up with grad e: But we could talk about this stuff , I think this would be fun to do . professor c: that , you know , this therefore is further evidence that , you know , more data is really all you should care about , and that I thought was just kind of going too far the other way , grad e: Machine - learning . professor c: and and the the , one one person ga g g got up and made a a brief defense , but it was a different kind of grounds , it was that that , i w the reason people were not using so much data before was not because they were stupid or didn't realize data was important , but in fact th they didn't have it available . , but the other point to make a again is that , machine learning still does matter , but it it matters more in some situations than in others , and it and also there 's there 's not just mattering or not mattering , but there 's mattering in different ways . , you might be in some situation where you care how much memory you 're using , or you care , you know , what recall time is , grad e: Right . professor c: or you care , you know , and and grad e: Or you only have a million words for your some new task . professor c: Yeah , or or , phd d: Or done another language , or , you so there 's papers on portability and rapid prototyping and blah - blah - blah , grad e: Yep . " professor c: And there 's cost ! phd d: So , these are like two different religions , basically . professor c: you know , so so these , th the in the in the speech side , the thing that @ @ always occurs to me is that if you if you one person has a system that requires ten thousand hours to train on , and the other only requires a hundred , and they both do about the same because the hundred hour one was smarter , that 's that 's gonna be better . because people , there isn't gonna be just one system that people train on grad e: Yep . She put this up , and it was like this is this p people kept saying , " Can I see that slide again ? " professor c: Yeah . phd d: Yeah , postdoc a: and then they 'd make a comment , and one person said , well - known person said , you know , " Before you dismiss forty - five years including my work " phd d: yeah . phd d: But th you know , the same thing has happened in computational linguistics , right ? You look at the ACL papers coming out , and now there 's sort of a turn back towards , OK we 've learned statistic you know , we 're basically getting what we expect out of some statistical methods , and , you know , the there 's arguments on both sides , grad e: Yep . grad e: Is that all all of them are based on all the others , right ? Just , you you can't say phd b: Maybe they should have said " focus " or something . And I 'm saying the same thing happened with speech recognition , right ? For a long time people were hand - c coding linguistic rules and then they discovered machine - learning worked better . And now they 're throwing more and more data and worrying perhaps worrying less and less about , the exact details of the algorithms . phd d: And and then you hit this grad e: Except when they have a Eurospeech paper . grad e: Shall we read some digits ? Are we gonna do one at a time ? Or should we read them all agai at once again

The team believed that their unique and new corpus would be of interest to others, leading them to decide to keep various formats such as DVDs, tapes, and LDCs for data sharing. They also aimed to standardize their data formats. Grad A explained that his vector contained binary values indicating the existence of phonological features, with the goal of mapping feature sets to the presence of specific phonological features. The focus at the moment was on feature detection rather than mapping. Future efforts would involve obtaining accurate forced alignments on digit data and generating a report for Eurospeech'01. PhD B's model performed better on high mismatch cases, reflecting the team's priority in that area. However, PhD H expressed concern about the model's performance on medium and high mismatch cases, as adding noise had a negative impact. The professor informed the team that the evaluation would take place on November 13 and encouraged them to conduct experiments to determine the most important factors. Although the team had concerns about the evaluation's weighting, they did not anticipate significant differences. There was a possibility that the evaluation might be postponed.

Question: Summarize the discussion on the product quotation. Article: project manager: Okay so we're here to talk about the detailed design of the product , 'kay ? user interface: Yep . I'm just gonna open , say a few boring words to start with again , and start taking minutes afterwards . You guys are gonna give us a presentation of our wonder product that I can see some demonstrations of over there . marketing: Bra user interface: project manager: Then we're gonna talk about finance , and I've got a lovely Excel spreadsheet that I knocked up in the last five minutes for this . project manager: So industrial designer: project manager: Your thing is in where is it ? Is it in user interface: Three , three . Production costs estimated by our manufacturing department and the research department , which is us , is fifteen point eight Euros , user interface: industrial designer: someone forgot the units there user interface: Unit price . we implemented the basic functions , which is just T_V_ functions plus the locator , which was one of the marketing things , cradle , scroll wheel for the the channels , and we implemented the f the the way of putting the new and revolutionary zapping , your favourite channels functionality , in the scroll . So this is the user interface: So here I'll give you the so this is the cradle unit , and this is the actual remote itself . so the scroll bar is or the scroll wheel is this this green little scrolly guy here , and then the volume controls are here and here . user interface: you've got the keypad which is the numbers f from zero to nine and then ten . we have our we have the enter button and what was the other button here ? This is the teletext . industrial designer: Start s the the start to to to user interface: The programme button , industrial designer: programme yeah . So this bl this button will be used both for the favourites and for programming your the the type of television you wanna use . So the plastic is the white area of this of the model here , and the red area is like a rubber covering . user interface: So you can see that when it lays like this or like this and the buttons are all gonna be rubber , so it's pretty hard to actually damage it project manager: Is that could that be easy to for the scroll wheel to be rotated if it lands on it ? user interface: Yeah that might be a possible a mi possible problem , but if you drop it industrial designer: Not helping . user interface: Yeah and it depends on if it's sliding , but I think it's pretty ergonomic . industrial designer: project manager: I take it that this is gonna be slightly lighter in the final design as well . user interface: Yeah the the power button is a bit of a reach , but I think we might scale down the final model a bit . user interface: These this is a bit larger than it would be , but project manager: It's cool . user interface: project manager: And hold it so marketing: that's project manager: wh what's the marketing perspective ? marketing: oh that's oh I like it . you guys gave me more than I was asking for , so I'm happy because we've got some really marketable features in this . So you ha you have like the the base station with the little button for the where's my remote . industrial designer: Wicked isn't it ? project manager: So let me get it , user interface: so project manager: if I press this button user interface: beep beep beep project manager: I see . industrial designer: marketing: So you can take this ho take this home with you tonight and you can push that and he'll be across town user interface: Beep beep beep project manager: I plan to do that as well . no no no tha that's alri project manager: So the the two blue are are those for the the it to charge off of in ? user interface: Exactly that's exactly what those are for . user interface: And there's one other feature that we were debating , but we decided to go against it , is you could industrial designer: project manager: user interface: beep beep beep industrial designer: user interface: we were thinking that it might be interesting to have a trigger button here because you have this finger project manager: Yeah it's the right shape isn't it ? user interface: it it's it kinda feels like there should be something there , but we couldn't figure out what button is important enough to put there . And we we don't wanna accidentally be hitting the power button like that so project manager: But maybe if you had a trigger plus the scroll then that would get past the the problem of it landing and scrolling , user interface: . So maybe in a final design phase we might tweak that a little bit , project manager: Okay . project manager: But it's definitely got options for like different types of models and things as well based on that , hasn't it ? user interface: The scroll wheels , a problem with them not being sort of user interface: industrial designer: project manager: I don't think the user interface guy wants to touch it anymore . marketing: Well of course , user interface: industrial designer: marketing: My my s my suggestion is we're gonna go go to the silvers and blacks like most of the televisions . user interface: marketing: So you're not gonna find my my folder up there I gotta do mine up at the board . So project manager: Can I not get your get at stuff from your shared folder now ? marketing: No it's not in there because I had the computer problem and I I I cou I couldn't create it . marketing: I couldn't create it in the PowerPoint , project manager: marketing: and I think I've got this really strange cable . So what I had , basically going from the PowerPoint format , is that yeah yeah I like this a lot . Is this one of the tests is to see how we can adapt to s changing situations in the in the meeting room ? project manager: industrial designer: Nah . We've got the features , we have the characteristics , and we have the I I don't know what we would call the other part what we call you know the the the corp corporate Help me . So the features I think we got the scroll , we've got the the locator , we've got the durability , we've got the dependability , industrial designer: It fell off . marketing: the characteristics I talk about , we have reliability , we have comfort , we have ergonomics , we have environmentally s sensitive . and the corporation , we're talking about we're we're a new we're a new company . We're wanting you to find our product so we're gonna give you a good product at a fair price . One thing I would want to to see is is can we can we get a lifetime guarantee on this product , a normal use guarantee , which means that this product , for the for the life of of the life use , if it should have a technical problem , that we could re replace it at no cost ? That was something I would be interested in . so yeah without going into great details , we have a we have a product , it has the features and the characteristics , and the background , I believe , to make it marketable I believe at a cost of of of thirty thirty five to to fifty Euros . We're gonna be competitive , and we're gonna we're gonna have a market niche . w project manager: Do you would you a argue that that we're better going for the higher cost than bringing it down into twenty f five as we probably could , but lowering our profit margins ? marketing: That that would be that would be I think a decision best made by corporate I I m for my evaluation , based on what our competition is , I th I think that that we can go after this and and and go after more of the exclusivity sense than the mass market sense . But you guys came up with a great product , and at that cost I think it there's nobody else that's putting this this combination of of ingredients together . But with all of these other features I think people c one thing I'm I'm hoping for is people are not gonna even notice . There's gonna be somebody going home and say oh sh this thing doesn't work for my D_V_D_ and my but I like these other things , so they keep it , they don't take it back . project manager: And we're actually quite open to be able to expand the product for a later version with those features quite simply anyway , aren't we ? Th there's no fundamentally different technology to do that . marketing: Well one of one of the thoughts that I had is can can this unit be be produced in a way that makes it upgradable ? project manager: . You know is there a card in th can we make a card and so after industrial designer: W we need we need we need s some more buttons if it would to work on some other stuff , but user interface: marketing: - , but you follow what I'm s I'm s industrial designer: We we w yeah we could get another version of it that actually works . But marketing: Yeah 'cause if if we can make this unit upgradable then we're yeah but then we talk about changing the warranty concept and everything , but that's that was just an idea I had . to me the only additions project manager: Yeah , the plus there's the the risk of making it unusable as well , or making it less b because at the moment it's actually very straightforward to look at all the buttons , you know what they do , it's very simple , and it just works . So I have a little spreadsheet for us where I I was wondering , you when you talked about the fifteen point eight Euros , I was wondering how you came up with that figure ? user interface: Well , that was just just our technical team added up the production costs of the individual units . project manager: I've made a f few assumptions here in that I'm assuming that our power adaptor we can make for a cost of four Euros , user interface: -huh . project manager: equivalent to solar cells , which I think is probably fair considering that we have in-house manufacturing of power adaptors already . project manager: and I'm assuming that the locator beacon , the you know the user interface: Yeah . project manager: Can be made for it sounded different that time can be made for a similar price to an L_C_ display , user interface: Oh , sorry . industrial designer: project manager: an do you think that's fair coming from a m the manufacturing ? user interface: Yeah I do think we that we we don't need the events chip on print , we only need the the regular chip on print , project manager: . user interface: And we and we have a single-curved project manager: Is that a single-curved rather than a double-curved ? user interface: I think that project manager: We're not entirely sure what single-curve versus double-cur marketing: We've got a we've got a curve and a droop . user interface: It's single-curved , project manager: You think ? Okay user interface: yeah . But we save one Euro that way , yeah ? So we come bring it down to Fifteen point four . marketing: project manager: Do don't speak so it's in here , in that user interface: Okay . project manager: w do we have any we have special form don't we ? user interface: Yeah we do . project manager: But the the the we haven't talked about any special colour though I don't th user interface: Oh it's a that's not very special , it's pretty project manager: if we're going for greys and silvers then I don't think we're O okay so we're user interface: If th . project manager: Push-button , scroll wheel , we're basically we have th industrial designer: We don't project manager: is this intended to be a button as well or just a scroll ? user interface: That's a scroll . project manager: Just a scroll ? It's not one of the scrolls where , for example , with this one you could push it down to be a button ? user interface: no we just use it as a scroll . project manager: Okay so we're on to the user interface: S 's kind of s frighteningly accurate . project manager: We're on to the pat-on-the-back part of the presentation , where we have a look at the criterias th that Paul the criterion criteria that Paul has has given us , and we can use that to tell How's it going ? Anyone got any thoughts ? user interface: What ? project manager: How how have we done today ? user interface: I think we did pretty well . marketing: No , I think we come up with a with a attractive marketable product and and concept . project manager: Any other chang thoughts ? Okay so th th what about room for creativity ? marketing: project manager: Is it the . marketing: well we we we kinda broke we kinda at least adjusted every every criteria they gave us project manager: . marketing: because we d we still have the the teletext capability in this thing right , user interface: marketing: So you know you know if this thing flies then we've we've adjusted or broken every every idea they gave us . project manager: no yeah but we did we did break with the specs a little bit I guess , industrial designer: project manager: but the marketing: But I like when I say we have we had I believe we have room for creativity 'cause w this is we did it . project manager: 'Kay leadership , what do we report back to the bosses ? No th th I think they were r reasonably flexible with us over the whole changing the specs thing . industrial designer: It was more of a teamwork thing then really leadership based project was project manager: I agree . industrial designer: That's almost a crotch mi cr project manager: That's it's down , it's quite close . marketing: You know you know what they're gonna have on the recording in there from that microphone is your lunch digesting you know th project manager: Keep it , keep it calm . marketing: project manager: So yeah the the pen came in alright and it's a little uncomfortable to use but I guess it works . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: I've been wor I've been wondering about that all day , but see these look like they're that looks the oth that looks like it would be that way around , industrial designer: Use them like that . What new ideas have we found ? industrial designer: user interface: Oh wel marketing: New ideas f for the product or for the the the the environment or project manager: Well let's do both then . marketing: what are we ta project manager: for the product ? user interface: Well we had the favourites list , and the scroll bar , and we have the cradle , and the r remote call feature . project manager: And for the meeting room , Has anyone got any more industrial designer: Yeah comfortable headsets would be nice . marketing: clearly remote control microphones would be the would be a nice solution to all these cables , but I'm sure that there's there's some justification for these things that I don't know about . user interface: marketing: It's not been it's not been cooperating so well , but I don't think that's the that's avoidable . project manager: Oh hang on it really that's something we that the costs were under twelve fifty Euros . industrial designer: project manager: And the costs within the budget ? Not the original budget , but they are now . user interface: industrial designer: Who wrote that one ? project manager: Thank user interface: project manager: Thanks guys . marketing: S I've got a lot of paperwork to catch up on so let's close this and come back and 'kay <doc-sep>project manager: Then I guess that's your bit ? I I didn't s see anything about it , marketing: Yeah . marketing: project manager: I'll show you how we're going to do with financing this design . project manager: Well the finance we'll do later , so firstly I'll show you the notes . project manager: Well user interface: marketing: project manager: We ge we went through the agenda , industrial designer: project manager: and well we had some some presentations from you three . marketing: industrial designer: it's pretty much like Mike draw drew the in the during the last meeting . industrial designer: and later we'll put out more interesting covers with different patterns and pictures and everything . You can see it also on the on the on the side view , that only this part is the front , and the rest of it , the under the under side of it , yeah , the back side and the lower part of the front is of course titanium made of titanium , and has the titanium colour of course , the look . industrial designer: which is made which is also part of the back , part of the titanium titanium part . user interface: Yeah , it's a double R_ , but industrial designer: Yeah ? user interface: It's a double R_ . industrial designer: it's difficult to draw so small , but it's our double R_ logo is in there . it's difficult to draw again the little oval or round I think oval will be better for the for the d for the different channel buttons . And then we have the m The m user interface: Channel up and volume ? industrial designer: Yeah the the con the the the , yeah , the t volume and the channel controls in the middle here . with kind of arrow shapes , which makes it also a bit more exciting than basic round or square buttons . Oh nei we the Okay button's here in the middle of the of the operators , of the channel and volume changers . project manager: Well if I look at it , the side the side view user interface: Well , at the back industrial designer: Maybe we maybe we should finish first our talk user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Maybe I I don't want to I don't want to suppress you but n I'll finish this quick . project manager: industrial designer: okay I've had everything I guess on the front ? user interface: No the back . user interface: No I don't think And the industrial designer: And the company slogan , we thought in a kind of arc shape above the logo . industrial designer: and project manager: W user interface: And about the side view This the front won't be as thick , industrial designer: user interface: but again th the the drawing technique makes it very difficult to to really project manager: Well I see , but industrial designer: Oh and before I forget . industrial designer: And you can record it using , yeah , the the the back of the f w device . marketing: project manager: When I look at when I look at this side view , I think w when I have that in my hand , it's terrible . ? project manager: If if you look if if this this is thick , and this is thin , th th then it that it lies over your hands . But industrial designer: Why ? Well it fits it it it it fits the hand , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: mean the the the the project manager: Well what what what I what I agree is that when when you have such of an arc in the middle , so that the the a the ends and the fronts is a bit thicker , so th then it falls over your hands . user interface: If y If you handle a remote , you you usually don't have your hand straight like this . H What do you suggest we do ? This was Mike's prototype , project manager: Well marketing: industrial designer: and y you seemed to agreed on it . project manager: Well the sides I haven't seen yet , ? industrial designer: But now you have a totally different . industrial designer: The size ? Yeah well the size doesn't really matter w project manager: They the the the the the side view , industrial designer: Side ? oh the side ? project manager: we didn't industrial designer: W we we he drew the s the side , user interface: Yeah yeah . user interface: Yeah you you don't you don't grab it , industrial designer: You're not holding it like this or something . user interface: you you industrial designer: You , yeah , y How do you call it ? Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: You you you're using buttons this way , or if you're right-handed , this way . industrial designer: And maybe you can you can grab it a bit higher , marketing: Yeah , I agree on this . That's not the point user interface: No but but industrial designer: Well the the Well that's a reason to to to put the L_C_D_ screen of course on the upper side , but user interface: Well f for as far as I can see , three of us agree project manager: Yeah well user interface: and only Nils project manager: I think if you t if you three agree then then that's it . industrial designer: But are d Can you live with it ? project manager: Alright , if you think that that's the way it should user interface: Yeah ? industrial designer: Y Yeah , y y y y you said it was totally unusable . project manager: No No , industrial designer: But do you project manager: when I I my personal taste is that I want it to fall over my hands with a thick But In the market industrial designer: But d you don't think this is completely unusable I guess . industrial designer: Not totally , well project manager: For me , I I wouldn't buy it . project manager: Yeah , we don't know , industrial designer: Maybe a thousand people , project manager: but that's that's that's that's more market research . user interface: industrial designer: any other suggestions ? project manager: No , I think it's great . You can do the evaluation criteria on this ? user interface: industrial designer: You're very personal again . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: So I made a I made a few questions on the hand of the impor most important requirements and trends . marketing: I think you have all seen this kind of evaluation , so I don't have to explain it . the first question is , is the device good-looking ? Because normal p most people thought that earlier devices were ugly ugly . So what do we think ? industrial designer: Well d we designed it , so of course we are very user interface: . project manager: To the customers ? industrial designer: So and we ha we have answer now ? project manager: To potential customers who have to take this questionnaire ? industrial designer: Yeah . We designed it to be good-looking , so industrial designer: I Yeah , I think it marketing: Yeah , but , you know We dis we di we designed it to be perfect . Easy to find t industrial designer: Well l well let's start with the beginning , just one by one . is it good-looking ? industrial designer: Well , I guess I think it's it's it's pointed towards the youth of course , if you look at the design and and the colours and everything . it's it's not f a device that marketing: The titanium might be f for older people . industrial designer: Yeah , that's that's for older people , it's it's more that classical look . I think Yeah they like black of course , but I think they'll they they think the the titanium look of it is also I think it's also good for them , so I think we both have consider considered the youth and also a bit older people . user interface: I think we shouldn't discuss any points points that long , because I don't know how how many points there are but project manager: No . user interface: no it's marketing: Easy to change channels ? project manager: No , not false . industrial designer: D we d we don't we don't have that s user interface: Well it's easier to find than a a normal black one or something , project manager: Well six then . industrial designer: Well we don't have the device that beeps when you lost it or so , project manager: Are the functions easy to learn ? industrial designer: but project manager: Well w I we do want we have a l f f less of an user interface: We have so few functions , so Yeah . project manager: And the device R_S_I_ sensitive ? user interface: Well , I should I think two , project manager: Yeah . Two ? industrial designer: ? project manager: Yeah , but just do some We we marketing: Yeah project manager: I th I th I think this is too time consuming . industrial designer: Are we take too much time ? project manager: not not towards you , marketing: Yeah , I agree . marketing: Right , R_ R_S_I_ sensitive ? R_S_I_ sensitive ? project manager: well well a bit , so four . project manager: Is the device easy to use ? user interface: The project manager: Yes we have not many buttons . project manager: Are the trends about fruit and vegetables implemented ? user interface: T industrial designer: F project manager: Well in our covers , in our fronts . industrial designer: Four ? marketing: If you look at this industrial designer: Well , it doesn't really resemble any fruit , that's true . project manager: industrial designer: But but we have the the the the the sparkly fruity colours of course . user interface: This is the last meeting ? project manager: Yes , but we we have to design much more , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: The what ? project manager: The sample speaker , industrial designer: The marketing: Out . marketing: Batteries are quite project manager: L_C_ three ? Yeah hand dynamo ? Y t come on , marketing: no , no no no . user interface: Well well why why why should we use a advanced chip ? industrial designer: Because project manager: Well be for the L_C_D_ you had said . user interface: Why not ? industrial designer: Because that y project manager: Well what what's the difference between simple and regular ? industrial designer: because my information says it . project manager: What's the difference between a simple and a regular chip ? industrial designer: Huh ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: And simple ? industrial designer: well yeah I I read something about it , but user interface: Simple . So Well you have to use the advanced chip , if you have the L_C_D_ screen . user interface: We we we Why ? project manager: user interface: We have very little options furthermore , for the project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: But if you have a regular chip , you can't have the L_C_D_ screen . project manager: Well , we could say , well this special colour , that isn't that that isn't there , marketing: No project manager: because the the fronts they will buy it . industrial designer: it d it doesn't marketing: No , that's n It's not relevant . marketing: No , Then the whole concept is industrial designer: Yeah , I know but that's what my information says . user interface: You you we have an advanced chip-on-print , industrial designer: user interface: and we have an L_C_ display . industrial designer: Well and what do they mean with curves again ? Because we you have uncurved project manager: Well I I did single curve to Well you said s double curved , user interface: I ? project manager: he , user interface: ? project manager: because I thought it's a b a bit cheaper already . industrial designer: Well marketing: No industrial designer: But what what did what do n marketing: no no no . project manager: But industrial designer: Sorry , but What do they mean with the curves ? project manager: Curved ? industrial designer: Is th Is this a curve ? project manager: Yes , that's curved . Come on , if we if we if we make this fifty million , they won't hesitate to congratulate us , so user interface: industrial designer: marketing: If if you make people brand-aware , they are willing to pay more . industrial designer: But I user interface: Yeah or we could replace it marketing: If you if you make it cool to have project manager: By the way , we also have this one . industrial designer: Hey but I think you'll agree that that we that now we have this screen , it's it's very not practical to ha to consider this after we have designed the entire thing . marketing: industrial designer: Well that's pretty l user interface: Why why don't we replace the titanium with plastic coloured titanium , marketing: That is pretty stupid . Well user interface: titanium-coloured plastic ? project manager: Who ? marketing: project manager: You want to dump the titanium ? user interface: Yeah well if we we we have to get cheaper . industrial designer: I think project manager: Th then you have a ugly , stupid , l ugly looking , dumb remote that that no-one would buy . industrial designer: I think the titanium just provided the the tough look and the and the marketing: Y project manager: Yes . project manager: and th that it is strong , and industrial designer: And also the the older people will like it because of that . industrial designer: Alright it's not our target audience , but it's it's useful if it's important for old people . project manager: We still we had to focus to get more people from the younger group , industrial designer: Yeah . But I think you could better change titanium to hard a hard kind of plastic looking like titanium than lose the L_C_D_ screen . project manager: I'll put in the report we that we think that fourteen point one is the l m lowest price you can make a remote for that's trendy d these days . project manager: Titanium , I thi I think this this is this is e really good re remote . But user interface: industrial designer: Yeah this is good , marketing: Osl industrial designer: but it it's not good enough . project manager: Ah those those account managers , what do th d what do they know ? user interface: Well project manager: Come on . user interface: industrial designer: What do we Well what do we know ? All we want is a is a fancy design but we don't really consider the costs . So marketing: So s If you don't have the money , you can't make it . industrial designer: And on plastic times two and then we are there ? project manager: Well , no it's just all plastic . W marketing: project manager: What do we want , guys ? industrial designer: I want gold plating . user interface: Because you y have that curve industrial designer: We have we have to fill user interface: and you have that curve . project manager: Finance ? user interface: this this ain't titanium , but it looks like it . project manager: Well , guys ? industrial designer: We get more salary , if we make if cheaper than twelve twelve and a half . project manager: Guys ? user interface: project manager: We have to dump our titanium , marketing: Shoot . project manager: and we'll hate the managers for that , but now we're going to evaluate our project , of project , user interface: industrial designer: Objection . Well , satisfaction on for example , are we satisfactory about our creativity ? industrial designer: Well I can't get no satisfaction , but marketing: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: I think it's Well in in if we consider the costs then this is the best , yeah . user interface: project manager: I think it's terrible that we got those costs at the last moment . But that that that's that , yeah that's a reason , industrial designer: Its it's ridiculous actually , but user interface: And unrealistic . We had nice design , and then you get the cost , and you had to dump all your creativity . project manager: I al I I've filled that in in a the questionnaires each time , so user interface: marketing: Yeah yeah . user interface: project manager: But o alright , the teamwork ? industrial designer: Well they they didn't think of the requirements . project manager: No they said , oh we won't d we won't use teletext , we won't use the D_V_D_ . project manager: well what do you , what did you think about the SMARTboard ? industrial designer: It was a complete disaster . Yeah ? industrial designer: No it it it it is project manager: Well user interface: No , that's a SMARTboard , and that's a digital pen . marketing: This this this isn't a SMARTboard , right ? project manager: Well it's both a SMARTboard . marketing: You u you use the project manager: It's both a SMARTboard , but this one is used for a desktop , and that one is used to to draw . But project manager: Well , wi w which one did you like ? user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Well I didn't use marketing: Yeah , but I think there's a big distinction between the these th project manager: We're now talking about the SMARTboards . user interface: Well we we used that one , industrial designer: Nei It it's much m user interface: and we needed it . user interface: Yeah alright , but project manager: Or install a laptop to a beamer , or have this one standing here in an I I like it . project manager: And the digi the digital pen ? Did did you like that one ? industrial designer: I I didn't use it . project manager: I used it just to check it out , but industrial designer: That's the marketing: Yeah . project manager: You you can't send that to anyone , because you you've scrabbled something on a page for yourself , user interface: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: So what's the what's the th what's the point of importing it into project manager: It's , no , it it's useless . industrial designer: you can bring your paperwork along and p Well of course if you have a lot of paper project manager: But marketing: Yeah , it might be useful for drawings . industrial designer: If you've If you've project manager: But for notes , it i you you have to put that in a strict you have to put a name , standard date , and all those things . So if you were to write them down for yourself , and then put that in your computer , you still have to type it over to Word . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: So it doesn't d doesn't have any marketing: Yeah , right . industrial designer: But I think d this option is only useful if you've got a lot of paperwork . industrial designer: Well did you really Did you really take take those in account ? I half of time I didn't notice they were there . project manager: Well w why not ? etcetera We industrial designer: project manager: N new ideas found ? industrial designer: Right . user interface: project manager: What kind of ideas for n a future schedule What ? For future meetings you have got ? industrial designer: marketing: user interface: Well I missed the option to to email , marketing: Communicate in between . project manager: But two t But th then you have to have a lot of drawings , because if I had a company and I'm going to buy those expensive huge expensive things , I and I have to w pay those papers that are expensive , I'm not going to user interface: industrial designer: Well No marketing: For people who sketch th the whole day , I can imagine that it's useful . project manager: Well th then still they they they should have a a nice graphics programme on the laptop . industrial designer: But it's still an expensive expensive project manager: Because this is huge marketing: Well project manager: this v very very expensive paper . user interface: Well you you can't you can't draw on a laptop like you like you paint of or draw with your hand . industrial designer: Well and if marketing: Mouse is ju just isn't working if you're sketching . industrial designer: And but what if maybe this this board SMARTboard is malfunctioning or someone . But suppose it was working correctly , what would it be useful then , if it wasn't off all the time ? A project manager: Well no . industrial designer: Really ? marketing: Yeah , but he's saying if it is correct , and you can draw very , yeah , very precise industrial designer: Anything you want . project manager: Well th th then still it's it's it's very expensive towards a a just a green school board . industrial designer: Well it isn't , but maybe that thing is is marketing: Yeah , mu industrial designer: Yeah , board , a school board , yeah . user interface: Yeah , but but then you can save it in instantly , and and and re-use it , and industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: This if it works correct , maybe this thing this thing is just malfunctioning . project manager: industrial designer: So if we get in if we get another one and you make sure it does work , project manager: Yep . project manager: Se user interface: Yeah , we can go to the bar and with our newly earned money . But industrial designer: Maybe till four o'clock or something ? marketing: industrial designer: Well dunno . project manager: Well yeah , it is a bit Well we still have to make the end report and all those things . project manager: I Di did you save this one in the folder ? marketing: You better get started . industrial designer: They also want to see my cat and his rabbit , and user interface: My big bird . project manager: marketing: project manager: Where is this ? marketing: industrial designer: Maybe the pen is just broken and the board isn't . user interface: industrial designer: Who is she you're talking about ? project manager: She already knows . industrial designer: Because then we have to confront her with our user interface: So she can see we're ready . project manager: I'm going to resign after this project anyway , so marketing: Oh , that's just great <doc-sep>project manager: And then we going to do some finance to see if it is feasible user interface: And chocolate ? project manager: and at the end we will we will evaluate ourself as a team . So first , I present as we came to this perfect model , project manager: user interface: and then we'll give some technical specifications . We analysed all the fruits project manager: user interface: and contacted NASA , and made some real good project manager: MASA ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: And making some analysis of different fruits , we choose the ultimate form , ultimate colours , and ultimate smell of it . But we still didn't want to go far from our titanium idea , 'cause it's the most of the moder the m the modern material we can p select . Explanat user interface: Everyone is f really really glad to obtain an s such a r such a device . imitating flatulence] project manager: What do you say ? user interface: N marketing: It says project manager: user interface: You must say it . And so , we have buttons and using L_C_D_ , or like you can use this jog wheel and select which ever option on the L_C_D_ , and then do on and off . Like , m switching the L_C_D_ display if you want to use L_C_D_ , or you don't want you can just use normal button . industrial designer: And then you can see the look L_C_D_ and all the switches . industrial designer: Yeah , or s So , we want to have simple and perfect shapes , like I shown in these phones . That's for the L_C_D_ or for the titanium ? marketing: You mean we can change the colour of th industrial designer: For the L_C_D_ . Even you can configure your colours for its the depending on your mood , or s marketing: Okay . Or project manager: And w wait , wh what are the strawberries for ? Wh wh industrial designer: Huh ? marketing: On the L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: Ah , these are like sensors . industrial designer: So , marketing: industrial designer: after this meeting we'll propose a party for our success for project manager: Ah . project manager: industrial designer: So , any specific questions for project manager: we'll see in the financial part if all gets into user interface: marketing: It makes sense . project manager: W Who is the five fifty millions we first make a party in ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: yeah , let's see if th it's meet the evaluation criterium . You made a very nice prototype , and , I think , we now need altogether to try to evaluate it to see if it makes sense to do it , if it fulfils our what we want to do , and things like that . As you know , before going and creating and producing these strawberry remote control , it's very important to first verify if it makes sense , if we have a chance to sell it . marketing: so we need to evaluate it , try to do it in a constative way , and as much as we can . And then we are just going to have an average , which will give us the value of our remote control . Of course , this can be discussed , but let's let's see , so let's vote . marketing: So , industrial designer: Yeah , what's is really marketing: what do you think , is it fancy ? industrial designer: it's really project manager: I think that fancy , we can say it is fancy . project manager: what do you think ? marketing: What do you think ? user interface: Feel the weight . So marketing: Yeah , o one means it's , yes , a very fancy and seven mean no at all . marketing: So , what about technology ? We have we have speech recognition , we have location based , industrial designer: And we have L_C_D_ . project manager: Yeah , I think it's a marketing: Quite user interface: Yeah , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: still we need to cha marketing: So let's suppose my daughter take it and and through it away . project manager: marketing: Do you think it makes sense that it's going to live again ? , maybe not the prototype . Well , so the question is does it have the minimum requirement of re remote control ? industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: So I don't know . These are the main marketing: it depends on the project manager: And you can do di two sites ? marketing: Okay . Yeah , and you can do on L_C_D_ using these going to scrolling all the option . industrial designer: So if you don't want marketing: So but , for instance , because the L_C_D_ is not touch control , touch screen , you cannot go to channel twenty five directly . user interface: You go you project manager: You c push here the the user interface: So , the basic mode project manager: yeah . marketing: It's much longer than that that being two two five , no ? user interface: No . marketing: But So what do you think for it , usefulness ? industrial designer: So , d Yeah , we need to address we want marketing: Seems to be useful . industrial designer: we only address two main functions here and the other functions will be on L_C_D_ . So project manager: Let me understand well , industrial designer: so project manager: because I'm not sure that's for that this one are b d two dir directional button . And which what is that ? user interface: It's a jog dial for controlling the cursor on the L_C_D_ screen . , see in L_C_D_ , like you will have blocks and you select which one . marketing: Is it the the the effective size and weight that the Is it real size , real weight ? Or Because it industrial designer: Yeah , it's size al almost marketing: Size is going to be that , yeah ? industrial designer: Yeah , because it is marketing: and and industrial designer: The weight will be bit lighter . marketing: because I'm haven't seen the weight so I must not user interface: Okay . marketing: Well , so colour , it seems that we have the several colours for the L_C_D_ . marketing: But , it's not very clear what is the colour of the sh the sh the case . industrial designer: The case is silver titanium , no ? marketing: It's a it's going to be titanium . marketing: So project manager: I it that's industrial designer: So maybe , I think marketing: I think usefulness is m as as I rem just have to remind you that usefulness is much less important than fanciness . industrial designer: Yeah , well marketing: Whether it's fancy or not now , it we have to decide . marketing: But this project manager: I would have m i found more fancy that the fruits are useful . Not like this d We're just giving the fruit for more fanciness and more attraction , too . industrial designer: So , maybe think we can have rubber or some sponges , stuff for strawberries and different colours . industrial designer: So it's marketing: So , it seems we are not so clear on the shape industrial designer: Even project manager: No , I'm not sure why industrial designer: These buttons project manager: if it was like this industrial designer: But it looks really not really good . user interface: And industrial designer: Even we can provide many different colours or different fruits , and project manager: -huh . user interface: but still you got some rubber fruit here , and it's completely completely secure to leave it with children and that . project manager: Okay , so you you you feel like it's something a protection for the remote control . Yeah , we've yeah we have sensors here and so here and here , project manager: Also . marketing: but can we adapt it to each each personal use ? user interface: Sure , sure , just look at it . marketing: That industrial designer: You can marketing: What else can we need ? industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: You Do you think you are gonna be able to do that with ti titanium as well ? project manager: Yeah , it's fudge titanium . Well , I if if this is if you are ready to do that , then I think it deserves a one . So now , it has to fulfil the financial criterium ? marketing: industrial designer: Financi marketing: Ah-ha . user interface: What what's the limit ? project manager: H marketing: It's twelve bucks . user interface: it's it's okay that I don't know , 'cause it's not my field . So the case , which one is it in the end ? industrial designer: Yeah , I think we will go for a single curve , no ? marketing: Let's do a single curve . marketing: It's only curve ? project manager: Oh see , I I think that the the price is this one . marketing: Special colour ? user interface: Well , n Why three ? industrial designer: No , only one , no ? marketing: No because project manager: . marketing: So the L_C_D_ project manager: How many push-button ? industrial designer: Scro project manager: Three or two ? industrial designer: two . That's that's not marketing: That's all ? project manager: We choose this one , and not this one . marketing: is it a scroll wheel and pe push button , th this centre one ? project manager: Or only a scroll-wheel . So project manager: You try to s marketing: You are trying to make make up make us up . industrial designer: It's already project manager: Because how do you do to y select ? industrial designer: Ah . marketing: No , but you select with the two d the other two buttons , project manager: Yeah , you you go on the location with your scroll wheel industrial designer: Y ye marketing: no ? That's true . project manager: You you have all of these , no ? marketing: She's very hard on this . project manager: Not special colours an interest in ? marketing: No , the colour is in the L_C_D_ . project manager: And buttons are not colourised ? They are m industrial designer: marketing: I no . marketing: Well , if I look at what is the most expensive things , it's the L_C_D_ industrial designer: Sample speaker . user interface: Well , as you may know there's some research done in the field of producing energy from mechanical eng , producing electricity from mechanical energy . So , the point is that when you take device and push the button , you produce enough energy project manager: But you don't need a battery ? user interface: to make electricity . project manager: But marketing: So that would project manager: it's like the hand dynamo , no ? industrial designer: Maybe the jog wheel can be like kind of hand marketing: So , but if we select the hand dynamo it's okay , we only industrial designer: is marketing: We we win one . user interface: And ? marketing: And ? project manager: M maybe minus three , no ? industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: It's not changing , no ? user interface: Why ? industrial designer: It you don't marketing: Yeah , yeah , yeah , if Click somewhere , you'll see features . industrial designer: Yeah , that marketing: It Is it ? project manager: Yeah , yeah y industrial designer: marketing: I think we're exceeding now . It's maximum industrial designer: Is really strict ? marketing: We would prefer , project manager: and don't have to Yeah , yeah . marketing: I'm just curious to see this industrial designer: Ho marketing: my address chip on print . , I would say it's the Russian trick , but project manager: Yeah , but is English . When we see the results , there is no doubt there industrial designer: Yeah , it's really project manager: . user interface: M maybe not , huh ? marketing: Team-work , very strong , I would say . marketing: New ideas found ? project manager: So , you say , is there sheep ? marketing: Yeah . A good leader , you know , a good leader is somewhere in the shade and marketing: but then I I mus That's true . user interface: we could forecast it , right ? marketing: To whom ? To the whole our company ? project manager: I'm the one , proposing the celebration . industrial designer: So where we will go now ? project manager: Ah , industrial designer: ye project manager: I think it's finish . marketing: I think the meeting industrial designer: Will go to Italian restaurant , or marketing: The meeting is over at least

The group thoroughly evaluated the cost of the product, discussing various component details such as the chip, exterior cover material, curve, buttons, and LCD screen. They decided that it would be more feasible to replace titanium with a hard plastic resembling titanium, rather than sacrificing the LCD screen. This adjustment resulted in an estimated cost of fourteen point one Euros, which exceeded the budget. However, after further discussions and adjustments to the chip, curve, buttons, and scroll wheel, they were able to obtain a more accurate estimate of fifteen point eight Euros, which was considered to be within the budget of twelve-five Euros. Initially, the product components included a battery, a simple chip, a speech sensor, a single curve, titanium, two push buttons, a scroll wheel, and an LCD screen, totaling seventeen dot eight dollars. However, through careful consideration and calculations, the group managed to reduce the cost to under twelve dollars.

Question: What is the main thesis of the discussion and what were the professor's opinions on the 12 second mean, possible hypothesis, concluding comments, and future work? Article: professor c: Typically when you you 're ab r starting around forty for most people , it starts to harden and then it 's just harder for the lens to shift things phd d: Oh . professor c: and th the the symptom is typically that you you have to hold stuff further away to to see it . professor c: In fact , m my brother 's a gerontological psychologist and he he came up with an an a body age test which gets down to sort of only three measurements that are good enough st statistical predictors of all the rest of it . grad a: We 're we 're live by the way , so we 've got a good intro here professor c: Oh . , she 's probably least involved in the signal - processing stuff so maybe we can just just , I don't think we should go though an elaborate thing , but Jose and I were just talking about the , speech e energy thing , phd e: The @ @ professor c: and I phd e: Yeah . But I think , you know , the the i if I can if you don't mind my my speaking for you for a bit , . Right now , that he 's not really showing any kind of distinction , but but we discussed a couple of the possible things that he can look at . And one is that this is all in log energy and log energy is basically compressing the distances between things . He was he he was taking everything over two hundred milliseconds , and he 's going to vary that number and also look at moving windows , as we discussed before . And and the other thing is that the yeah doing the subtracting off the mean and the variance in the and dividing it by the standard deviation in the log domain , may not be the right thing to do . grad a: Could you take that mike there ? phd d: Are these the long term means ? Like , over the whole , the means of what ? grad a: Thanks . professor c: B Between between phd d: All the frames in the conversation ? professor c: No . professor c: And so i i his his He 's making the constraint it has to be at least two hundred milliseconds . And then he 's he 's measuring at the frame level still at the frame level , of what phd d: Right . and But one thing he was pointing out is when he he looked at a bunch of examples in log domain , it is actually pretty hard to see the change . And you can sort of see that , because of j of just putting it on the board that if you sort of have log - X plus log - X , that 's the log of X plus the log of two phd e: Yep . professor c: and it 's just , you know , it it diminishes the effect of having two of them . phd d: But you could do like a C D F there instead ? , we don't know that the distribution here is normally . So So what I was suggesting to him is that phd d: So just some kind of a simple professor c: Actually , a PDF . professor c: Yeah , but I think also u I think a good first indicator is when the the the researcher looks at examples of the data and can not see a change in how big the the signal is , when the two speaker phd e: Yeah . professor c: doing casual looking and can get the sense , " Hey , there 's something there . And when he 's looking in straight energy he is , so that 's a good place to start . , when you did the sampling ? over the speech segments or s or sampling over the the individual channels in order to do the e the amplitude equalization , did you do it over just the entire everything in the mike channels ? phd e: How professor c: You didn't try to find speech ? grad a: No , I just took over the entire s entire channel sampled ten minutes randomly . professor c: And someone who would who would be So the normalization factor probably is i i i is is grad a: Yeah , this was quite quick and dirty , and it was just for listening . So yeah there there there There 's a good chance then given that different people do talk different amounts that there is there there is still a lot more to be gained from gain norm normalization with some sort phd e: Yeah . But we were agreed that in addition to that there should be s stuff related to pitch and harmonics and so forth . professor c: So we didn't talk at all about the other derivatives , but again just just looking at , I think Liz has a very good point , that in fact it would be much more graphic just to show Well , actually , you do have some distributions here , for these cases . professor c: You have some histograms , and , they don't look very separate . phd e: This is the the first derivate of log of frame energy without any kind of normalization . grad a: Except that it 's hard to judge this because the they 're not normalized . phd d: W , what I meant is , even if you use linear , you know , raw measures , like raw energy or whatever , professor c: " Number " phd d: maybe we shouldn't make any assumptions about the distribution 's shape , and just use you know , use the distribution to model the the mean , or what y you know , rather than the mean take some professor c: Yeah . grad a: Interesting phd e: Here I I professor c: Oh that yeah that 's a good q phd e: in No I I I haven't the result professor c: did did you have this sort of thing , for just the just the l r the the unnormalized log energy ? OK . professor c: That 's a phd d: Well it might be just good to know what it looks like . That 's That 's cuz I 'd mentioned scatter plots before but she 's right , phd d: Cuz phd e: Huh ? professor c: even before you get the scatter plots , just looking at a single feature , looking at the distribution , is a good thing to do . professor c: Yeah , but but what she 's saying is , which is right , is le phd e: combination of two , of energy and derivate professor c: let 's start with the Before we get complicated , let 's start with the most basic wh thing , which is we 're arguing that if you take energy if you look at the energy , that , when two people are speaking at the same time , usually there 'll be more energy than when one is right ? phd e: Yeah . professor c: And the first way you 'd look at that , s she 's , you know , absolutely right , is that you would just take a look at the distribution of those two things , much as you 've plotted them here , phd e: Yeah . professor c: So , with three colors or three shades or whatever , just just look at those distributions . professor c: And then , given that as a base , you can see if that gets improved , you know , or or or worsened by the looking at regular energy , looking at log energy , we were just proposing that maybe it 's you know , it 's harder to see with the log energy , and also these different normalizations , does a particular choice of normalization make it better ? phd e: Yeah . professor c: But I had maybe made it too complicated by suggesting early on , that you look at scatter plots because that 's looking at a distribution in two dimensions . professor c: And then we w I think we 're agreed that pitch - related things are are are going to be a a really likely candidate to help . professor c: But since your intuition from looking at some of the data , is that when you looked at the regular energy , that it did in fact usually go up , when two people were talking , that 's eh you know , you should be able to come up with a measure which will match your intuition . professor c: And she 's right , that a that having a having having this table , with a whole bunch of things , with the standard deviation , the variance and so forth , it 's it 's it 's harder to interpret than just looking at the the same kind of picture you have here . But It it 's curious but I f I found it in the in the mixed file , in one channel that eh in several oh e eh several times eh you have an speaker talking alone with a high level of energy professor c: phd e: eh in the middle eh a zone of overlapping with mmm less energy professor c: So there 'll be some cases for which phd e: Because there reach very many professor c: But , the qu So So they 'll be phd d: Right . professor c: This is I w want to point to visual things , But they there 'll be time There 'll be overlap between the distributions , but the question is , " If it 's a reasonable feature at all , there 's some separation . grad a: And I was just going to say that that right now we 're just exploring . I grad a: What you would imagine eventually , is that you 'll feed all of these features into some discriminative system . grad a: And so even if if one of the features does a good job at one type of overlap , another feature might do a good job at another type of overlap . the the reason I had suggested the scatter f p features is I used to do this a lot , when we had thirteen or fifteen or twenty features to look at . phd e: Yeah , this is the professor c: Because something is a good feature by itself , you don't really know how it 'll behave in combination and so it 's nice to have as many as many together at the same time as possible in in some reasonable visual form . There 's cool graphic things people have had sometimes to put together three or four in some funny funny way . But it 's true that you shouldn't do any of that unless you know that the individual ones , at least , have have some some hope phd e: Yeah . phd d: it 's really important to pick a normalization that matches the distribution for that feature . phd d: And it may not be the same for all the types of overlaps or the windows may not be the same . e Actually , I was wondering , right now you 're taking a all of the speech , from the whole meeting , and you 're trying to find points of overlap , but we don't really know which speaker is overlapping with which speaker , professor c: Right . phd d: right ? So another way would just be to take the speech from just , say , Morgan , And just Jane and then just their overlaps , phd e: Yeah . phd d: like but by hand , by cheating , and looking at you know , if you can detect something that way , because if we can't do it that way , there 's no good way that we 're going to be able to do it . phd d: That You know , there might be something helpful and cleaner about looking at just individuals and then that combination alone . So if I don't know , if you go through and you find Adam , cuz he has a lot of overlaps and some other speaker who also has e enough speech phd e: Yeah . phd d: and just sort of look at those three cases of Adam and the other person and the overlaps , phd e: Yeah . phd d: maybe and just look at the distributions , maybe there is a clear pattern phd e: Yeah . phd d: but we just can't see it because there 's too many combinations of of people that can overlap . postdoc b: I think it 's to start with it 's s your your idea of simplifying , starting with something that you can see eh you know without the extra layers of phd d: Right . Cuz if energy doesn't matter there , like I don't think this is true , but what if phd e: To study individual ? postdoc b: Sorry , what ? phd d: ? phd e: To study individual ? postdoc b: Well , you you you don't have to study everybody individually phd d: Well , to study the simplest case to get rid of extra phd e: The the the But Consider postdoc b: but just simple case and the one that has the lot of data associated with it . Cuz what if it 's the case and I don't think this is true grad a: That was a great overlap by the way . phd d: What if it 's the case that when two people overlap they equate their you know , there 's a conservation of energy and everybody both people talk more softly ? I don't think this happens at all . postdoc b: Or or what if what if the equipment what if the equipment adjusts somehow , phd d: Or they get louder . postdoc b: there 's some equalizing in there ? phd d: Yeah or professor c: no we don't have that . grad a: Well , but But I think that 's what I was saying about different types of overlap . phd d: There are there are different types , and within those types , like as Jose was saying , that sounded like a backchannel overlap , meaning the kind that 's a friendly encouragement , like " , but , some of those , as you showed , I think can be discriminated by the duration of the overlap . It Actually the s new student , Don , who Adam has met , and he was at one of our meetings He 's getting his feet wet and then he 'll be starting again in mid - January . phd d: and So maybe phd e: This is a s a general studio of the overlapping we 're studying the i professor c: Yeah . Well I I I I would s actually still recommend that he do the overall thing phd d: So it might be something that we can help by categorizing some of them and then , you know , look at that . professor c: he has the histogram mechanism , he has the stuff that subtracts out and all he has to do is change it from from log to plain energy and plot the histogram and look at it . And then he should go on and do the other stuff bec but But this will phd d: Yeah . I didn't mean that that for you to do that , but I was thinking if if Don and I are trying to get categories professor c: phd d: and we label some data for you , and we say this is what we think is going So you don't have to worry about it . phd e: Consider different class of overlap ? phd d: Yeah , that we would be working on anyway . phd d: Then maybe you can try some different things for those three cases , and see if that helps , or phd e: Yeah . This is the thing I I comment with you before , that we have a great variation of th situation of overlapping . phd e: And the behavior for energy is , log energy , is not the same all the time . phd e: And professor c: But I guess I was just saying that that right now from the means that you gave , I don't have any sense of whether even , you know , there are any significant number of cases for which there is distinct and I would imagine there should be some you know , there should be The distributions should be somewhat separated . professor c: and I I would still guess that if they are not separated at all , that there 's some there 's there 's most likely something wrong in the way that we 're measuring it . professor c: but For instance , I wouldn't expect that it was very common overall , that when two people were talking at the same time , that it would that it really was lower , phd e: Yeah . phd d: or a sort of , a case where where you would never know that unless you actually go and look at two individuals . phd d: It might the case , though , that the significant energy , just as Jose was saying , comes in the non - backchannel cases . Because in back Most people when they 're talking don't change their own energy when they get a backchannel , cuz they 're not really predicting the backchannel . professor c: e e and and again what they what difference there was would kind of be lost in taking the log , phd d: and the backchannels are sort of easy to spot s in terms of their words or , just listen to it . phd d: It just professor c: Mmm , no , if it 's if i if it 's grad a: Tone professor c: Well , it won't be as big . phd d: even if you take the log , you can your model just has a more sensitive measures . grad a: You could imagine doing specialized ones for different types of backchannels , if you could if you had a good model for it . professor c: If if you 're a I guess my point is , if you 're doing essentially a linear separation , taking the log first does in fact make it harder to separate . professor c: So it 's So , if you i i So i if there if there close to things it does phd e: Yeah . And right now we 're essentially doing this linear thing by looking across here and and saying we 're going to cut it here . But anyway , yeah , we 're not disagreeing on any of this , we should look at it more more finely , but I think that This often happens , you do fairly complicated things , and then you stand back from them and you realize that you haven't done something simple . So , if you generated something like that just for the energy and see , and then , a a a as as Liz says , when they g have smaller , more coherent groups to look at , that would be another interesting thing later . professor c: And then that should give us some indication between those , should give us some indication of whether there 's anything to be achieved f from energy at all . But then the Have you started looking at the pitch related stuff at all , or ? Pitch related ? phd e: The ? professor c: Harmonicity and so on ? phd e: I I 'm preparing the the program but I don't I don't begin because eh I saw your email professor c: Preparing to Yeah . phd e: and I agree with you it 's better to I suppose it 's better to to consider the the energy this kind of parameter bef professor c: Yeah . I I I I Well , we certainly should see this but I I I I think that the harm I certainly wasn't saying this was better than the harmonicity and pitch related things I was just saying phd e: I I go on with the with the pitch , professor c: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , I was just saying phd e: I I I I understood that eh I I had to finish by the moment with the and and concentrate my my energy in that problem . But I think , like , all these derivatives and second derivatives and all these other very fancy things , I think I would just sort of look at the energy and then get into the harmonicity as as a suggestion . So maybe since w we 're trying to compress the meeting , I know Adam had some form stuff he wanted to talk about and did you have some ? postdoc b: I wanted to ask just s something on the end of this top topic . So , when I presented my results about the distribution of overlaps and the speakers and the profiles of the speakers , at the bottom of that I did have a proposal , phd e: - huh . postdoc b: and I had plan to go through with it , of of co coding the types of overlaps that people were involved in s just with reference to speaker style so , you know , with reference phd d: Oh . postdoc b: and you know I said that on my in my summary , phd d: That 'd be great . postdoc b: that you know so it 's like people may have different amounts of being overlapped with or overlapping phd d: Yeah , I remem Right . postdoc b: but that in itself is not informative without knowing what types of overlaps they 're involved in so I was planning to do a taxonomy of types overlaps with reference to that . postdoc b: So , but it you know it 's like it sounds like you also have something in that direction . postdoc b: Is is it phd d: We have nothing You know , basically , we got his environment set up . It 's mostly that , if we had to label it ourselves , we we would or we 'd have to , to get started , but if It it would be much better if you can do it . You 'd be much better at doing it also because you know , I I 'm not I don't have a good feel for how they should be sorted out , postdoc b: Interesting . phd d: and I really didn't wanna go into that if I didn't have to . So if If you 're w willing to do that or or grad a: It would be interesting , though , to talk , maybe not at the meeting , but at some other time about what are the classes . phd d: I think that 's a research effort in and of itself , phd e: Yeah . phd d: because you can read the literature , but I don't know how it 'll turn out phd e: Yeah . postdoc b: It seems like we also s with reference to a purpose , too , that we we 'd want to have them coded . phd d: And we 'd still have some funding for this project , phd e: phd d: like probably , if we had to hire some like an undergrad , because Don is being covered half time on something else postdoc b: phd d: he we 're not paying him the full RA - ship for all the time . If we got it to where we wanted we needed someone to do that I don't think there 's really enough data where where postdoc b: Yeah , I see this as a prototype , to use the only the the already transcribed meeting as just a prototype . phd e: I I think a a another parameter we c we we can consider is eh the duration . Because is possible eh some s s eh some classes eh has eh a type of a duration , eh , a duration very short when we have we have overlapping with speech . And it 's interesting , I think , to consider the the window of normalization , normalization window . Eh because eh if we have a type of , a kind of eh overlap , eh backchannel overlap , with a short duration , is possible eh to normali i i that if we normalize eh with eh eh consider only the the eh window eh by the left eh ri eh side on the right side overlapping with a a very eh oh a small window eh the if the fit of normalization is eh mmm bigger eh in that overlapping zone eh very short postdoc b: that you have eh you have a backchannel , eh , eh you have a overlapping zone very short phd d: Yeah . phd e: and you consider eh n eh all the channel to normalize this very short eh professor c: phd e: for example " mmm - " eh And the energy is not eh height eh I think if you consider all the channel to normalize and the channel is mmm bigger eh eh eh compared with the with the overlapping eh duration , professor c: phd e: eh the effect is mmm stronger eh that I the the e effect of the normalization eh with the mean and the and the variance eh is different that if you consider only a window compared eh with the n the duration of overlapping . phd e: Is s If phd d: Well it 's a sliding window , right ? So if you take the the measure in the center of the overlapped piece , you know , there 'd better be some something . phd d: But if your window is really huge then yeah you 're right you won't even phd e: Yeah , This is the This is the the idea , to consider only the the small window near near near the the overlapping zone . You know , you shouldn't be more than like You should definitely not be three times as big as your as your backchannel . And hopefully it 's more like on the order of professor c: I 'm not sure that 's necessarily true . professor c: Because because it because again if you 're just compensating for the gain , phd d: Yea phd e: Yeah . professor c: you know , the fact that this this gain thing was crude , and the gain wh if someone is speaking relatively at consistent level , just to to give a an extreme example , all you 're doing is compensating for that . And then you still s And then if you look at the frame with respect to that , it still should should change phd d: Yeah , it depends how different your normalization is , as you slide your window across . postdoc b: It 's possible to try it both ways , grad a: Well , we 're also talking about a couple of different things . postdoc b: isn't it ? in this small grad a: one is your analysis window and then the other is any sort of normalization that you 're doing . phd d: But it is definitely true that we need to have the time marks , phd e: Yeah . phd d: and I was assuming that will be inherited because , if you have the words and they 're roughly aligned in time via forced alignment or whatever we end up using , then you know , this student and I would be looking at the time marks postdoc b: Yep , I agree . Coming off of the other phd d: and classifying all the frames inside those as whatever labels Jane gave phd e: Yeah . phd d: phd e: I can give you my transcription file , postdoc b: I was thinking that that would come from the engineering side , phd d: I don't think you need to . That should be linked to the words which are linked to time somehow , postdoc b: There you go . grad a: If it 's not hand - marked then we 're not going to get the times . phd d: Well , it 's something that w Well , we we wouldn't be able to do any work without a forced alignment anyway , phd e: Yes phd d: so somehow if once he gets going we 're gonna hafta come up with one professor c: Yes . professor c: Well again for the close mike stuff , we could come up take a s take the Switchboard system or something , grad a: That might be good enough . professor c: Just , you know , low - pass filter the speech and phd d: Cuz there 's there 's a lot of work you can't do without that , how how would you professor c: Yeah . phd d: You 'd have to go in and measure every start and stop point next to a word grad a: Yep . But , should talk about our options as far as the transcription grad a: Yep , if IBM doesn't professor c: But . postdoc b: How So it 's two pages per person ? grad a: Nope . postdoc b: Oh ! grad a: So one is a one time only speaker form and the other is the digits . why did you switch the order of the Date and Time fields ? This is rather a low - level , but grad a: On which one ? postdoc b: On on the new one , Time comes first and then Date , but I thought grad a: Oh you mean on the digit form ? postdoc b: This is this is rather a low level question , but but it used used to be Date came first . postdoc b: Well , how would the How would the user know the time if they didn't know the date ? grad a: It 's an interesting observation , but it was intentional . Because the date is when you actually read the digits and the time and , excuse me , the time is when you actually read the digits , but I 'm filling out the date beforehand . If you look at the form in front of you ? that you 're going to fill out when you read the digits ? you 'll see I 've already filled in the date but not the time . I always assumed So the time is supposed to be pretty exact , because I 've just been taking beginning time time of the meeting . grad a: The the reason I put the time in , is so that the person who 's extracting the digits , meaning me , will know where to look in the meeting , to try to find the digits . professor c: Why What what were you putting in ? postdoc b: Oh , well , I was saying if we started the meeting at two thirty , phd e: Yeah . postdoc b: I 'd put two thirty , and I guess d e everyone was putting two thirty , professor c: Oh . postdoc b: and I didn't realize there was " oh I 'm about to read this and I should " grad a: Actually it 's about one third each . About one third of them are blank , about one third of them are when the digits are read , and about one third of them are when the meeting starts . postdoc b: This would be a radical suggestion but grad a: I could put instructions ? Nah . postdoc b: Ei - either that or maybe you could maybe write down when people start reading digits on that particular session . grad a: But if I 'm not at the meeting , I can't do that . professor c: For some reason he doesn't want to sit through every meeting that 's grad a: Yep , but that is the reason Name , Email and Time are where they are . phd e: " use only " postdoc b: Actually you could Well that does raise another question , which is why is the " Professional use only " line not higher ? Why doesn't it come in at the point of Date and Seat ? Oh . grad a: What ? professor c: What ? postdoc b: Well , because If y your your professional use , you 're gonna already have the date , and the s grad a: What which form are you talking about ? postdoc b: Well I 'm comparing the new one with the old one . grad a: The digit form doesn't The digit postdoc b: Oh ! I wasn't supposed to phd e: Yeah . grad a: So on the digits form , everything above the line is a fill - in form postdoc b: Sorry about that . Alright s but I didn't mean to derail our discussion here , so you really wanted to start with this other form . grad a: No , either way is fine I just You just started talking about something , and I didn't know which form you were referring to . postdoc b: Alright yeah , I was comparing so th this is So I was looking at the change first . So it 's like we started with this and now we 've got a new version of it wi with reference to this . professor c: So the main thing that the person fills out is the name and email and time ? phd e: Yeah . postdoc b: What And there 's an addition of the native language , which is a bit redundant . grad a: That 's because the one , the digit form that has native language is the old form not the new form . professor c: " South Midland , North Midland " postdoc b: That 's the old and that 's the new . grad a: Yeah this was the problem with these categories , I I picked those categories from TIMIT . phd d: Actually , the only way I know is from working with the database and having to figure it out . grad a: So , I was gonna ask phd e: What i professor c: So is South Midland like Kansas ? grad a: wh w . grad a: So so what accent are we speaking ? Western ? professor c: By definition ? phd e: And for simple for for me ? professor c: Well , phd d: Probably Western , yeah . phd e: Is mean my native language Spanish Spanish ? eh The original is the center of Spain and the beca grad a: Yeah , you could call it whatever you want . phd e: Because is different , the Span - the Spanish language from the the north of Spain , of the south , of the west and the grad a: Sure . grad a: So I 'm not sure what to do about the Region field for English variety . You know , when I wrote I was writing those down , I was thinking , " You know , these are great if you 're a linguist " . grad a: But I don't know how to I don't know how to I don't know how to categorize them . professor c: If you 're if e if y phd d: This wasn't developed by th these regions weren't professor c: if you 're a TI or MIT from nineteen eighty - five . grad a: Yeah So I guess my only question was if if you were a South Midland speaking region , person ? Would you know it ? professor c: Yeah . grad a: Is that what you would call yourself ? phd d: I don't know . professor c: You know , I think if you 're talking if you 're thinking in terms of places , as opposed to names different peop names people have given to different ways of talking , I would think North Midwest , and South Midwest would be more common than saying Midland , right , I I went to s phd d: Yeah . Now the usage Maybe we can give them a li like a little map ? with the regions and they just No , I 'm serious . phd d: Because it takes less time , and it 's sort of cute phd e: i at this in that side in that side of the the paper . phd d: Well just a little You know , it doesn't have all the detail , but you sort of professor c: But what if you moved five times and and postdoc b: Well , I was thinking you could have ma multiple ones and then the amount of time phd d: No , but you 're categorized . You could say , you know " ten years on the east coast , five years on the west coast " or something or other . grad a: Well , We I think we don't want to get that level of detail at this form . phd d: I As I said , I don't think there 's a huge benefit to this region thing . It it gets The problem is that for some things it 's really clear and usually listening to it you can tell right away if it 's a New York or Boston accent , but New York and Boston are two well , I guess they have the NYC , but New England has a bunch of very different dialects and postdoc b: grad a: Yeah , so I picked these regions cuz we had talked about TIMIT , and those are right from TIMIT . And so these would be satisfying like a speech research community if we released the database , grad a: So . phd d: but as to whether subjects know where they 're from , I 'm not sure because I know that they had to fill this out for Switchboard . phd d: Also Northwest you 've got Oreg - Washington and Oregon now which y people don't know if it 's western or northern . phd d: It 's like Northwest grad a: Am I speaking Am I speaking Western ? professor c: Oh , what is Northern ? Well and what and what 's Northern ? phd d: I think originally it was North Northwest grad a: Northwest ? phd d: But phd e: Yeah . And and so I would think I would say , I 've I 've got a mix of California and Ohio . grad a: I c I think at the first level , for example , we speak the same . grad a: a techno - speak accent ? phd d: Yeah , you know ? phd e: A techno grad a: A a geek region ? phd d: Well it 's I you can sort of identify postdoc b: Geek region . phd d: it f It 's it 's not not that that 's phd e: Is different . phd d: but but maybe that maybe we could leave this and see what people See what people choose and then let them just fill in if they don't I don't know what else we can do , cuz That 's North Midland . postdoc b: I 'm wondering about a question like , " Where are you from mostly ? " phd e: Yeah . professor c: But I I 'm s I 'm now that you mentioned it though , I am really am confused by " Northern " . professor c: If you 're i if you 're postdoc b: Scandinavian , the Minnesota area 's north . professor c: right ? postdoc b: professor c: And and and Oregon and and Oregon and Washington are are Western , but they 're also Northern . professor c: Maybe Maybe we Maybe we should put a little map and say " put an X on where you 're from " , phd d: No , that 's phd e: And is in those grad a: Yeah really . phd e: And if you put postdoc b: It 'd be pretty simple , yeah . If you put eh the state ? grad a: Well well we sort of postdoc b: Where are you from mostly ? phd d: We we went we went around this and then a lot of people ended up saying that it phd e: - huh . grad a: Well , I like the idea of asking " what variety of English do you speak " as opposed to where you 're from Because th if we start asking where we 're from , again you have to start saying , " well , is that the language you speak or is that just where you 're from ? " phd e: Yeah . phd d: it gives us good information on where they 're from , but that doesn't tell us anything grad a: And professor c: We could always ask them if they 're from phd d: well , enough about their grad a: . So so I would say Germany phd d: like grad a: You know am I speaking with German accent postdoc b: Oh . postdoc b: Well , see , I 'm thinking " Where are you from mostly " phd d: Right . postdoc b: because , you know , then you have some some kind of subjective amount of time factored into it . grad a: there 's not a lot of r of room professor c: I 'd say , " Boston , New York City , the South and Regular " . grad a: I think of those , Northern is the only one that I don't even know what they 're meaning . phd e: And And And usually here people here know what is their kind of mmm lang English language ? professor c: That 's a joke . Right ? We can make up our own So we can say " Northwest " , " Rest of West " or something . postdoc b: I professor c: " Do you come from the Louisiana Purchase ? " phd d: So we could take out " North " " Northern " . phd e: eh here Is easy for people to know ? phd d: That 's Yeah , w It 's In It 's it 's harder in America anywhere else , basically . postdoc b: I can't do it , but phd e: Or Boston ? professor c: Yeah . phd d: They know they don't speak the same as the grad a: But is Boston New England ? postdoc b: And they 're proud of it . phd e: phd d: But that 's why they have New York City but postdoc b: Well , we ca Well , why can't we just say characterize something like char characterize your accent professor c: Well , Boston 's @ @ , too . " postdoc b: and and so I would say , " I don't know " . Right , which probably means you have a very postdoc b: But someone from Boston with a really strong coloration would know . And so would an R - less Maine or something , phd d: And that 's actually good . phd d: I was I was thinking of something along that line professor c: How postdoc b: Good . phd d: because if you don't know , then , you know , ruling out the fact that you 're totally inept or something , postdoc b: . phd d: if somebody doesn't know , it probably means their accent isn't very strong compared to the sort of midwest standard . professor c: Well , it wasn't that long ago that we had somebody here who was from Texas who was absolutely sure that he didn't have any accent left . I I would say more more sweepingly , " how would you characterize your accent ? " phd e: Yeah . grad a: So you want to change the instructions also not just say region ? phd d: W postdoc b: Well , I think this discussion has made me think that 's s something to consider . grad a: I don't know if I if I read this form , I think they 're going to ask it they 're going to answer the same way if you say , " What 's variety of English do you speak ? Region . " as if you say " what variety of region region do you speak ? Please characterize your accent ? " They 're going to answer the same way . grad a: Well what we talked about with that is is so that they would understand the granularity . postdoc b: Yes , but if , as Liz is suggesting , people who have strong accents know that they do grad a: that 's what I had before , and you told me to list the regions to list them . phd d: we we professor c: Yeah last week last week I was sort of r arguing for having it wide open , but then everybody said " Oh , no , but then it will be hard to interpret because some people will say Cincinnati and some will say Ohio " . phd d: What if we put in both ? grad a: That 's what the " Other " is for . phd d: And Would people No , what if we put in both ways of asking them ? So . One is Region and the another one is " if you had to characterize yourself your accent , what would you say ? " grad a: Won't they answer the same thing ? phd d: Well they might only answer only one of the questions but if postdoc b: Yeah that 's fine . postdoc b: They might say " Other " for Region because they don't know what category to use phd d: Actually postdoc b: but they might have something phd d: Right . phd d: It just And we we might learn from what they say , as to which one 's a better way to ask it . professor c: W This is just a small thing phd d: But I Cuz I really don't know . professor c: but It says " Variety " and then it gives things that e have American as one of the choices . But then it says " Region " , but Region actually just applies to , US , grad a: Right . professor c: right ? grad a: that 's why I put the " Other " in . We just We sort of thought , " yes , " y y professor c: S postdoc b: At the last meeting , my recollection was that we felt people would have less that that there are so many types and varieties of these other languages and we are not going to have that many subjects from these different language groups grad a: Yep . grad a: So , I the way I had it last time was Region was blank , postdoc b: That 's what I thought . grad a: And and I think that that 's the best way to do it , postdoc b: Yeah . grad a: because because of the problems we 're talking about but what we said last week , was no , put in a list , so I put in a list . grad a: Well , certainly dropping " Northern " I think is right , because none of us know what that is . phd d: Cuz , And keeping " Other " , and then maybe this North Midland , we call it " North Midwest " . Does that make sense ? phd e: South Midwest ? phd d: That would help me professor c: U unless you 're from Midland , Kansas . phd d: I don't know where Midland is professor c: There 's a Or Midland Midland grad a: Is " Midwest " one word ? professor c: Is it Midland Midland Midland , Texas or Midland , Kansas ? I forget . It 's just one big shebang , where , of course , you have huge variation in dialects , grad a: But that 's true of New England too . I was going to say the only one that doesn't have a huge variety is New York City . I I would think that these categories would be more w would be easier for an an analyst to put in rather than the subject himself . professor c: U grad a: I think that that was what happened with TIMIT , was that it was an analyst . Where does Where does d w Where Where 's where does New New York west of west of New York City and Pennsylvania and phd d: Yeah , I don't know how it came from . Pennsylvania is not grad a: " Other " , it goes under " Other " , definitely under " Other " . phd d: Well , you know , Pennsylvania has a pretty strong dialect and it 's totally different than professor c: Pennsylvania Yeah . and New Jersey is not New England and Maryland is not New England and none of those are the South . Rather than have circle fill in forms , say " Region , open paren , E G Southern comma Western comma close paren colon . grad a: Is that a real accent ? postdoc b: Sure , yeah ! grad a: How do you spell it ? phd e: Yeah . Because that get 's at both of the things we were trying to do , professor c: OK . grad a: the granularity , and the person can just self - assess and we don't have to argue about what these regions are . postdoc b: So you have native language , you have region , and then you have time spent in English speaking country . Now , I wonder if it might be useful to have another open field saying " which one parenthesis S paren closed parenthesis " . postdoc b: It doesn't have to be ex all at all exact , just in the same open field format that you have . s e Any any other open mike topics or should we go right to the digits ? grad a: did you guys get my email on the multitrans ? That OK . postdoc b: So you this is n Dan 's patches , Dan Ellis 's patches . grad a: The what the ones I applied , that you can actually do are Dan 's , because it doesn't slow it down . phd d: M postdoc b: Fantastic ! grad a: Just uses a lot of memory . phd d: So when you say " slow " , does that mean to grad a: No , the the one that 's installed is fine . Which , instead of having the one pane with the one view , It has multiple panes with the views . grad a: But the problem with it is the drawing of those waveforms is so slow that every time you do anything it just crawls . phd d: It 's So , it it 's the redrawing of the w postdoc b: That 's a consideration . postdoc b: And this 'll be a hav having the multiwave will be a big help cuz in terms of like disentangling overlaps and things , that 'll be a big help . postdoc b: e so you e the patches that you grad a: No , he suggested that , but he didn't It 's not installed . phd d: So is there any hope for actually displaying the wave form ? grad a: not if we 're going to use Tcl - TK At least not if we 're going to use Snack . And it 's useful to have the grad a: Why don't we we see how Dan 's works and if it If we really need the display phd d: Yeah . And it 's just , you know , a a uni - dimensional feature , varying in time . phd d: Right ? grad a: We we could do that but that would mean changing the code . grad a: This is a program that we got from someone else , and we 've done patches on . professor c: If there was some Is there some way to have someone write patches in something faster and and link it in , or something ? phd d: That 's grad a: Not easily . grad a: Let 's try it with Dan 's and if that isn't enough , we can do it otherwise . grad a: I think it is , cuz when I was playing with it , the mixed signal has it all in there . And so it 's really It 's not too bad to find places in the in the stream where things are happening . postdoc b: And it 's also also the case that that this multi - wave thing is proposed to the phd e: ? postdoc b: So . postdoc b: They said that the only reason they hadn't had the multi the parallel stream one before was simply that they hadn't had time to do it . grad a: And if if professor c: They may well have not had much demand for it . You mean they could they could do it and it would be fast enough if they do it ? phd e: Yeah . I just mean I just mean that it 's that that his phd d: Or ? phd e: Oh . This one that we now have does have the status of potentially being incorporated l likely being incorporated into the central code . postdoc b: Now , tha Now , if we develop further then , y , I don't grad a: I think if if if one of us sat down and coded it , so that it could be displayed fast enough I 'm sure they would be quite willing to incorporate it . postdoc b: it 's I think it 's a nice feature to have it set that way . postdoc b: I just like the idea of it being something that 's , you know , tied back into the original , so that other people can benefit from it . I also understand that you can have widgets that are very useful for their purpose and that you don't need to always go that w route . Let 's do digits , and then we 'll turn off the mikes , and then I have one other thing to discuss . phd d: so I can Well , I can wait for the digits but I can't stay for the discussion grad a: Well , you want to go first ? Or . postdoc b: Well , should we e should we switch off the g professor c: Well , we 'll talk to you about it grad a: Do you wanna go do digits or do you wanna just skip digits ? phd d: . phd d: But if there 's something on the rest of the I 'm I 'll be around just have to make call before quarter of . postdoc b: Ke grad a: Why don't you read the digits ? professor c: Yeah , why don't you read the digits and then you can go <doc-sep>grad b: Actually grad f: I just had one of the most frustrating meetings of my career . grad a: So that 's why Keith and I are going to be a little dazed for the first half m the meeting . Yeah , I I I avoided that as long as I could for you guys , grad f: growl . grad d: Oh yeah , how di how d exactly did , that paper lead to anti - lock brakes ? grad f: Oh , I could tell you had a rough day , man ! grad d: Nah . grad c: Oh yeah , Liz suggested we could start off by , doing the digits all at the same time . professor e: e grad a: Really ? Do we have to like , synchronize ? professor e: Well , I think you 're supposed to OK . grad f: Are you being silly ? grad d: Oh wait do we have t professor e: Everybody 's got different digits , grad c: Yep . professor e: right ? grad d: Yeah , do we have to time them at the same time or just overlapping grad f: . grad a: And any rate ? professor e: e yeah , the grad f: Alright . professor e: Well , they they have s they have the close talking microphones for each of us , grad a: Yeah , that 's true . grad a: Are we gonna start all our meetings out that way from now on ? professor e: No . grad d: Are we to r Just to make sure I know what 's going on , we 're talking about Robert 's thesis proposal today ? Is that grad c: We could . grad d: Is professor e: Well , you you had s you said there were two things that you might wanna do . grad c: Not not rehearse , I have just not spent any time on it , so I can show you what I 've got , get your input on it , and maybe some suggestions , that would be great . I don't know how much of a chance you had to actually read it grad a: I haven't looked at it grad c: because grad a: yet , grad c: but you could always send me comments per electronic mail grad a: but I will . grad c: the It basically says , well " this is construal " , and then it continues to say that one could potentially build a probabilistic relational model that has some general , domain - general rules how things are construed , and then the idea is to use ontology , situation , user , and discourse model to instantiate elements in the classes of the probabilistic relational model to do some inferences in terms of what is being construed as what grad a: . grad c: ? grad d: OK , we can we can we can pass pass my , we can pass my extra copy around . grad d: Er , actually , my only copy , now that I think about it , grad f: Alrigh grad a: OK . grad c: actually this is the the newest version after your comments , grad f: OK . grad c: and professor e: Yeah , no I s I s I see this has got the castle in it , and stuff like that . grad d: Oh , maybe the version I didn't have that I mine the w did the one you sent on the email have the professor e: Yeah . grad c: if you would have checked your email you may have received a note from Yees asking you to send me the , up - to - d grad a: Oh . grad c: And any type of comment whether it 's a spelling or a syntax or grad a: grad c: readability grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . grad c: ? grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . And y , email any time , but most usefully before grad d: The twenty - first I 'm assuming . grad f: That 's grad d: What , today 's the twenty - first ? grad f: Well , better hurry up then ! grad d: Oh , man ! grad a: Before the twenty - ninth , grad c: The twenty - ninth . grad c: That 's when I 'm meeting with Wolfgang Wahlster to sell him this idea . grad c: OK ? Then I 'm also going to present a little talk at EML , about what we have done here and so of course , I 'm I 'm gonna start out with this slide , so the most relevant aspects of our stay here , and , then I 'm asking them to imagine that they 're standing somewhere in Heidelberg and someone asks them in the morning The Cave Forty - Five is a is a well - known discotheque which is certainly not open at that that time . grad c: they 're supposed to imagine that , you know , do they think the person wants to go there , or just know where it is ? , which is probably not , the case in that discotheque example , or in the Bavaria example , you just want to know where it is . So basically we can make a point that here is ontological knowledge but if it 's nine nine PM in the evening then the discotheque question would be , for example , one that might ask for directions instead of just location . Then what have we done so far ? We had our little bit of , SmartKom stuff , that we did , everth grad f: Oh , you 've got the parser done . Then I 'm going to talk about the data , you know these things about , actually I have an example , probably . grad c: But they 're they 're mimicking the synthesis when they speak to the computer , grad f: Oh , OK . grad c: the you can observe that all the time , they 're trying to match their prosody onto the machine . grad c: Yeah , you have to grad a: Wh grad f: The system breaking . , I will talk about our problems with the rephrasing , and how we solved it , and some preliminary observations , also , I 'm not gonna put in the figures from Liz , but I thought it would interesting to , point out that it 's basically the same . , as in every human - human telephone conversation , and the human - computer telephone conversation is of course quite d quite different from , some first , observations . Then sort of feed you back to our original problem cuz , how to get there , what actually is happening there today , and then maybe talk about the big picture here , e tell a little bit as much as I can about the NTL story . I I wa I do wanna , I 'm not quite sure about this , whether I should put this in , that , you know , you have these two sort of different ideas that are or two different camps of people envisioning how language understanding works , and then , talk a bit about the embodied and simulation approach favored here and as a prelude , I 'll talk about monkeys in Italy . And , Srini was gonna send me some slides but he didn't do it , so from but I have the paper , I can make a resume of that , and then I stole an X - schema from one of your talks I think . So X - schemas , then , I would like to do talk about the construction aspect and then at the end about our Bayes - net . Should I mention the fact that , we 're also actually started going to start to look at people 's brains in a more direct way ? professor e: You certainly can . I y I you know , I don't know grad a: You might just wanna like , tack that on , as a comment , to something . professor e: Well , the time to mention it , if you mention it , is when you talk about mirror neurons , then you should talk about the more recent stuff , about the kicking grad c: Yeah . professor e: and , you know , the yeah , yeah and that the plan is to see to what extent the you 'll get the same phenomena with stories about this , so that grad c: professor e: which , actually , i i even on your five - layer slide , you you 've got an old one that that leaves that off . grad c: But , you know , it would But I don't think I I am capable of of do pulling this off and doing justice to the matter . , there is interesting stuff in her terms of how language works , so the emergentism story would be nice to be you know , it would be nice to tell people how what 's happening there , plus how the , language learning stuff works , professor e: OK , so , so anyway , I I agree that 's not central . professor e: What you might wanna do is , and may not , but you might wanna this is rip off a bunch of the slides on the anal there the there we 've got various i generations of slides that show language analysis , and matching to the underlying image schemas , and , how the construction and simulation that ho that whole th grad c: Yeah , th that that 's c that comes up to the X - schema slide , grad a: OK , right . grad c: so basically I 'm gonna steal that from Nancy , grad a: OK , I can give you a more recent if you want grad c: one of Nancy 's st grad a: well , that might have enough . grad c: I yeah , but I also have stuff you trash you left over , professor e: OK . professor e: You could get it out of there , or some grad a: Which I can even email you then , you know , like there probably was a little few changes , not a big deal . Sorry grad c: Well , I I don't feel bad about it at all grad a: No , you shouldn't . grad c: on the the , you 're that 's see , that 's you . grad c: I might even mention that this work you 're doing is sort of also with the MPI in Leipzig , so . grad a: It 's it 's certainly related , grad c: Because , EML is building up a huge thing in Leipzig . Would professor e: Yeah , it 's different , this is the , DNA building , or someth the double helix building . professor e: The yeah it was it turns out that if if you have multiple billions of dollars , y you can do all sorts of weird things , and grad d: Wait , they 're building a building in the shape of DNA , grad a: What ? grad d: is that what you said ? professor e: Roughly , yeah . grad f: Oh ! Oh boy ! grad a: O professor e: Including cr cross - bridges , grad a: What ? professor e: and grad a: Oh my god ! grad f: That 's brilliant ! Hhh . professor e: You d you really now I I spent the last time I was there I spent maybe two hours hearing this story which is , grad a: Of what grad d: Y You definitely wanna w don't wanna waste that money on research , grad a: the building ? grad d: you know ? professor e: Right . grad c: Well , the the offices are actually a little the , think of , ramps , coming out of the double helix and then you have these half - domes , glass half - domes , and the offices are in in the glass half - dome . grad c: But I th professor e: So , yeah , I think that 's that 's a good point , th th that the date , the , a lot of the this is interacting with , people in Italy but also definitely the people in Leipzig and the the b the combination of the biology and the Leipzig connection might be interesting to these guys , yeah . grad f: You might want to , double - check the spellings of the authors ' names on your references , you had a few , misspells in your slides , there . grad f: unless there 's a person called " Jackendorf " , grad a: On that one ? professor e: No , no , no . grad a: I 'll probably I c might have I 'll probably have comments for you separately , not important . professor e: So I did note i i it looks like the , metaphor didn't get in yet . grad c: it did , there is a reference to Srini professor e: Well , s reference is one thing , the question is is there any place Oh , did you put in something about , grad a: Metonymy and metaphor here , right ? professor e: the individual , we 'd talked about putting in something about people had , Oh yeah , OK . professor e: But , what I meant is , I think even before you give this , to Wahlster , you should , unless you put it in the text , and I don't think it 's there yet , about we talked about is the , scalability that you get by , combining the constructions with the general construal mechanism . professor e: OK , so where where is it , cuz I 'll have to take a look . grad c: but I I did not focus on that aspect but , Ehhh , it 's just underneath , that reference to metaphor . grad c: But that 's really grad a: That 's not about that , is it ? grad c: Yeah . professor e: No , it it it s says it but it doesn't say it doesn't it d it d grad c: Why . professor e: Cuz let me tell the gang what I think the punch line is , because it 's actually important , which is , that , the constructions , that , Nancy and Keith and friends are doing , are , in a way , quite general but cover only base cases . And to make them apply to metaphorical cases and metonymic cases and all those things , requires this additional mechanism , of construal . And the punch line is , he claimed , that if you do this right , you can get essentially orthogonality , that if you introduce a new construction at at the base level , it should com , interact with all the metonymies and metaphors so that all of the projections of it also should work . professor e: And , similarly , if you introduce a new metaphor , it should then , compose with all of the constructions . professor e: And it to the extent that that 's true then then it 's a big win over anything that exists . grad d: So does that mean instead of having tons and tons of rules in your context - free grammar you just have these base constructs and then a general mechanism for coercing them . So that , you know , for example , in the metaphor case , that you have a kind of direct idea of a source , path , and goal and any metaphorical one and abstract goals and all that sort of stuff you can do the same grammar . But , the trick is that the the way the construction 's written it requires that the object of the preposition for example be a container . Well , " trouble " isn't a container , but it gets constr construed as a c container . So that 's that 's where this , grad d: So with construal you don't have to have a construction for every possible thing that can fill the rule . So 's it 's it it 's a very big deal , i i in this framework , and the thesis proposal as it stands doesn't , I don't think , say that as clearly as it could . That is , there are physical containers , there are physical paths , there you know , et cetera . grad c: But " walked into the cafe and ordered a drink , " and " walked into the cafe and broke his nose , " that 's sort of professor e: Oh , it doesn't mean that they 're unambiguous . professor e: a cafe can be construed as a container , or it can be construed you know as as a obstacle , grad f: - huh . professor e: But it does say that , if you walked into the cafe and broke your nose , then you are construing the cafe as an obstacle . professor e: And if that 's not consistent with other things , then you 've gotta reject that reading . grad d: You con you conditioned me with your first sentence , and so I thought , " Why would he walk into the cafe and then somehow break his nose ? " , oh , grad f: He slipped on the wet floor . grad c: You don't find that usage , I checked for it in the Brown national corpus . grad c: The " walk into it " never really means , w as in walked smack professor e: But " run into " does . grad c: Yeah , but , y y if you find " walked smacked into the cafe " or " slammed into the wall " professor e: Yeah , no , but " run into " does . professor e: Because you will find " run into , " , grad d: Cars run into telephone poles all the time . grad a: Yeah , " run into " might even be more impact sense than , you know , container sense . professor e: But Like , " run into an old friend " , it probably needs its own construction . , you know , George would have I 'm sure some exa complicated ex reason why it really was an instance of something else grad a: professor e: and maybe it is , but , there are idioms and my guess is that 's one of them , but , I don't know . grad f: Sudden surprising contact , professor e: Yeah , but it 's it 's it 's it 's Right . It 's sort of partially inspired by the spatial professor e: Well , this is this motivated but yeah grad f: Yeah . professor e: oh yeah , mo for sure , motivated , but then you can't parse on motivated . grad a: There 's there 's lots of things you could make T - shirts out of , but , this has gotten wh We don't need the words to that . grad a: What ? Oh , no no no no no no no no no , we 're not going there . professor e: anything else you want to ask us about the thesis proposal , you got grad c: Well , professor e: We could look at a particular thing and give you feedback on it . grad c: Well there actually the i what would have been really nice is to find an example for all of this , from our domain . grad a: wh when you say all this , do you mean , like , I don't know , the related work stuff , grad c: How grad a: as well as , mappings ? grad c: w Well we have , for example , a canonical use of something professor e: Right right r grad c: and y it 's , you know , we have some constructions and then it 's construed as something , and then we we may get the same constructions with a metaphorical use that 's also relevant to the to the domain . professor e: OK , f let 's let 's suppose you use " in " and " on " . professor e: So " in the bus " and " on the bus , " , that 's actually a little tricky in English because to some extent they 're synonyms . grad c: I had two hours w with George on this , so it , professor e: OK , what did he say . Oh , h that 's grad c: " On the bus " is a m is a metaphorical metonymy that relates some meta path metaphorically and you 're on on that path and th w it 's he there 's a platform notion , professor e: Yeah , I I believe all that , it 's just grad c: right ? " he 's on the standing on the bus waving to me . grad c: But th the regular as we speak " J Johno was on the bus to New York , " professor e: Yeah . grad c: he 's that 's , what did I call it here , the transportation schema , something , professor e: Yeah . grad c: where you can be on the first flight , on the second flight , professor e: Yeah . professor e: like " under the bus , " or something , where grad c: But it 's it 's unfortunately , this is not really something a tourist would ever say . grad c: And there 's a lot of " out of " analysis , so , professor e: Right . grad c: could we capture that with a different construal of grad a: Yeah , it 's a little it 's , we 've thought about it before , t to use the examples in other papers , and it 's it 's a little complicated . Cuz you 're like , it 's a state of there 's resource , grad f: Out of out of film , in particular . You 're out of the state of having film , right ? and somehow film is standing for the re the resour the state of having some resource is just labeled as that resource . grad f: yeah , grad a: It 's a little bit grad f: but and plus the fact that there 's also s , can you say , like , " The film ran out " you know , or , maybe you could say something like " The film is out " grad a: Yeah , is film the trajector ? grad f: so like the the film went away from where it should be , namely with you , or something , right ? You know . The the film the film is gone , right ? , I never really knew what was going on , I I find it sort of a little bit farfetched to say that that " I 'm out of film " means that I have left the state of having film or something like that , grad a: It 's weird . professor e: b but the difference grad c: Is the d the final state of running out of something is being out of it . professor e: But , grad f: ! professor e: Yeah , so so nob so no one has in in of the , professional linguists , grad a: . grad a: There was ? Who ? professor e: Well , there I thought or there was a paper on it . professor e: Huh ? grad f: There was one on on " out " or " out of " ? professor e: There was a Well , it may be just " out " . professor e: I think there was " over " but there was also a paper on " out " . grad f: Yeah , Lind - Susan Lindner , grad a: Oh , yeah , you 're right . grad f: right ? The the " the syrup spread out " ? professor e: Yeah , and all that sort of stuff . And undoubtably there 's been reams of work about it in cognitive linguistics , professor e: OK . So , grad a: It 's not one of the y it 's more straightforward ones forward ones to defend , so you probably don't want to use it for the purposes grad c: grad a: th these are you 're addressing like , computational linguists , professor e: OK . Or are you ? grad c: There 's gonna be four computational linguists , grad a: OK . But more emphasis on the computational ? Or emphasis on the linguist ? grad c: computer it 's More there 's going to be the just four computational linguists , by coincidence , but the rest is , whatever , biocomputing people and physicists . I 'm - we 're worrying about the th the thes grad c: Oh , the thesis ! grad a: Oh , I meant this , professor e: it 's just for one guy . grad c: That 's that 's computa should be very computational , grad a: you know , like OK . grad a: You know , it 's an obvious one grad f: Totally weird stuff . grad c: the the old bakery example might be nice , grad a: but , grad c: " Is there a bakery around here " . grad a: Around ? grad c: No , it 's the bakery itself grad a: Oh . grad c: is it a building ? , that you want to go to ? or is it something to eat that you want to buy ? grad a: Oh , oh yeah . The question is d do you wanna do you wanna construe do you wanna constr - strue grad f: Sh grad d: It 's a speech - act . It 's because do you wanna c do you want to view the bakery as a p a place that that i for example , if y grad a: Yeah . But the other is , yo you might have smelled a smell and are just curious about whether there 'd be a bakery in the neighborhood , or , grad f: professor e: pfff you know , you wonder how people here make their living , and there 're all sorts of reasons why you might be asking about the existence of a bakery grad f: Yeah . professor e: But , those are interesting examples but it 's not clear that they 're mainly construal examples . grad a: So it 's a lot of pragmatics , there , that grad f: Yeah . professor e: So let 's so let 's think about this from the point of view of construal . So let 's first do a So the metonymy thing is probably the easiest and a and actually the Though , the one you have isn't quite grad a: You mean the s You mean " the steak wants to pay " ? professor e: N no not that one , that 's that 's a the sort of background . grad c: How old is it ? How much does it cost ? grad d: Oh . grad a: To go in , that 's like grad f: Two hundred million dollars . grad a: Like , " it " doesn't refer to " thing , " it refers to acti you know , j thing standing for activ most relevant activity for a tourist you could think of it that way , but . grad f: Well , shoot , isn't that , that 's what grad c: Well , my argument here is it 's it 's it 's the same thing as " Plato 's on the top shelf , " grad f: figuring that out is what this is about . grad c: I 'm con you know , th that you can refer to a book of Plato by using " Plato , " grad a: Yeah . No no , I I 'm agreeing that this is a good , grad c: and you can refer back to it , and so you can Castles have as tourist sites , have admission fees , so you can say " Where is the castle , how much does it cost ? " . grad c: So , You 're also not referring to the width of the object , or so , grad a: . Can we think of a nice metaphorical use of " where " in the tourist 's domain ? . professor e: So you know it 's you you can sometimes use " where " f for " when " grad f: O professor e: in the sense of , you know , where wh where where was , " where was Heidelberg , in the Thirty Years ' War ? " Or something . grad f: Like what side were they on , grad a: What ? professor e: Yeah . , grad a: Ah ! Or like its developmental state or something like that , you could I guess you could get that . grad f: there 's also things like , s , I guess I could ask something like " Where can I find out about blah - blah - blah " in a sort of doesn't nece I don't necessarily have to care about the spatial location , just give me a phone number professor e: Yeah . grad f: and I 'll call them or something like that ? professor e: You know , " Where could I learn its opening hours , " or something . professor e: So we 're thinking about , or we could also think about , grad c: Well , I I I professor e: How about " I 'm in a hurry " ? grad a: State . professor e: It i But it 's a state and the the issue is , is that it may be just a usage , grad f: ? professor e: you know , that it 's not particularly metaphorical , I don't know . grad a: I 'm really into professor e: Ah ! How about I I I you know , " I 'm in I 'm in a state of exhaustion " ? grad a: Do you really say that ? professor e: or something like that , which a tourist w Huh ? grad a: Would you really say that ? professor e: A st , well , you can certainly say , you know , " I 'm in overload . grad a: Yeah , I was gonna say , like grad d: professor e: Oh , you can do that ? Really ? Of course that 's that that 's definitely a , grad f: Fixed . grad a: There 're too there 're all sorts of fixed expressions I don't like " I 'm out of sorts now ! " professor e: Right . grad a: Like " I 'm in trouble ! " grad c: Well I when , just f u the data that I 've looked at so far that rec professor e: Yeah . grad c: So , you know , mak re making reference to buildings as institutions , as containers , as build professor e: Right . , so ib in mus for example , in museums , you know , as a building or as something where pictures hang versus , you know , ev something that puts on exhibits , so forth . grad a: Why don't you want to use any of those ? grad c: ? grad a: So y you don't wanna use one that 's grad c: Yeah , well No , but this that 's what I have , you know , started doing . professor e: The castle the that old castle one is sort of grad c: Metonymy , polysemy . grad c: But I think the argument should be , can be made that , you know , despite the fact that this is not the most met metaphorical domain , because people interacting with HTI systems try to be straightforward and less lyrical , professor e: Yeah . grad c: construal still is , you know , completely , key in terms of finding out any of these things , so , . So that 's that 's that 's a that 's a reasonable point , that it in this domain you 're gonna get less metaphor and more metonymy . grad c: We , I with a I looked with a student I looked at the entire database that we have on Heidelberg for cases of metonymy . grad c: But OK this is just something we 'll we 'll see , professor e: Right . I guess if anybody has additional suggestions , grad c: maybe the " where is something " question as a whole , you know , can be construed as , u i locational versus instructional request . grad c: So , if we 're not talk about the lexic grad a: Location versus what ? grad c: instruction . grad a: Oh , I thought that was definitely treated as an example of construal . grad a: Right ? grad c: Yeah but then you 're not on the lexical level , that 's sort of one level higher . grad c: Also it would be nice to get ultimately to get a nice mental space example , professor e: We grad c: so , even temporal references are just in the spatial domain are rare . professor e: What was this p instead of wh what you know how was this painted , what color was this painted , was this alleyway open . grad c: We c we can show people pictures of objects and then have then ask the system about the objects and engage in conversation on the history and the art and the architecture and so forth . grad d: For some reason when you said " feedback electronically " I thought of that you ever see the Simpsons where they 're like the family 's got the buzzers and they buzz each other when they don't like what the other one is saying ? grad a: Yeah <doc-sep>professor c: And Hans - , Hans - Guenter will be here , I think by next next Tuesday or so . professor c: So he 's he 's going to be here for about three weeks , phd b: Oh ! That 's nice . professor c: So he 's gonna look in on everything we 're doing phd d: grad e: Th - that 's his spectral subtraction group ? professor c: Yeah , grad e: Is that right ? professor c: yeah . He 's , very , very , easygoing , easy to talk to , and , very interested in everything . professor c: he 's he 's he 's he 's phd a: Wh - Back when I was a grad student he was here for a , a year or n six months . , I went around and talked to everybody , and it seemed like they they had some new results but rather than them coming up and telling me I figured we should just wait a week and they can tell both you know , all of us . So , why don't we why don't we start with you , Dave , and then , we can go on . grad e: So , since we 're looking at putting this , mean log m magnitude spectral subtraction , into the SmartKom system , I I did a test seeing if , it would work using past only and plus the present to calculate the mean . So , I did a test , where I used twelve seconds from the past and the present frame to , calculate the mean . And phd a: Twelve seconds Twelve twelve seconds back from the current frame , is that what you mean ? grad e: Twelve seconds , counting back from the end of the current frame , phd a: OK , OK . So it was , twen I think it was twenty - one frames and that worked out to about twelve seconds . grad e: And compared to , do using a twelve second centered window , I think there was a drop in performance but it was just a slight drop . grad e: Is is that right ? professor c: yeah , it was pretty it was pretty tiny . And , that that , that 's encouraging for for the idea of using it in an interactive system like And , another issue I 'm I 'm thinking about is in the SmartKom system . So say twe twelve seconds in the earlier test seemed like a good length of time , but what happens if you have less than twelve seconds ? And , So I w bef before , Back in May , I did some experiments using , say , two seconds , or four seconds , or six seconds . In those I trained the models using mean subtraction with the means calculated over two seconds , or four seconds , or six seconds . And , here , I was curious , what if I trained the models using twelve seconds but I f I gave it a situation where the test set I was subtracted using two seconds , or four seconds , or six seconds . And , I th I think it was , four se I think I think it was , something like four seconds and , six seconds , and eight seconds . And it seems like it it it hurts compared to if you actually train the models using th that same length of time but it it doesn't hurt that much . , u usually less than point five percent , although I think I did see one where it was a point eight percent or so rise in word error rate . But this is , w where , even if I train on the , model , and mean subtracted it with the same length of time as in the test , it the word error rate is around , ten percent or nine percent . professor c: But it but looking at it the other way , isn't it what you 're saying that it didn't help you to have the longer time for training , if you were going to have a short time for grad e: That that 's true . , professor c: why would you do it , if you knew that you were going to have short windows in testing . grad e: Wa phd a: Yeah , it seems like for your , in normal situations you would never get twelve seconds of speech , right ? I 'm not e u phd b: You need twelve seconds in the past to estimate , right ? Or l or you 're looking at six sec seconds in future and six in professor c: Yeah . phd a: Is this twelve seconds of , regardless of speech or silence ? Or twelve seconds of speech ? grad e: Of of speech . professor c: The other thing , which maybe relates a little bit to something else we 've talked about in terms of windowing and so on is , that , I wonder if you trained with twelve seconds , and then when you were two seconds in you used two seconds , and when you were four seconds in , you used four seconds , and when you were six and you basically build up to the twelve seconds . grad e: But s so I g So I guess the que the question I was trying to get at with those experiments is , " does it matter what models you use ? Does it matter how much time y you use to calculate the mean when you were , tra doing the training data ? " professor c: Right . But the other thing is that that 's , the other way of looking at this , going back to , mean cepstral subtraction versus RASTA kind of things , is that you could look at mean cepstral subtraction , especially the way you 're doing it , as being a kind of filter . You know , basically you 're you 're you 're doing a high - pass filter or a band - pass filter of some sort and and just design a filter . And then , you know , a filter will have a certain behavior and you loo can look at the start up behavior when you start up with nothing . professor c: And and , you know , it will , if you have an IIR filter for instance , it will , not behave in the steady - state way that you would like it to behave until you get a long enough period , but , by just constraining yourself to have your filter be only a subtraction of the mean , you 're kind of , you know , tying your hands behind your back because there 's filters have all sorts of be temporal and spectral behaviors . professor c: And the only thing , you know , consistent that we know about is that you want to get rid of the very low frequency component . phd b: But do you really want to calculate the mean ? And you neglect all the silence regions or you just use everything that 's twelve seconds , and grad e: you do you mean in my tests so far ? phd b: Ye - yeah . grad e: th , yeah , I guess it 's something I need to play with more to decide how to set that up for the SmartKom system . Like , may maybe if I trained on six seconds it would work better when I only had two seconds or four seconds , and professor c: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , and again , if you take this filtering perspective and if you essentially have it build up over time . , if you computed means over two and then over four , and over six , essentially what you 're getting at is a kind of , ramp up of a filter anyway . But , if you do that , then , in practice somebody using the SmartKom system , one would think if they 're using it for a while , it means that their first utterance , instead of , you know , getting , a forty percent error rate reduction , they 'll get a , over what , you 'd get without this , policy , you get thirty percent . And then the second utterance that you give , they get the full you know , full benefit of it if it 's this ongoing thing . phd a: Oh , so you you cache the utterances ? That 's how you get your , professor c: Well , I 'm saying in practice , yeah , grad e: M phd a: Ah . professor c: that 's If somebody 's using a system to ask for directions or something , phd a: OK . And and to begin with if it doesn't get them quite right , ma m maybe they 'll come back and say , " excuse me ? " phd a: And so , there 's a higher probability of it making an error , in the first utterance . phd a: What would be really cool is if you could have , this probably users would never like this but if you had could have a system where , before they began to use it they had to introduce themselves , verbally . professor c: Oh , the other thing I guess which which , I don't know much about as much as I should about the rest of the system but but , couldn't you , if you if you sort of did a first pass I don't know what kind of , capability we have at the moment for for doing second passes on on , some kind of little small lattice , or a graph , or confusion network , or something . But if you did first pass with , the with either without the mean sub subtraction or with a a very short time one , and then , once you , actually had the whole utterance in , if you did , the , longer time version then , based on everything that you had , and then at that point only used it to distinguish between , you know , top N , possible utterances or something , you you might it might not take very much time . , I know in the large vocabulary stu , systems , people were evaluating on in the past , some people really pushed everything in to make it in one pass but other people didn't and had multiple passes . And , the argument , against multiple passes was u u has often been " but we want to this to be r you know have a nice interactive response " . And the counterargument to that which , say , BBN I think had , was " yeah , but our second responses are second , passes and third passes are really , really fast " . grad e: S so , the the idea of the second pass would be waiting till you have more recorded speech ? Or ? professor c: Yeah , so if it turned out to be a problem , that you didn't have enough speech because you need a longer longer window to do this processing , then , one tactic is you know , looking at the larger system and not just at the front - end stuff is to take in , the speech with some simpler mechanism or shorter time mechanism , grad e: professor c: do the best you can , and come up with some al possible alternates of what might have been said . And , either in the form of an N - best list or in the form of a lattice , or or confusion network , or whatever . professor c: And then the decoding of that is much , much faster or can be much , much faster if it isn't a big bushy network . And you can decode that now with speech that you 've actually processed using this longer time , subtraction . professor c: So , it 's it 's common that people do this sort of thing where they do more things that are more complex or require looking over more time , whatever , in some kind of second pass . professor c: and again , if the second pass is really , really fast , another one I 've heard of is is in in connected digit stuff , going back and l and through backtrace and finding regions that are considered to be a d a digit , but , which have very low energy . professor c: So , there 's lots of things you can do in second passes , at all sorts of levels . phd a: So is that , that it ? grad e: I guess that 's it . , so , the last two weeks was , like So I 've been working on that Wiener filtering . And , found that , s single like , I just do a s normal Wiener filtering , like the standard method of Wiener filtering . And that doesn't actually give me any improvement over like , b it actually improves over the baseline but it 's not like it doesn't meet something like fifty percent or something . So , I 've been playing with the v phd a: Improves over the base line MFCC system ? Yeah . professor c: Is that using in combination with something else ? phd b: No , just just one stage Wiener filter professor c: With with a phd b: which is a standard Wiener filter . professor c: No , no , but in combination with our on - line normalization or with the LDA ? phd b: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . phd b: So , I di i di professor c: So , does it g does that mean it gets worse ? Or ? phd b: No . Like I have an LDA f LDA plus on - line normalization , and then I plug in the Wiener filter in that , professor c: Yeah ? phd b: so it improves over not having the Wiener filter . So it improves but it it doesn't take it like be beyond like thirty percent over the baseline . So professor c: But that 's what I 'm confused about , cuz I think I thought that our system was more like forty percent without the Wiener filtering . phd a: Is this with the v new VAD ? phd b: well , these are not No , it 's the old VAD . So my baseline was , nine This is like w the baseline is ninety - five point six eight , and eighty - nine , and professor c: So , if you can do all these in word errors it 's a lot a lot easier actually . phd b: What was that ? Sorry ? professor c: If you do all these in word error rates it 's a lot easier , right ? phd b: Oh , OK , OK , OK . phd d: The baseline is something similar to a w , the t the the baseline that you are talking about is the MFCC baseline , right ? phd b: The t yeah , there are two baselines . So the baseline One baseline is MFCC baseline that When I said thirty percent improvement it 's like MFCC baseline . professor c: So so so what 's it start on ? The MFCC baseline is is what ? Is at what level ? phd b: It 's the it 's just the mel frequency and that 's it . professor c: No , what 's what 's the number ? phd b: so I I don't have that number here . What 's ten point seven ? phd b: It 's a medium misma OK , sorry . phd b: So professor c: OK , four point three , ten point seven , phd b: And forty forty . professor c: And what were you just describing ? phd b: Oh , the one is this one is just the baseline plus the , Wiener filter plugged into it . professor c: But where 's the , on - line normalization and so on ? phd b: Oh , OK . So , with the with the on - line normalization , the performance was , ten OK , so it 's like four point three . So the h well matched has like literally not changed by adding on - line or LDA on it . professor c: OK , and what kind of number an and what are we talking about here ? phd b: It 's the It - it 's Italian . professor c: Is this TI - digits phd b: I 'm talking about Italian , professor c: or Italian ? phd b: yeah . professor c: And what did So , what was the , corresponding number , say , for , the Alcatel system for instance ? phd b: Mmm . professor c: Do you know ? phd d: Yeah , so it looks to be , phd b: You have it ? phd d: Yep , it 's three point four , eight point , seven , and , thirteen point seven . phd b: So , this is the single stage Wiener filter , with The noise estimation was based on first ten frames . phd b: Actually I started with using the VAD to estimate the noise and then I found that it works it doesn't work for Finnish and Spanish because the VAD endpoints are not good to estimate the noise because it cuts into the speech sometimes , so I end up overestimating the noise and getting a worse result . phd b: So , so this was , And so this was giving , this this was like not improving a lot on this baseline of not having the Wiener filter on it . And , so , I ran this stuff with one more stage of Wiener filtering on it but the second time , what I did was I estimated the new Wiener filter based on the cleaned up speech , and did , smoothing in the frequency to to reduce the variance professor c: phd b: I have I 've I 've observed there are , like , a lot of bumps in the frequency when I do this Wiener filtering which is more like a musical noise or something . And so by adding another stage of Wiener filtering , the results on the SpeechDat - Car was like , So , I still don't have the word error rate . And the rest is like the LDA plu and the on - line normalization all remaining the same . , so this was , like , compared to , Fifty - seven is what you got by using the French Telecom system , right ? phd d: No , I don't think so . phd b: Y i phd d: Is it on Italian ? phd b: No , this is over the whole SpeechDat - Car . phd b: Yeah , so the new the new Wiener filtering schema is like some fifty - six point four six which is like one percent still less than what you got using the French Telecom system . But again , you 're you 're more or less doing what they were doing , right ? phd b: It 's it 's different in a sense like I 'm actually cleaning up the cleaned up spectrum which they 're not doing . They 're d what they 're doing is , they have two stage stages of estimating the Wiener filter , but the final filter , what they do is they they take it to their time domain by doing an inverse Fourier transform . phd b: And they filter the original signal using that fil filter , professor c: - huh . phd b: which is like final filter is acting on the input noisy speech rather than on the cleaned up . So this is more like I 'm doing Wiener filter twice , but the only thing is that the second time I 'm actually smoothing the filter and then cleaning up the cleaned up spectrum first level . phd b: And actually I tried it on s the original clean , the original spectrum where , like , I the second time I estimate the filter but actually clean up the noisy speech rather the c s first output of the first stage and that doesn't seems to be a giving , that much improvement . And and what I t what I tried was , by using the same thing but , so we actually found that the VAD is very , like , crucial . phd b: by instead of using the current VAD , if you just take up the VAD output from the channel zero , when instead of using channel zero and channel one , because that was the p that was the reason why I was not getting a lot of improvement for estimating the noise . So I just used the channel zero VAD to estimate the noise so that it gives me some reliable mar markers for this noise estimation . professor c: What 's a channel zero VAD ? phd b: professor c: I 'm I 'm confused about that . phd b: so , it 's like phd d: So it 's the close - talking microphone . phd b: Yeah , the close - talking without professor c: Oh , oh , oh , oh . phd b: So because the channel zero and channel one are like the same speech , but only w , the same endpoints . professor c: phd b: But the only thing is that the speech is very noisy for channel one , so you can actually use the output of the channel zero for channel one for the VAD . , so a are they going to pro What are they doing to do , do we know yet ? about as far as what they 're what the rules are going to be and what we can use ? phd d: Yeah , so actually I received a a new document , describing this . phd b: Yeah , that 's phd d: And what they did finally is to , mmm , not to align the utterances but to perform recognition , only on the close - talking microphone , phd b: Which is the channel zero . professor c: So it 's not like that 's being done in one place or one time . phd d: And professor c: That 's that 's just a rule and we 'd you you were permitted to do that . Is is that it ? phd d: I think they will send , files but we we don't Well , apparently professor c: Oh , so they will send files so everybody will have the same boundaries to work with ? phd d: Yeah . phd d: Oh , i Yeah , so what happened here is that , the overall improvement that they have with this method So Well , to be more precise , what they have is , they have these alignments and then they drop the beginning silence and and the end silence but they keep , two hundred milliseconds before speech and two hundred after speech . , and the overall improvement over the MFCC baseline So , when they just , add this frame dropping in addition it 's r , forty percent , right ? professor c: phd b: Yeah , which is phd d: which is , t which is the overall improvement . phd b: It gives like negative Well , in in like some Italian and TI - digits , phd d: Yeah , some @ @ . So by using the endpointed speech , actually it 's worse than the baseline in some instances , which could be due to the word pattern . professor c: Yeah , phd d: And Yeah , the other thing also is that fourteen percent is less than what you obtain using a real VAD . phd d: So So I think this shows that there is still work , well , working on the VAD is still still important I think . professor c: Yeah , c phd d: phd a: Can I ask just a a high level question ? Can you just say like one or two sentences about Wiener filtering and why why are people doing that ? phd b: . phd a: What 's what 's the deal with that ? phd b: OK , so the Wiener filter , it 's it 's like it 's like you try to minimize , so the basic principle of Wiener filter is like you try to minimize the , d , difference between the noisy signal and the clean signal if you have two channels . Like let 's say you have a clean t signal and you have an additional channel where you know what is the noisy signal . And you get you can do that , if if you have only a c noisy signal , at a level which you , you w try to estimate the noise from the w assuming that the first few frames are noise or if you have a w voice activity detector , you estimate the noise spectrum . phd b: And then you phd a: Do you assume the noise is the same ? phd b: Yeah . phd b: So but that 's not the case in , many many of our cases but it works reasonably well . And then you do this , this is the transfer function of the Wiener filter , so " SF " is a clean speech spectrum , power spectrum phd a: professor c: Right phd b: And , professor c: actually , I guess phd b: Yeah . phd b: So but the thing is that you have to estimate the SF from the noisy spectrum , what you have . So you estimate the NF from the initial noise portions and then you subtract that from the current noisy spectrum to get an estimate of the SF . phd a: So is this , basically s , similar to just regular spectral subtraction ? phd b: It professor c: It 's all pretty related , phd b: Yeah . It 's it 's there 's a di there 's a whole class of techniques where you try in some sense to minimize the noise . phd a: Do people use the Wiener filtering in combination with the spectral subtraction typically , or is i are they sort of competing techniques ? phd b: Not seen . phd b: So it 's like I haven't seen anybody using s Wiener filter with spectral subtraction . professor c: but y but there you make different approximations , and in spectral subtraction , for instance , there 's a a an estimation factor . professor c: You sometimes will figure out what the noise is and you 'll multiply that noise spectrum times some constant and subtract that rather than and sometimes people even though this really should be in the power domain , sometimes people s work in the magnitude domain because it it it works better . phd a: So why did you choose , Wiener filtering over some other one of these other techniques ? phd b: the reason was , like , we had this choice of using spectral subtraction , Wiener filtering , and there was one more thing which I which I 'm trying , is this sub space approach . phd b: So I picked up phd a: So you 're sort of trying @ @ them all . phd b: Y Yeah , phd a: Ah , phd b: we just wanted to have a few noise production compensation techniques phd a: I see . professor c: I m yeah , there 's Car - Carmen 's working on another , on the vector Taylor series . professor c: So they were just kind of trying to cover a bunch of different things with this task and see , you know , what are what are the issues for each of them . phd b: So so one of one of the things that I tried , like I said , was to remove those zeros in the fri filter by doing some smoothing of the filter . phd b: Like , you estimate the edge of square and then you do a f smoothing across the frequency so that those zeros get , like , flattened out . So what I did was like I p did this and then you I plugged in the one more the same thing but with the smoothed filter the second time . phd b: So that 's where I got like fifty - six point five percent improvement on SpeechDat - Car with that . And So the other thing what I tried was I used still the ten frames of noise estimate but I used this channel zero VAD to drop the frames . And that has taken the performance to like sixty - seven percent in SpeechDat - Car , which is which which like sort of shows that by using a proper VAD you can just take it to further , better levels . phd a: So that 's sort of like , you know , best - case performance ? phd b: Yeah , so far I 've seen sixty - seven , no , I haven't seen s like sixty - seven percent . And , using the channel zero VAD to estimate the noise also seems to be improving but I don't have the results for all the cases with that . So I used channel zero VAD to estimate noise as a lesser 2 x frame , which is like , everywhere I use the channel zero VAD . And that seems to be the best combination , rather than using a few frames to estimate and then drop a channel . phd b: so we c so , which which means , like , by using this technique what we improve just the VAD professor c: Yes . And , w Yeah , but this all these things , I have to still try it on the TI - digits , which is like I 'm just running . And there seems to be not improving a a lot on the TI - digits , so I 'm like investigating that , why it 's not . So , so the other the other thing is like I 've been I 'm doing all this stuff on the power spectrum . So Tried this stuff on the mel as well mel and the magnitude , and mel magnitude , and all those things . So , one of one of reasons I thought like doing the averaging , after the filtering using the mel filter bank , that seems to be maybe helping rather than trying it on the mel filter ba filtered outputs . phd b: Yeah , th that 's that 's the only thing that I could think of why why it 's giving improvement on the mel . professor c: how about the subspace stuff ? phd b: Subspace , I 'm I 'm like that 's still in a little bit in the back burner because I 've been p putting a lot effort on this to make it work , on tuning things and other stuff . , So to r to remind you a little bit of of what I did before , is just to apply some spectral subtraction with an overestimation factor also to get , an estimate of the noise , spectrum , and subtract this estimation of the noise spectrum from the , signal spectrum , but subtracting more when the SNR is is , low , which is a technique that it 's often used . phd a: " Subtracting more " , meaning ? phd d: So you overestimate the noise spectrum . phd d: So , above twenty DB , it 's one , so you just subtract the noise . phd d: And then it 's b Generally Well , I use , actually , a linear , function of the SNR , phd a: phd d: which is bounded to , like , two or three , when the SNR is below zero DB . phd d: doing just this , either on the FFT bins or on the mel bands , t doesn't yield any improvement professor c: Oh ! , what are you doing with negative , powers ? phd d: o Yeah . So there is also a threshold , of course , because after subtraction you can have negative energies , phd a: phd d: and So what I I just do is to put , to to add to put the threshold first and then to add a small amount of noise , which right now is speech - shaped . phd a: Speech - shaped ? phd d: Yeah , so it 's a it has the overall overall energy , pow it has the overall power spectrum of speech . phd a: So when y when you talk about there being something less than zero after subtracting the noise , is that at a particular frequency bin ? phd d: i - huh . phd a: And so when you say you 're adding something that has the overall shape of speech , is that in a in a particular frequency bin ? Or you 're adding something across all the frequencies when you get these negatives ? phd d: For each frequencies I a I 'm adding some , noise , but the a the amount of the amount of noise I add is not the same for all the frequency bins . Right now I don't think if it makes sense to add something that 's speech - shaped , because then you have silence portion that have some spectra similar to the sp the overall speech spectra . So this is something I can still work on , phd a: So what does that mean ? phd d: but . phd a: I 'm trying to understand what it means when you do the spectral subtraction and you get a negative . It means that at that particular frequency range you subtracted more energy than there was actually phd d: That means that So so yeah , you have an an estimation of the noise spectrum , but sometimes , of course , it 's as the noise is not perfectly stationary , sometimes this estimation can be , too small , so you don't subtract enough . phd a: So in in an ideal word i world if the noise were always the same , then , when you subtracted it the worst that i you would get would be a zero . , the lowest you would get would be a zero , cuz i if there was no other energy there you 're just subtracting exactly the noise . phd d: - , professor c: Yep , there 's all there 's all sorts of , deviations from the ideal here . professor c: for instance , you 're you 're talking about the signal and noise , at a particular point . And even if something is sort of stationary in ster terms of statistics , there 's no guarantee that any particular instantiation or piece of it is exactly a particular number or bounded by a particular range . professor c: So , you 're figuring out from some chunk of of of the signal what you think the noise is . professor c: and there 's absolutely no reason to think that you 'd know that it wouldn't , be negative in some places . professor c: on the other hand that just means that in some sense you 've made a mistake because you certainly have stra subtracted a bigger number than is due to the noise . professor c: Also , we speak the whole where all this stuff comes from is from an assumption that signal and noise are uncorrelated . And that certainly makes sense in s in in a statistical interpretation , that , you know , over , all possible realizations that they 're uncorrelated phd a: professor c: or assuming , ergodicity that i that i , across time , it 's uncorrelated . But if you just look at a quarter second , and you cross - multiply the two things , you could very well , end up with something that sums to something that 's not zero . But if down the road you 're making use of something as if it is a power spectrum , then it can be bad to have something negative . Now , the other thing I wonder about actually is , what if you left it negative ? What happens ? phd b: Is that the log ? professor c: because , are you taking the log before you add them up to the mel ? phd b: After that . So the thing is , I wonder how if you put your thresholds after that , I wonder how often you would end up with , with negative values . phd b: But you will But you end up reducing some neighboring frequency bins @ @ in the average , right ? When you add the negative to the positive value which is the true estimate . But nonetheless , you know , these are it 's another f kind of smoothing , right ? that you 're doing . So , you 've done your best shot at figuring out what the noise should be , and now i then you 've subtracted it off . And then after that , instead of instead of , leaving it as is and adding things adding up some neighbors , you artificially push it up . professor c: Which is , you know , it 's there 's no particular reason that that 's the right thing to do either , right ? phd b: Yeah , yeah . professor c: So , i in fact , what you 'd be doing is saying , " well , we 're d we 're we 're going to definitely diminish the effect of this frequency in this little frequency bin in the in the overall mel summation " . I d I don't know if it would be phd a: Sort of the opposite of that would be if if you find out you 're going to get a negative number , you don't do the subtraction for that bin . professor c: although phd a: That would be almost the opposite , right ? Instead of leaving it negative , you don't do it . If your if your subtraction 's going to result in a negative number , you you don't do subtraction in that . professor c: Yeah , but that means that in a situation where you thought that that the bin was almost entirely noise , you left it . phd d: And , yeah , some people also if it 's a negative value they , re - compute it using inter interpolation from the edges and bins . professor c: People can also , reflect it back up and essentially do a full wave rectification instead of a instead of half wave . Well , actually I tried , something else based on this , is to to put some smoothing , because it seems to to help or it seems to help the Wiener filtering professor c: Actually , when you do spectral subtraction you can , find this this equivalent in the s in the spectral domain . You can compute , y you can say that d your spectral subtraction is a filter , and the gain of this filter is the , signal energy minus what you subtract , divided by the signal energy . And this is a gain that varies over time , and , you know , of course , depending on the s on the noise spectrum and on the speech spectrum . And what happen actually is that during low SNR values , the gain is close to zero but it varies a lot . Mmm , and this this is the cause of musical noise and all these the the fact you we go below zero one frame and then you can have an energy that 's above zero . But it 's the smoothing is nonlinear in the sense that I tried to not smooth if the gain is high , because in this case we know that , the estimate of the gain is correct because we we are not close to to to zero , and to do more smoothing if the gain is low . So , well , basically that 's this idea , and it seems to give pretty good results , although I 've just just tested on Italian and Finnish . And on Italian it seems my result seems to be a little bit better than the Wiener filtering , phd b: phd d: I don't know if you have these improvement the detailed improvements for Italian , Finnish , and Spanish there phd b: Fff . No , I don't have , for each , phd d: or you have just have your own . professor c: So these numbers he was giving before with the four point three , and the ten point one , and so forth , those were Italian , right ? phd b: Yeah , yeah , yeah . phd d: phd b: I actually didn't give you the number which is the final one , phd d: no , we 've phd b: which is , after two stages of Wiener filtering . phd d: professor c: But do you have numbers in terms of word error rates on on Italian ? So just so you have some sense of reference ? phd d: Yeah . professor c: And this is , spectral subtraction plus what ? phd d: Plus plus nonlinear smoothing . Well , it 's the system it 's exactly the sys the same system as Sunil tried , professor c: On - line normalization and LDA ? phd d: but professor c: Yeah . But instead of double stage Wiener filtering , it 's it 's this smoothed spectral subtraction . phd a: for Do they use spectral subtraction , or Wiener filtering , or ? phd b: They use spectral subtraction , right . phd d: It it 's Wiener filtering , phd b: Oh , it 's it 's Wiener filtering . professor c: Yeah , plus , I guess they have some sort of cepstral normalization , as well . phd b: s They have like yeah , th the just noise compensation technique is a variant of Wiener filtering , phd d: phd d: One in the time domain and one in the frequency domain by just taking the first , coefficients of the impulse response . , what you did , it 's similar phd b: It 's similar in the smoothing and phd d: because you have also two two kind of smoothing . phd d: One in the time domain , and one in the frequency domain , phd b: Yeah . phd a: Does the smoothing in the time domain help phd d: phd a: Well , do you get this musical noise stuff with Wiener filtering or is that only with , spectral subtraction ? phd b: No , you get it with Wiener filtering also . phd a: Does the smoothing in the time domain help with that ? Or some other smoothing ? phd b: Oh , no , you still end up with zeros in the s spectrum . phd b: the phd d: Well , I cannot you cannot hear beca well , actually what I d did not say is that this is not in the FFT bins . So , it could be seen as a f a a smoothing in the frequency domain because I used , in ad mel bands in addition and then the other phase of smoothing in the time domain . But , when you look at the spectrogram , if you don't have an any smoothing , you clearly see , like in silence portions , and at the beginning and end of speech , you see spots of high energy randomly distributed over the the spectrogram . phd d: phd a: That 's the musical noise ? phd d: Which is musical noise , phd a: phd d: yeah , if if it If you listen to it , if you do this in the FFT bins , then you have spots of energy randomly distributing . And if you f if you re - synthesize these spot sounds as , like , sounds , phd a: phd d: professor c: Well , none of these systems , by the way , have , y you both are are working with , our system that does not have the neural net , phd d: And phd b: Yep . So one would hope , presumably , that the neural net part of it would would improve things further as as they did before . Yeah , although if if we , look at the result from the proposals , one of the reason , the n system with the neural net was , more than well , around five percent better , is that it was much better on highly mismatched condition . I 'm thinking , for instance , on the TI - digits trained on clean speech and tested on noisy speech . phd d: And if we have no , spectral subtraction or Wiener filtering , i the system is , we thought the neural neural network is much better than before , even in these cases of high mismatch . phd a: Could you train a neural net to do spectral subtraction ? professor c: Yeah , it could do a nonlinear spectral subtraction phd d: professor c: but I don't know if it , you have to figure out what your targets are . phd a: Yeah , I was thinking if you had a clean version of the signal and and a noisy version , and your targets were the M F - , you know , whatever , frequency bins phd d: professor c: Yeah , well , that 's not so much spectral subtraction then , phd d: professor c: but but but it 's but at any rate , yeah , people , phd a: People do that ? professor c: y yeah , in fact , we had visitors here who did that I think when you were here ba way back when . professor c: The objection everyone always raises , which has some truth to it is that , it 's good for mapping from a particular noise to clean but then you get a different noise . professor c: And the experiments we saw that visitors did here showed that it there was at least some , gentleness to the degradation when you switched to different noises . phd a: How did it compare on , for for good cases where it it , stuff that it was trained on ? Did it do pretty well ? professor c: Oh , yeah , it did very well . , we 're not doing exactly that , we 're not trying to generate good examples but by trying to do the best classifier you possibly can , for these little phonetic categories , phd a: it we 'll just have to see whether it helps more or less the same , but I would imagine it would help some . professor c: So in any event , all of this I was just confirming that all of this was with a simpler system . , Yeah , so this is th the , Well , actually , this was kind of the first try with this spectral subtraction plus smoothing , professor c: And it seems that the one that I chose for the first experiment was the optimal one , so , professor c: It 's amazing how often that happens . Yeah , another thing that I it 's important to mention is , that this has a this has some additional latency . Because when I do the smoothing , it 's a recursion that estimated the means , so of the g of the gain curve . So , instead o of using the current estimated mean to , subtract the current frame , it 's better to use an estimate that 's some somewhere in the future . phd b: You mean , the m the mean is computed o based on some frames in the future also ? professor c: phd b: Or or no ? phd d: It 's the recursion , so it 's it 's the center recursion , right ? phd b: professor c: One five ? phd d: professor c: One five ? Five zero ? phd d: Five zero , professor c: Five zero . phd b: why why is that delay coming ? Like , you estimate the mean ? phd d: Yeah , the mean estimation has some delay , right ? phd b: Oh , yeah . phd b: It isn't OK , so it 's like it looks into the future also . professor c: What if you just look into the past ? phd d: It 's , not as good . professor c: How m by how much ? phd d: it helps a lot over the ba the baseline but , mmm professor c: By how much ? phd d: it It 's around three percent , relative . phd d: mmm So , professor c: It 's depending on how all this stuff comes out we may or may not be able to add any latency . Yeah , b but I don't think we have to worry too much on that right now while you kno . professor c: s Yeah , I think the only thing is that phd d: So professor c: I would worry about it a little . professor c: Because if we completely ignore latency , and then we discover that we really have to do something about it , we 're going to be find ourselves in a bind . professor c: Yeah , just , you know , just be be a little conservative phd d: Oh yes . professor c: because we may end up with this crunch where all of a sudden we have to cut the latency in half or something . So , yeah , there are other things in the , algorithm that I didn't , @ @ a lot yet , phd a: Oh ! phd d: which phd a: Sorry . If if there 's another part of the system that causes a latency of a hundred milliseconds , is this an additive thing ? Or c or is yours hidden in that ? phd d: We can do something in parallel also , in some like some cases like , if you wanted to do voice activity detection . phd b: So you can make a decision on that voice activity detection and then you decide whether you want to filter or not . phd a: couldn't , I Couldn't you just also , i if you know that the l the largest latency in the system is two hundred milliseconds , don't you couldn't you just buffer up that number of frames and then everything uses that buffer ? phd b: Yeah . phd a: And that way it 's not additive ? professor c: Well , in fact , everything is sent over in buffers cuz of isn't it the TCP buffer some ? phd b: You mean , the the data , the super frame or something ? phd d: phd b: Yeah , but that has a variable latency because the last frame doesn't have any latency phd d: phd b: So But the only thing is that the first frame in that twenty - four frame buffer has a twenty - four frame latency . phd b: Because it just goes as phd a: Yeah , I wasn't thinking of that one in particular phd b: Yeah . phd a: but more of , you know , if if there is some part of your system that has to buffer twenty frames , can't the other parts of the system draw out of that buffer and therefore not add to the latency ? professor c: Yeah . And and that 's sort of one of the all of that sort of stuff is things that they 're debating in their standards committee . Like , I played a little bit with this overestimation factor , but I still have to to look more at this , at the level of noise I add after . , I know that adding noise helped , the system just using spectral subtraction without smoothing , but I don't know right now if it 's still important or not , and if the level I choose before is still the right one . , and another thing is to Yeah , for this I just use as noise estimate the mean , spectrum of the first twenty frames of each utterance . I don't remember for this experiment what did you use for these two stage phd b: I used ten just ten frames . Yeah , because phd d: The ten frames ? phd b: the reason was like in TI - digits I don't have a lot . But , so what 's this result you told me about , the fact that if you use more than ten frames you can improve by t phd b: Well , that 's that 's using the channel zero . phd b: Which phd d: But this is ten frames plus plus phd b: Channel zero dropping . phd d: no , these results with two stage Wiener filtering is ten frames phd b: t Oh , this phd d: but possibly more . The second thing I was working on is to , try to look at noise estimation , mmm , and using some technique that doesn't need voice activity detection . , and for this I u simply used some code that , I had from from Belgium , which is technique that , takes a bunch of frame , and for each frequency bands of this frame , takes a look at the minima of the energy . And then average these minima and take this as an an energy estimate of the noise for this particular frequency band . So , I compute an FFT based on the long , signal frame which is sixty - four millisecond phd a: So you have one minimum for each frequency ? phd d: What what I what I d , I do actually , is to take a bunch of to take a tile on the spectrogram and this tile is five hundred milliseconds long and two hundred hertz wide . phd d: And this tile , in this tile appears , like , the harmonics if you have a voiced sound , because it 's it 's the FTT bins . And when you take the m the minima of of these this tile , when you don't have speech , these minima will give you some noise level estimate , If you have voiced speech , these minima will still give you some noise estimate because the minima are between the harmonics . And If you have other other kind of speech sounds then it 's not the case , but if the time frame is long enough , like s five hundred milliseconds seems to be long enough , you still have portions which , are very close whi which minima are very close to the noise energy . You said five hundred milliseconds phd d: Mmm ? professor c: but you said sixty - four milliseconds . Which is which ? What ? phd d: Sixty - four milliseconds is to compute the FFT , bins . phd d: actually it 's better to use sixty - four milliseconds because , if you use thirty milliseconds , then , because of the this short windowing and at low pitch , sounds , the harmonics are not , wha , correctly separated . phd d: So if you take these minima , it b they will overestimate the noise a lot . professor c: So you take sixty - four millisecond F F Ts and then you average them over five hundred ? Or ? , what do you do over five hundred ? phd d: So I take to I take a bunch of these sixty - four millisecond frame to cover five hundred milliseconds , professor c: Ah . phd d: on the on on the bunch of fifty frames , right ? professor c: I see . So the interest of this is that , as y with this technique you can estimate u some reasonable noise spectra with only five hundred milliseconds of of signal , so if the the n the noise varies a lot , you can track better track the noise , professor c: The only requirement is that you must have , in these five hundred milliseconds segment , you must have voiced sound at least . So what I did is just to simply replace the VAD - based , noise estimate by this estimate , first on SpeechDat - Car Well , only on SpeechDat - Car actually . And it 's , slightly worse , like one percent relative compared to the VAD - based estimates . , I think the reason why it 's not better , is that the SpeechDat - Car noises are all stationary . So , u y y there really is no need to have something that 's adaptive professor c: But , I expect s maybe some improvement on TI - digits because , nnn , in this case the noises are all sometimes very variable . professor c: But are you comparing with something e I 'm I 'm p s a little confused again , i it , when you compare it with the V A D - based , phd d: professor c: VAD - Is this is this the ? phd d: It 's It 's the France - Telecom - based spectra , s , Wiener filtering and VAD . professor c: Oh , you 're not doing this with our system ? phd d: In i I 'm not No , no . Actually , th the best system that we still have is , our system but with their noise compensation scheme , right ? professor c: Right . But phd d: So I 'm trying to improve on this , and by by replacing their noise estimate by , something that might be better . professor c: Couldn't you try this for that ? phd d: But I di professor c: Do you think it might help ? phd d: Not yet , because I did this in parallel , professor c: I see , phd d: and I was working on one and the other . phd b: So I 'm also using that n new noise estimate technique on this Wiener filtering what I 'm trying . phd b: So I I have , like , some experiments running , I don't have the results . , the idea is just to , flatten the log , spectrum , and to flatten it more if the the probability of silence is higher . So in this way , you can also reduce somewhat reduce the musical noise and you reduce the variability if you have different noise shapes , because the the spectrum becomes more flat in the silence portions . With this , no improvement , but there are a lot of parameters that we can play with and , Actually , this this could be seen as a soft version of the frame dropping because , you could just put the threshold and say that " below the threshold , I will flatten comp completely flatten the the spectrum " . So it would be like frame dropping , because during the silence portions which are below the threshold of voice activity probability , w you would have some kind of dummy frame which is a perfectly flat spectrum . And this , whitening is something that 's more soft because , you whiten you just , have a function the whitening is a function of the speech probability , so it 's not a hard decision . phd d: so I think maybe it can be used together with frame dropping and when we are not sure about if it 's speech or silence , well , maybe it has something do with this . , you know , in in JRASTA we were essentially adding in , white , white noise dependent on our estimate of the noise . professor c: You could imagine one that that that made use of where where the amount that you added in was , a function of the probability of it being s speech or noise . Yeah , w Yeah , right now it 's a constant that just depending on the the noise spectrum . professor c: Cuz that that brings in sort of powers of classifiers that we don't really have in , this other estimate . professor c: What what what point does the , system stop recording ? How much phd a: It 'll keep going till I guess when they run out of disk space , professor c: It went a little long ? , disk phd a: but I think we 're OK . Yeah , so there are with this technique there are some I just did something exactly the same as as the Ericsson proposal but , the probability of speech is not computed the same way . And I think , i for yeah , for a lot of things , actually a g a good speech probability is important . Like for frame dropping you improve , like you can improve from ten percent as Sunil showed , if you use the channel zero speech probabilities . , so yeah , the next thing I started to do is to , try to develop a better voice activity detector . And , I d yeah , for this I think we can maybe try to train the neural network for voice activity detection on all the data that we have , including all the SpeechDat - Car data . , and the way I mi I do that is that I just use the HTK system but I train it only on the close - talking microphone . It seems to be , i Actually what I observed is that for Italian it doesn't seem Th - there seems to be a problem . Because What ? phd b: you mean their d the frame dropping , right ? Yeah , it doesn't phd d: Yeah . phd d: so , the c the current VAD that we have was trained on , t SPINE , right ? phd b: TI - digits . And actually we observed we listened to some of the utterances and sometimes for Finnish there is music in the recordings and strange things , right ? phd b: Yeah . phd d: Yeah , so the idea was to train all the databases and obtain an alignment to train on these databases , and , also to , try different kind of features , as input to the VAD network . And we came up with a bunch of features that we want to try like , the spectral slope , the , the degree o degree of voicing with the features that , we started to develop with Carmen , e with , the correlation between bands and different kind of features , phd b: Yeah . Well , Hans - Guenter will be here next week so I think he 'll be interested in all all of these things <doc-sep>professor b: OK So today we 're looking at a number of things we 're trying and fortunately for listeners to this we lost some of it 's visual but got tables in front of us . what is what does combo mean ? phd c: So combo is a system where we have these features that go through a network and then this same string of features but low - pass filtered with the low - pass filter used in the MSG features . And so these low - pass filtered goes through M eh another MLP and then the linear output of these two MLP 's are combined just by adding the values and then there is this KLT . There is there is the features there 's the OGI features and then those features go through a contextual l l let 's take this bottom arr one pointed to by the bottom arrow . phd c: professor b: So phd c: So we have these features from OGI that goes through the three paths . phd c: The second path is MLP also using nine frames several frames of features professor b: Yeah . phd c: MLP professor b: Aha ! aha ! phd c: Adding the outputs just like in the second propose the the proposal from for the first evaluation . So this is yeah professor b: And so and then the the the one at the top and I presume these things that are in yellow are in yellow because overall they 're the best ? phd c: Yeah that 's the reason , yeah . professor b: Oh let 's focus on them then so what 's the block diagram for the one above it ? phd c: For the f the f first yellow line you mean ? professor b: Yeah . phd c: Yeah so it 's basically s the same except that we don't have this low - pass filtering so we have only two streams . phd c: professor b: Do you e they mentioned made some when I was on the phone with Sunil they they mentioned some weighting scheme that was used to evaluate all of these numbers . actually the way things seems to well it 's forty percent for TI - digit , sixty for all the SpeechDat - Cars , well all these languages . professor b: and we don't have the TI - digits part yet ? phd c: no . And so have you put all these numbers together into a single number representing that ? phd c: Yeah . professor b: OK so that should be pretty easy to do and that would be good phd c: No . professor b: and how does this compare to the numbers oh so OGI two is just the top top row ? phd d: Yeah . phd c: So yeah to actually OGI two is the the baseline with the OGI features but this is not exactly the result that they have because they 've they 're still made some changes in the features professor b: OK . I don't know by how much because they did not send us the new results professor b: OK . phd c: professor b: OK so the one one place where it looks like we 're messing things up a bit is in the highly mismatched Italian . phd c: But there are thirty - six and then sometimes we are we are we are around forty - two and professor b: Now up phd c: but professor b: so one of the ideas that you had mentioned last time was having a a second silence detection . professor b: So filt is what that is ? phd c: Filt , yeah phd d: Yeah . phd c: yeah so it seems f for the the well match and mismatched condition it 's it brings something . but actually apparently there are there 's no room left for any silence detector at the server side because of the delay . phd c: t two days ago they were still working on this trying to reduce the delay of the silence detector so but yeah if we had time perhaps we could try to find some kind of compromise between the delay that 's on the handset and on the server side . Perhaps try to reduce the delay on the handset and but well For the moment they have this large delay on the the feature computation and so we don't professor b: OK . So Alright so for now at least that 's not there you have some results with low - pass filter cepstrum doesn't have a huge effect but it but it looks like it you know maybe could help in a couple places . professor b: and Yeah and let 's see What else did we have in there ? I guess it makes a l at this point this is I I guess I should probably look at these others a little bit And you you yellowed these out but Oh I see yeah that that one you can't use because of the delay . let 's see that one Well even the just the the second row doesn't look that bad right ? That 's just yeah ? phd c: Yep . professor b: phd c: Actually the yeah the second line is pretty much like the first line in yellow except that we don't have this KLT on the first on the left part of the diagram . Yeah so when we do this weighted measure we should compare the two cuz it might even come out better . professor b: So so there 's so I I would put that one also as a as a maybe . and it yeah and it 's actually does does significantly better on the highly mismatched Italian , so s and little worse on the mis on the case , but Well yeah it 's worse than a few things phd c: professor b: so let 's see how that c that c c see how that comes out on their their measure and are are we running this for TI - digits or phd c: Yeah . professor b: Now is TI di is is that part of the result that they get for the development th the results that they 're supposed to get at the end of end of the month , the TI - digits are there also ? phd c: Yeah . Oh I see the one I was looking down here at the the o the row below the lower yellowed one . professor b: What happens there is it 's around the same and so you could reduce the dimension as you were saying before a bit perhaps . professor b: It 's significantly worse it 's it 's it 's it 's mostly worse . phd c: Exc - except for the HM phd d: For many a mismatch it 's worse . What are what are the sizes of any of these sets , I I 'm I 'm sure you told me before , but I 've forgotten . So you know how many words are in one of these test sets ? phd c: phd d: I don't remember . professor b: About ? phd c: it 's it depends well the well matched is generally larger than the other sets and I think it 's around two thousand or three thousand words perhaps , at least . professor b: So the so the sets so the test sets are between five hundred and two thousand sentences , let 's say phd c: Mmm . professor b: and each sentence on the average has four or five digits or is it most of them longer or phd c: Yeah . phd d: Yeah for the Italian even seven digits y more or less phd c: It it d Seven digits . phd d: but sometime the sentence have only one digit and sometime like the number of credit cards , something like that . See the the reason I 'm asking is is is we have all these small differences and I don't know how seriously to take them , right ? phd c: - ? professor b: So i if if you had just you know to give an example , if you had if you had a thousand words then a a tenth of a percent would just be one word , phd c: Yeah . professor b: so yeah it be kind of I 'd kind of like to know what the sizes of these test sets were actually . phd d: The size that we have ? phd c: We could we could run run some kind of significance tests professor b: Yeah since these well also just to know the numbers , phd c: or phd d: Yeah . phd d: Yeah we have the result that the output of the HTK professor b: Yeah . professor b: Yeah so anyway if you could just mail out what those numbers are and then then that that be great . professor b: what else is there here ? see the second second from the bottom it says SIL , but this is some different kind of silence or thing or what was that ? phd c: phd d: It the the output silence of the MLP . To apply also to in include also the the silence of the MLP we have the fifty - six form and the silence to pick up the silence and we include those . phd d: Yeah , because when we apply the KLT phd c: No they 're I think there is this silence in addition to the KLT outputs professor b: No . phd c: it is because we we we just keep we don't keep all the dimensions after the KLT phd d: In addition t phd c: and yeah . phd c: So we try to add the silence also in addition to the these twenty - eight dimensions . And what and what 's OGI forty - five ? The bottom one there ? phd c: it 's o it 's OGI two , it 's so the th it 's the features from the first line phd d: It 's in fact OGI two . professor b: Right , but what 's the what does the last row mean ? phd c: So it 's basically this but without the KLT on the from the left path . So what 's the difference between the second phd c: the second line you don't have this combo stuff so you just professor b: Oh . phd d: professor b: OK , so alright so it looks to me I guess the same given that we have to take the filt ones out of the the running because of this delay problem so it looks to me like the ones you said I agree are are the ones to look at phd c: professor b: oh yeah also when when they 're using this weighting scheme of forty , thirty - five , twenty - five is that on the percentages or on the raw errors ? I guess it 's probably on the percentages right ? phd c: I guess , yeah . OK so if we can know what how many words are in each and then Dave Dave promised to get us something tomorrow which will be there as far as they 've gotten Friday phd c: professor b: and how long did it I guess if we 're not doing all these things if we 're only doing I guess since this is development data it 's legitimate to do more than one , right ? ordinarily if in final test data you don't want to do several and and take the best phd c: Yeah . professor b: that 's that 's that 's not proper but if this is development data we could still look at a couple . But we have to decide we have to fix the system on this d on this data , to choose the best professor b: Yeah . phd c: and these professor b: But the question is when when do we fix the system , phd c: But we could professor b: do we fix the system tomorrow or do we fix the system on Tuesday ? phd c: it d professor b: I Yeah , OK except that we do have to write it up . professor b: Right so maybe what we do is we we we as soon as we get the data from them we start the training and so forth phd c: Yeah but professor b: but we start the write - up right away because as you say there there 's only minor differences between these . professor b: Yeah , and and I I would you know , I would I 'd kind of like to see it phd c: yeah . Have y have you seen alt d do they have a format for how they want the system descriptions or anything ? phd c: not really . Yes , for those who are listening to this and not looking at it it 's not really that impressive , it 's just tiny . It 's all these little categories set a , set b , set c , multi - condition , clean . Do you know what no what no mitigation means here ? phd c: it should be the the problem with the error channel error professor b: Oh that 's probably the phd c: or professor b: this is probably channel error stuff phd c: well , you professor b: huh ? Oh this is i right , it says right above here channel channel error resilience , phd c: Yeah . and they have yes , split between seen databases and non - seen so basically between development and and evaluation . professor b: And so right , it 's presumed there 's all sorts of tuning that 's gone on on the see what they call seen databases and there won't be tuning for the unseen . So the everything else is the SpeechDat - Car , that 's the multi multilingual phd c: Yeah , so it 's not divided between languages you mean or professor b: Well , it is . phd c: it just professor b: It is , but there 's also there 's these tables over here for the for the TI - digits and these tables over here for the car data which is which is I guess all the multilingual stuff phd c: Oh yeah . professor b: Well anyway , sounds like there 'll be a lot to do just to work with our partners to fill out the tables over the next next few days phd c: professor b: I guess they have to send it out let 's see the thirty - first is Wednesday and I think the it has to be there by some hour European time on Wednesday phd c: professor b: so I think basically phd d: We lost time Wednesday maybe because that the difference in the time may be is a long different of the time . professor b: E excuse me ? phd d: Maybe the Thursday the twelfth of the night of the Thurs - thirty - one is is not valid in Europe . professor b: Yes , so I think we have to actually get it done Tuesday phd d: Tuesday . professor b: phd c: Except if if it 's the thirty - one at midnight or I don't know we can still do some work on Wednesday morning . W i is but is is it midni I thought it was actually something like five PM on phd c: Yeah , well . professor b: was like I thought it was five PM or something , I didn't think it was midnight . professor b: well , so five PM their time is is if phd d: Not five PM , three PM . phd d: no three three A - three PM ? phd c: No , we are wondering about the the the hour that we have to eh I don't know if it 's three PM it 's phd d: Oh yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . phd c: Yeah , it 's it 's midnight but professor b: Yes , yes , but I didn't think it was midnight that it was due , I thought it was due at some hour during the day like five PM or something . professor b: so I I well we should look but my assumption is that we basically have to be done Tuesday . professor b: but then then we 'll actually have the new data which is the German and the Danish phd c: Yeah . professor b: but that really will be much less work because the system will be fixed phd c: Yeah . professor b: so all we 'll do is take whatever they have and and and run it through the process . professor b: so there 'll be no new training , there 'll just be new HTK runs , so that 's means in some sense we can kind of relax from this after after Tuesday and and maybe next meeting we can start talking a little bit about where we want to go from here in terms of the research . professor b: you know what things did you think of when you were doing this process that you just didn't really have time to adequately work on so phd c: professor b: What ? grad a: Oh , Stephane always has these great ideas and oh , but we don't have time . professor b: And and also it 's still true that I think it 's true that that we we at least got fairly consistent i improved results by running the neural net transformation in parallel with the features phd c: But professor b: rather than in sequence which was was your suggestion and that that that seems to have been borne out . professor b: The fact that none of these are are you know , enormous is is is not too surprising most improvements aren't enormous and phd c: Yeah . professor b: some of them are but you have something really really wrong and you fix it you can get big and really enormous improvements phd c: professor b: but Cuz our best improvements over the years that we 've gotten from finding bugs , but Anyway OK well I I think I see where we are and everybody knows what they 're doing and is there is there anything else we should talk about or or are we done ? phd c: We so basically we will I think we 'll try to to focus on these three architectures and and perhaps I was thinking also a fourth one with just just a single KLT because we did not really test that professor b: - huh . professor b: Oh I have yeah I do have one other piece of information which I should tell people outside of this group too I don't know if we 're gonna need it but Jeff up at the University of Washington has gotten a hold of a some kind of server farm of of ten multiprocessor IBM machines RS six thousands phd c: professor b: and and so I think each one is four processors or something or I don't know , eight hundred megahertz or something and there 's four processors in a box and there 's ten boxes and there 's some kind of ti so if you know he 's got a lot of processing power and we 'd have to schedule it but if we have some big jobs and we wanna wanna wanna run them he 's he 's offering it . It 's when he was here eh he he used i not only every machine here but every machine on campus as far as I could tell , so so in some ways he just got his payback , but again I I don't know if we 'll end up with if we 're gonna be CPU limited on anything that we 're doing in this group phd c: OK well you guys doing great stuff so that 's that that 's really neat and we 'll g don't think we need to Oh well the other thing I guess that I will say is that the digits that we 're gonna record momentarily is starting to get are starting to get into a pretty good size collection and in addition to the SpeechDat stuff we will have those to work with really pretty soon now so that 's that 's another source of data . which is s under somewhat better control and that we can we can make measurements of the room the that you know if we feel there 's other measurements we don't have that we 'd like to have we can make them and Dave and I were just talking about that a little while ago so that 's another another possibility for this this kind of work . professor b: K , if nobody has anything else maybe we should go around do do our digits do our digits duty <doc-sep>I woke up twenty minutes ago , thinking , what did I forget ? grad d: It 's great how the br brain sort of does that . grad d: in two weeks from today ? Yeah ? More or less ? I 'll be off to Sicily and Germany for a couple , three days . grad b: Now what are y what are you doing there ? I forgot ? grad d: OK , I 'm flying to Sicily basically to drop off Simon there with his grandparents . And then I 'm flying to Germany t to go to a MOKU - Treffen which is the meeting of all the module - responsible people in SmartKom , grad b: Mmm . And then I 'm also going up to EML for a day , and then I 'm going to meet the very big boss , Wolfgang Walster , in Saarbruecken and the System system integration people in Kaiserslautern and then I 'm flying back via Sicily pick up my son come back here on the fourth of July . grad e: What a great time to be coming back to the grad b: God bless America . grad d: And I 'm sure all the the people at the airport will be happy to work on that day . grad b: Wait , aren't you flying on Lufthansa though ? grad d: Once you get to the United States it 'll be a problem , but grad d: Yeah . And , that 's that bit of news , and the other bit of news is we had you know , I was visited by my German project manager who A , did like what we did what we 're doing here , and B , is planning to come here either three weeks in July or three weeks in August , to actually work . grad d: And we sat around and we talked and he came up we came up with a pretty strange idea . And , maybe it might be ultimately the most interesting thing for Eva because she has been known to complain about the fact that the stuff we do here is not weird enough . grad d: Imagine if you will , that we have a system that does all that understanding that we want it to do based on utterances . So if you have the knowledge of how to interpret " where is X ? " under given conditions , situational , user , discourse and ontological conditions , you should also be able to make that same system ask " where is X ? " grad e: So in instead of just being able to observe phenomenon , and , guess the intention we might be able just to sort of give it an intention , and make it produce an utterance . grad b: Well , like in AI they generally do the take in , and then they also do the generation phase , like Nancy 's thing . Or , you remember , in the the hand thing in one - eighty - two , like not only was it able to recognize but it was also to generate based upon situations . grad d: And once you 've done that what we can do is have the system ask itself . grad e: Except this smacks a little bit more of a schizophrenic computer than AI . grad d: Yeah you c if you want , you can have two parallel machines , asking each other . What would that give us ? Would A be something completely weird and strange , and B , i if you look at all the factors , we will never observe people let 's say , in wheelchairs under you know , in under all conditions , grad e: That 's good . grad d: you know , when they say " X " , and there is a ride at the goal , and the parking is good , we can never collect enough data . If you get the system to speak to itself , you may find n break downs and errors and you may be able to learn . And , so there 's no no end of potential things one could get out of it , if that works . grad d: So Yeah , I w See the the generation bit , making the system generate generate something , is shouldn't be too hard . grad b: I just don't think I think we 're probably a year away from getting the system to understand things . Well , if we can get it to understand one thing , like our " where is " run through we can also , maybe , e make it say , or ask " where is X ? " Or not . e I 'm sort of have the impression that getting it to say the right thing in the right circumstances is much more difficult than getting it to understand something given the circumstances and so on , you know , just cuz it 's sort of harder to learn to speak correctly in a foreign language , rather than learning to understand it . Right ? grad d: grad e: just the fact that we 'll get The point is that getting it to understand one construction doesn't mean that it will n always know exactly when it 's correct to use that construction . Right ? grad d: It 's it 's Well , I 've I 've done generation and language production research for fo four four and a half years . And so it 's it 's you 're right , it 's not the same as the understanding . grad d: But , I think it 'd be fun to look at it , or into that question . And so that 's that 's But grad b: The basic idea I guess would be to give allow the system to have intentions , basically ? Cuz that 's basically what needs to be added to the system for it . grad d: Well , look at th eee , I think even think even What it would be the the prior intention . So let 's , let 's say we have this grad b: Well we 'd have to seed that , . Right ? grad b: grad d: What would it ask ? grad b: It wouldn't know what to ask . We 'd have to set up a situation where , it didn't know where something was and it wanted to go there . grad b: Which means that we 'd need to set up an intention inside of the system . Right ? Which is basically , " I don't know where something is and I need to go there " . grad d: Ooh , do we really need to do that ? Because , grad b: Well , no I guess not . Excel grad d: s It 's i I know it 's it 's strange , but look at it look at our Bayes - net . If we don't have Let 's assume we don't have any input from the language . Right ? So there 's also nothing we could query the ontology , but we have a certain user setting . If you just ask , what is the likelihood of that person wanting to enter some something , it 'll give you an answer . Which is , wanting to know where something is , maybe nnn and wanting I don't know what it 's gonna be , but there 's gonna be something that grad e: Well you 're not gonna are you gonna get a variety of intentions out of that then ? , you 're just talking about like given this user , what 's the th what is it what is that user most likely to want to do ? grad d: Well you can observe some user and context stuff and ask , what 's the posterior probabilities of all of our decision nodes . grad d: You could even say , " let 's take all the priors , let 's observe nothing " , and query all the posterior probabilities . Which , if we have an algorithm that filters out whatever the the best or the most consistent answer out of that , will give us the intention ex nihilo . And that is exactly what would happen if we ask it to produce an utterance , it would be b based on that extension , ex nihilo , which we don't know what it is , but it 's there . So we wouldn't even have to t to kick start it by giving it a certain intention or observing anything on the decision node . And whatever that maybe that would lead to " what is the castle ? " , grad b: I 'm just grad d: or " what is that whatever " . grad b: I guess what I 'm afraid of is if we don't , you know , set up a situation , we 'll just get a bunch of garbage out , like you know , everything 's exactly thirty percent . So what we actually then need to do is is write a little script that changes all the settings , you know , go goes through all the permutations , which is we did a didn't we calculate that once ? grad b: Well that was that was absurdly low , in the last meeting , grad d: It 's a grad c: grad b: cuz I went and looked at it cuz I was thinking , that could not be right , and it would it was on the order of twenty output nodes and something like twenty grad c: And like thirty input nodes grad b: thirty input nodes . grad c: or some grad b: So to test every output node , would at least Let 's see , so it would be two to the thirty for every output node ? Which is very th very large . I 'm talking about billions and billions and billions and a number two to the thirty is like a Bhaskara said , we had calculated out and Bhaskara believes that it 's larger than the number of particles in the universe . That 's just That 's It 's a billion , right ? grad b: Two to the thirty ? Well , two to the thirty is a billion , but if we have to do it two to the twenty times , then that 's a very very large number . grad b: Cuz you have to query the node , for every a , or query the net two to the twenty times . grad e: Yeah , it 's g Anyway , the point is that given all of these different factors , it 's e it 's it 's still going to be impossible to run through all of the possible situations or whatever . grad b: If it takes us a second to do , for each one , and let 's say it 's twenty billion , then that 's twenty billion seconds , which is grad e: Yeah . grad e: Long ! grad c: grad b: Hours and hours and hours and hours . grad e: Tah - dah ! grad b: Which probabilistically will be good enough . So , it be it it 's an idea that one could n for for example run run past , what 's that guy 's name ? You know ? He - he 's usually here . We we we we g grad b: Wait , who ? grad e: Yeah , i that would the g the bald guy . And , what other news do I have ? Well we fixed some more things from the SmartKom system , but that 's not really of general interest , Oh ! Questions , yeah . How is the generation XML thing ? grad b: I 'm gonna work on that today and tomorrow . I 've tried about five times so far , where I work for a while and then I 'm like , I 'm hungry . I found everything that I need and stu and , grad d: But st grad b: At the b furthermore , I told Jerry that I was gonna finish it before he got back . He 's coming back when ? next grad b: Well , I think we think we 'll see him definitely on Tuesday for the next Or , no , wait . grad b: I think I will try to work on the SmartKom stuff and I 'll if I can finish it today , I 'll help you with that tomorrow , if you work on it ? I don't have a problem with us working on it though ? So . grad b: we just it wouldn't hurt to write up a paper , cuz then , yeah I was talking with Nancy and Nancy said , you don't know whether you have a paper to write up until you write it up . grad d: Well grad b: And since Jerry 's coming back , we can run it by him too . , what 's your input ? grad e: Well , I don't have much experience with , conference papers for compu in the computer science realm , and so when I looked at what you had , which was apparently a complete submission , I just sort of said what just I I didn't really know what to do with it , like , this is the sort of the basic outline of the system or whatever , or or " here 's an idea " , right ? That 's what that paper was , " here 's here 's one possible thing you could do " , grad d: grad e: short , eight pages , and I just don't know what you have in mind for expanding . Like I 'd I what I didn't do is go to the web site of the conference and look at what they 're looking for or whatever . Well , it seems to me that grad b: Wait , is this a computer science conference or is it a grad d: well it 's more It 's both , right ? It 's it 's sort of t cognitive , neural , psycho , linguistic , but all for the sake of doing computer science . So it 's sort of cognitive , psycho , neural , plausibly motivated , architectures of natural language processing . So it seems pretty interdisciplinary , and , w w the keynote speaker is Tomasello and blah - blah - blah , grad e: Right . grad d: so , W the the question is what could we actually do and and and keep a straight face while doing it . grad d: well , you can say we have done a little bit and that 's this , and sort of the rest is position paper , " we wanna also do that " . Might be more interesting to do something like let 's assume , we 're right , we have as Jerry calls it , a delusion of adequacy , and take a " where is X " sentence , grad e: grad d: and say , " we will just talk about this , and how we cognitively , neurally , psycho - linguistically , construction grammar - ally , motivated , envision , understanding that " . That should be able to we should be able to come up with , you know , a sort of a a parse . There 's a s diagram somewhere which tells you how to put that grad a: I know , I didn't understand that either ! grad b: No wait . grad b: See the p how the plastic things ar arch out like that ? There we go . grad a: It does ! I 'm sorry I didn't mean to grad e: But that 's what you get for coming late to the meeting . grad e: grad d: We 're talking about this , alleged paper that we may , just , sort of w grad a: Oh ! Which Johno mentioned to me . And I just sort of brought forth the idea that we take a sentence , " Where is the Powder - Tower " , grad a: grad d: and we we p pretend to parse it , we pretend to understand it , and we write about it . About how all of these things grad a: What 's the part that 's not pretend ? The writing ? grad d: OK , then we pretend to write about . grad a: Tha - Which conference is it for ? grad d: It 's the whatever , architectures , eh you know , where There is this conference , it 's the seventh already international conference , on neu neurally , cognitively , motivated , architectures of natural language processing . grad d: And the keynote speakers are Tomasello , MacWhinney ? grad a: Whinney . grad a: is is it normally like like , dialogue systems , or , you know , other NLP - ish things ? grad d: No no no no no no no no . grad e: Why , we 've got over a week ! grad d: It would be nice to go write two papers actually . And one one from your perspective , and one from our peve per per grad a: th that 's the kinda thing that maybe like , the general con sort of like NTL - ish like , whatever , the previous simulation based pers maybe you 're talking about the same kind of thing . grad d: Well , I I also think that if we sort of write about what we have done in the past six months , we we we could sort of craft a nice little paper that if it gets rejected , which could happen , doesn't hurt grad a: grad d: because it 's something we eh grad a: Having it is still a good thing . grad b: Will I ? grad a: When is it and where ? grad d: In case of grad e: ! grad d: It 's on the twenty second of September , in Saarbruecken Germany . So , is the What Are you just talking about you know , the details of how to do it , or whether to do it , or what it would be ? grad e: What would one possibly put in such a paper ? grad d: What to write about . grad a: Or what to write about ? grad d: What is our what 's our take home message . What what do we actually Because , it I don't like papers where you just talk about what you plan to do . , it 's obvious that we can't do any kind of evaluation , and have no you know , we can't write an ACL type paper where we say , " OK , we 've done this grad a: And , maybe even That 's maybe the time to introduce the the new formalism that you guys have cooked up . grad b: But that grad e: Are in the process of grad a: How many pages ? grad b: don't they need to finish the formalism ? grad d: It 's just like four pages . grad a: Four pages ? grad d: it 's it 's not even a h grad e: Yeah . grad d: I don't know w Did you look at it ? Yeah , it depends on the format . Oh , I thought you were I thought we were talking about something which was much more like ten or something . grad a: And it 's also difficult to even if you had a lot of substance , it 's hard to demonstrate that in four pages , basically . grad a: it 's still it 's still grad d: Well I maybe it 's just four thousand lines . I do I don't They don't want any They don't have a TeX f style @ @ guide . Why , for whatever reason , grad a: Not including figures and such ? grad d: I don't know . Well , grad d: We 'll just grad b: I would say that 's closer to six pages actually . Isn't a isn't it about fifty s fifty five , sixty lines to a page ? grad d: I d don't quote me on this . This is numbers I I have from looking o grad b: How many characters are on a line ? grad d: OK . grad a: ASCII ? grad d: Let 's let 's wh wh what should we should should we , discuss this over tea and all of us look at the web ? Oh , I can't . grad a: Wha - w grad d: Look at the web page and let 's talk about it maybe tomorrow afternoon ? grad a: More cues for us to find it are like , neural cons grad d: Johno will send you a link . grad d: And I 'm also flying grad e: I got this from the two one two . Yes ? grad d: I 'm flying to Sicily next in a w two weeks from now , grad a: Oh , lucky you . And otherwise you haven't missed much , except for a really weird idea , but you 'll hear about that soon enough . grad a: The idea that you and I already know about ? That you already told me ? Not that OK . Yeah , that is something for the rest of the gang to to g grad e: The thing with the goats and the helicopters ? grad d: Change the watchband . Did you catch that allusion ? It 's time to walk the sheep ? grad e: No . grad d: It 's a a presumably one of the Watergate codes they grad e: Oh . grad d: Anyways , th , don't make any plans for spring break next year . grad a: Does that mean Does that mean you 'll get you 'll fly us there ? grad e: We 'll see . grad d: But coconut anana pineapple , that 's that 's tricky , yeah . grad e: So , but we have to decide what , like , sort of the general idea of grad b: Potatoes . Sorry ! grad e: we 're gonna have an example case , right ? I m the the point is to like this " where is " case , or something . grad d: Yeah , maybe you have It would be kind of The paper ha would have , in my vision , a nice flow if we could say , well here is th the th here is parsing if you wanna do it c right , here is understanding if you wanna do it right , and you know without going into technical grad e: grad a: But then in the end we 're not doing like those things right yet , right ? Would that be clear in the paper or not ? grad d: That would be clear , we would grad a: OK . grad d: I I mailed around a little paper that I have grad a: It would be like , this is the idea . Oh , I didn't get that , grad d: w we could sort of say , this is grad a: did I ? Oops . grad d: See this , if you if you 're not around , and don't partake in the discussions , and you don't get any email , grad a: I 'm sorry . grad d: Su So we could we could say this is what what 's sort of state of the art today . And grad a: And how much to get into the cognitive neural part ? grad b: That 's the only That 's the question mark . grad d: We grad b: Don't you need to reduce it if it 's a or reduce it , if it 's a cognitive neuro grad a: Well , you don't have t the conference may be cognitive neural , doesn't mean that every paper has to be both . grad d: Yeah , and you can you can just point to the to the literature , grad e: Mmm . grad d: you can say that construction - based You know grad a: So i so this paper wouldn't particularly deal with that side although it could reference the NTL - ish sort of , like , approach . grad a: The fact that the methods here are all compatible with or designed to be compatible with whatever , neurological neuro neuro - biol su stuff . grad a: Yeah , I guess four pages you could you could definitely it 's definitely possible to do it . Like introducing the formalism might be not really possible in detail , but you can use an example of it . grad e: Well , l looking at yeah , looking at that paper that that you had , you know , like , you didn't really explain in detail what was going on in the XML cases or whatever you just sorta said well , you know , here 's the general idea , some stuff gets put in there . You know , hopefully you can you can say something like constituents tells you what the construction is made out of , you know , without going into this intense detail . grad e: Give them the one paragraph whirlwind tour of w w what this is for , grad a: Yeah . So this will be sort of documenting what we think , and documenting what we have in terms of the Bayes - net stuff . grad d: And since there 's never a bad idea to document things , no ? grad a: That 's th that 's definitely a good idea . grad d: That would be my , We we should sketch out the details maybe tomorrow afternoon - ish , if everyone is around . grad d: And , the , other thing , yeah we actually Have we made any progress on what we decided , last week ? I 'm sure you read the transcript of last week 's meeting in red so sh so you 're up to dated caught up . grad d: We decided t that we 're gonna take a " where is something " question , and pretend we have parsed it , and see what we could possibly hope to observe on the discourse side . grad b: Remember I came in and I started asking you about how we were sor going to sort out the , decision nodes ? grad a: Yes ! What 'd you say ? grad b: I remember you talking to me , just not what you said . grad b: Well , there was like we needed to or , in my opinion we need to design a Bayes another sub - Bayes - net You know , it was whether it was whether we would have a Bayes - net on the output and on the input , grad a: Oh . grad b: or whether the construction was gonna be in the Bayes - net , grad a: Oh , yeah . grad b: and grad a: So that was was that the question ? Was that what grad b: Well that was related to what we were talking about . grad d: Should I introduce it as SUDO - square ? grad b: Yeah sure . The SUDO - square is , " Situation " , " User " , " Discourse " , right ? " Ontology " . grad e: Oh I saw the diagram in the office , grad a: Oh my god , that 's amazing ! grad d: Mmm . grad e: Way ! grad d: Is it ? grad a: Someone 's gonna start making Phil Collins jokes . grad e: You know like " Sussudio " , grad a: Yeah , come on . grad e: in here grad d: Oh Well , also he 's talking about suicide , and that 's that 's not a notion I wanna have evoked . I didn't really listen to it , grad d: The grad a: I was too young . So , what 's going on here ? So what are what grad d: So , grad e: Was wollte der Kuenstler uns damit sagen ? grad a: Stop excluding me . grad d: OK , so we have tons of little things here , grad a: I can't believe that that 's never been thought of before . grad d: and we 've grad b: Wait , what are the dots ? I don't remember what the dots were . grad a: grad d: You know , these are our , whatever , belief - net decision nodes , and they all contribute to these things down here . grad a: Wait , wait , what 's the middle thing ? grad d: That 's EDU . grad e: That 's a c grad d: e e Our e e e grad a: But wh grad e: That 's grad d: You . grad a: But what is it ? grad d: Well , in the moment it 's a Bayes - net . Eh I have taken care that we actually can build little interfaces , to other modules that will tell us whether the user likes these things and , n the or these things , and he whether he 's in a wheelchair or not , grad a: OK . Is that supposed to be the international sign for interface ? grad d: I think so , yeah . grad d: No , this is a RME core by agent design , I don't know . grad d: There 's maybe a different grad e: So wait , what a what are these letters again , Situr - Situation , User , Discourse and grad d: Situation , user , d ontology . grad d: And for example w i s I Irena Gurevich is going to be here eh , end of July . grad d: So , we have discussed in terms of the EVA grad a: Grateful for us ? grad d: grad a: Did you just say grateful for us ? OK , sorry . grad d: Think of back at the EVA vector , and Johno coming up with the idea that if the person discussed the discussed the admission fee , in eh previously , that might be a good indication that , " how do I get to the castle ? " , actually he wants to enter . grad d: Or , you know , " how do I get to X ? " discussing the admission fee in the previous utterance , is a good indication . grad a: grad d: So we don't want a hard code , a set of lexemes , or things , that person 's you know , sort of filter , or search the discourse history . grad d: So what would be kind of cool is that if we encounter concepts that are castle , tower , bank , hotel , we run it through the ontology , and the ontology tells us it has , admission , opening times , it has admission fees , it has this , it has that , and then we we we make a thesaurus lexicon , look up , and then search dynamically through the , discourse history for occurrences of these things in a given window of utterances . grad d: And that might , you know , give us additional input to belief A versus B . grad a: So it 's not just a particular word 's OK , so the you 're looking for a few keys that you know are cues to sorry , a few specific cues to some intention . grad e: so , wait so , since this since this sort of technical stuff is going over my head , grad b: And then grep , basically . grad e: the the point is that you that when someone 's talking about a castle , you know that it 's the sort of thing that people are likely to wanna go into ? Or , is it the fact that if there 's an admission fee , then one of the things we know about admission fees is that you pay them in order to go in ? And then the idea of entering is active in the discourse or something ? And then grad d: Well grad e: blah - blah - blah ? grad d: the the idea is even more general . grad d: The idea is to say , we encounter a certain entity in a in a in a utterance . So le let 's look up everything we the ontology gives us about that entity , what stuff it does , what roles it has , what parts , whatever it has . And , then we look in the discourse , whether any of that , or any surface structure corresponding to these roles , functions aaa has ever occurred . grad d: And then , the discourse history can t tell us , " yeah " , or " no " . grad d: So , we may think that if you say , " where is the theater " , whether or not he has talked about tickets before , then we he 's probably wanna go there to see something . grad d: Or " where is the opera in Par - Paris ? , grad e: OK . grad d: yeah ? Lots of people go to the opera to take pictures of it and to look at it , grad e: grad d: And , the discourse can maybe tell us w what 's more likely if we know what to look for in previous statements . And so we can hard code " for opera , look for tickets , look for this , look for that , grad e: OK . grad d: or look for Mozart , look for thi " but the smarter way is to go via the ontology and dynamically , then look up u stuff . But you 're still doing look up so that when the person So the point is that when the person says , " where is it ? " then you sort of say , let 's go back and look at other things and then decide , rather than the other possibility which is that all through discourse as they talk about different things You know like w prior to the " where is it " question they say , you know , " how much does it cost to get in , you know , to to see a movie around here " , " where is the closest theater " The the the point is that by mentioning admission fees , that just sort of stays active now . grad e: And then , over in your Bayes - net or whatever , when when the person says " where is it " , you 've already got , you know since they were talking about admission , and that evokes the idea of entering , then when they go and ask " where is it " , then you 're Enter node is already active grad d: grad e: that 's the sort of cognitive linguistic - y way , grad d: Yeah , e ultimately that 's also what we wanna get at . So , of course we have to keep memory of what was the last intention , and how does it fit to this , and what does it tell us , in terms of of the the what we 're examining . grad d: And furthermore , we can idealize that , you know , people don't change topics , grad e: But , even th for that , there is a student of ours who 's doing a dialogue act , recognition module . grad d: So , maybe , we 're even in a position where we can take your approach , which is of course much better , as to say how how do these pieces grad e: Mmm . So these are issues but we what we actually decided last week , is to , and this is , again , for your benefit is to , pretend we have observed and parsed an utterance such as " where is the Powder - Tower " , or " where is the zoo " , and specify , what what we think the the output , observe , out i input nodes for our Bayes - nets for the sub sub - D , for the discourse bit , should be . So that And I will I will then come up with the ontology side , bits and pieces , so that we can say , OK we we always just look at this utterance . That 's the only utterance we can do , it 's hard coded , like Srini , sort of hand parsed , hand crafted , but this is what we hope to be able to observe in general from utterances , and from ontologies , and then we can sort of fiddle with these things to see what it actually produces , in terms of output . grad e: grad d: So we need to find out what the " where is X " construction will give us in terms of semantics and Simspec type things . We decided sort of the the prototypical " where is X " , where you know , we don't really know , does he wanna go there , or just wanna know where it is . grad e: Well we were grad d: So the difference of " where is the railway station " , versus where where " where is Greenland " . grad b: ah grad e: So , we 're supposed to we 're talking about sort of anything that has the semantics of request for location , right ? actually ? Or , anyway , the node in the the ultimate , in in the Bayes - net thing when you 're done , the the node that we 're talking about , is one that says " request for location , true " , or something like that , right ? , and and exactly how that gets activated , you know , like whether we want the sentence " how do I get there ? " to activate that node or not , you know , that 's that 's sort of the issue that sort of the linguistic - y side has to deal with , right ? grad d: Yeah , but it Yea - Nnn Well actually more m more the other way around . We wanted something that represents uncertainty we in terms of going there or just wanting to know where it is , for example . grad d: And so this is prototypically @ @ found in the " where is something " question , surface structure , grad e: OK . grad b: We grad d: which can be p you know , should be maps to something that activates both . grad b: I don't see unde how we would be able to distinguish between the two intentions just from the g utterance , though . grad d: The grad b: bef or , before we don't before we cranked it through the Bayes - net . grad b: OK , but then so basically it 's just a for every construction we have a node in the net , right ? And we turn on that node . What is the Well grad b: And then given that we know that the construction has these two things , we can set up probabilities we can s basically define all the tables for ev for those grad d: Yeah , it should be So we have , i let 's assume we we call something like a loc - X node and a path - X node . And what we actually get if we just look at the discourse , " where is X " should activate or should grad e: Mmm . Should be both , whereas maybe " where is X located " , we find from the data , is always just asked when the person wants to know where it is , and " how do I get to " is always asked when the person just wants to know how to get there . Right ? So we want to sort of come up with what gets , input , and how inter in case of a " where is " question . So what what would the outcome of of your parser look like ? And , what other discourse information from the discourse history could we hope to get , squeeze out of that utterance ? So define the the input into the Bayes - net based on what the utterance , " where is X " , gives us . So definitely have an Entity node here which is activated via the ontology , grad a: s grad d: so " where is X " produces something that is s stands for X , whether it 's castle , bank , restroom , toilet , whatever . And then the ontology will tell us grad a: That it has a location or something like that ? or th the ontology will tell us where actually it is located ? grad d: No . grad d: Where it is located , we have , a user proximity node here somewhere , grad a: OK . grad d: e which tells us how far the user how far away the user is in respect to that entity . So you 're talking about , for instance , the construction obviously involves this entity or refers refers to this entity , grad d: grad a: and from the construction also you know that it is a location is or a thing thing that can be located . Sh - and that 's the thing that is being that is the content of the question that 's being queried by one interpretation of " where is X " . So is the question it 's just that I 'm not sure what the Is the question , for this particular construction how we specify that that 's the information it provides ? Or or asked for ? b Both sides , right ? grad d: Yeah , you don't need to even do that . grad a: Observed when you heard the speaker say " where is X " , or when when that 's been parsed ? grad d: grad b: I d I just I don't like having characterizing the constructions with location and path , or li characterizing them like that . Cuz you don't It seems like in the general case you wouldn't know how how to characterize them . There could be an interpretation that we don't have a node for in the it just seems like @ @ has to have a node for the construction and then let the chips fall where they may . And , in this cas and since since it can mean either of those things , it would light both of those up . grad e: grad d: So I think r in here we have " I 'll go there " , right ? grad b: Answers ? grad d: And we have our Info - on . So in my c my case , this would sort of make this happy , and this would make the Go - there happy . What you 're saying is we have a Where - X question , Where - X node , that makes both happy . Right ? That 's what you 're proposing , which is , in my mind just as fine . So w if we have a construction node , " where is X " , it 's gonna both get the po posterior probability that it 's Info - on up , grad b: Mmm , yeah . grad d: Info - on is True - up , and that Go - there is True - up , as well . Which would be exactly analogous to what I 'm proposing is , this makes makes something here true , and this makes something also something here true , and this makes this True - up , and this makes this True - up as well . You know with with this points to this points to that , and so on because I don't know , it grad a: Is - , grad d: Yeah , because we get we get tons of constructions I think . Because , you know , mmm people have many ways of asking for the same thing , grad e: Yeah . grad d: and grad a: So un grad b: I change I changed my mind actually . grad a: I have a different kinda question , might be related , which is , OK so implicitly everything in EDU , we 're always inferring the speaker intent , right ? Like , what they want either , the information that they want , or It 's always information that they want probably , of some kind . Right ? Or I I don't know , or what 's something that they grad d: The system doesn't massage you , no . So I don't know if the i if th just there 's more s here that 's not shown that you it 's already like part of the system whatever , but , " where is X " , like , the fact that it is , you know , a speech - act , whatever , it is a question . It 's a question that , queries on some particular thing X , and X is that location . grad a: So that seems different from just having the node " location - X " and that goes into EDU , right ? grad d: Yeah . That 's that 's grad a: So tha is that what you 're t talking about ? grad d: So , w Exactly . grad d: The next one would be what we can squeeze out of the I don't know , maybe we wanna observe the , the length of of the words used , and , or the prosody grad a: Mmm . So in some ways grad d: I don't know , grad a: so in some ways in the other sort of parallel set of mo more linguistic meetings we 've been talking about possible semantics of some construction . grad a: Right ? Where it was the simulation that 's , according to it you know , that that corresponds to it , and as well the as discourse , whatever , conte infor in discourse information , grad d: So , are we looking for a sort of abbreviation of that , that 's tailored to this problem ? Cuz that that has , you know , basically , you know , s it 's in progress still it 's in development still , but it definitely has various feature slots , attributes , bindings between things grad d: U that 's exactly r , why I 'm proposing It 's too early to have to think of them of all of these discourse things that one could possibly observe , grad a: - huh . grad d: so let 's just assume grad a: For the subset of grad d: human beings are not allowed to ask anything but " where is X " . That exactly " where is X " , grad d: In ter grad a: not the the choices of " where is X " or " how do I get to X " . grad d: And , but you know , do it do it in such a way that we know that people can also say , " is the town hall in front of the bank " , so that we need something like a w WH focus . Nuh ? Should be should be there , that , you know , this the whatever we get from the grad a: Wait , so do , or do not take other kinds of constructions into account ? grad d: Well , if you if you can , oh definitely do , grad a: OK . Right ? If i if if it 's not at all triggered by our thing , then it 's irrelevant , grad a: it seems like for instance , " where is X " , the fact that it might mean , " tell me how to get to X " , like Do y So , would you wanna say that those two are both , like Those are the two interpretations , right ? the the ones that are location or path . So , you could say that the s construction is a question asking about this location , and then you can additionally infer , if they 're asking about the location , it 's because they wanna go to that place , in which case , the you 're jumping a step step and saying , " oh , I know where it is grad d: grad a: but I also know how to get they wanna seem they seem to wanna get there so I 'm gonna tell them " . So there 's like structure grad e: Right , th this it 's not it 's not that this is sort of like semantically ambiguous between these two . grad e: It 's really about this but why would you care about this ? Well , it 's because you also want to know this , or something like that right ? grad a: So it 's like you infer the speaker intent , grad d: grad a: and then infer a plan , a larger plan from that , for which you have the additional information , grad e: Yeah . grad d: If you think about , focus on this question , how would you design that ? grad e: grad d: Is it do you feel confident about saying this is part of the language already to to detect those plans , and why would anyone care about location , if not , you know and so forth . grad d: Or do you actually , this is perfectly legitimate , and I I would not have any problems with erasing this and say , that 's all we can activate , based on the utterance out of context . grad a: like , grad d: And then the the the miracle that we get out the intention , Go - there , happens , based on what we know about that entity , about the user , about his various beliefs , goals , desires , blah - blah - blah . But this is the sort of thing , I I propose that we think about , grad a: OK . grad d: so that we actually end up with , nodes for the discourse and ontology so that we can put them into our Bayes - net , never change them , so we all there is is " where is X " , and , Eva can play around with the observed things , and we can run our better JavaBayes , and have it produce some output . And for the first time in th in in the world , we look at our output , and and see whether it it 's any good . grad d: Yeah , I , for me this is just a ba matter of curiosity , I wanna would like to look at , what this ad - hoc process of designing a belief - net would actually produce . And , maybe it also h enables you to think about certain things more specifically , come up with interesting questions , to which you can find interesting answers . grad d: So th this might be a nice opening paragraph for the paper as saying , " you know people look at kinds of at ambiguities " , and , in the literature there 's " bank " and whatever kinds of garden path phenomenon . A , A , these things are never really ambiguous in discourse , B , B , don't ever occur really in discourse , but normal statements that seem completely unambiguous , such as " where is the blah - blah " , actually are terribly complex , and completely ambiguous . grad d: And so , what every everybody else has been doing so far in in in you know , has been completely nonsensical , and can all go into the wastepaper bin , and the only grad e: That 's always a good way to begin . grad d: Nice overture , but , you know , just not really OK , I 'm eja exaggerating , but that might be , you know , saying " hey " , you know , some stuff is is actually complex , if you look at it in in in the vacuum grad e: And some stuff that 's as that 's absolutely straightforward in the vacuum , is actually terribly complex in reality . grad b: When do you need to start wizarding ? grad d: At four ten . grad d: Also we 're getting a a person who just got fired , from her job . Which is good news in the sense that if we want to continue , after the thir thir after July , we can . And , and that 's also maybe interesting for Keith and whoever , if you wanna get some more stuff into the data collection . grad d: Look at the results we 've gotten so far for the first , whatever , fifty some subjects ? grad a: Fifty ? You 've had fifty so far , or ? grad d: No , we 're approaching twenty now . grad d: But , until Fey is leaving , we surely will hit the some of the higher numbers . Is that around ? Like , cuz that 's pretty much getting posted or something right away when you get it ? grad d: . grad e: Or ? I guess it has to be transcribed , huh ? grad d: We have , eh found someone here who 's hand st hand transcribing the first twelve . And I can ch ch st e grad e: You know you know that I that I looked at the first the first one and got enough data to keep me going for , you know , probably most of July . grad d: But you can listen to a y y y You can listen to all of them from your Solaris box

The thesis proposal introduces the concept of "construal" and its role in drawing inferences in a probabilistic relational model. It was suggested to focus more on the understanding of metaphor and metonymy through construal. The professor recommended using a second-pass system to address the higher error probability in the first utterance, which improved performance with more data. The energy when two people speak simultaneously was discussed as a starting point for measuring discourse. Finding bugs has been crucial in improving the system over the years, and the professor mentioned the availability of IBM processors at the University of Washington. Additionally, the idea of using the system for language generation and incorporating it into the belief-net was proposed for future work.

Question: What were the attitudes of the Project Manager towards potential cost pressure, infra-red, teletext, and the expert view on system properties? Also, what was discussed by the group regarding the problem of dust in the control? Article: I don't know if if everybody knows me , so I'm Bart , marketing: My name's Frank . They'll record our actions and you'll have wires and microphones that will record your voice . there are also some microphones there but th you don't have to pay a lot of attention on those , because it will disappear when you don't attend to it . So is there a project documents folder ? There are some notes in it already I see , some documents . Well I don't know if you've noticed , but we're working for Real Reaction . We put fashion in electronics , we make it work , we put a lot of effort in design and in the product itself . marketing: project manager: maybe I can sit down , then I can take some notes or Let's see . project manager: I dunno it's not a lot of work , but just if you hear something you can write down , just write it down . No ? user interface: ? marketing: Can't say I paid much attention to it , project manager: I can see if it works this way . project manager: Real Remote is not really the company we're we are , but it's just a little fault . project manager: okay , what are we going to do ? our project aim is as you can see a new remote control . The Industrial Designer is going to work on the working design , components design and a bit of the look and feel design . the User Interface Designer is going to do the technical function design , user interface concept and user interface design . And the marketing expert is doing a little bit of user requirement specification , trend watching and project product ev evaluation . We are going to work with a lot of high-tech tools here , so it's ab it's handy if we have a little bit of training first . N these functions we don't have anything to do with , only undo , you can undo a little piece of drawing . It's really funny because you can draw with it on this page in the think it is form of . But all you will found that already because there are a lot of documents in it already , so it will be okay . And these are available on the smart boards as well , so if you have a document you wanna show , just open it from the folder . It's what I just said , it's save , print , move back or forward one page . marketing: project manager: the only thing we have to look after is that we use different colours , and different line width . Because if you hold it like this , the sensors will get blocked and then the drawing won't get good . 'Cause if you're going to draw like really fast then the pen won't hold up . user interface: project manager: These are not very much , but , see you have to do it real slow . project manager: Ah I was trying to draw a dolphin , user interface: project manager: but I think his nose has to be a little bit marketing: user interface: project manager: But it's close . I think that's it because if you wan ar are going to do it like this then it will be a stripe . project manager: Is your cat , or did you find him on the street ? industrial designer: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: Well , it's supposed to be a cat . So everybody knows how to work with the white board now ? So if you have any ideas or if you wanna draw anything on the white board , just ask marketing: Yeah . marketing: project manager: as you can see , we for our remote control , a selling price is twenty five Euros . that's the least we have to get from our remote controls , so we have to work together to reach our aims . we can do it international , so we have to focus on different kind of users , different kind of cultures , and different kind of trends as well . Our production cost can be maximal twelve and a half Euros , so that's also a point we have to keep in mind , that we won't make remote controls with small televisions inside , and stuff like that . Selling price twenty five , profit aims fifty million , but more important is the int international market we're trying to focus on . marketing: So just on a side note , why is it my laptop is only giving me a black screen ? user interface: ? project manager: maybe you have to say the magic word . But so does everybody has experiences with remote controls , and not the ordinary mote controls , but also a little bit different ones ? Like you can use for other ? marketing: user interface: . marketing: Well , we have a kind of broad T_V_ at home , and a D_V_D_ player , so we got like a lot of remote controls , one for the T_V_ , one for the video recorder , one for the D_V_D_ player . marketing: And I think it's it would be best to just make one remote control that can operate them all . And you can program I think eight different devices in it , and you can use it for your television , anything else . project manager: And it also operates on infra-red , so you have to got the little device inside your room , and then you can operate it from the third or th or second floor . marketing: Oh project manager: So that's pretty handy when you have a video recorder or D_V_D_ player downstairs and you've got a link to your T_V_ on the second floor . but only the I think that if you can put different kind of devices in one remote control , it makes it a lot easier as well . project manager: And other functions for a remote control ? Maybe we can make it user interface: user interface: you never no know , marketing: So user interface: I w project manager: Waterproof . But they'll also really drag up the production costs , so think we'll have to see about that too . project manager: No ? user interface: project manager: Okay , then I'll put the minutes from this meeting in the project folder , and then we can all work <doc-sep>It's not as interesting as it should be because we just had the meeting , marketing: project manager: but I'll show them . I've put a f a file in the project management folder , which says exactly what kind of decisions we should take . this because of our last model was very functional , but it people didn't like that , so our new mo model must be very good-looking . project manager: marketing: such as an L_C_D_ screen , speech acknowledgement , as we talked about earlier . marketing: So we have to have something like that , like we project manager: L_C_D_ and our our fronts . industrial designer: Easy to use ? project manager: Well , easy to use s is a bit contradictionary with the first marketing: Yeah ? industrial designer: I think that's your ta user interface: project manager: Functional is not an issue , and then easy to use . industrial designer: you can make a very complicated remote anyway , so ease of use It's not a very comp complicated device . But the most important thing is that it looks great and people say wow , that's real great great concept . project manager: user interface: marketing: The group we are targeting is very pleased with fruit and vegetables . industrial designer: marketing: So we we we might cons consider in front of in in that sort of way . project manager: Well the the handy thing about our fronts is that we can follow these trends e ev every year . And the materials ? I have heard several things , so I I'll have to change that on the way . project manager: Well maybe it it it is , industrial designer: We should move to something project manager: but it doesn't look strong . Y Hard plastic i is of course pretty pretty tough , but it doesn't have a really really tough look . it's generally the case that senior and wealthy people above forty five years old like , as you said , particularly the traditional materials as such as wood and materials such as that . industrial designer: And then we have young and dynamic people , which is of course our group , the people we aim at . Soft materials is of course agai again a bit a contradiction with our material choice of what you said , that it should be hard an and and and and strong looking . And if also a finding but not very ap applicable here , that sports and gaming devices such as discmans for jogging and that those kind of devices , gaming devices , should define the characteristics of the device . But since we don't have a really a sports or gaming device , so we don't really have to consider that . project manager: Sports , they're that are accessible on on your L_C_D_ window user interface: Soccer fronts . project manager: All the results ? industrial designer: Well I also have several examples of styles , marketing: We keep coming back to the fronts . industrial designer: It looks like Well you know you recognise the shapes , project manager: industrial designer: it's very primary colours , bright colours and round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: You also see this device , it's not very round and Fruity of course . industrial designer: So to give you an idea of marketing: Well it's got a strong look , this . Although it's plastic , it's it's grey to to to give it iron look . Well we have to make a project manager: Well you can make th th th that middle ring can you you can make another colour . I don't think that's very practical , project manager: No , it isn't . industrial designer: Because if we make it grey or or silvery looking , it it does make it a lot more does make it looking a lot more stronger . industrial designer: 'Cause if you look at this , it it doesn't look very very strong , marketing: Yeah but the industrial designer: becau But this is plastic , and and this too , but marketing: But it doesn't have to look strong . project manager: So , if you ti industrial designer: Well user interface: And it it doesn't have to be strong , also . project manager: Well marketing: Nah yeah the feel project manager: You you Maybe you should have some some coloured titanium or something . But solar energy is not very practical inside a house , because you don't have a have a lot of sun . marketing: industrial designer: And kinetic and and and dynamos are are not very practical , I think , for for a simple remote , marketing: industrial designer: that's a bit , oh , that's a bit That's a bit much . If you use the curved case , a curved case , double curved then you can't use titanium . project manager: What do you exactly mean with double curved ? industrial designer: Now this to give it a more modern look . project manager: Double curved ? industrial designer: I'll draw it , project manager: It it mean user interface: Yeah . marketing: industrial designer: And it makes it gives it a more u user friendly shape , than if you have . No otherwi no difficult scroll things or some things like that , because it makes more complex and expensive . And , as we agreed , we don't use a speaker or a sensor or speak speech controlled device . But we do use an L_C_D_ screen , so we we do have to consider of we have to use a more advanced chip , which is more complex and expensive . But It's worth the trouble I think , project manager: Well user interface: The buttons can be made of an a soft material . project manager: marketing: user interface: there are new developments in speech recognition systems , and they are already being used on coffee machines . user interface: it's not really speech recognition , it's more like you can talk to the chip , record the message and record an answer , and then once you talk to the remote , then he will a answer with the the prerecorded message that you left . So if I say hi Mike , and you have recorded hi Mike back , then you will get that . That's a bit user interface: But i it's just a marketing: But that that makes it cheap . marketing: It's it's just a an extra function , project manager: But it has no functionality for our remote at all . user interface: No marketing: No but user interface: but that's the gadget they want , or the gimmicks . user interface: Well , as I said earlier I think the L_C_D_ screen should be positioned at the lower end of the remote . project manager: user interface: the buttons for screen width and general settings and and that kind of stuff marketing: user interface: we can also do let that kind of functions be shown in the L_C_D_ screen , instead of extra buttons . project manager: So you put a menu in the L_C_D_ ? user interface: I think young people and yeah w well every user would like that . the buttons should be positioned positioned the same way as they are on a , well , conventional remote , I think . And I drew an example , industrial designer: user interface: but it did not work quite the well the way I wanted it to do . user interface: ? Well I have the I can draw it again , industrial designer: Can you draw it now ? user interface: and I know what I did wrong . marketing: How do you give input to the menu on the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: with the the up and down and and well buttons and the marketing: Alright . industrial designer: Those are the the cha the channel buttons of course ? user interface: Yeah just the numbers . industrial designer: And then below is the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: These these will be bigger in the the real design . user interface: This must be the Okay button used to interact with the L_C_D_ screen . user interface: And with this you can , yes , go to through the menus project manager: Yeah . user interface: and that can the video button should be an apart button , marketing: You've project manager: Yes . project manager: And what's the menu button ? user interface: it's marketing: And you you need a you need a speaker . user interface: ? marketing: For the user interface: This button can also be the Menu button , we use in the menus industrial designer: project manager: But how did How do you get out of the menu then ? Yeah . user interface: Well we we can add another button here , but project manager: Maybe I you could j just do an an exit with Okay . project manager: Yes , well but bec because when you push Menu you get in , industrial designer: Yeah ? Yeah ? project manager: and then you have to push Okay when you get to a choice . That's you you should have user interface: No no , we we we should add a extra Menu button industrial designer: No . project manager: Or you can put in the L_C_D_'s window an option Get Out . user interface: Ah once you have an extra Menu button , you don't need that that extra option . user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: marketing: Or don't user interface: if we decide to to implement that , maybe we should . industrial designer: Why would you put it then , and where is the recording the microphone ? user interface: Well they that could be anywhere . user interface: Well the speaker and the microphone , I think , are the same little hole thingy . industrial designer: but we could d do , but it's perhaps more expensive , the speaker on the back or something . user interface: Well i there are a all already being implemented in in coffee machines , so they won't be very expensive . And oh I think as you can see so , the L_C_D_ screen does look better at the lower end , or at the bottom . project manager: Yes ? user interface: You can But I did not like it very much , but marketing: user interface: Well these are quite obvious , very ugly remote . user interface: No , well th marketing: Nei They're n they're not trendy . user interface: this is for children but th industrial designer: Tho Yeah those marketing: It doesn't look strong . user interface: W but with the colours i it's a bit the way we're going to . industrial designer: But it it must not look too childish of course huh ? project manager: It's it's all too much buttons . I think we should , if it's possible , one with colours , but marketing: Nah th It's too expensive . user interface: I don't know project manager: Well , that's too expensive I think . project manager: It still has t marketing: You can make the the underside , you can make it more round , where the L_C_D_ is . user interface: Well marketing: I dunno if you know the No Nokia telephone , with the round thing at at the bottoms , s something like that . It's just a half round half half circle at And then it falls exactly over the hand , and that's very nice . All the the materials from the case , the electric cable that's all your your side of the story . now from the user interface , your package ? where No well , that's more like the buttons where they have to come . marketing: Materials are the most , most impor project manager: So as you said , fruity is in , well sells good . so if we go through them industrial designer: Copy paste this story into a into a Word document , and then put the answers after the subjects . industrial designer: Well we have to decide all these things ? user interface: Yeah but all these examples are of a coffee machine . project manager: Yeah well Why should I industrial designer: W we can override them ? marketing: project manager: Yeah . I suggest Well what do I suggest actually ? project manager: What what kind of properties should it have ? Well we just listened . user interface: Why don't we use titanium or or a hard , yeah , some kind of metal for the the the whole remote except the front . industrial designer: Yeah but the non-removable elements of the of the remote , so not the front , could be titanium , user interface: Yeah . user interface: And I don't know if you can make steel just any way you want it to . user interface: Well any colour industrial designer: According to my sources , it's it's totally possible to make an entire Titanium is available , and we can make an entire remote out of it , if we want . marketing: So , we're going for a titanium back and a plastic front ? project manager: I've user interface: . project manager: So material , hard plastic for the front ? industrial designer: Yeah , for the front and then titanium for the back . marketing: But then you have the problem , when you have a titanium back , you can't switch it . industrial designer: Well but marketing: You know ? industrial designer: The titan titanium isn't isn't v very Yeah , i it doesn't curves . Titanium is very No no no , but you know b Titanium is very basic colour , marketing: Yeah , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: and it doesn't really matter if we have a purple front on it or a orange front . industrial designer: And even if it does doesn't match , it will People like colours that don't match . industrial designer: Excuse me ? marketing: user interface: The electrical cable does industrial designer: project manager: It's from our coffee industrial designer: Yeah copper i just a ba basic user interface: No we don't use an electrical cable . industrial designer: Yeah in project manager: industrial designer: Yeah well inside the remote control we use a couple of project manager: Of course . project manager: Well marketing: project manager: all the all the inside work of our remote is standard work . user interface: and I will project manager: Well you can put that in into the shared folder , user interface: The shared folder . And what do we ? user interface: project manager: We thing that fruit and bright colours are industrial designer: Yeah the the the front w marketing: I think we can launch a couple of packages . marketing: Yeah but if you if you launch five different packages like iPod mini user interface: Yeah , right For the initiative launch . project manager: We should not give them the m the most lovely front when they buy it for the first time . user interface: Well you can you can give them s s three or so , industrial designer: The most boring fronts possible . industrial designer: Yeah but you you can have some basic colours , and then we come with the special patterns on them , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Red red , blue and green you give them or something , industrial designer: and and marketing: Yeah . this fruit and bright colours , yeah well I think we'll have to in the next half an hour , we'll have to s s specify the different types we want to launch , when we well introduce our remote . industrial designer: we still have to make We have still have to make the es the the real basic design . project manager: Well I'll have to , before I get another warning for five minutes , I'm going to get Where is my mouse ? where is my mouse ? industrial designer: marketing: Lost my mouse . industrial designer: How Yeah yeah , but how do I user interface: But bu we stay we stay here or something ? project manager: Yes well we'll get it to hear that I think . Th they're saying SMARTboard and that's it marketing: You can take the SMARTboard . And take it to our rooms and project manager: so you can you you are going to make a prototype , and y Well that's includes specifying the buttons etcetera . well you will go and do something else on the project user interface: industrial designer: Some Some non functional tasks . project manager: what are you going to do ? I don't know what product evaluation exactly means , but you'll get the specifications . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: No but project manager: How long do we still have ? industrial designer: Well , can we talk about something else ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah ? user interface: Will we use round buttons or square ones for the for the numbers ? industrial designer: Round I think . user interface: And these these s these buttons are more triangle-ish shaped project manager: Why does marketing: Curvy . industrial designer: But now I see the marketing: And this must be volume I think , project manager: Heh ? marketing: and this programme . project manager: We can't get user interface: Well most of the time up and down is programme and left and right are volume , I think . user interface: Yeah , it depends , but If you turn up the volume , you always see this thingy go up . industrial designer: Well we We we j we'll just give them an marketing: Yeah , that's right . industrial designer: project manager: So what are we going to do ? I as Project Manager ha don't have a clue . I think a logo , our company logo , and the slogan should be or could be project manager: Also the slogan ? On the industrial designer: Yeah , why not ? If there's enough space , you can put user interface: I I'd say only the logo . project manager: And well you c On the back , you can put h At the bottom , you can put the logo with the industrial designer: Right corner , or maybe here in the middle ? user interface: the text ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: yeah , at the back ? marketing: But the logo the logo shouldn't be exchangeable , when you get off the front . industrial designer: Yeah it it should be hard on the on the on the board , project manager: Yeah well marketing: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , user interface: Yeah , but then you must really yeah push it in or something . industrial designer: I l I like the idea of the of the slogan on the on the on the thing . user interface: industrial designer: But am I the only one , or user interface: Yeah , on the backside . industrial designer: No not on the front , user interface: On the back Yes , you you can , yeah , push that in , industrial designer: but on the backside . industrial designer: I think it's a nice idea , to make it more recognisable , that the next to the logo you have the slogan . project manager: Yes , slogan from company on the back with logo industrial designer: But we'll we'll take that with us into the design . industrial designer: Do you do you see a bit of the of the of the titanium ? O on the front ? project manager: Five minutes left . industrial designer: maybe if we make this this this lower part titanium , user interface: Yes we could industrial designer: the front is the the upper part , and the the bit with the with the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: of between we can do but But then you have two parts of front , two fronts that user interface: No , they have two fronts , marketing: No no no no . industrial designer: This enti entire bottom ? marketing: Else you you get problems with the L_C_D_ . user interface: No , you can you can just And then not a straight line but some sort of wave or something . industrial designer: it's marketing: Yeah , project manager: What ? industrial designer: Yeah yeah . industrial designer: That's a bit too much , but project manager: No that's nothing . project manager: Well I think we can , I just It's marketing: It's not relaxing . project manager: Yeah , o user interface: the fourth one is empty , isn't it ? marketing: project manager: Oh user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: You have to empty one huh ? project manager: Oh , we have a one . marketing: industrial designer: What are you doing chief ? project manager: So , you can draw a Yeah . user interface: Yeah I think we have to wait ? industrial designer: Yeah project manager: Well I'll get a I'll get the message . marketing: No user interface: industrial designer: But I don't Do we have to stay here , marketing: project manager: No , I think industrial designer: or I think we have to return first . Well we have b you have to have a bit of humour in the in the discussions too , marketing: You just have to push harder . industrial designer: project manager: We know you'll you'll you'll hate it but industrial designer: But th youth doesn't care about functio functionality , so marketing: No . project manager: Well , that's not bad , is it ? industrial designer: Well they marketing: No . project manager: So is it user interface: Yes , but you you get really close to the screen with your hand , industrial designer: user interface: and I don't think that's industrial designer: marketing: . user interface: industrial designer: Where's the good old chalk board with the the green board with the , how do you call it , chalk , yeah . industrial designer: Maybe if i if that thing is recalibrated , we can draw a thing quick , and then before it goes off again . Alright now we know what to do , so user interface: We'll stay here ? project manager: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Maybe w maybe we maybe w m Can we get email here ? project manager: No , get away <doc-sep>I just thought marketing: What was it , problem ? user interface: it didn't work anymore . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: Welcome to the conceptual design meeting industrial designer: marketing: project manager: for Real Reaction . , and at the end , I , when I finish it off I have some input from a master class I visited . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: The the the the the concepts on we where we must reach a decision on . , the first one is really about the the the the the total package with Well , we have decided to do a do the with a touch-screen that must be a case around it so it won't be as breakable . how how about the energy ? Can you can you reload it or just have batteries which you must exchange ? , the user interface concept . marketing: project manager: At the end , I will take notes and at the end of the minutes will be at the shared folder . marketing: industrial designer: what I did was I reviewed previously used items by two two different age groups . And I just watch what the differences are and I checked , well , what what d do we want , and how can we d aim a at the target group . Well what I found was that a senior project manager: industrial designer: senior citizens marketing: I'm sorry . industrial designer: They , well , they like more the they like the traditional materials , like wood and and such more . , they they they they like luxurious styles , where whereas the young and dynamic , they like a more soft materials . project manager: industrial designer: soft and fluffy and colourful and marketing: industrial designer: Well , shapes are curved and round . project manager: a soft material for a remote control ? industrial designer: No , I'll I'll get to that . industrial designer: But the two basic sources that I found were the best possible were the battery versus kinetic . I figured , well that's ki kinda high-tech , when when you have a remote control that well , when you pick it up , it has power . industrial designer: Well , we could also use a battery , that's a bit marketing: Yeah but when the power gets low , you have to shake it or something ? project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . Or you can go for both ? user interface: Oh , have you considered the option of using a solar panel ? industrial designer: Yeah , I actually did . industrial designer: and you you could you could use normal light , but you wouldn't get the same amount of energy that you would from a battery or something . industrial designer: for ultimate b n use of solar panels , you could actually use you could use solar panels , but you ha you'd have to implement them into the remote control , leaving you a bit less space for the interface . industrial designer: So so i i it it wo what's actually I I c just in f I've figured it out that well , seeing that you'll always be within the l distance of T_V_ , and the from T_V_ there comes a a a whole bunch of light . industrial designer: But , well you just take up all the space , and you wouldn't have the full amount of power actually used . project manager: But you prefer kinetic ? industrial designer: So I I prefer kinetic because it's well , the costs aren't that much higher , and , ju just a bit more high-tech than than a normal battery . industrial designer: if No , but d Well , you pick it up and you press buttons and y well , you project manager: And that's enough to to keep the energy level industrial designer: Yeah , well actually it is . industrial designer: And it it if it isn't , you just shake it a bit and and add add with power up again . industrial designer: But , what l what Jarek said , you could you could use a battery that you'd just keep it on the recharging whenever it moves . industrial designer: And so that well , user interface: industrial designer: f furthermore , you you we checked the cases . You ha I you sim you simply add a basic standard model it was kind of square and I figured that's a bit boring . , single curve , it's just a well , you know , it's just a nice curve . industrial designer: That gives you an whole new effec project manager: Dynamic dynamic look ? marketing: . industrial designer: Yeah , that gives you a younger and more high-tech look , I f I figured . marketing: But , are you going to draw it ? industrial designer: What ? user interface: Th th yeah . industrial designer: And then in three-D_ effect you could go user interface: marketing: project manager: industrial designer: So y you you just Yeah , this is a this bit difficulty in marketing: user interface: industrial designer: I didn't take a major in art . So But but you could have a whole new the back back the the the depth , you could you could just play around a bit with . industrial designer: but just a Well , furthermore , well , plastic versus rubber ? You We could choose what what's better , plastic or rubber . project manager: That's the material the younger people want , ain't it ? user interface: industrial designer: Yeah , yeah plastic is Plastic also has that cheap feeling to it , like plastic Your your I usually associate plastic with something that's cheap . Well , we discussed it in a previous meeting , so I figured I'll just leave it at the L_C_D_ . And chip set , well if we are going to use traditional buttons , we could go with a simple chip set . But if we decide to go on a n L_C_D_ screen , we would use an we have to use an a advanced chip set . If it isn't manageable budget-wise , we'd have to go over to to sim to simple buttons . So I bet a big company in Korea or Taiwan , like Samsung , can give us a big discount on the chips , so industrial designer: user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , probably , but But yeah , that's that's marketing: So That that shouldn't be a real issue , I think . I'll I'll I'll just add , I put a big summary here , so we could discuss it a bit . what i what are your ideas concerning battery versus kinetic ? marketing: user interface: I think you should use kinetic as a back-up . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah , well Fifty cent user interface: industrial designer: why doesn't And then we have single-curved versus double-curved . industrial designer: rubber ? user interface: isn't possible to make combination with kind of rubber is or bendable remotes where you've got a . industrial designer: You user interface: Or do you think it industrial designer: I figured it will be m rather than hard user interface: Rubber casing , yeah . industrial designer: because well if you use an d a touch-screen , it's just a casing around it . user interface: is it possible of is it necessary to make a touch-screen square ? It isn't , I think , yeah ? industrial designer: Well , m I don't know . user interface: We're We put fashion in electronics , industrial designer: That isn't user interface: so maybe we can marketing: ? Yeah okay , but if you have a square L_C_D_ screen , and you put a case around it that has like bulbs or that that covers part of the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: So so so what are the opinions ? rubber or plastic ? I I I prefer rubber . project manager: Yeah ? industrial designer: Yeah , you too ? user interface: That's good . user interface: Well , as long a as long as it's it's it's firm , and you don't it's not bendable or something , project manager: marketing: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , it it shouldn't it shouldn't flop over when you hold it in your hand project manager: Okay . industrial designer: No , that that that that's gonna The the chip set will hold it firm in place , marketing: user interface: Okay . industrial designer: and and and and a L_C_D_ screen also user interface: It might even bounce back when you drop it on the floor . marketing: industrial designer: tra traditional versus L_C_D_ , well I figured we we all set on that . Well I figure if we go for L_ L_C_D_ , we we should have the advanced . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: Okay Last week project manager: marketing: I went to Paris and Milan for some trend-watching . In Paris and Milan , we asked different people , differing in age and in income , the amount of money to spend , what they like in design and material nowadays . industrial designer: Well , the Teletubbies sh project manager: marketing: You wer you weren't in Paris ? Okay . Okay , our secondary audience , people above forty a forty years in age , they like the dark traditional colours . Yeah , materials like wood that project manager: Yeah , but wood is not a not a material you which you build a a remote control of . industrial designer: marketing: The that isn't wood anyway , but Okay ? But , that's our secondary audience . project manager: Would you prefer that you can choose the colour of your remote control or marketing: I'll I'll come to that in a second point . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: Here , think about removable covers , as seen in mobile telephon telephone market . industrial designer: marketing: Like the Nokia the removable covers , just put a red on it and go to the shop and buy a green one . So to come back to your question , I think and the people in Milan and Paris also think that the rubber should be pretty hard . The phones and the project manager: industrial designer: Well , I actually saw a phone that you could use as a remote , so Yeah . project manager: marketing: in my second sheet of personal preferences , we have to reconsider the speech function recognition . project manager: So that you say S_P_S_S_ , and it goes to marketing: Yeah , like something . marketing: You you can see that the market is just screaming for new technologies , like speak speech recognition and stuff . But , we have to keep the cost in in mind , but it user interface: Twelve fifty marketing: Yeah , it it can be very expensive . project manager: Yeah , but you don't use that th games when you watching television , I think . But you don't use games when you're d when you're making a telephone call . user interface: When your parents are watching some boring program , you can take the remote and do something else . Well , I do that , but Okay , and project manager: industrial designer: marketing: And third , I stick with it , the log-in functionality with the slogan , take parental control to a new dimension . Well that's a just simple PowerPoint mock-up I want to m make it more as dynamic for you so I'll draw there . So if you press system , that's marketing: user interface: Yeah , well m multiple system options can , maybe five or ten or or one , can fit in . Or maybe even a step further when you want to t have some other options that are not programmable with one horizontal button . And well , how do do we want to look at f Yeah Does a remote look Well , it's you've gotta hold it in one hand . So the middle like all remotes have to be in a little bit small , so you can put it in inside your hands . One thing you've gotta keep in mind , keep the remote clear of too much functions at the same time . project manager: user interface: know that if you are changing the menu structure here , And well , I still believe you should keep displaying the buttons . But if you're programming the colour of the T_V_ , do not display twenty other options that are possible . Do not have to select a screen first and then brightness and then colour and un-plus , and push plus twenty times . And when you get to n to to ten , ye and want to go back , well you have a problem . Just m most most modern T_V_s , you you press one zero , and it goes to ten . , what do you think about a back-and-forth come-up button ? project manager: user interface: Yeah , yeah w Yeah , I I find I must trying to tell it . marketing: But if you go from two to eight , and you want user interface: Or if you're watching Studio Sports on on seventeen , and your wife is watching some soap on two marketing: Yeah , and on two . user interface: And if you're using that button a lot of times , well of course the menu will still be displayed on the screen . But if you're really switching between two channels , you won't have time to d use the other options . project manager: I think we can discuss a little about the the three kind of revolutionary things Tim came with . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: industrial designer: project manager: There's n not too much decision on that one so I think that parental control is a good function to to put in the remote . marketing: Yeah but What I see How I see it is you put it on the the remote and then you have like a Windows log-on screen with parents , children . marketing: And w when you want to use the parents option , you have to user interface: It it has to be fast . You don't want to to go down and watch the news at eight o'clock and turn it on and wait twenty seconds for for the log-on screen and then remember your code and all kinds of settings . marketing: Yeah , ok project manager: No but I think most people find it much more important that their children don't watch sex or violence on the television , and wait ten or fifteen seconds longer , so they can finally watch it because of that . You c may use like when there's X_P_ , a simple log-on , d you just push one or two or three . user interface: And if you push parents , then marketing: That then then then you have to go to three-digit log-in . user interface: And if you w you push p children , you don't have to log in , but you can only watch children's channels or marketing: It automatically goes Yeah . Well industrial designer: I don't know if it's worth the time and effort we are going to spend on it . Because well it's a simple function , but it's gonna take a lot of resources and a lot of time to programming it . And I'm not sure if it's actually worth investing that much time and effort into it . project manager: Well I think that's a b there's a big market for it , industrial designer: I don't know what project manager: because you Yeah , you read many times in magazines same kind of stuff , and you heard on the news that that he Yeah , they believe that children are influenced by the television , industrial designer: marketing: yeah . But there are a lot of people will below forty who have children in young age who who want to not watch violent or user interface: Yeah . user interface: Just make through a remote as it is , but make an option to insert profiles , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause if my grandad would buy this remote , he wouldn't want to bother with all all the all the things to do . project manager: That's a that's a better idea ? marketing: Yeah , w It just has to be w when it's deliver out of the store , it has to be just simple and plain . marketing: But if you want to install it personally If I got kids , and I could choose between two remote controls . user interface: You're thinking about some channels they cannot see , but well , I I when I think , oh yeah , for the f for all the standard channels , and only for maybe after ten o'clock in the evening violent films and movies will come industrial designer: marketing: user interface: and maybe maybe some some timing will be needed instead of of channels , marketing: Yeah . user interface: because if you're watching , I don't know , you're in the at day , cartoons will come up m on maybe Friday night . But maybe there's some option that that t the kind of show view numbers are violent , and that they are blocked out . user interface: Yeah , the disadvantage vantage is that someone will has to send all the show-view numbers of the programs that they remotes and edit it all , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: But , well , if you want to I i i if we in incorporate the parental control , let's say we do , and and well whatever , cho child just goes up to the T_V_ and presses up for instance . user interface: Well , yeah you could say if parental control is only it it'll go from fourteen to sixteen with the page-up then , but industrial designer: But that Well , I'm not sure because for that to happen , you d you will have to receive a signal from the remote control , so it would , yeah , have to be constant constant signalling . industrial designer: What m what may be better is to incorporate an a separate device that that you can program with the remote control . So there's n that's there's besides the remote control , you'll have a separate project manager: I wouldn't put it in an optional device . industrial designer: Yeah ? project manager: If we do it , we we must do it in a kind of ways that like a profile , a parent profile , and a family profile , and otherwise . marketing: And and you know w when you install another device , children can still go up to the T_V_ , p pop open the thing and and and g project manager: Yeah . But industrial designer: But , only difference is the the people buying the remote control will now get the f added feature of parental control , project manager: industrial designer: and those people wouldn't necessary want it . And what do you guys think of the games in the voice recognition ? I personally think that that becomes too much . user interface: Yeah , well yeah , I project manager: It's more like it gets you to the functionality , but user interface: A mail too from management that it's very popular to use voice recon recognition . user interface: But I don't think when you're watching T_V_ , hearing loud noises from the T_V_ , someone screaming one , and you f the channel switches , Yeah . project manager: That would user interface: As long as it's isn't a primary feature of the remote , marketing: That that doesn't c that doesn't co user interface: but marketing: Yeah , that that doesn't cost a lot of extra resources , I think . So that will that that that must be in it , you think ? industrial designer: Yeah , that will be nice . And the parental control are user interface: Optional in project manager: optional ? marketing: Yeah , it's it's in it . But too ma I I think so , but user interface: But how we do it ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: Well , I think also it's a good idea , buts very difficult to incorporate . user interface: Is t some menu function , you choose parental control , and maybe four files will emerge from menu where put it on . , but will there Like the first idea from You can buy it without and with parental contr control ? Or are we going to put it in and just user interface: marketing: To put user interface: You can put on marketing: Yeah , to put it in always . And you can just s when you buy it , you can select personal preference , parental control on , and the password or something . I I figure if you had two different remotes , you could bo choose one with well a receiver in it . marketing: Yeah ? I thought they were just project manager: Yeah , you yo industrial designer: Yeah , you you have some T_V_s any marketing: a able to receive . user interface: Well , maybe you just have to restrict it to what programs , where the parent says , you cannot watch channel seven , nine , and ten , and you cannot watch all channels after ten o'clock . industrial designer: Well yeah , you could you could easily you could easily you could easily to the mote control . But , on the T_V_ user interface: Yeah ? marketing: at least my T_V_ , is a is a compartment which you can press . marketing: And there are buttons behind it which you can use , if you d if you don't if you don't have a industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , you could you could you could go like user interface: or make it ourselves very diffic industrial designer: that that would actually make things a lot more easy . industrial designer: I'm not sure what marketing thinks about it , but marketing: Or j Yeah . user interface: marketing: Ah project manager: marketing: I have to consult my legal advisor about it . So I think we have decided on the things that from Janus , the energy , the combination between battery and kinetic . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: The case will be double-curved and rubber , in a fr flashy fruity colour that with cover is removable . project manager: Yeah , but you have that in the user interface: What I was thinking about is just a menu structure , when you don't use it is simple . You use the user interface: And when you push system properties , entire list pops up with e ev all kind of f stuff you can program . industrial designer: Well yeah , you you could actually build in a function that you can program it yourself , for the more advanced users . Because you can you can like build in a back-forward button , and some po somebody would just want to watch two channels . project manager: We take it to the other meeting , okay ? I have a little w little chat to do marketing: Okay . project manager: I went to a master class and two things are are can come in handy for us . Knowledge engineering and the fact that that that the idea of knowledge , sharing and learning knowledge from other companies is like that . marketing: project manager: It's it's very hot at the moment , marketing: project manager: so it's it's mostly for the management expert to to look what other marketing: Marketing . marketing: Yeah , that's my function , to industrial designer: project manager: W user interface: marketing: Okay . project manager: What other companies had to also with the the the the marketing campaign when they put on a newer remote , just some Yeah . project manager: they're a ha they're at Yeah , benchmarking , that's the word I saw . marketing: project manager: I couldn't Okay , another thing is there were there there was a survey , and it came out that people like to buy things from a single large provider , instead of those who are partnering with us . So , we must we must bring it as if Real Reaction is is big company , a trustful company , and it has m marketing: How I know a marketing name for our product . project manager: I had a I had another idea to put the whole the whole idea of Real Reaction and a single brand and that kind of thing . marketing: - ? project manager: When you put on remote , you see a kind of a just like when you telephone , you see a little animation . user interface: marketing: Yeah , okay , but it has to be like a split second , because you have to put in a code also and project manager: The user interface: Yeah . But w th the idea from this thing is that we must present it as a as we are a a single large provider who will stand on our own . industrial designer: Well , if you if you have the l L_C_D_ screen , you can you can have a small logo i at the bottom . user interface: Yeah , I It's ok For f project manager: That's what they said in the master class . user interface: Oh , for the next meeting , right ? industrial designer: marketing: project manager: N , next meeting starts in thirty minutes . marketing: Who who gave you the master class ? project manager: The master class ? marketing: Ronald Betenberg ? project manager: Franz Mehler's . industrial designer: project manager: idea that you the the industrial development centre and user interface will work together on a prototype . user interface: industrial designer: So we're going to work together right now ? user interface: Stay here and project manager: Yeah , the well , dids this what I what I heard . project manager: But keep an eye on your laptops for a real industrial designer: Yeah , I'm not sure if we we Because I saw something about individual actions . project manager: Yeah , but th there's there's still the my instructions that you will work together <doc-sep>marketing: What's the agenda for this meeting ? project manager: The I will present here agenda with with with with slides to you . I've also made notes of the previous meeting and I was about to send them you but then I had to go to this meeting so you will get them too marketing: project manager: Then I hope you all have worked out some some some some presentations about about well you the the task given to you in the previous meeting . then I will bring in some some some new requirements I I got from the account manager , I try to work them out , they were quite abstract , and we can have maybe have com some discussion about it . project manager: and Well in this meeting we should really try to reach a decision about the target group and the functionality of the marketing: . industrial designer: You mean the social target group who we wants to target ? project manager: Yes well yes w who are we going to to well to sell this , marketing: . So And then we will close this meeting user interface: project manager: and after this meeting we'll we'll have a lunch . Maybe why Anna can you c do you have a presentations ? marketing: No , I don't . project manager: you want a table to to marketing: I c I can talk about it but I have no slides or anything . project manager: Yes yes maybe maybe you can can just talk about it or maybe you can use the whiteboard if necessary . Well I've just been presented with some research we've done in a small focus group so , a hundred people , just asked them about their remote control usage habits and what they want in a remote control . It's probably can't email this to you , I've just got a web page with some data on it . seventy five percent of users said they zap a lot , so they use their remote control quite frequently while they're watching television . Fifty percent of users say that they only use ten percent of the buttons , so they've got a remote control with a lot of functionality but really most of the time they only use a small part of that . project manager: Do you Do you have this information on the web page you said ? marketing: I have an a web page yes . So basically there's a breakdown of how much they use the different functions on a rem remote control . , channel selection is used a hundred and sixty eight times and then there's things like channel settings , audio settings , which are only used very infrequently . Teletext is used fourteen times in the hour , so it is used but not nearly as much as the channel selection is used . marketing: An interesting thing that this report has brought up is that fifty fifty percent of users report that the remote control gets lost a lot of the time in the room , so some way of some way of locating the remote control would be very useful to a lot of users . industrial designer: marketing: Thirty four percent said it takes too long to learn to use a remote control , they want something that's easier to use straight away , more intuitive perhaps . industrial designer: It's it's easy to learn or how do you say it's marketing: Thirty four percent said it took too much time to learn to use a new one . industrial designer: Not enough marketing: I don't know how we'd go about combating that . What do you mean there ? marketing: For R_S_I_ ? Respet Repetitive strain injury . project manager: But it's it's the opinion of the of the users huh ? marketing: Yeah . marketing: and then it's got a demographic breakdown on industrial designer: Maybe y y you cannot put this webpage online on the marketing: I should be able to actually , if I email it to you now . user interface: You can disconnect it there project manager: You can maybe just just user interface: no ? marketing: Oh no , yeah . industrial designer: Ah it's it okay it's a webpage on the C_ it's a file marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: So these are important numbers that Matthew and I need to take into account for our functional user interface: Oh yeah . It's probably easier if you put it on yours and then I'll just email it to you . industrial designer: Yeah these numbers have have to be have to be taken into account for the both yeah user interface and functional design . marketing: One thing it goes on to talk about , which is interesting , is the hang on a minute . industrial designer: Because if there are many numbers and we need to select to to constraint our design based on what is more important . industrial designer: Speech recognition in marketing: And who would pay more for that and whether people would find it useful . industrial designer: So that we don't Do we not need any button on the remote control marketing: Well potentially yeah , project manager: user interface: industrial designer: it would be all based on speech . project manager: Well it would it would be a solution for when your remote control is lost , marketing: project manager: when it has speech recognition then i then it doesn't matter where it is , my well it's we should be in range , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: I'm not sure whether we will we can make this for for twelve Euro fi and fifty cents . industrial designer: And we don't know where the state of the art of speech recognition is , maybe you know ? user interface: Oh . Well , it depends you know like there is it's a very small vocabulary that you want to do the operations like you want to say on , off , one , two , twenty three , project manager: . project manager: Yes , user interface: It's it's going to be li project manager: that that that that's . user interface: it's not going to be s so easy but u usually it's going to be more of an isolated case project manager: Do you have some more important facts user interface: but it's but I don't know with twenty fi marketing: project manager: or can we go to the next presentation ? industrial designer: Okay . So marketing: Well industrial designer: you had to to to summarise maybe the marketing: This is now talking about who would pay for speech recognition in a remote control , who would pay more for it , . Ninety percent of the fifteen to twenty five year old market said that they would pay more , it goes down from there , seventy six percent for twenty five to thirty five , thirty five percent for thirty five to forty five , twenty two percent for forty five to fifty five and then eight percent for fifty five to sixty five . marketing: Yeah , it really depends where we're gonna be targeting this product , user interface: project manager: . industrial designer: I thi You us marketing: It'll be in a different window , yep . marketing: Another thing it's talking about there is the L_C_D_ screen but there's no figures apparently on that . I okay project manager: Oh , industrial designer: I stay project manager: this is user interface: Now you can move I think yeah . user interface: It's a channel selection , a module , this and this function , marketing: Sorry ? Oh . I'd like first to give a quick a very simple introduction , how does it work , so that everybody knows even if you don't have a very technical background what is it because I think in the product it is important . industrial designer: So basically the basic function of a remote control is to send messages to another system that is fixed . industrial designer: And so an energy source feeds an integrated circuit , the chip , that can compose messages , usually through a infrared bit marketing: So my method for designing the yeah the work design yeah first the the main point is that I would wish to to make a really functional product . I would prefer to have very functional capabilities rather than fancy stuff that in fact is not used and doesn't work . industrial designer: So for that yeah as it's important to take into account the user requirements from the Marketing Expert Anna marketing: industrial designer: and w to to we should agree on what are the technical functions for this remote control and I show you the the working design . we want an on off button , it can be it's simple but it's it's important , and also the to both channels as well as other buttons that come after , marketing: . So the components I quickly draw here , is that in this part you have the remote control the the sender and on the other part the receiver so that's my method is will be to well my aim would be to design the and choose the chips and the infrared components to build the remote control marketing: This is very quick design , you stop me or interrupt me if you don't agree on it on that . industrial designer: And so what I have found and after a lot of work actually I I draw this I draw for you this schema marketing: Well . industrial designer: that can be maybe too technical for you but is very important for me marketing: You drew it a long time ago ? industrial designer: you know . industrial designer: And that's it so I won't go into details about that project manager: overwhelming . So project manager: are they cheap , or are they reliable ? What were your industrial designer: found and yeah th you have always a compromise with reliability and i if it's expensive , project manager: . industrial designer: but this one was not this one also really reliable so yeah that's it for the working design , I hope you get clearer view on what what a remote control is in terms of technical components project manager: Yes . industrial designer: but maybe yeah project manager: So user interface: But is it can you just buy it on the market and f plug it in or you want to ma industrial designer: No no no no we we will This is a preference but we can always change project manager: What I w what I was thinking about the the the schema about the sender and the receiver , can you can you get back to it ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , the receiver is of course already in the television and we are not able to change it . We will use infrared protocol using yeah infrared and and of course we need to adapt to that protocol that already exists project manager: industrial designer: and but we what we can do is adapting the the chips inside to the best chips and infrared bubbles . Of course yeah user interface: But you should be careful , industrial designer: in the chip you have it yeah . user interface: people are sometime becoming problem , like a guy has recently designed a remote which could switch off any other T_V_s , so basically through all the things . user interface: So maybe we should think of marketing: industrial designer: Of course yeah we should take that into account marketing: That's handy . project manager: Yeah yes marketing: So if the b T_V_ in the next apartment's really loud , you can just turn it off . industrial designer: in the user interface: Yeah so you can just go on the street and then switch off everyone's T_V_ and you can just walk away industrial designer: user interface: You don't have to be near the T_V_ at all . project manager: I I feel I I I think M Mael will will consider this th these things . So I'm going to talk a little bit about the technical function so wha what actually it's about what is the user going to do , I think my last presented what is going inside , marketing: user interface: so what's the user is going to see from the outside and how he is going to use it . So well the approach is that basically the idea is to send a message to the T_V_ set , as Mael has pointed , and it will be decoded by the T_V_ and usually we it is easier to have keys or buttons with which people can press and then changing a button will basically change the message which is being sent to the T_V_ and industrial designer: So p as Anna has said that this ki people are interested in things which are you don't need to k press the keys , people are can have a speech recognition but this is s a question which will we have to see later . user interface: But in the present scenario is that you have certain keys and you press it like your mobile phone , and it sends a message to the T_V_ . user interface: And so generally I don't have some figures sorry but so there are two kinds of remote if you popularly in the household , actually so you have a standard T_V_ remote where you have just a on , off button and play , volume change and keys for the number and more than one digit option . And if you see for example righ right now even the one on more than one digit option is for two digit channel which is like ninety nine , but tomorrow you might have one fifty channels you know to browse or two hundred channels to browse who knows , but . Then there is this is the standard one with without any fancy thing you know like i it doesn't have teletext option , it can without any , it's a very simple thing , which which you can vouch . And then you have what's the v video remote file which is like usually it has almost all the keys over there and , but it then it has other options like stop and then you play the movie or or fo fast forward the movie or something like that so i it has those marketing: And then well personal preferences I would basically think of having a kind of aim for the next generation thing where the we could have both the the f a T_V_ and the remote video remote control because some of the keys in the video's remote control and the T_V_ they could be integrated together so that we could aim for the like in the f coming future that type of applications with marketing: Okay . How would that work ? So you've got say maybe a V_C_R_ and a T_V_ which are separate , user interface: marketing: so you on my one at home I've got a V_C_R_ remote which then changes the channel on the V_C_R_ and doesn't do anything on the T_V_ , user interface: Yeah . marketing: so is it gonna be like a switch on the remote that says t use the T_V_ or use the V_C_R_ ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: or does it know which one you want to use ? user interface: actually you could you could think of having s a y you can have a key which could tell y it could go to the video thing marketing: user interface: but yo you you you still can't in that case when it you use that the function should be able to take up the V_C_R_ option marketing: user interface: and you could play it or You can also think about having like I in a few days you will be ha in in few ye coming years you might even have a system where you have a separate sitting setup box marketing: user interface: and you have something like you do you do you suppose you are not able to watch some programme and actually it downloading all the time for you marketing: user interface: and you can just you know when you come back you could just switch on that thing and watch a program . user interface: In that case you want to browse faster , browse slow , you want to have those kind of functionalities . user interface: It's the next generation thing , project manager: yes , user interface: but it is going to come in couple of years . project manager: but I think it's i i it's already there , user interface: It's goi project manager: the hard disk recorders I I've seen them in the shop . user interface: it's going to record your things and you and you you need basically the functionalities what you need in both video as well as in the standard T_V_ thing . That's , user interface: No no we are not making a universal remote , marketing: yeah . user interface: we are just looking at giving a scenario , I have a T_V_ and tomorrow I am going to have set up box marketing: . user interface: which is going to sit there and it's going to do that job for me . Because y project manager: W w w w we need to decide on on on on in how far we go to in this . project manager: Mean , you can go pretty far I f I think with with with functions and possible future p prospects marketing: . So we can always discuss about it for example the presently the video market actually this demand , video over-demand or what we call it as , it's presently booming up actually industrial designer: user interface: so it i like people are providing like things like movies , you can select actually so you want to watch a movie and your p your provider gives a list of movies , and then you select those list . user interface: and then when you come you want to loo watch it on your T_V_ . industrial designer: Or even you don't need to download it , it's streamed online yeah . user interface: Yeah it can be streamed online for you and you can say what time I want to watch the movie marketing: . project manager: I have received some some some some well points of of thinking over of my account manager and I would like to share them with you . project manager: first thing is teletext is a well known feature of televisions marketing: Do we include it , and do we give it a prominent prominent place on on on the on well huh on the remote mot control itself . project manager: as a in any case it's it's not used , well very much , but it's it is still used . project manager: further yes we must think , do we stay to to television only , the television as we as we all know it with with broadcasting signals and you can't go back huh , or do we go further as Matthew indicated by supporting recording devices ? user interface: marketing: So D_V_D_s and V_C_R_s ? project manager: indeed indeed . , furthermore , w we need really need to interest y younger customers and then with younger customers people below the age of forty , marketing: project manager: So industrial designer: So project manager: that's to that's there's a market but they will grow older older marketing: project manager: and you'll al always need to have the the future with younger people . project manager: therefore , younger people like trendy trendy designs , so that's w we should make our our our R_C_ as trendy as possible but it should also be have a reliable image , so when it looks too too spacey or too fancy people will think well does it work at all . user interface: Yeah it's well you you can follow the ideas how you want to keep the keys , you know right now if you take it you have like zero , one , two , three like a keys separately , marketing: user interface: but suppose if you take the the present trend of mobile phones there are like big thick keys marketing: . user interface: you press on the top , it takes one number , you press on the bottom it takes another number , and basically so the space covered so that you don't see two separate keys there actually industrial designer: But I think taking the idea of getting inspiration from mobile phones is interesting , especially if we're going after a younger market , user interface: Yeah so . Yes yes marketing: that's the the the the new and the funky things , project manager: mo industrial designer: Because they are already used to that , you know , product . marketing: that's , project manager: Yes it's recognisable industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: yeah , there's lot there's lots of pretty mobile phones , not too many pretty remote controls . So , for example you have presently keys like one , two , three like this , actually , and four five six like that and you can have keys like this in form like keys like that project manager: Mael can you hand me over this ? industrial designer: Yes . How much longer have we got for the meeting by the way ? project manager: well marketing: 'Cause we haven't talked about demographic at all project manager: I think fi five min user interface: Forty minutes ? marketing: and it's a very important issue . too sorry , so we basically don't change the original order of them industrial designer: user interface: but then the keys are more spacious , marketing: user interface: they don't look so there there is a very sligh thing , so if you press on the top it takes the one , it takes the three , four , sorry four here five and six , marketing: . user interface: so the keys can be it looks you know not very much cluttered but it looks nice industrial designer: user interface: but you can have a lot of options t if you press on the to project manager: Okay . industrial designer: marketing: basically we're trying to get people to buy a remote control user interface: Yeah . marketing: wouldn't they already have a remote control with their television when they buy one ? user interface: project manager: Of course they have already one . marketing: 'cause it's only a low market , it's a cheap-end remote control , we can't beat modern functionality , we might we'll be able to beat them on th the look of it , th the design of it but that's not a big seller , if they're not just going to buy a new remote control just 'cause it looks pretty , they have to actually need it as well . I well I think many people said in your in in your research the appearance of the R_C_ is is important when they are buying one marketing: . I've got friends who've got so many things they need a universal remote , otherwise they're using five different remotes for their all their things . marketing: In that case they wouldn't buy our product , because it doesn't give them what they need in terms of functionality . project manager: So your you think we should go for a more u universal high-performance marketing: Well , we can't , with the price range . project manager: What do What do you think about What componen industrial designer: Yeah we have yeah twelve point five Euros per per R_ s R_C_ marketing: . industrial designer: and I think with this now you know that chips are very cheaps marketing: If we're getting into universal remote territory , we're getting to L_C_D_ screens and things like that industrial designer: that's marketing: which would drive the cost up a lot . industrial designer: Ye project manager: Is the L_C_D_ screen marketing: For universal remotes industrial designer: I don't think L_C_D_ is not necessary well , th for long term . project manager: I think thi this could be this could be a market because universal remote controls tend to be quite expensive . marketing: And quite complicated to use , project manager: S so we can try to go in between , marketing: yes . project manager: but but still but still people have the idea this is more functional than a normal R_C_ industrial designer: Universal . project manager: marketing: But if we're going for the say fifteen to twenty five age group then not many of them would actually own T_V_s to use a remote control on . project manager: yes but w we're targeting I think on more on the on the twenty to forty group . Who just have or already have a job and have the money but may not want to spend that much money on a on a universal universal control . Are we gonna be at the very bottom of the price range , or are we kind of middle to bottom ? I don't know . project manager: I think when we think it over I thi I think we are trying to offer the a kind of universal control for for less money . project manager: So d Do you agree ? user interface: Well Well I it's fine with me like the price as long as it is not too expensive . industrial designer: Yeah user interface: and it d Our provin industrial designer: because we have to take into account that we are gonna b we are gonna sell four aro around four million so when we speak about these numbers the price of a chip is price of a chip is very cheap . industrial designer: So I'm okay for designing a ne less yeah a a kind of universal R_C_ yeah . And basically you can look to the standards of other industrial designer: Yeah that's needed , yeah . So I guess what I'd like from a universal remote is maybe choosing between three devices , being able to switch between them , there may be stereo , V_C_R_ and T_V_ . marketing: And just be able to s use them all from the same remote , but not at the same time . user interface: Yeah you can also browse through all the standards you know , where are the limit of standards for all of them and you can just browse through them . project manager: So given we are going for this universal type m maybe it is good when you try to find out which components you therefore need and y you will try to get more specific user interface content industrial designer: Yes . project manager: and maybe you can look on on what trends are in this in this type of market . user interface: and we'll I'm sure we'll up something good marketing: project manager: W yes , user interface: for the project manager: we we can have lunch now . project manager: So Then th th the next meeting will user interface: Yeah so we meet in well what are our project manager: after lunch you have we have thirty minutes of work and then we have the next meeting

The Project Manager acknowledged the potential cost implications of implementing infra-red technology and agreed to determine a specific cost before making a decision. Marketing expressed concerns about the battery status display and indicated a preference for its inclusion if feasible. To address potential issues with the LCD screen, Marketing suggested incorporating a small amount of titanium between the two fronts, as users often encounter dust and dirt when exchanging fronts. The group agreed to this suggestion, along with the addition of curved edges. The Project Manager initially mentioned teletext as a well-known feature of televisions but acknowledged its decreasing relevance due to the internet. Two options were proposed: stopping at the television phase or advancing to the recording device phase. The discussion then shifted to target customers and teletext-related issues. Marketing recommended creating an expert view and a simple view for user convenience. User Interface suggested incorporating system properties in the menu structure to display the entire list for programming. The Industrial Designer proposed adding a back-forward button for users who prefer fewer channels.

Question: Summarize the options discussed and the decision made regarding the location of the recording equipment. Article: grad a: And you should be able to see which one which one you 're on by , watching the little bars change . grad a: So , actually , if you guys wanna go ahead and read digits now , as long as you 've signed the consent form , that 's alright . grad e: Are we supposed to read digits at the same time ? grad a: No . We 're talking about doing all at the same time but I think cognitively that would be really difficult . grad a: So , when you 're reading the digit strings , the first thing to do is just say which transcript you 're on . You can see the transcript ? There 's two large number strings on the digits ? So you would just read that one . And the pause is just so the person transcribing it can tell where one line ends and the other begins . And I 'll give I 'll read the digit strings first , so can see how that goes . Well , why don't I go ahead and read digit strings and then we can go on from there . All of you look like you 're doing it reasonably correctly , but you want it about two thumb widths away from your mouth , and then , at the corner . And that 's so that you minimize breath sounds , so that when you 're breathing , you don't breathe into the mike . And the short form , you should read the consent form , but , the thing to notice is that we will give you an opportunity to edit a all the transcripts . So , if you say things and you don't want them to be released to the general public , which , these will be available at some point to anyone who wants them , you 'll be given an opportunity by email , to bleep out any portions you don't like . , should I Do you want me to talk at all about why we 're doing this and what this project is ? professor c: yeah . Oh grad e: Does Nancy know that we 're meeting in here ? grad b: I sent an email . So are the people going to be identified by name ? grad a: Well , what we 're gonna we 'll anonymize it in the transcript . So , then in terms of people worrying about , excising things from the transcript , it 's unlikely . Oh , I see , but the a but the but the grad a: Right , so if I said , " Oh , hi Jerry , how are you ? " , we 're not gonna go through and cancel out the " Jerry "s . grad a: so we will go through and , in the speaker ID tags there 'll be , you know , M - one O seven , M - one O eight . grad a: it w , I don't know a good way of doing it on the audio , and still have people who are doing discourse research be able to use the data . grad a: And so we don't wanna have to do aliases professor c: Right . grad a: So I think that it 's better just as a pro post - process to edit out every time you bash Microsoft . The idea is that you 'd be able to put a PDA at the table at an impromptu meeting , and record it , and then be able to do querying and retrieval later on , on the meeting . So that 's my particular interest , is a portable device to do m , information retrieval on meetings . And so what we wanted is a room that 's instrumented with both the table top microphones , and these are very high quality pressure zone mikes , as well as the close talking mikes . What the close talk ng talking mikes gives us is some ground truth , gives us , high quality audio , especially for people who aren't interested in the acoustic parts of this corpus . So , for people who are more interested in language , we didn't want to penalize them by having only the far field mikes available . So that 's why we 're recording in parallel with the close talking and the far field at the same time . And then , all these channels are recorded simultaneously and framed synchronously so that you can also do things like , beam - forming on all the microphones and do research like that . Our intention is to release this data to the public , probably through f through a body like the LDC . So because the general environment is so challenging , we decided to to do at least one set of digit strings to give ourselves something easier . And it 's exactly the same digit strings as in TI - digits , which is a common connected digits corpus . grad a: OK , so when the l last person comes in , just have them wear a wireless . So , the most important form is the consent form , so just be s be sure everyone signs that , if they consent . grad b: I 'm sure it 's pretty usual for meetings that people come late , grad a: Yeah . And , just give me a call , which , my number 's up there when your meeting is over . grad a: And I 'm going to leave the mike here but it 's n , but I 'm not gonna be on so don't have them use this one . So you guys who got email about this oh f , Friday or something about what we 're up to . grad e: What was the nature of the email ? professor c: Oh , this was about , inferring intentions from features in context , and the words , like " s go to see " , or " visit " , or some grad b: Wel - we I I I professor c: You didn't get it ? grad e: I don't think I did . We could pursue , if we thought it 's it 's worth it but , I think we we will agree on that , to come up with a with a sort of very , very first crude prototype , and do some implementation work , and do some some research , and some modeling . So the idea is if you want to go somewhere , and focus on that object down Oh , I can actually walk with this . Now , we found in our , data and from experiments , that there 's three things you can do . If you want to actually go up or into the tower , you have to go this way , and then through some buildings and up some stairs and so forth . If you actually want to see the tower , and that 's what actually most people want to do , is just have a good look of it , take a picture for the family , you have to go this way , and go up here . grad b: or so That 's ab er , i the street network of our geographic information system . It would always use the closest point to the object , and then the tourists would be faced , you know , in front of a wall , but it would do them absolutely no good . grad e: What 's it what 's it made out of ? grad b: r red limestone . Okay , I This , These intentions , we w w we could , if we want to , call it the the Vista mode , where we just want to eh s get the overview or look at it , the Enter mode , and the , well , Tango mode . So But sometimes the the Tango mode is really relevant in the in the sense that , if you want to , If you don't have the intention of entering your building , but you know that something is really close to it , and you just want to approach it , or get to that building . Consider , for example , the Post Office in Chicago , a building so large that it has its own zip code . So , I 've looked , through twenty some , I didn't look through all the data . , and there there 's , a lot more different ways in people , the ways people phrase how to g get if they want to get to a certain place . Maybe I should go back a couple of steps and go through the professor c: No , OK come in , sit down . grad b: Is I I think grad e: No , that one 's already on , I thought he said . , people , when they w when they want to go to a building , sometimes they just want to look at it . I I gave an example where the point where you end up if you want to look at it is completely different from where if you want to enter it . So , this is sort of how people may , may phrase those requests to a a a mock - up system at least that 's the way they did it . And we get tons of of these " how do I get to " , " I want to go to " , but also , " give me directions to " , and " I would like to see " . And , what we can sort of do , if we look closer a closer at the the data That was the wrong one . This is of course a crucial factor , " what type of object is it ? " So , some buildings you just don't want to take pictures of . Sometimes I found in the , looking at the data , in a superficial way , I found some s sort of modifiers that that m may also give us a hint , " I 'm trying to get to " Nuh ? " I need to get to " . Sort of hints to the fact that you 're not really sightseeing and and just f there for pleasure and so forth and so on . That whatever it is you 're doing at the moment may also inter influence the interpretation of of a phrase . What we do know , is that the parser we use in the SmartKom system will never differentiate between any of these . So it 's it 's it 's way too crude to d capture those differences in intentions . So , I thought , " Mmm ! Maybe for a deep understanding task , that 's a nice sort of playground or first little thing . " Where we can start it and n sort of look " OK , we need , we gonna get those M - three - L structures . We may need additional part of speech , or maybe just some information on the verb , and modifiers , auxiliaries . And I will try to to sort of come up with a list of factors that we need to get out of there , and maybe we want to get a g switch for the context . So this is not something which we can actually monitor , now , but just is something we can set . And then you can all imagine sort of a a constrained satisfaction program , depending on on what , comes out . We want to have an a structure resulting if we feed it through a belief - net or or something along those lines . We 'd get an inferred intention , we we produce a structure that differentiates between the Vista , the Enter , and the , Tango mode . So we think it 's a well - formed , starter task for this , deeper understanding in the tourist domain . grad f: So , where exactly is the , deeper understanding being done ? Like , s is it before the Bayes - net ? Is it , professor c: Well , it 's the it 's it 's always all of it . But it 's deep enough that you can distinguish between these th three quite different kinds of , going to see some tourist thing . And , so that 's that 's the quote " deep " that we 're trying to get at . And , Robert 's point is that the current front - end doesn't give you any way to Not only doesn't it do it , but it also doesn't give you enough information to do it . It isn't like , if you just took what the front - end gives you , and used some clever inference algorithm on it , you would be able to figure out which of these is going on . So , and this is Bu - I in general it 's gonna be true of any kind of deep understanding , there 's gonna be contextual things , there 're gonna be linguistic things , there 're gonna be discourse things , and they gotta be combined . And , my idea on how to combine them is with a belief - net , although it may turn out that t some totally different thing is gonna work better . , the idea would be that you , take your You 're editing your slide ? grad b: Yeah . So the thing is , i , d naively speaking , you 've you 've got a for this little task , a belief - net , which is going to have as output , the conditional pr probability of one of three things , that the person wants to , to View it , to Enter it , or to Tango with it . And , then the question is there are two questions is , one , where do you get this i information from , and two , what 's the structure of the belief - net ? So what are the conditional probabilities of this , that , and the other , given these things ? And you probably need intermediate nodes . So it may well be that , for example , that , knowing whether Oh , another thing you want is some information abou I think , about the time of day . And , if things are obviously closed , then , you grad b: People won't want to enter it . And , if it 's not obvious , you may want to actually , point out to people that it 's closed you know , what they 're g going to is closed and they don't have the option of entering it . grad b: s b professor c: So another thing that can come up , and will come up as soon as you get serious about this is , that another option of course is to have a more of a dialogue . So one thing you could do is build a little system that , said , " whenever you got a question like that I 've got one of three answers . grad b: But maybe that 's a false state of the system , that it 's too close to call . You want the you want the ability to a You want the ability to ask , but what you don't wanna do is onl build a system that always asks every time , and i That 's not getting at the scientific problem , grad b: professor c: and it 's In general you 're you know , it 's gonna be much more complex than that . , I think also the the the deep understanding part of it is is going to be in there to the extent that we , want it in terms of our modeling . We can start , you know , basic from human beings , model that , its motions , going , walking , seeing , we can mem model all of that and then compose whatever inferences o we make out of these really conceptual primitives . S so so the way that might come up , if you wanna Suppose you wanted to do that , you might say , " , as an intermediate step in your belief - net , is there a Source - Path - Goal schema involved ? " OK ? And if so , is there a focus on the goal ? Or is there a focus on the path ? or something . And that could be , one of the conditiona you know , th the In some piece of the belief - net , that could be the the appropriate thing to enter . grad f: So , where would we extract that information from ? From the M - three - L ? professor c: No . See , the M - three - L is not gonna give th What he was saying is , the M - three - L does not have any of that . grad e: The M - three - L is the old SmartKom output ? professor c: Right . professor c: So we have th w we we we have to have a better w way of referring to grad b: The parser output ? professor c: grad b: " Analyzed speech " I think it 's what they call it , professor c: Yeah . grad b: o th No , actually , intention lattices is what we 're gonna get . professor c: Is - i but they c they call it intention lattice , but tha grad b: In - in a intention lattice k Hypothesis . So , th they 're gonna give us some cr or We can assume that y you get this crude information . And they don't give you the kind of object , they don't give you any discourse history , if you want to keep that you have to keep it somewhere else . grad e: So , if someone says , " I wanna touch the side of the Powder - Tower " , that would basically , we need to pop up Tango mode and the and the directions ? professor c: If i if Yeah , if it got as simple as that , yeah . But that doesn't necessarily But we 'd have to infer a Source - Path - Goal to some degree for touching the side , right ? grad b: Well , th the there is a p a point there if I understand you . " Where is the city hall ? " And this do they don't wanna sh see it on a map , or they don't wanna know it 's five hundred yards away from you , or that it 's to the your north . Where is that damn thing ? grad e: And the parser would output grad b: Well , that 's a a question mark . sh A lot of parsers , just , That 's way beyond their scope , is of interpreting that . You know ? But , still outcome w the outcome will be some form of structure , with the town hall and maybe saying it 's a WH focus on the town hall . grad e: I 'm just trying to figure out what the SmartKom system would output , depending on these things . grad b: it will probably tell you how far away it is , at least that 's That 's even what Deep Map does . Because i we can not differentiate , at the moment , between , you know , the intention of wanting to go there or the intention of just know wanting to know where where it is . grad d: People no might not be able to infer that either , right ? Like the fact Like , I could imagine if someone came up to me and asked , " Where 's the city hall ? " , I might say , g ar " Are you trying to get there ? " Because how I describe , t its location , p probably depend on whether I think I should give them , you know , directions now , or say , you know , whatever , " It 's half a mile away " or something like that . grad b: because where people ask you , " Where is New York ? " , you will tell them it 's on the East Coast . grad b: Y y eh you won't tell them how to get there , ft you know , take that bus to the airport and blah - blah - blah . grad b: But if it 's the post office , you will tell them how to get there . professor c: But i Go go back to the the , th grad b: So I w this is " onto " is is knowledge about buildings , professor c: Yeah , that slide . grad b: their opening times , and then t coupled with time of day , this should You know . grad d: So that context was like , their presumed purpose context , i like business or travel , as well as the utterance context , like , " I 'm now standing at this place at this time " . professor c: Yeah , well I think we ought to d a As we have all along , d We we 've been distu distinguishing between situational context , which is what you have as context , and discourse context , grad b: And , so what we were talking about doing , a a as a first shot , is not doing any of the linguistics . So , the the the reason the belief - net is in blue , is the notion would be , this may be a bad dis bad idea , but the idea is to take as a first goal , see if we could actually build a belief - net that would make this three way distinction , in a plausible way , given these We have all these transcripts and we 're able to , by hand , extract the features to put in the belief - net . Saying , " Aha ! here 're the things which , if you get them out of out of the language and discourse , and put them into the belief - net , it would tell you which of these three , intentions is most likely . " And if to actually do that , build it , you know , run it y y run it on the data where you hand - transcribe the parameters . th th i i if you can't do this task , grad b: We need a different , engine . Well it i I if it if it 's the belief - nets , we we 'll switch to you know , logic or some terrible thing , but I don't think that 's gonna be the case . I think that , if we can get the information , a belief - net is a perfectly good way of doing the inferential combination of it . The real issue is , do what are the factors involved in determining this ? And I don't know . grad d: I missed the beginning , but , I guess could you back to the slide , the previous one ? So , is it that it 's , These are all factors that , a These are the ones that you said that we are going to ignore now ? or that we want to take into account ? You were saying n professor c: Take them into account . And and it 's clear from the data , like , sorta the correct answer in each case . professor c: Let 's go back to th Let 's go back to the the the slide of data . grad d: That 's that 's the thing I 'm curious ab grad b: grad d: Like do we know from the data wh which OK . But , since we are designing a a a an , compared to this , even bigger data collection effort , we will definitely take care to put it in there , grad d: grad b: in some shape , way , form over the other , grad d: grad b: to see whether we can , then , get sort of empirically validated data . grad b: from this , we can sometimes , you know an and that 's that but that isn't that what we need for a belief - net anyhow ? is sort of s sometimes when people want to just see it , they phrase it more like this ? But it doesn't exclude anybody from phrasing it totally differently , even if they still grad d: grad b: But then other factors may come into play that change the outcome of their belief - net . And I 'm sure even i the most , sort of , deliberate data collection experiment will never give you data that say , " Well , if it 's phrased like that , the intention is this . grad b: You know , because then , you grad d: u u , the only way you could get that is if you were to give th the x subjects a task . Right ? Where you have where your , current goal is to grad b: We Yeah ! That 's what we 're doing . grad d: grad b: But but we will still get the phrasing all over the place . So , I think you all know this , but we are going to actually use this little room grad d: professor c: and start recording subjects probably within a month or something . So , this is not any lo any of you guys ' worry , except that we may want to push that effort to get information we need . If it turns out that we need data of a certain sort , then the sort of data collection branch can be , asked to do that . And one of the reasons why we 're recording the meeting for these guys is cuz we want their help when we d we start doing , recording of subjects . No , you you will not have , and there it is , and , But you know , y y the , grad d: And I think the other concern that has come up before , too , is if it 's I don't know if this was collected what situation this data was collected in . Was it is it the one that you showed in your talk ? Like people grad b: No , no . So was this , like , someone actually mobile , like s using a device ? grad b: N no , no not i it was mobile but not not with a w a real wizard system . But , is it I guess I don't know The situation of of collecting th the data of , like Here you could imagine them being walking around the city . And then you have all sorts of other c situational context factors that would influence w how to interpret , like you said , the scope and things like that . grad d: If they 're doing it in a you know , " I 'm sitting here with a map and asking questions " , I I would imagine that the data would be really different . But It was never th th the goal of that data collection to to serve for sat for such a purpose . So that 's why for example the tasks were not differentiated by intentionality , grad d: I 'm sure we can produce some if we need it , that that will help us along those lines . So , to Finding out what , you know , situational con what the contextual factors of the situation really are , you know is an interesting s interesting thing . grad b: u u Sort of I 'm , at the moment , curious and I 'm I 'm s w want to approach it from the end where we can s sort of start with this toy system that we can play around with , grad d: grad b: so that we get a clearer notion of what input we need for that , grad d: And then we can start worrying about where to get this input , what what do we need , you know Ultimately once we are all experts in changing that parser , for example , maybe , there 's just a couple three things we need to do and then we get more whatever , part of speech and more construction - type - like stuff out of it . grad e: How exactly does the data collection work ? Do they have a map , and then you give them a scenario of some sort ? grad b: OK . You 're gonna be in here , and somebody And and you see , either th the three - D model , or , a QuickTime animation of standing u in a square in Heidelberg . So , just off a textbook , tourist guide , to familiarize , yourself with that sort of odd - sounding German street names , like Fischergasse and so forth . Part two is , you 're told that this huge new , wonderful computer system exists , that can y tell you everything you want to know , and it understands you completely . And so you 're gonna pick up that phone , dial a number , and you get a certain amount of tasks that you have to solve . First you have to know find out how to get to that place , maybe with the intention of buying stamps in there . Maybe So , the next task is to get to a certain place and take a picture for your grandchild . It crashes , And grad d: a At the third ? Right then ? grad b: After the third task . And then , a human operator comes on , and and exp apologizes that the system has crashed , but , you know , urges you to continue , you know ? now with a human operator . And so , you have basically the same tasks again , just with different objects , and you go through it again , and that was it . Oh , and one one little bit w And , the computer you are you are being told the computer system knows exactly where you are , via GPS . And so you have to do some s tell the person sort of where you are , depending on what you see there . , this is a a a a a bit that I d I don't think we Did we discuss that bit ? , I just sort of squeezed that in now . grad d: So , in the display you can Oh , you said that you cou you might have a display that shows , like , the grad b: Yeah . grad d: And so , as you grad b: n grad d: Oh , two - D . grad d: So as you move through it that 's - they just track it on the for themselves grad b: Yeah . So grad b: Yeah ? that would be an an an enormous technical effort , unless we would We can show it walks to , you know . grad b: And you see the label of the name So we get those names , pronunciation stuff , and so forth , and we can change that . So your tasks don't require you to , yo you 're told So when your task is , I don't know , " Go buy stamps " or something like that ? So , do you have to respond ? or does your , what are you ste what are you supposed to be telling the system ? Like , w what you 're doing now ? or grad b: Well , we 'll see what people do . grad d: There 's no OK , so it 's just like , " Let 's figure out what they would say under the circumstances " . grad b: in both cases it 's gonna be a human , in the computer , and in the operator case . grad b: And we will re there will be some dialogue , you know ? So , you first have to do this , and that , grad d: Yep . But , maybe the maybe what you 're suggesting Is what you 're suggesting that it might be too poor , the data , if we sort of limit it to this ping pong one t , task results in a question and then there 's an answer and that 's the end of the task ? You wanna m have it more more steps , sort of ? grad d: Yeah , I I don't know how much direction is given to the subject about what their interaction , th they 're unfamiliar w with interacting with the system . , we we have to have this discussion of th the experiment , and the data collection , and all that sorta stuff grad d: - huh . Sh - Is sh grad d: She started taking the class last year and then didn't , you know , didn't continue . So , anyway , she 's looking for some more part time work w while she 's waiting actually for graduate school . So we may have someone , to do this , and she 's got you know , some background in in all this stuff . That 's So , Nancy , we 'll have an At some point we 'll have another discussion on exactly wha t t you know , how that 's gonna go . professor c: And , Jane , but also , Liz have offered to help us do this , data collection and design and stuff . professor c: So , when we get to that we 'll have some people doing it that know what they 're doing . I guess the reason I was asking about the sort of the de the details of this kind of thing is that , it 's one thing to collect data for , I don't know , speech recognition or various other tasks that have pretty c clear correct answers , but with intention , obviously , as you point out , there 's a lot of di other factors and I 'm not really sure , how how e the question of how to make it a t appropriate toy version of that , it 's ju it 's just hard . So , obviously it 's a grad e: Yeah , actually I guess that was my question . Is the intention implicit in the scenario that 's given ? Like , do the grad d: It is , if they have these tasks that they 're supposed to grad e: Yeah , I just wasn't sure to what level of detail the task was . professor c: the The problem that I was tr gonna try to focus on today was , let 's suppose by magic you could collect dialogues in which , one way or the other , you were able to , figure out both the intention , and set the context , and know what language was used . The issue is , can we find a way to , basically , featurize it so that we get some discrete number of features so that , when we know the values to all those features , or as many as possible , we can w come up with the best estimate of which of the , in this case three little intentions , are most likely . grad d: w What are the t three intentions ? Is it to go there , to see it , and grad b: To come as close as possible to it . professor c: Th - the terminology we 're using is to grad d: Yeah , it 's @ @ . " Take a picture of it " you you might well want to be a really rather different place than entering it . professor c: And , for an object that 's at all big , sort of getting to the nearest part of it , could be quite different than either of those . professor c: Just sort of grad d: OK , so now I understand the referent of Tango mode . grad b: S To " Waltz " it ? grad d: Yeah , like , how close are you gonna be ? professor c: Well . So grad f: All these So , like , the question is how what features can like , do you wanna try to extract from , say , the parse or whatever ? professor c: Right . grad f: Like , the presence of a word or the presence of a certain , stem , or certain construction or whatever . Is there a construction , or the kind of object , or w , anything else that 's in the si It 's either in the in the s the discourse itself or in the context . So if it turns out that , whatever it is , you want to know whether the person 's , a tourist or not , OK ? that becomes a feature . But fo for the current problem , it would just be , " OK , if you can be sure that it 's a tourist , versus a businessman , versus a native , " or something , that would give you a lot of discriminatory power and then just have a little section in your belief - net that said , " pppt ! " Though sin f in the short run , you 'd set them , grad f: professor c: and see ho how it worked , and then in the longer run , you would figure out how you could derive them . So , how should What 's the , plan ? Like , how should we go about figuring out these professor c: OK . So , first of all is , do e either of you guys , you got a favorite belief - net that you 've , you know , played with ? JavaBayes or something ? grad f: Oh . OK ? So y so one of th one of the things we wanna do is actually , pick a package , doesn't matter which one , presumably one that 's got good interactive abilities , cuz a lot of what we 're gonna be d You know , we don't need the one that 'll solve massive , belief - nets quickly . Because i that 's A lot of what it 's gonna be , is , playing with this . So that if if we have all these cases OK ? So we make up cases that have these features , OK , and then you 'd like to be able to say , " OK , here 's a bunch of cases " There 're even ones tha that you can do learning OK ? So you have all their cases and and their results and you have a algorithms to go through and run around trying to set the the probabilities for you . , my guess is we aren't gonna have enough data that 's good enough to make the these data fitting ones worth it , but I don't know . OK , and you wanna it s You know , the standard things you want it stable , you want it yeah , @ @ . And , as soon as we have one , we can start trying to , make a first cut at what 's going on . OK ? We we have a we know what the outcomes are gonna be , and we have some some data that 's loose , we can use our own intuition , and see how hard it is , and , importantly , what intermediate nodes we think we need . So it if it turns out that just , thinking about the problem , you come up with things you really need to You know , this is the kind of thing that is , you know , an intermediate little piece in your belief - net . grad b: And it and it may serve as a platform for a person , maybe me , or whoever , who is interested in doing some linguistic analysis . , w we have the For - FrameNet group here , and we can see what they have found out about those concepts already , that are contained in the data , you know , to come up with a nice little set of features and , maybe even means of s , extracting them . And and that altogether could also be , become a nice paper that 's going to be published somewhere , if we sit down and write it . And When you said JavaBayes belief - net you were talking about ones that run on coffee ? or that are in the program language Java ? professor c: No , th It turns out that there is a , The new end of Java libraries . I have no idea whether that 's The obvious advantage of that is that you can then , relatively easily , get all the other Java packages for GUIs or whatever else you might want to do . professor c: So that i that 's I think why a lot of people doing research use that . But it may not be I have no idea whether that 's the best choice an and there 're plenty of people around , students in the department who , you know , live and breathe Bayes - nets . So , grad d: There 's the m tool kit that , Kevin Murphy has developed , professor c: Right . I don't know I don't know whether you guys have met Kevin yet or not , grad b: grad b: But i But since we all probably are pretty sure that , the professor c: Yeah . And the ontology that , the student is is constructing for me back in in EML is in OIL and that 's also in XML . And so that 's where a lot of knowledge about bakeries , about hotels , about castles and stuff is gonna come from . grad b: so , if it has that IO capability and if it 's a Java package , it will definitely be able We can couple . grad b: Who isn't , nuh ? professor c: So , in terms of of interchanging in and out of any module we build , It 'll be XML . And if you 're going off to queries to the ontology , for example , you 'll have to deal with its interface . But that 's that 's fine an and , all of these things have been built with much bigger projects than this in mind . It 's kind of blackboards and multi - wave blackboards and ways of interchanging and registering your a And so forth . if we can get the core of the thing to work , in a way that we 're comfortable with , then we ca we can get in and out of it with , XML , little descriptors . Yeah , I like , for example , the what you said about the getting input from from just files about where you h where you have the data , have specified the features and so forth . professor c: I don't I don't see grad b: That 's , of course , easy also to do with , you know , XML . grad b: So r professor c: That that , you know , feature value XML format is probably as good a way as any . So it 's als Yeah , I guess it 's also worth , while you 're poking around , poke around for XML packages that , do things you 'd like . grad f: Doesn't does SmartKom system have such packages ? grad b: Yeah . It 's also professor c: And the question is , d you c you you 'll have to l We 'll have to l That should be ay We should be able to look at that grad b: No , u u y the What I What sort of came to my mind i is was the notion of an idea that if if there are l nets that can actually lear try to set their own , probability factors based on on on on input professor c: Yeah . grad b: which is in file format , if we , get really w wild on this , we may actually want to use some some corpora that other people made and , for example , if if they are in in MATE , then we get X M L documents with discourse annotations , t you know , t from the discourse act down to the phonetic level . grad b: Michael has a project where you know , recognizing discourse acts and he does it all in MATE , and so they 're actually annotating data and data and data . So if we w if we think it 's worth it one of these days , not not with this first prototype but maybe with a second , and we have the possibility of of taking input that 's generated elsewhere and learn from that , that 'd be nice . professor c: It 'd be nice , but but I I I do I don't wanna count on it . , you can't you can't run your project based on the speculation that that the data will come , grad b: No , no , just for professor c: and you don't have to actually design the nets . So in terms of of the , the what the SmartKom gives us for M - three - L packages , it could be that they 're fine , or it could be eeh . professor c: it 's , It doesn't control what you do in you know , internally . grad b: grad e: What 's the time frame for this ? grad b: Two days ? Two , three days ? professor c: Huh ? Yeah bu w I 'd like that this y yeah , this week , to ha to n to have y guys , you know , pick the y you know , belief - net package grad b: No . professor c: and tell us what it is , and give us a pointer so we can play with it or something . professor c: And , then as soon as we have it , I think we should start trying to populate it for this problem . Make a first cut at , you know , what 's going on , and probably the ea easiest way to do that is some on - line way . , you can f figure out whether you wanna make it a web site or You know , how grad b: I I I , OK , I t Yeah . grad b: But , maybe it might be interesting if if the two of you can agree on who 's gonna be the speaker next Monday , to tell us something about the net you picked , and what it does , and how it does that . grad b: So that will be sort of the assignment for next week , is to to for slides and whatever net you picked and what it can do and and how far you 've gotten . Pppt ! professor c: Well , I 'd like to also , though , ha have a first cut at what the belief - net looks like . OK ? So , you know , here a here are grad e: So we 're supposed to @ @ about features and whatnot , professor c: Right . professor c: And , as I said , what I 'd like to do is , what would be really great is you bring it in If if if we could , in the meeting , say , you know , " Here 's the package , here 's the current one we have , " , you know , " What other ideas do you have ? " and then we can think about this idea of making up the data file . Of , you know , get a t a p tentative format for it , let 's say XML , that says , l you know , " These are the various scenarios we 've experienced . " We can just add to that and there 'll be this this file of them and when you think you 've got a better belief - net , You just run it against this , this data file . grad e: And what 's the relation to this with Changing the table so that the system works in English ? grad b: OK . I 've downloaded them both , and I started to unpack the Linux one , the NT one worked fine . and I started unta pack the Linux one , it told me that I can't really unpack it because it contains a future date . Now , Then it will be my job to get this whole thing running both on Swede and on this machine . And then Hopefully that hoping that my urgent message will now come through to Ralph and Tilman that it will send some more documentation along , we I control p Maybe that 's what I will do next Monday is show the state and show the system and show that . , what one hopes is that when we understand how the analyzer works , we can both worry about converting it to English and worry about how it could ex extract the parameters we need for the belief - net . So we 're gonna do belief - nets this week , and then professor c: Oh , yeah . n None of this is i n Neither of these projects has got a real tight time - line , in the sense that over the next month there 's a there 's a deliverable . If if you know , if we don't get any information for these guys f for several weeks then we aren't gonna sit around , you know , wasting time , trying to do the problem or guess what they You know , just pppt ! go on and do other things . grad b: Yeah , but but the This point is really I think very , very valid that ultimately we hope that that both will merge into a harmonious and , wonderful , state where we can not only do the bare necessities , IE , changing the table so it does exactly in English what it does in German , but also that we can sort of have the system where we can say , " OK , this is what it usually does , and now we add this little thing to it " , you know ? whatever , Johno 's and Bhaskara 's great belief - net , and we plug it in , and then for these certain tasks , and we know that navigational tasks are gonna be a core domain of the new system , it all all of a sudden it does much better . Nuh ? Because it can produce better answers , tell the person , as I s showed you on this map , n you know , produce either you know , a red line that goes to the Vista point or a red line that goes to the Tango point or red line that goes to the door , which would be great . So not only can you show that you know something sensible but ultimately , if you produce a system like this , it takes the person where it wants to go . So this was actually an actual problem that we encountered , which nobody have has because car navigation systems don't really care . grad b: If you go d If you wanna drive to the SAP in Waldorf , I 'm sure the same is true of Microsoft , it takes you to the the address , whatever , street number blah - blah - blah , you are miles away from the entrance . professor c: Probably not then , cuz y you probably can't drop the mail there anyway . So , you two , who 'll be working on this , li are are you gl will you be doing Well , are you supposed to just do it by thinking about the situation ? Can you use the sample data ? professor c: Of course they use the sample data . grad d: Is it like Yeah , ho is there more than Is there a lot s of sample data that is beyond what you what you have there ? grad b: There there 's more than I showed , but , I think this is sort of , in part my job to look at that and and to see whether there are features in there that can be extracted , grad d: Yeah . grad b: and to come up with some features that are not you know , empirically based on on a real experiment or on on on reality grad d: Right . grad b: but sort of on your intuition of you know , " Aha ! This is maybe a sign for that , grad d: We can end the meeting and call Adam , and then we wanna s look at some filthy pictures of Heidelberg . professor c: is that OK ? grad b: And that 's why , when it was hit by , a cannon ball , it exploded . I first thought it had something to do with the material that it w that 's why I asked <doc-sep>But all all I know is that it seems like every time I am up here after a meeting , and I start it , it works fine . And if I 'm up here and I start it and we 're all sitting here waiting to have a meeting , it gives me that error message and I have not yet sat down with been able to get that error message in a point where I can sit down and find out where it 's occurring in the code . professor d: So so the , the new procedural change that just got suggested , which I think is a good idea is that , we do the digit recordings at the end . And that way , if we 're recording somebody else 's meeting , and a number of the participants have to run off to some other meeting and don't have the time , then they can run off . It 'll mean we 'll get somewhat fewer , sets of digits , but , I think that way we 'll cut into people 's time , if someone 's on strict time , less . , so , let 's see , we were having a discussion the other day , maybe we should bring that up , about , the nature of the data that we are collecting . @ @ that , we should have a fair amount of data that is , collected for the same meeting , so that we can , I don't know . Wh - what what were some of the points again about that ? Is it phd f: well , OK , I 'll back up . phd f: at the previous at last week 's meeting , this meeting I was griping about wanting to get more data and I I talked about this with Jane and Adam , and was thinking of this mostly just so that we could do research on this data , since we 'll have a new this new student di does wanna work with us , phd a: Well , great . phd f: And he 's already funded part - time , so we 'll only be paying him for sort of for half of the normal part - time , phd a: What a deal . grad b: And what 's he interested in , specifically ? phd f: So he 's comes from a signal - processing background , but I liked him a lot cuz he 's very interested in higher level things , like language , and disfluencies and all kinds of eb maybe prosody , grad b: Anyway , I thought OK , maybe we should have enough data so that if he starts he 'd be starting in January , next semester that we 'd have , you know , enough data to work with . phd f: But , Jane and Adam brought up a lot of good points that just posting a note to Berkeley people to have them come down here has some problems in that you m you need to make sure that the speakers are who you want and that the meeting type is what you want , and so forth . So , I thought about that and I think it 's still possible , but I 'd rather try to get more regular meetings of types that we know about , and hear , then sort of a mish - mosh of a bunch of one one - time grad b: One offs ? phd f: Yeah , just because it would be very hard to process the data in all senses , both to get the , to figure out what type of meeting it is and to do any kind of higher level work on it , like well , I was talking to Morgan about things like summarization , or what 's this meeting about . it 's very different if you have a group that 's just giving a report on what they did that week , versus coming to a decision and so forth . Then I was , talking to Morgan about some new proposed work in this area , sort of a separate issue from what the student would be working on where I was thinking of doing some kind of summarization of meetings or trying to find cues in both the utterances and in the utterance patterns , like in numbers of overlaps and amount of speech , sort of raw cues from the interaction that can be measured from the signals and from the diff different microphones that point to sort of hot spots in the meeting , or things where stuff is going on that might be important for someone who didn't attend to listen to . And in that , regard , I thought we definitely w will need it 'd b it 'd be nice for us to have a bunch of data from a few different domains , or a few different kinds of meetings . So this this meeting is one of them , although I 'm not sure I can participate if I You know , I would feel very strange being part of a meeting that you were then analysing later for things like summarization . phd f: and then there are some others that menti that Morgan mentioned , like the front - end meeting and maybe a networking group meeting . phd f: But basically , for anything where you 're trying to get a summarization of some kind of meeting meaning out of the meeting , it would be too hard to have fifty different kinds of meetings where we didn't really have a good grasp on what does it mean to summarize , grad b: Yeah . phd f: but rather we should have different meetings by the same group but hopefully that have different summaries . And then we need a couple that of We don't wanna just have one group because that might be specific to that particular group , but @ @ three or four different kinds . So , in general , I was thinking more data but also data where we hold some parameters constant or fairly similar , grad b: phd f: like a meeting about of people doing a certain kind of work where at least half the participants each time are the same . grad b: professor d: Now , let l l let me just give you the other side to that cuz I ca because I I don't disagree with that , but I think there is a complimentary piece to it too . professor d: As many people here a a and talking about the kind of thing that you were just talking about it would have too few people from my point of view . So , I think I would also very much like us to have a fair amount of really random scattered meetings , of somebody coming down from campus , and and , phd c: professor d: sure , if we can get more from them , fine , postdoc e: professor d: but if we only get one or two from each group , that still could be useful acoustically just because we 'd have close and distant microphones with different people . postdoc e: Can I can I say about that that the the issues that I think Adam and I raised were more a matter of advertising so that you get more native speakers . Because I think if you just say an And in particular , my suggestion was to advertise to linguistics grad students because there you 'd have so people who 'd have proficiency enough in English that that , it would be useful for for purposes You know . postdoc e: But you know , I think I 've been I 've I I 've gathered data from undergrads at on campus and if you just post randomly to undergrads I think you 'd get such a mixed bag that it would be hard to know how much conversation you 'd have at all . And and the English you 'd have The language models would be really hard to build professor d: Well , you want to i postdoc e: because it would not really be it would be an interlanguage rather than than a professor d: Well , OK , first place , I I I don't think we 'd just want to have random people come down and talk to one another , I think there should be a meeting that has some goal and point cuz I I think that 's what we 're investigating , postdoc e: OK . phd f: It has to be a a pre - existing meeting , like a meeting that would otherwise happen anyway . professor d: So I was I was thinking more in terms of talking to professors , and and and , senior , d and , doctoral students who are leading projects and offering to them that they have their hold their meeting down here . The second point is I think that for some time now , going back through BeRP I think that we have had speakers that we 've worked with who had non - native accents and I th I think that postdoc e: Oh , oh . postdoc e: No , it 's more a matter of , proficiency , e e just simply fluency . postdoc e: I deal with people on on campus who I think sometimes people , undergraduates in computer science , have language skills that make , you know that their their fluency and writing skills are not so strong . professor d: You 're just talking about postdoc e: Well , e I just think , grad b: We all had the same thought . postdoc e: but you know , it 's like when you get into the graduate level , no problem . professor d: But grad b: Well , I think that , I think that the only thing we should say in the advertisement is that the meeting should be held in English . And and I think if it 's a pre - existing meeting and it 's held in English , I I think it 's probably OK if a few of the people don't have , g particularly good English skills . postdoc e: OK , now can I can I say the other aspect of this from my perspective which is that , there 's there 's this this issue , you have a corpus out there , it should be used for for multiple things cuz it 's so expensive to put together . postdoc e: And if people want to approach , i so I know e e You know this The idea of computational linguistics and probabilistic grammars and all may not be the focus of this group , professor d: - huh . postdoc e: but the idea of language models , which are fund you know generally speaking , you know , t t terms of like the amount of benefit per dollar spent or an hour invested in preparing the data , professor d: postdoc e: if you have a choice between people who are pr more proficient in , i more fluent , more more close to being academic English , then it would seem to me to be a good thing . I postdoc e: Because otherwise y you don't have the ability to have , so if if you have a bunch of idiolects that 's the worst possible case . If you have people who are using English as a as an interlanguage because they they don't , they can't speak in their native languages and but their interlanguage isn't really a match to any existing , language model , professor d: - huh . professor d: Well , that 's pretty much what you 're going to have in the networking group . But the thing is , I think that these people are of high enough level in their in their language proficiency that professor d: I see . postdoc e: I I 'm I 'm just thinking that we have to think at a at a higher level view , could we have a language model , a a grammar a grammar , basically , that , wo would be a a possibility . postdoc e: So y so if you wanted to bring in a model like Dan Jurafsky 's model , an and do some top - down stuff , it to help th the bottom - up and merge the things or whatever , it seems like , I don't see that there 's an argument professor d: postdoc e: I 'm I what I think is that why not have the corpus , since it 's so expensive to put together , useful for the widest range of of central corp things that people generally use corpora for and which are , you know , used in computational linguistics . professor d: OK , well , i i let 's let 's see what we can get . , it it I think that if we 're aiming at at , groups of graduate students and professors and so forth who are talking about things together , and it 's from the Berkeley campus , probably most of it will be OK , postdoc e: Yes , that 's fine . And my point in m in my note to Liz was I think that undergrads are an iff iffy population . grad b: Well , not to mention the fact that I would be hesitant certainly to take anyone under eighteen , probably even an anyone under twenty - one . professor d: Oh , you age - ist ! grad b: What 's that ? Well , age - ist . Well , Morgan , you were mentioning that Mari may not use the k equipment from IBM if they found something else , cuz there 's a professor d: They 're they 're yeah , they 're d they 're assessing whether they should do that or y do something else , hopefully over the next few weeks . phd f: Cuz , one remote possibility is that if we st if we inherited that equipment , if she weren't using it , could we set up a room in the linguistics department ? And and , there there may be a lot more or or in psych , or in comp wherever , in another building where we could , record people there . I think we 'd have a better chance grad b: I think we 'd need a real motivated partner to do that . But if there were such a it 's a remote possibility , then , you know , one of us could you know , go up there and record the meeting or something rather than bring all of them down here . phd f: So it 's just a just a thought if they end up not using the the hardware . professor d: Well , the other thing Yeah , the other thing that I was hoping to do in the first place was to turn it into some kind of portable thing so you could wheel it around . , and grad b: Well , I know that space is really scarce on at least in CS . phd f: But you may not need a separate room , you know , grad b: That 's true . phd f: the idea is , if they have a meeting room and they can guarantee that the equipment will be safe and so forth , and if one of us is up there once a week to record the meeting or something grad b: True . professor d: Well , maybe John would let us put it into the phonology lab or something . grad b: Yeah , I think it would be interesting because then we could regularly get another meeting . phd c: But I I I think you need , another portable thing a another portable equipment to to do , eh , more e easier the recording process , eh , out from ICSI . phd c: Eh , if you you want to to record , eh , a seminar or a class , eh , in the university , you you need It - it would be eh eh very difficult to to put , eh , a lot of , eh , head phones eh in different people when you have to to record only with , eh , this kind of , eh , d device . grad b: Yeah , but I think if we if we wanna just record with the tabletop microphones , that 's easy . grad b: Right ? That 's very easy , phd c: Ye - Yeah , yeah . professor d: Actually , that 's a int that raises an interesting point that came up in our discussion that 's maybe worth repeating . We realized that , when we were talking about this that , OK , there 's these different things that we want to do with it . So , it 's true that we wanna be selective in some ways , the way that you were speaking about with , not having an interlingua and , these other issues . But on the other hand , it 's not necessarily true that we need all of the corpus to satisfy all of it . So , a a as per the example that we wanna have a fair amount that 's done with a small n recorded with a small , typ number of types of meetings But we can also have another part that 's , just one or two meetings of each of a of a range of them and that 's OK too . , i We realized in discussion that the other thing is , what about this business of distant and close microphones ? , we really wanna have a substantial amount recorded this way , that 's why we did it . But what about For th for these issues of summarization , a lot of these higher level things you don't really need the distant microphone . phd f: Right , I c I think there 's grad b: And you don't really need the close microphone , you mean . phd f: Yea - yeah yeah , you actually don't really even need any fancy microphone . postdoc e: Which one did you mean ? professor d: You d You don't ne it doesn't you just need some microphone , somewhere . professor d: but phd f: use , but I think that any data that we spend a lot of effort to collect , professor d: Yeah . phd f: you know , each person who 's interested in , we have a cou we have a bunch of different , slants and perspectives on what it 's useful for , they need to be taking charge of making sure they 're getting enough of the kind of data that they want . phd f: And So in my case , I think there w there is enough data for some kinds of projects and not enough for others . phd f: And so I 'm looking and thinking , " Well I 'd be glad to walk over and record people and so forth if it 's to help th in my interest . phd f: And other people need to do that for themselves , h or at least discuss it so that we can find some optimal professor d: Right . professor d: But I think that I 'm raising that cuz I think it 's relevant exactly for this idea up there that if you think about , " Well , gee , we have this really complicated setup to do , " well maybe you don't . professor d: Maybe if if If really all you want is to have a a a recording that 's good enough to get a , a transcription from later , you just need to grab a tape recorder and go up and make a recording . professor d: we we could have a fairly We could just get a DAT machine and phd f: Well , I agree with Jane , though , on the other hand that phd c: Yeah . phd f: So that might be true , you may say for instance , summarization , or something that sounds very language oriented . You may say well , " Oh yeah , you just do that from transcripts of a radio show . phd f: But what you what I was thinking is long term what would be neat is to be able to pick up on Suppose you just had a distant microphone there and you really wanted to be able to determine this . phd f: So I do think that long term you should always try to satisfy the greatest number of of interests and have this parallel information , which is really what makes this corpus powerful . phd f: Otherwise , you know , lots of other sites can propose individual studies , so professor d: but I I think that the i We can't really underestimate the difficulty shouldn't really u underestimate the difficulty of getting a setup like this up . professor d: And so , it took quite a while to get that together and to say , " Oh , we 'll just do it up there , " phd f: OK . professor d: If you 're talking about something simple , where you throw away a lot of these dimensions , then you can do that right away . Talking about something that has all of these different facets that we have here , it won't happen quickly , it won't be easy , and there 's all sorts of issues about th you know keeping the equipment safe , or else hauling it around , and all sorts of o phd f: So then maybe we should try to bring people here . professor d: I think the first priority should be to pry to get try to get people to come here . phd f: that 's that 's OK , so professor d: We 're set up for it . phd f: Yeah , I And I think we can get people to come here , that But the issue is you definitely wanna make sure that the kind of group you 're getting is the right group so that you don't waste a lot of your time and the overhead in bringing people down . professor d: Yeah , they have to do their digits or they don't get they don't get their food . professor d: Yeah grad b: Should I pursue that ? phd f: Oh , definitely , yeah . grad b: So I 'm not sure whether they 'll still be so willing to volunteer , but I 'll send an email and ask . phd f: I 'd love to get people that are not linguists or engineers , cuz these are both weird grad b: Right . professor d: The the The oth the other h phd f: well , I know , I shouldn't say that . The o the o the other The other thing is , that we we talked about is give to them , burn an extra CD - ROM . professor d: and give them So if they want a basically and audio record of their phd f: Well , I thought that was I thought he meant , " Give them a music CD , " like they g Then he said a CD of the of their speech professor d: Oh . phd f: and I guess it depends of what kind of audience you 're talking to , but You know , I personally would not want a CD of my meeting , grad b: Mmm . Of the meeting ? phd f: but maybe yeah , maybe you 're professor d: If you 're having some planning meeting of some sort and you 'd like phd f: right . professor d: We 're saying , " Look , you know , you 're gonna get this . It 's actually p It 's probably gonna be pretty useless to you , grad b: Yep . professor d: but you 'll ge appreciate , you know , where it 's useful and where it 's useless , phd f: Right . professor d: and then , we 're gonna move this technology , so it 'll become useful . phd a: What if you could tell them that you 'll give them the the transcripts when they come back ? postdoc e: Alth phd f: But we might need a little more to incentivize them , that 's all . postdoc e: I hav I have to raise a little eensy - weensy concern about doing th giving them the CD immediately , because of these issues of , you know , this kind of stuff , where maybe You know ? professor d: Good point . professor d: So we can so we can postdoc e: We could burn it after it 's been cleared with the transcript stage . phd f: If It should be the same CD - ROM that we distribute publically , grad b: That 's a good point . phd f: right ? professor d: Although it 's phd f: Otherwise they 're not allowed to play it for anyone . postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right , say " Yeah , well , I got this CD , and , Your Honor , I " grad b: Yeah . So that was that topic , and then , I guess another topic would be where are we in the whole disk resources question for grad b: We are slowly slowly getting to the point where we have enough sp room to record meetings . So I did a bunch of archiving , and still doing a bunch of archiving , I I 'm in the midst of doing the P - files from , Broadcast News . phd c: Eleven ? grad b: And it 'll take another eleven to do the clone . phd a: Where did you copy it to ? grad b: Well , it 's Abbott . professor d: Sk - It 's copying from one place on Abbott to another place on Abbott ? grad b: Tape . phd a: Ah ! grad b: So I 'm archiving it , and then I 'm gonna delete the files . postdoc e: One thing The good news about that that is that once once it 's archived , it 's pretty quick to get back . professor d: Is it ? postdoc e: it it it The other direction is fast , but this direction is really slow . phd a: Generating a clone ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's a good point . phd a: Oh ! Hunh ! professor d: S postdoc e: Now , what will Is the plan to g to So stuff will be saved , it 's just that you 're relocating it ? , so we 're gonna get more disk space ? Or did I ? grad b: No , the the these are the P - files from Broadcast News , which are regeneratable regeneratable postdoc e: OK . grad b: And so they they were two gigabytes per file and we had six of them or something . professor d: Or maybe six ? grad b: The SUN , ha , takes more disks than the Andatico one did . The SUN rack takes Th - One took four and one took six , or maybe it was eight and twelve . professor d: How many How much phd a: Is there a difference in price or something ? grad b: Well , what happened is that we we bought all our racks and disks from Andatico for years , according to Dave , and Andatico got bought by another company and doubled their prices . I 've been looking at the , Aurora data and , first first look at it , there were basically three directories on there that could be moved . One was called Aurora , one was Spanish , which was Carmen 's Spanish stuff , and the other one was , SPINE . phd a: And so , I wrote to Dan and he was very concerned that the SPINE stuff was moving to a non - backed - up disk . So , I realized that well , probably not all of that should be moved , just the CD - ROM type data , the the static data . So I moved that , and then , I asked him to check out and see if it was OK . I told him he could delete it if he wanted to , I haven't checked today to see if he 's deleted it or not . And then Carmen 's stuff , I realized that when I had copied all of her stuff to XA , I had copied stuff there that was dynamic data . professor d: So , but , y you 're figuring you can record another five meetings or something with the space that you 're clearing up from the Broadcast News , but , we have some other disks , some of which you 're using for Aurora , but are we g do we have some other other space now ? grad b: Yep . So , so , we have space on the current disk right now , where Meeting Recorder is , and that 's probably enough for about four meetings . phd a: OK , I but the stuff I 'm moving from Aurora is on the DC disk that we grad b: I don't remember . Yeah , we were at a hundred percent and then we dropped down to eighty - six for reasons I don't understand . And then with Broadcast News , that 's five or six more meetings , so , you know , we have a couple weeks . , so , yeah , I think I think we 're OK , until we get the new disk . phd a: So should , One question I had for you was , we need we sh probably should move the Aurora an and all that other stuff off of the Meeting Recorder disk . Is there another backed - up disk that you know of that would ? grad b: We should put it onto the Broadcast News one . grad b: But , so we could ' jus just do that at the end of today , once the archive is complete , and I 've verified it . professor d: OK , @ @ So , then I guess th the last thing I 'd had on my my agenda was just to hear hear an update on what what Jose has been doing , phd c: - huh . professor d: so phd c: I have , eh , The result of my work during the last days . Eh , and the the last , eh , days , eh , I work , eh , in my house , eh , in a lot of ways and thinking , reading eh , different things about the the Meeting Recording project . phd c: But for me , eh is interesting because , eh , eh , here 's i is the demonstration of the overlap , eh , problem . phd c: It 's a real problem , a frequently problem , because you have overlapping zones eh , eh , eh , all the time . phd c: Eh , by a moment I have , eh , nnn , the , eh , n I I did a mark of all the overlapped zones in the meeting recording , with eh , a exact mark . Oh , you did that by hand ? phd c: Heh ? That 's eh , yet b b Yeah , by b b by hand by hand because , eh , eh " Why . " grad b: Can I see that ? Can I get a copy ? professor d: Oh . phd c: My my idea is to work phd a: Wow ! phd c: I I I do I don I don't @ @ I don't know , eh , if , eh , it will be possible because I I I haven't a lot eh , enough time to to to work . , only just eh , six months , as you know , but , eh , my idea is , eh , is very interesting to to work in in the line of , eh , automatic segmenter . phd c: Eh but eh , eh , in my opinion , we need eh , eh , a reference eh session to t to to evaluate the the the tool . And so are you planning to do that or have you done that already ? phd c: And No , no , with i grad b: Have you done that or are you planning to do that ? phd c: Sorry ? No , I I plan to do that . Darn ! phd c: I plan I plan , but eh , eh , the idea is the is the following . I I will I will eh , talk about eh , in the in the blackboard about the my ideas . phd c: Eh , eh This information eh , with eh , exactly time marks eh , for the overlapping zones eh overlapping zone , and eh , a speaker a a pure speech eh , eh , speaker zone . , eh zones eh of eh speech of eh , one speaker without any any eh , noise eh , any any acoustic event eh that eh , eh , w eh , is not eh , speech , real speech . And , I need t true eh , silence for that , because my my idea is to to study the nnn the the set of parameters eh , what , eh , are more m more discriminant to eh , classify . The idea is to eh to use eh , I 'm not sure to eh yet , but eh my idea is to use a a cluster eh algorithm or , nnn , a person strong in neural net algorithm to eh to eh study what is the , eh , the property of the different feat eh feature , eh , to classify eh speech and overlapping eh speech . phd c: And my idea is eh , it would be interesting to to have eh , a control set . And my control set eh , will be the eh , silence , silence without eh , any any noise . postdoc e: Which means that we 'd still You 'd hear the grad b: Yeah , fans . phd c: Eh , I eh , noise eh , eh claps eh , tape clips , eh , the difference eh , professor d: phd c: eh , eh , event eh , which , eh , eh , has , eh eh , a hard effect of distorti spectral distortion in the in the eh speech . grad b: So so you intend to hand - mark those and exclude them ? professor d: phd c: Yeah , I have mark in in in in that Not in all in all the the file , grad b: phd c: only eh , eh , nnn , mmm , I have eh , ehm I don't remind what is the the the the quantity , but eh , I I have marked enough speech on over and all the overlapping zones . I have , eh , two hundred and thirty , more or less , overlapping zones , and is similar to to this information , grad b: Whew ! phd c: because with the program , I cross the information of , of Jane with eh , my my segmentation by hand . phd c: And the the idea is , eh , I I will use , eh , I want My idea is , eh , to eh to classify . phd c: I I need eh , the exact eh , mark of the different , eh , eh , zones because I I want to put , eh , for eh , each frame a label indicating . I I I put , eh , eh , for each frame a label indicating what is th the type , what is the class , eh , which it belong . phd c: Eh , the class you will overlapping speech " overlapping " is a class , eh , " speech " @ @ the class that 's grad b: Nonspeech . phd a: These will be assigned by hand ? phd c: a I I I ha I h I I put the mark by hand , phd a: Based on the - huh . phd c: because , eh , my idea is , eh , in in the first session , I need , eh , I I need , eh , to be sure that the information eh , that , eh , I I will cluster , is is right . Because , eh , eh , if not , eh , I will I will , eh , return to the speech file to analyze eh , what is the problems , grad b: Well , training , and validation . And I I 'd prefer I would prefer , the to to have , eh , this labeled automatically , but , eh , eh , fro th I need truth . So , the difference between the top two , i So so I start at the bottom , so " silence " is clear . By " speech " do you mean speech by one sp by one person only ? phd c: Speech Yeah . postdoc e: So this is un OK , and then and then the top includes people speaking at the same time , or or a speaker and a breath overlapping , someone else 's breath , or or clicking , overlapping with speech So , that that 's all those possibilities in the top one . phd c: Eh , in the first moment , because , eh , eh , I I have information , eh , of the overlapping zones , eh , information about if the , eh , overlapping zone is , eh , from a speech , clear speech , from a one to a two eh speaker , or three speaker , or is is the zone where the breath of a speaker eh , overlaps eh , onto eh , a speech , another , especially speech . postdoc e: So it 's basi it 's basically speech wi som with with something overlapping , which could be speech but doesn't need to be . phd c: No , no , es especially eh , overlapping speech from , eh , different eh , eh , speaker . Eh professor d: No , but there 's but , I think she 's saying " Where do you In these three categories , where do you put the instances in which there is one person speaking and other sounds which are not speech ? " phd c: Ah ! professor d: Which category do you put that in ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right . Yeah , he here I I put eh speech from eh , from , eh , one speaker without , eh , eh , any any any events more . postdoc e: Oh ! professor d: Right , so where do you put speech from one speaker that does have a nonspeech event at the same time ? phd c: Where ? Where What is the class ? professor d: Which catege which category ? postdoc e: Like a c phd c: No . phd c: For for the by the @ @ no , @ @ because I I I I want to limit the the nnn , the the study . grad b: Yeah , so that 's what he was saying before , is that he excluded those . phd c: " Why ? Why ? What 's the reason ? " because i it 's the first study . In the in the future , the the idea is to to extend the class , phd a: Is is phd c: to consider all the all the information , you you mentioned before professor d: Yeah . phd c: but eh , the the first idea Because eh , I don't know what hap what will happen with the study . i it 's pure phd a: What if there was a door - slam or something ? phd c: No , no , it 's pure silence . professor d: What you Well w I I think what you m I think what you mean is that it 's nonspeech segments that don't have impulsive noises . professor d: Right ? Cuz you 're calling what you 're calling " event " is somebody coughing or clicking , or rustling paper , or hitting something , which are impulsive noises . Right ? phd c: h here yet , yet I I I I I think I I think , eh , there are that some kind of noises that , eh , don't don't wanted to to be in that , eh , in that control set . phd c: But I prefer , I prefer at at the first , eh , the the silence with eh , this eh this kind of the of eh of noise . professor d: Right , it 's , it 's " Background " might be might be a better word than " silence " . phd c: And , with this information The idea is eh , eh , nnn , I have a label for for each , eh , frame and , eh with a cluster eh algorithm I and postdoc e: Well , we needed to get the categories , yeah . And eh I am going to prepare a test bed , eh , well , eh , a a set of feature structure eh , eh , models . phd c: I have to to test , but eh I phd a: You have your own ? phd c: Yeah , yeah , yeah . Is a modified version of of of a pitch tracker , eh , from , eh , Standar - eh Stanford University in Stanford ? No . phd a: Oh ! What 's it written in ? phd c: Eh , em , I I I don't remember what is the the name of the of the author , because I I have several I have eh , eh , em , eh , library tools , from eh , Festival and of from Edinburgh eh , from Cambridge , eh , and from our department . phd c: And And I have to because , in general the pitch tracker , doesn't work very well and grad b: Bad . This this is And th the idea is to to , eh , to obtain , eh , for example , eh , eh diff eh , eh , different well , no , a great number of eh FEC for example , eh , eh , twenty - five , eh , thirty thirty parameters , eh , for for each one . And in a first eh , nnn , step in the investi in the research in eh , my idea is try to , eh , to prove , what is the performance of the difference parameter , eh to classify the different , eh , what is the the the the front - end approach to classify eh , the different , eh , frames of each class eh and what is the the , nnn , nnn , nnn , eh , what is the , the error eh , of the data grad b: Supervised clustering . phd c: and the second is try to eh , to use some ideas eh , similar to the linear discriminant analysis . phd c: Eh ? Eh , similar , because the the idea is to to study what is the contribution of eh , each parameter to the process of classify correctly the different the different parameters . What sort of classifier ar ? phd c: Eh , the the the classifier is nnn by the moment is eh is eh , similar , nnn , that the classifier used eh , in a quantifier vectorial quantifier is eh , used to to eh , some distance to to put eh , a vector eh , in in a class different . grad b: Unimodal ? phd c: Is Yeah ? W with a model , is is only to cluster using a eh , @ @ or a similarity . grad b: So is it just one cluster per phd c: A another possibility it to use eh a netw netw a neural network . phd c: But eh what 's the p What is my idea ? What 's the problem I I I I see in in in if you you use the the neural network ? If w when this kind of eh , mmm , cluster , clustering algorithm to can test , to can eh observe what happened you you can't you can't eh , eh put up with your hand in the different parameter , grad b: Right , you can't analyse it . phd c: but eh If you use a neural net is is a good idea , but eh you don't know what happened in the interior of the neural net . professor d: Well , actually , you can do sensitivity analyses which show you what the importance of the different parce pieces of the input are . professor d: It 's hard to w w what you It 's hard to tell on a neural net is what 's going on internally . professor d: But it 's actually not that hard to analyse it and figure out the effects of different inputs , especially if they 're all normalized . professor d: Well , this isn't tru if if if you really wonder what different if if phd c: Yeah . phd c: But professor d: Yeah , then a decision tree is really good , but the thing is here he 's he 's not he 's not like he has one you know , a bunch of very distinct variables , like pitch and this he 's talking about , like , a all these cepstral coefficients , and so forth , grad b: Right . professor d: in which case a a any reasonable classifier is gonna be a mess , and it 's gonna be hard to figure out what what phd c: And grad b: Right . professor d: I , I think the other thing that one , this is , I think a good thing to do , to sort of look at these things at least See what I 'd I 'd Let me tell you what I would do . Instead of taking all the MFCC 's , or all the PLP 's or whatever , I would just take a couple . professor d: OK ? Like like C - one , C - two , something like that , so that you can visualize it . professor d: OK , so before you do build up any kind of fancy classifiers , just take a look in two dimensions , at how these things are split apart . professor d: That I think will give you a lot of insight of what is likely to be a useful feature when you put it into a more complicated classifier . professor d: And the second thing is , once you actually get to the point of building these classifiers , @ @ what this lacks so far is the temporal properties . So if you 're just looking at a frame and a time , you don't know anything about , you know , the structure of it over time , and so you may wanna build @ @ build a Markov model of some sort , or or else have features that really are based on on on some bigger chunk of time . But don't anyway , this is my suggestion , is don't just , you know , throw in twenty features at it , the deltas , and the delta del and all that into some classifier , even even if it 's K - nearest - neighbors , you still won't know phd c: Yeah . professor d: what it 's doing , even You know it 's , I think to know what it 's to have a better feeling for what it 's grad b: Yep . professor d: look at at som some picture that shows you , " Here 's These things , are offer some separation . " And , in LPC , the thing to particularly look at is , I think is something like , the residual phd c: Yeah . S postdoc e: Can I ask ? It strikes me that there 's another piece of information , that might be useful and that 's simply the transition . So , w if you go from a transition of silence to overlap versus a transition from silence to speech , there 's gonna be a b a big informative area there , it seems to me . phd c: I eh the the Meeting Recorder project , for me , has eh , two eh , w has eh several parts , several p objective professor d: But eh , at the first , in the acoustic , eh , eh , parts of the project , eh I think you eh we have eh two main eh objective . And for that , if you don't use , eh , eh , a speech recognizer , eh broad class , or not broad class to to try to to to label the different frames , I think the Ike criterion or BIC criterion eh will be enough to detect the change . When you you have , eh , eh s eh the transition of speech or or silence eh to overlap zone , this criterion is enough with probably with , eh , this kind of , eh , eh the the the more eh use eh use eh used eh em normal , regular eh parameter MF - MFCC . But eh eh I I understand that you your objective is to eh classify , to know that eh that zone not is only a new zone in the in the file , that eh you have eh , but you have to to to know that this is overlap zone . because in the future you will eh try to to process that zone with a non - regular eh eh speech recognizer model , I suppose . phd c: you you will pretend to to to process the overlapping z eh zone with another kind of algorithm professor d: phd c: because it 's very difficult to to to obtain the transcription from eh using eh eh a regular , normal speech recognizer . phd c: A model to detect more acc the mor most accurately possible that is p , will be possible the , eh the mark , the change and another another model will @ @ or several models , to try s but eh several model eh robust models , sample models to try to classify the difference class . grad b: I 'm I 'm I 'm sorry , I didn't understand you what you said . What what model ? postdoc e: phd c: Eh , the the classifiers of the of the n to detect the different class to the different zones before try to to recognize , eh with eh to transcribe , with eh a speech recognizer . phd c: And my idea is to use eh , for example , a neural net postdoc e: So p phd c: with the information we obtain from this eh this eh study of the parameter with the selected parameter to try to eh to put the class of each frame . phd c: you you eh , eh have obtained in the first eh , step with the for example , BIC eh , eh criterion compare model postdoc e: phd c: And You I don't - u professor d: OK , but , I I think in any event we 're agreed that the first step is phd c: i postdoc e: Yeah . professor d: Because what we had before for for , speaker change detection did not include these overlaps . professor d: So the first thing is for you to to build up something that will detect the overlaps . professor d: Right ? So again , I think the first thing to do to detect the overlaps is to look at these , in in in in grad b: Features ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , I again , the things you 've written up there I think are way too way too big . professor d: OK ? If you 're talking about , say , twelfth twelfth - order MFCC 's or something like that it 's just way too much . All you 'll be able to do is put it into a classifier and see how well it does . professor d: Whereas I think if you have things if you pick one or two dimensional things , or three of you have some very fancy display , and look at how the the different classes separate themselves out , you 'll have much more insight about what 's going on . professor d: Well , you 'll you 'll get a feeling for what 's happening , you know , phd c: Yeah . professor d: so if you look at Suppose you look at first and second - order cepstral coefficients for some one of these kinds of things and you find that the first - order is much more effective than the second , and then you look at the third and there 's not and not too much there , you may just take first and second - order cepstral coefficients , phd c: Yeah . professor d: right ? And with LPC , I think LPC per se isn't gonna tell you much more than than than the other , maybe . , and on the other hand , the LPC residual , the energy in the LPC residual , will say how well , the low - order LPC model 's fitting it , which should be pretty poorly for two two or more people speaking at the same time , and it should be pretty well , for w for for one . professor d: And so I i again , if you take a few of these things that are are prob promising features and look at them in pairs , I think you 'll have much more of a sense of " OK , I now have , doing a bunch of these analyses , I now have ten likely candidates . phd c: but eh , eh eh eh eh I don't know it is the first eh way to to do that and I would eh like to to know what eh , your opinion . Eh all this study in the f in the first moment , I I w I I will pretend to do with eh eh equalizes speech . grad b: With postdoc e: With what ? With what ? grad b: Right . phd c: Eh , why ? Because eh the spectral distortion is more eh a lot eh clearer , very much clearer if we compare with the PDA . phd c: fff ! Because the n the noise eh to sp the signal - to - noise relation is eh is is low . phd c: I don't know eh i i that eh the the result of the of the study eh with eh with eh this eh this speech , the mix speech eh will work exactly with the eh PDA files . phd c: eh What , I , what what is the effect of the low ' signal to to to noise relation , you know , eh with professor d: N u We Well , I think I think I think it 's not a it 's not at all unreasonable . It makes sense to start with the simpler signal because if you have features which don't aren't even helpful in the high signal - to - noise ratio , then there 's no point in putting them into the low signal ratio , one would think , anyway . professor d: And so , if you can get @ @ again , my prescription would be that you would , with a mixed signal , you would take a collection of possible , features look at them , look at how these different classes that you 've marked , separate themselves , and then collect , in pairs , and then collect ten of them or something , and then proceed with a bigger classifier . professor d: And then if you can get that to work well , then you go to the other signal . And then , and you and you know , they won't work as well , but how m you know , how much grad b: Right . Because it I think it would be interesting to see if some features work well with close mixed , and And don't professor d: . professor d: That 's well , the It it 's it 's true that it also , it could be useful to do this exploratory analysis where you 're looking at scatter plots and so on in both cases . phd c: I I I I think that the the eh parameter we found , eh , eh worked with both eh , speech file , postdoc e: That 's good . phd c: but eh what is the the the relation of eh of the performance when eh you use eh the , eh eh speech file the PDA speech files . Is eh is not easy eh to to solve , because if you I I I have seen the the the speech file from eh PDA , and s some parts is very difficult because you you don't see the spectrum the spectrogram . phd c: Is very difficult to apply eh , eh a parameter to detect change when you don't see . Well , that that that 's another reason why very simple features , things like energy , and things things like harmonicity , and residual energy are , yeah are are better to use than very complex ones because they 'll be more reliable . phd a: Yeah , I maybe this is a dumb question , but w I thought it would be I thought it would be easier if you used a PDA professor d: Nah . phd a: because can't you , couldn't you like use beam - forming or something to detect speaker overlaps ? grad b: Well , if you used the array , rather than the signal from just one . professor d: Yeah , no , you you 're you 're right grad b: But that 's professor d: that In fact , if we made use of the fact that there are two microphones , you do have some location information . which we don't have with the one and and so that 's phd a: Is that not allowed with this project ? professor d: well , no , we we don't have any rules , r really . professor d: I think I I think I think it 's it 's it 's a it 's an additional interesting question . professor d: I think you wanna know whether you can do it with one , because you know it 's not necessarily true that every device that you 're trying to do this with will have two . professor d: if , on the other hand , we show that there 's a huge advantage with two , well then that could be a real point . professor d: But , we don't n even know yet what the effect of detecting having the ability to detect overlaps is . postdoc e: There there is a complication though , and that is if a person turns their back to the to the PDA , then some of the positional information goes away ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , it it it does , i it d it does , but the the the issue is that that phd a: No , it 's not it 's not that so much as postdoc e: And then , And if they 're on the access on the axis of it , that was the other thing I was thinking . postdoc e: He You mentioned this last time , that that if if you 're straight down the midline , then then the r the left - right 's gonna be different , grad b: Yeah , we hav need to put it on a little turntable , phd c: I I I I I th grad b: and phd a: Well , it 's phd c: Yeah . postdoc e: It seems to me that that it 's not a p , you know , it 's this the topograph the topology of it is is a little bit complicated . phd a: I don't I don't know ho phd c: I I I think Sorry . I I I think because the the the distance between the two microph eh , microphone , eh , in the PDA is very near . But it 's from my opinion , it 's an interesting idea to to try to study the binaural eh problem eh , with information , because I I found difference between the the speech from from each micro eh , in the PDA . It - it 's not amplitude , postdoc e: Oh yeah ! Oh I agree ! And we use it ourselves . postdoc e: But I 'm just I 'm just saying that the way we 're seated around a table , is not the same with respect to each to each person with respect to the PDA , phd c: No . postdoc e: so we 're gonna have a lot of differences with ref respect to the speaker . phd c: But professor d: That 's So so i @ @ I think the issue is , " Is there a clean signal coming from only one direction ? " phd a: Right . professor d: If it 's not coming from just one direction , if it if th if there 's a broader pattern , it means that it 's more likely there 's multiple people speaking , phd c: Yeah . phd a: So it 's sort of like how how confused is it about where the beam is . professor d: Yeah , is there a narrow Is there a narrow beam pattern or is it a a distributed beam pattern ? So if there 's a distributed beam pattern , then it looks more like it 's it 's , multiple people . OK , it just it just seemed to me that , that this isn't the ideal type of separation . , I I think it 's I can see the value o professor d: Oh , ideal would be to have the wall filled with them , but But the thing is just having two mikes If you looked at that thing on on Dan 's page , it was When when there were two people speaking , and it looked really really different . phd a: Did - Sorry , b I 'm not sure what Dan 's page is that you mean . professor d: You take the signal from the two microphones and you cros and you cross - correlate them with different lags . So when one person is speaking , then wherever they happen to be at the point when they 're speaking , then there 's a pretty big maximum right around that point in the l in in the lag . professor d: So if at whatever angle you are , at some lag corresponding to the time difference between the two there , you get this boost in the in in the cross - correlation value function . phd a: So so if there 's two grad b: And if there are multiple people talking , you 'll see two peaks . postdoc e: Well , let me ask you , if if both people were over there , it would be less effective than if one was there and one was across , catty - corner ? phd c: Yeah . The - the Oh , I 'm sorry , postdoc e: No ? professor d: if they 're right next to one another ? phd a: If I was if I was here and Morgan was there and we were both talking , it wouldn't work . professor d: i i postdoc e: Next next one over n over on this side of the P PDA . postdoc e: Versus you versus you know , and we 're catty - corner across the table , and I 'm farther away from this one and you 're farther away from that one . grad b: Or or even if , like , if people were sitting right across from each other , you couldn't tell the difference either . Yeah , so it 's postdoc e: And so my point was just that it 's it 's gonna be differentially differentially varia valuable . postdoc e: it 's not to say , I certainly think it 's extremely val And we we humans n n depend on you know , these these binaural cues . professor d: But it 's almost but it 's almost a I think what you 're talking about i there 's two things . professor d: There 's a sensitivity issue , and then there 's a pathological error issue . professor d: If someone just happens to be sitting right there then we won't get good information from it . and i and if there So it And if it 's the two of you guys on the same side professor d: if they 're if they 're close , it 's just a question of the sensitivity . professor d: So if the sensitivity is good enough and we just we just don't have enough , experience with it to know how postdoc e: Yeah . postdoc e: Oh I 'm not I 'm not trying to argue against using it , by any means . I just wanted to point out that that weakness , that it 's topo topologically impossible to get it perfect for everybody . professor d: the other thing you can do , if , i We 're assuming that it would be a big deal just to get somebody convince somebody to put two microphones in the PDA . And then you know then you 're sort of Yeah , then then you pretty much could cover phd a: Once you got two postdoc e: Interesting . phd a: Well what about just doing it from these mikes ? postdoc e: Interesting . phd c: It will be more interesting to study the PZM because the the the separation I I think professor d: @ @ But - but that 's , we can we 'll be all of this is there for us to study . professor d: But but but the thing is , one of the at least one of the things I was hoping to get at with this is what can we do with what we think would be the normal situation if some people get together and one of them has a PDA . phd a: That 's what I was asking about , what are the constraints ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , that 's that 's the constraint of one question that I think both Adam and I were were were interested in . professor d: but you know if you can instrument a room , this is really minor league compared with what some people are doing , right ? Some people at at , yeah , at Brown and and and and at and at Cape , grad b: Big micro @ @ arrays . phd a: Didn't they have something at Cape ? professor d: they both have these , you know , big arrays on the wall . And you know , if you could do that , you 've got microphones all over the place grad b: Very finely . professor d: you know p tens of microphones , and and phd a: Oh ! I saw a demo . professor d: And if you do that then you can really get very nice kind of selectivity phd a: Yeah . grad b: Oh , I saw one that was like a hundred microphones , a ten by ten array . phd a: And you could In a noisy room , they could have all kinds of noises and you can zoom right in on somebody . grad b: It was all in software and they and you could pick out an individual beam and listen to it . professor d: But , the reason why I haven't focused on that as the fir my first concern is because , I 'm interested in what happens for people , random people out in some random place where they 're p having an impromptu discussion . And you can't just always go , " well , let 's go to this heavily instrumented room that we spent tens of thousands of dollars to se to set up " . phd a: No , what you need to do is you 'd have a little fabric thing that you unroll and hang on a wall . phd a: It has all these mikes and it has a plug - in jack to the PDA . grad b: But I think professor d: The other thing actually , that gets at this a little bit of something else I 'd like to do , is what happens if you have two P D grad b: Yep . professor d: and they communicate with each other ? And then You know , they 're in random positions , the likelihood that , basically there wouldn't be any l likely to be any kind of nulls , if you even had two . grad b: Though All sorts of interesting things you can do with that , postdoc e: Interesting . grad b: not only can you do microphone arrays , but you can do all sorts of multi - band as well . postdoc e: Ah ! phd a: I still like my rug on the wall idea , so if anybody patents that , then grad b: But I think postdoc e: Well , you could have strips that you stick to your clothing . phd a: Hats ? grad b: In terms of the research th research , it 's really it 's whatever the person who is doing the research wants to do . , I i I i I would actually kind of like us to wind it down , see if we can still get to the end of the , birthdays thing there . professor d: So grad b: Well , I had a couple things that I did wanna bring out . grad b: One is , do we need to sign new these again ? postdoc e: Well , it 's slightly different . phd a: Are they new ? postdoc e: Cuz it it 's slightly different . professor d: Oh , this morning we didn't sign anything cuz we said that if anybody had signed it already , we didn't have to . grad b: Yeah , I I should 've checked with Jane first , but the ch the form has changed . grad b: I had some things I wanted to talk about with the thresholding stuff I 'm doing . postdoc e: I had to make one grad b: But , if we 're in a hurry , we can put that off . postdoc e: Well , should I I have some results to present , but I guess we won't have time to do that this time . But it seems like the anonymization is , is also something that we might wanna discuss in greater length . , wha what postdoc e: If if we 're about to wind down , I think what I would prefer is that we , delay the anonymization thing till next week , and I would like to present the results that I have on the overlaps . @ @ It sounds like u , there were there were a couple technical things people would like to talk about . Why don't we just take a couple minutes to to briefly do them , and then and then and then and then and then we grad b: OK , go ahead , Jane . postdoc e: I 'd Oh , I 'd prefer to have more time for my results . postdoc e: And I think the anonymization , if y if you want to proceed with that now , I just think that that 's that 's a discussion which also n really deserves a lo a you know , more that just a minute . postdoc e: I really do think that , because you raised a couple of possibilities yourself , you and I have discussed it previously , and there are different ways that people approach it , e and I think we should grad b: Alright . We 're we 're just We 're getting enough data now that I 'd sort of like to do it now , before I get overwhelmed with once we decide how to do it postdoc e: Well , OK . I I 'll give you the short version , but I do think it 's an issue that we can't resolve in five minutes . postdoc e: OK , so the the short thing is , we have , tape recording , sorry , digitized recor recordings . postdoc e: Now , in terms of like the transcript , the question becomes what symbol are you gonna put in there for everybody 's name , and whether you 're gonna put it in the text where he says " Hey Roger " or are we gonna put that person 's anonymized name in instead ? grad b: No , because then that would give you a mapping , and you don't wanna have a mapping . postdoc e: OK , so first decision is , we 're gonna anonymize the same name for the speaker identifier and also in the text whenever the speaker 's name is mentioned . Because that would give you a mapping between the speaker 's real name and the tag we 're using , and we don't want postdoc e: I I don't think you understood what I what I said . postdoc e: So , so in within the context of an utterance , someone says " So , Roger , what do you think ? " OK . Then , it seems to me that Well , maybe I it seems to me that if you change the name , the transcript 's gonna disagree with the audio , and you won't be able to use that . grad b: We don't we wanna we ha we want the transcript to be " Roger " . grad b: Because if we made the the transcript be the tag that we 're using for Roger , someone who had the transcript and the audio would then have a mapping between the anonymized name and the real name , and we wanna avoid that . postdoc e: OK , well , but then there 's this issue of if we 're gonna use this for a discourse type of thing , then and , you know , Liz was mentioning stuff in a previous meeting about gaze direction and who 's who 's the addressee and all , then to have " Roger " be the thing in the utterance and then actually have the speaker identifier who was " Roger " be " Frank " , that 's going to be really confusing and make it pretty much useless for discourse analysis . postdoc e: Now , if you want to , you know , in some cases , I I I know that Susan Ervin - Tripp in some of hers , actually did do , a filter of the s signal where the person 's name was mentioned , except professor d: Yeah Yeah , once you get to the publication you can certainly do that . postdoc e: And and I cer and I So , the question then becomes one level back . , how important is it for a person to be identified by first name versus full name ? Well , on the one hand , it 's not a full identity , we 're taking all these precautions , and they 'll be taking precautions , which are probably even the more important ones , to they 'll be reviewing the transcripts , to see if there 's something they don't like OK . On the other hand , this is a small this is a small pool , and people who say things about topic X e who are researchers and well - known in the field , they 'll be identifiable and simply from the from the first name . However , taking one step further back , they 'd be identifiable anyway , even if we changed all the names . postdoc e: So , is it really , You know ? grad b: Ugh ! postdoc e: Now , in terms of like so I I did some results , which I 'll report on n next time , which do mention individual speakers by name . Now , it would be very possible for me to take those data put them in a in a study , and just change everybody 's name for the purpose of the publication . And someone who looked professor d: You can go , you know , " Z " , for instance . , yeah , t it doesn't , I 'm not knowledgeable about this , but it certainly doesn't bother me to have someone 's first name in in the in the transcript . postdoc e: Yeah , and and in the form that they sign , it does say " your first name may arise in the course of the meetings " . So again , th the issue is if you 're tracking discourse things , you know , if someone says , " Frank said this " and then you wanna connect it to something later , you 've gotta have this part where that 's " Frank colon " . grad b: Yeah , shoot ! professor d: Right ? postdoc e: Yeah , and and you know , even more i i , immediate than that just being able to , Well , it just seems like to track track from one utterance to the next utterance who 's speaking and who 's speaking to whom , cuz that can be important . postdoc e: S i You know , " You raised the point , So - and - so " , it 's be kind of nice to be able to know who " you " was . postdoc e: And ac and actually you remember furthermore , you remember last time we had this discussion of how you know , I was sort of avoiding mentioning people 's names , professor d: Yeah , I was too . Well , if we 're going to step in after the fact and change people 's names in the transcript , we 've basically done something one step worse . Well , I would sug I I don't wanna change the names in the transcript , phd c: Yeah . grad b: but that 's because I 'm focused so much on the acoustics instead of on the discourse , and so I think that 's a really good point . L let me just back up this to make a a brief comment about the , what we 're covering in the meeting . I realize when you 're doing this that , I didn't realize that you had a bunch of things that you wanted to talk about . So I think what would be helpful would be , i and I 'll I 'll mention this to to Liz and Andreas too , that , before the meeting if anybody could send me , any any , agenda items that they were interested in and I 'll I 'll take the role of organizing them , into into the agenda , postdoc e: OK . I 've no desire to to make it up , but if if no one 's told me things , then I 'm just proceeding from my my guesses , and and , and i ye yeah , I I 'm sorry it ended up with your out your time to , I 'm just always asking Jose what he 's doing , you know , and and so it 's There 's , there 's obviously other things going on . grad b: How will we how would the person who 's doing the transcript even know who they 're talking about ? Do you know what I 'm saying ? phd a: " The person who 's doing the transcript " The IBM people ? grad b: Yeah . , so so how is that information gonna get labeled anyway ? postdoc e: How do you mean , who what they 're who they 're talking about ? grad b: so if I 'm saying in a meeting , " oh and Bob , by the way , wanted wanted to do so - and - so " , postdoc e: How do you mean ? phd a: They 're just gonna write " Bob " on it or do @ @ grad b: if you 're doing Yeah , @ @ they 're just gonna write " Bob " . If you 're if you 're doing discourse analysis , postdoc e: They won't be able to change it themselves . professor d: What ar how are they gonna do any of this ? grad b: Yeah , really . postdoc e: Well , I I 'm betting we 're gonna have huge chunks that are just totally un untranscribable by them . professor d: they 're gonna say speaker - one , or speaker - two or speaker I I phd a: They can't do that . phd c: Yeah , I think grad b: Well , the current one they don't do speaker identity . phd c: grad b: because in NaturallySpeaking , or , excuse me , in ViaVoice , it 's only one person . I think that My understanding from Yen Is it Yen - Ching ? Is that how you pronounce her name ? professor d: Yu - Ching , Yu - Ching . postdoc e: Oh , Yu - Ching ? Yu - Ching ? grad b: y Yu - Ching . postdoc e: was that , they will that they will adopt the part of the conventions that that we discussed , where they put speaker identifier down . But , you know , h they won't know these people , so I think it 's Well , they 'll they 'll adopt some convention but we haven't specified to them So they 'll do something like speaker - one , speaker - two , is what I bet , but I 'm betting there 'll be huge variations in the accuracy of of their labeling the speakers . professor d: And it and it may very well be , since they 're not going to sit there and and and worry ab about , it being the same speaker , they may very well go the eh the the first se the first time it changes to another speaker , that 'll be speaker - two . professor d: And the next time it 'll be speaker - three even if it 's actually speaker - one . grad b: Yeah we we can probably regenerate it pretty easily from the close - talking mikes . phd c: postdoc e: Yes , I was thinking , the temp the time values of when it changes . grad b: The p It 's a good point , " which what do you do for discourse tracking ? " phd c: Because y y you don't know to know , eh you don't need to know what i what is the iden identification of the of the speakers . If if if if someone says , " what what is Jose doing ? " and then Jose says something , you need to know that that was Jose responding . postdoc e: Unless we adopt a different set of norms which is to not id to make a point of not identifying people by name , which then leads you to be more contextually ex explicit . You know ? , so when we did this las last week , I felt that you know , now , Andreas may , @ @ , he he i sometimes people think of something else at the same time and they miss a sentence or something , and and because he missed something , then he missed the r the initial introduction of who we were talking about , and was was unable to do the tracking . postdoc e: But I felt like most of us were doing the tracking and knew who we were talking about and we just weren't mentioning the name . phd a: But , you know , like , at the beginning of this meeting Or , you I think said , you know , or s Liz , said something about , " is Mari gonna use the equipment ? " , how would you say that ? postdoc e: Yeah ? phd a: you have to really think , you know , about what you 're saying bef grad b: if you wanted to anonymize . Yeah , is professor d: " Is you know who up in you know where ? " phd a: Yeah . professor d: Right ? Use the phd a: I think it would be really hard if we made a policy where we didn't say names , plus we 'd have to tell everybody else . grad b: Yeah , darn ! , what I was gonna say is that the other option is that we could bleep out the names . phd a: I I think the I think I don't know , my own two cents worth is that you don't do anything about what 's in the recordings , you only anonymize to the extent you can , the speakers have signed the forms and all . grad b: Well , but that but that as I said , that that that works great for the acoustics , but it it hurts you a lot for trying to do discourse . grad b: Because you don't have a map of who 's talking versus their name that they 're being referred to . phd a: I thought we were gonna get it labelled speaker - one , speaker - two grad b: Sure but , h then you have to know that Jose is speaker - one and phd a: Why do you have to know his name ? professor d: OK , so suppose someone says , " well I don't know if I really heard what , what Jose said . professor d: So u phd a: Oh , I see , you wanna associated the word " Jose " in the dialogue with the fact that then he responded . professor d: And so , if we pass out the data to someone else , and it says " speaker - five " there , we also have to pass them this little guide that says that speaker - five is Jose , grad b: And that violates our privacy . professor d: and if were gonna do that we might as well give them " Jose " say it was " Jose " . postdoc e: Now , I I think that we have these two phases in the in the data , which is the one which is o our use , University of Washington 's use , IBM , SRI . postdoc e: And within that , it may be that it 's sufficient to not change the to not incorporate anonymization yet , but always , always in the publications we have to . postdoc e: And I think also , when we take it that next step and distribute it to the world , we have to . But I but I don that 's that 's a long way from now and and it 's a matter of between now and then of d of deciding how grad b: Making some decisions ? postdoc e: i i it You know , it may be s that we we 'll need to do something like actually X out that part of the the audio , and just put in brackets " speaker - one " . phd c: the ? ? grad b: You know , what we could do also is have more than one version of release . professor d: I I think that we we have a need to have a consistent licensing policy of some sort , and postdoc e: But I also think a consistent licensing policy is important . phd a: Well , one thing to to take into consideration is w are there any For example , the people who are funding this work , they want this work to get out and be useful for discourse . phd a: If we all of a sudden do this and then release it to the public and it 's not longer useful for discourse , you know grad b: Well , depending on how much editing we do , you might be able to still have it useful . grad b: But , n excuse me , but you could bleep out just the names . professor d: She No , but she 's saying , from the argument before , she wants to be able to say if someone said " Jose " in their in their thing , and then connect to so to what he said later , then you need it . But in the transcript , you could say , everywhere they said " Jose " that you could replace it with " speaker - seven " . But I I also wanna say that people grad b: And then it wouldn't meet match the audio anymore . professor d: And th and the other thing is if if if Liz were here , what she might say is that she wants to look if things that cut across between the audio and the dialogue , postdoc e: Well , you see ? So , it 's complicated . postdoc e: But it 's g but I think it was good to introduce the thing and we can do it next time . grad b: I didn't think when I wrote you that email I wasn't thinking it was a big can of worms , but I guess it is . postdoc e: Well it Discourse , you know Also I wanted to make the point that that discourse is gonna be more than just looking at a transcript . postdoc e: It 's gonna be looking at a t You know , and prosod prosodic stuff is involved , and that means you 're going to be listening to the audio , and then you come directly into this confronting this problem . phd a: Maybe we should just not allow anybody to do research on discourse , postdoc e: So . professor d: maybe we should only have meetings between people who don't know one another and who are also amnesiacs who don't know their own name . grad b: Did you read the paper on Eurospeech ? postdoc e: We could have little labels . I I I wanna introduce my Reservoir Dogs solution again , which is everyone has like " Mister White " , " Mister Pink " , " Mister Blue " . Did you read the paper a few years ago where they were reversing the syllables ? They were di they they had the utterances . phd a: But so , the syllables were in the same order , with respect to each other , but the acous grad b: Everything was in the same order , but they were the individual syll syllables were played backwards . phd a: What did it sound like ? grad b: People had no difficulty in interpreting it . So what we need is something that 's the reverse , that a speech recognizer works exactly the same on it but people can't understand it . professor d: What , what does the speech recognizer care ? grad b: Ah , anyway . professor d: postdoc e: Oh , do we do digits ? Or ? What do we do ? grad b: OK , we 'll quickly do digits . like as if you were talking like , " nine eight six eight seven ? " postdoc e: Well , you know , in the in the one I transcribed , I did find a couple instances I found one instance of contrastive stress , where it was like the string had a li So it was like " nine eight two four , nine nine two four " . So they were like looking ahead , postdoc e: And phd a: huh ? postdoc e: Well , they differed . , I 've I am sort of interested in in And sometimes , you know , I s And I I never know . phd a: Well , I was thinking that it must get kind of boring for the people who are gonna have to transcribe this postdoc e: and I phd a: They may as well throw in some interesting intonations

To address the need for additional space, a suggestion was made to create a separate room in the linguistics department. However, this solution required a dedicated partner and the assurance of equipment safety. Professor D proposed the idea of making the equipment portable, allowing it to be easily transported between meetings. Meanwhile, a graduate student is currently working on developing a futuristic Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). The concept behind this PDA is to enable users to record meetings for personal use and later retrieve relevant information through queries. The collected data will be anonymized to a certain extent, while still maintaining the authenticity of the meeting scenario. It is worth noting that this upcoming meeting will be one of the recorded sessions.

Question: What is the Prime Minister's stance on the national security bill that undermines Hong Kong's autonomy, and why did Hon. Bill Blair support the ban on Iver Johnson? Article: anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the 13th meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. In order to ensure that those joining the meeting via video conference can be seen and heard by those in the chamber, two screens have been set up on either side of the Chairs chair, and members in the chamber can listen to the floor audio or to interpretation using the earpieces at their desks. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name, and please direct your remarks through the chair. For those joining via video conference, I would like to remind you to leave your mike on mute mr. We have amazing speakersand an amazing Speaker, but that's a whole other storyand amazing microphones in the chamber, and they do pick up everything. For those joining us via video conference, I would like to remind you to leave your mikes on mute when you're not speaking. Also, please note that if you want to speak in English, you should be on the English channel, and if you want to speak in French, you should be on the French channel. Should you wish to alternate between the two languages, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking each time you switch languages. Should members participating by video conference wish to request the floor outside their designated speaking times, they should activate their mic and state that they have a point of order. I understand that there are no ministerial announcements for today, so we'll continue to the presentation of petitions, for a period not exceeding 15 minutes. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. For members participating in person, we ask that they please come and drop the signed certificate off at the table once the petition is presented. They provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of services to commercial agricultural crops and other ecological services every year, and the European Union has put heavy restrictions on the chemicals that are affecting them, the neonicotinoids. This petition calls on the Government of Canada, for the sake of bees and our food security, to follow Europe's lead and adhere to the precautionary principle by banning the use of neonicotinoids in Canada. It raises big questions about the choices facing seniors in certain situations, which is what makes this first petition particularly timely. I am tabling a petition related to Bill C-7, the government's euthanasia bill, which seeks to dramatically remove safeguards that the government said were vital only a short time ago. When some people are living in deplorable conditions, we cannot truly speak of them as having a choice of when they ought to die. Especially in light of that new information, I commend this petition for the consideration of members of the House. The second petition is in support of Bill S-204 on organ harvesting and trafficking, put forward in the Senate. The bill would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ without the donor's consent. It relates to what I think many of us will regard as the real heroes of the last few months. In this pandemic, there have often been very underpaid and overworked front-line workers who receive minimum wage and nothing more, and who are of course deemed essential services. The petitioners have asked the government to implement a wage supplement as a temporary measure to bring the wages for those who are in contact with the general public and working in what has been deemed an essential service to no less than $20 an hour, in light of their service and the risks they're taking for all of us. She said that when we present petitions, we are simply supposed to give one or two sentences before putting them on the table. the chair: I want to remind honourable members that when they are presenting petitions, they should be very concise with the prcis that they give up front, as opposed to going on for a long time. Now we will proceed to statements by members for a period not exceeding 15 minutes, and each statement will be for one minute. peter fonseca (mississauga eastcooksville, lib.): Thank you, Mr. Today I am honoured to recognize the youth in my riding of Mississauga EastCooksville who are part of the 52nd Mississauga Scouts. For over a decade, I've had the great opportunity to join the Scouts every year during the month of May for the door-to-door food drives. This year has been a lot different, owing to the COVID situation, but our Scouts are not used to saying the word impossible. David Chant, head leader for their cub pack, reached out to share that the youth have found innovative ways to engage our community through a virtual food bank. I say a big thank you to Scout leaders like David, who are strong role models for our youth, teaching them the importance of leadership, kindness and giving back. David and his group of Scouts raised over $46,000 worth of food last year for the Mississauga Food Bank and The Compass. Again, I give a huge virtual high-five to all of our young Scouts, who have taken the lead with lots of compassion and care. blake richards (banffairdrie, cpc): May 24 to May 31 is Tourism Week in Canada. This annual celebration is a time for us to recognize the contributions and experiences of Canada's tourism industry. This is a very important industry, and this year's Tourism Week is a little different from what it normally is. The ongoing coronavirus crisis has closed provincial and international borders to recreational travel, and tourism operators from coast to coast have been among the first and hardest hit due to the government-mandated lockdowns. Clear criteria regarding border reopenings and health and safety requirements will allow hospitality and tourism businesses to sufficiently prepare to reopen. Operators do not need to be set back any further because of a lack of clarity around reopening. While this Tourism Week is not a celebration like the one we had expected, I anticipate next year's celebration to be a celebration of an even stronger and more successful tourism industry in Canada. Chair, Monday was a sad day in my riding of BonavistaBurinTrinity, and indeed our entire province. Please join me as I offer sincere condolences to the families of the men who lost their lives at sea in a tragic accident off the coast of St. Ed Norman, his son Scott Norman and his nephew Jody Norman all tragically lost their lives while fishing for crab this past Monday. After a courageous search mission by Canadian Coast Guard auxiliary members and the Department of National Defence and Provincial Airlines, he is unfortunately still missing. Chair, I am sure the entire province of Newfoundland and Labrador, this parliamentary family and Canadians from coast to coast to coast join me in thinking of these men, along with their friends and families, during this difficult time. This builder of Quebec's political history drew his last breath at the age of91, late Sunday night. Mr.Dufour was the archetypal proud representative of my region who spent his entire life in Jonquire. He first became involved in the Alcan employee's union in Arvida, then continued his civic involvement at the municipal level as mayor, then in the Quebec National Assembly as the member for Jonquire. He will be remembered as a man with deep ties to his community, a man of integrity, a people person, who dedicated himself to serving citizens and advancing the independence movement in Quebec. On behalf of the people of the riding of Jonquire and all the people of Quebec, I offer my most sincere condolences to FrancisDufour's family and loved ones. soraya martinez ferrada (hochelaga, lib.): Thank you, Mr.Chair. The pandemic has greatly affected Montreal East, particularly the riding of Hochelaga, which I represent. Today, I'd like to recognize the exceptional work of all the volunteers and organizations in Hochelaga that are helping the more vulnerable populations, including Anonyme, CAP St-Barnab, CARE Montral, the Cuisine collective Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Bouffe Action, the Centre Communautaire Hochelaga, Chic Resto Pop, Jojo Dpannage, Groupe d'Entraide de Mercier-Ouest and many others. I'd like to acknowledge the commitment of the merchants who have rolled up their sleeves, including the Coop Couturires Pop, to make masks. Allow me to offer our condolences to the loved ones of the attendants who have lost their lives to protect ours. Chair, I rise today to pay tribute to a great Albertan and former parliamentarian, Louise Feltham, who passed away this Monday after a lengthy battle with cancer. She inspired the family motto How hard can it be? by creating communities and building several homes in her lifetime. Her many firsts included being the first woman to serve as a councillor in rural Alberta, the first female reeve in rural Alberta and the first woman born in Newfoundland to serve in this chamber. My thoughts and sympathies are with him, his wife Tammi and the rest of their family for this great loss. Chair, it is a great honour to speak to the House of Commons today from Whitehorse, Yukon, here on the traditional territory of the Kwanlin Dn First Nation and the Ta'an Kwch'n Council. As a great historic Canadian event last week, Yukon became home to Canada's first university north of 60. Yukon University will provide Yukoners with educational opportunities closer to home, expand our research capabilities and expertise on the Arctic and climate change and allow those who want to study northern and first nations governance to do so in the north. I encourage all students living in the northern half of Canada to look at the many programs and degrees at Yukon University to continue their studiesin some cases this year, virtuallyby remaining in the north. I want to congratulate the staff of Yukon College, who spent the last decade working towards this transition, and especially the outgoing president, Karen Barnes. First of all, from the Long Range Mountains, I too want to send my condolences to my colleague, Mr. We're all communities that rely on the sea, and we understand the importance and the tragedy, and the hard work it is being fishers. However, today, colleagues, I want to mention, as my colleague from across the way said, that it's national tourism week, so please take the time to get out and thank the tourism and hospitality businesses in your ridings. The tourism economy was hit very hard, especially seasonal and rural operations and the 1.8 million people the industry employs. It's exciting to speak with them about how they're working on their new normal and how it's going to be developed and implemented here in the Long Range Mountains. Remember too that many of our national parks are opening on June 1, so get out and explore the park in your backyard. I look forward to working with the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, Destination Canada and my colleagues so that when we turn the corner of this pandemic, we are ready to rebuild a stronger tourism economy. jacques gourde (lvislotbinire, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Some people were already too few in number and already burdened with heavy responsibilities even before the COVID-19 crisis occurred. I would like to take this opportunity to express my admiration for the dedication of all the essential workers who stepped up in the riding of LvisLotbinire. Fine men and women committed to human dignity, volunteers, retirees, and you, who have wisely agreed to stay home, you have been part, to varying degrees, of this great equation to minimize the impact of the spread and avoid the worst. Many children are happy to be able to expend their energy again; our seniors are being cuddled, with great care, and our essential workers in the riding are still dedicated to the job. I say bravo, thank you and don't give up, even though you have already earned your place in heaven. From his laboratories at the Univerist de Montral, he worked with CHUM and the Centre hospitalier universitaire SainteJustine, renowned institutions in Outremont. They are Quebeckers, Canadians, who are at the forefront of discoveries that save and will save lives. Since coming into office, our government has reversed the funding cuts to medical research and has invested billions in science. Recently, we announced new funding for COVID-19 research for fundamental science and supports for academic researchers. We are working very hard to find a vaccine for COVID-19, and our fundamental research is helping us to understand viruses that we don't even know the names of yet. Chair, citizens in my riding of AuroraOak RidgesRichmond Hill are showing incredible compassion as they help their families, their friends and even strangers during this difficult period. The Aurora Chamber of Commerce and the Richmond Hill Board of Trade are helping businesses navigate in these difficult times. Organizations like The STEAM Project and Ganesha Temple are making and donating face masks for those in need. The Aurora Farmers' Market is bringing local farmers and businesses to us, but this year with one key person missing. Our community has lost one of the farmers' market's founders, our jam lady, Jan Freedman. My sincere thanks to everyone who's working to ease the burdens on one another during this crisis. grard deltell (louis-saint-laurent, cpc): Mr.Chair, we all understand that a crisis like the one the world is currently experiencing generates deficits. We also know that a deficit is a bill we send to our children and grandchildren, which is why it is important to be prudent, to make wise choices and, above all, to know where we are going. It's a shame that every time we ask the government a question, no minister can tell us how big the Canadian deficit is. In fact, last Tuesday, at a parliamentary committee meeting in the Senate, the Parliamentary Budget Officer made some very scathing remarks about the government. He said that there had to be a deadline or we'd be heading toward taxation levels that haven't been seen in generations in this country because there is not a lot of ammunition left before we go into a large structural deficit. The Prime Minister needs to know that we can't play Santa Claus every day, because the bills in January come in fast, and they are high. That's why I'm so disappointed that the Liberals have maintained the ban on blood donations from gay men and trans women. Not only does it reinforce homophobia and transphobia, it also reduces our blood supply at this critical time. Now we've learned that the ban will also result in rejecting plasma donors, when plasma is so critical in emerging COVID-19 research and treatment. More than 17 countries, including Argentina, Italy and Spain, have no deferral period for men who have sex with men. They know that behaviour-based screening provides better security for the blood supply than discriminatory identity-based rules. I have asked the minister many times to lift the gay blood ban and I do so again today, but today I also call on the family and friends of gay men and trans women to step up now and donate blood in place of those of us who cannot. luc desilets (rivire-des-mille-les, bq): Good afternoon, Mr.Chair. On another note, the emergency wage subsidy was created for people who fear for their jobs or their businesses. In Rivire-des-Mille-les, as in many other ridings, we respond daily to businesses that don't have access to it. Unfortunately, there are people in our ridings who won't have the opportunity to hire staff this summer. It's so embarrassing that it's shameful, disrespectful and ridiculous. jamie schmale (haliburtonkawartha lakesbrock, cpc): Thank you, Chair. This week is Paramedic Services Week, and I would like to take a moment to thank these men and women who work tirelessly at the best of times to protect and save lives. Their efforts during COVID-19, like the services provided by many front-line workers in health care, such as personal support workers, doctors, nurses, janitorial and clerical staff, lab technicians and many others, have been extraordinary and truly beyond the call of duty. I hope this week all Canadians will take a moment to thank a paramedic or any front-line health care worker in their community for the amazing services they have been called upon to perform and will continue to provide in the challenging days ahead. Chair, I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention another unfortunate consequence of the current pandemic, the cancellation of the Kinmount Fair, a renowned event that has been running since 1870. This year the fair was to mark its 150th anniversary, but in true Kinmount spirit, this heartbreaking decision will not deter organizers from planning an even bigger and better event in 2021. anju dhillon (dorvallachinelasalle, lib.): Mr.Chair, I'd like to thank the members of the Canadian Armed Forces from the bottom of my heart for their invaluable assistance in the long-term care facilities. Through the observations and testimonies of these members, we saw the extent of the nightmare that many seniors had endured for a long time. Among many other loathsome details, they were left to starve, were abused and lived in filth, their cries of anguish ignored. It is up to each and every one of us to make sure no elderly person is ever hurt in this vile manner again. Usually there are a few extra seconds, which doesn't matter, but some of them have gone quite a bit over time, so starting Monday we'll be cutting them off at 60 seconds. I encourage everyone to practise them or take a look at them, and try to keep them within the 60 seconds so that we don't go over our allotted time. I would like to remind members to speak fairly slowly so that the interpreters can understand what they're saying. I'm sure it will be appreciated by the interpreters and those at home who are listening in, as then they can make out the important questions and answers that are being given in this chamber. The government has consistently worked to shut down Parliament and undermine personal sittings and has argued that the business of this country can be done by Zoom. However, for work of the G7 the Prime Minister said, theres no question that in-person meetings...are much more effective than even virtual meetings. By pushing to go virtual, is it the Prime Minister's goal to make Canada's Parliament less effective? hon. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Mr. In fact, I am pleased to be here in person meeting with members from across the country and pleased that our colleagues who live further away from Ottawa than I do have the opportunity to join us. Parliament plays an essential role in our democracy, and it's the chair: We will go back to Mr. A Saskatchewan producer called me and said that he tried to use the online AgriStability calculator. He said that most farmers can't use it, that in fact they can't put in their inventory changes. Why is the agriculture minister touting this lifeline for farmers when it doesn't actually work? hon. Chair, the agricultural sector is critical to our country, and the questions some of us have been asking around food security have reminded us how lucky we are, as Canadians, to be living in an agricultural superpower. When it comes to the specific technical questions that farmers have, they should turn to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, who will be delighted to help. john barlow: Could the Deputy Prime Minister tell me how much it cost to develop this online AgriStability calculator? hon. chrystia freeland: What I can say is that we are very mindful of and very grateful for the extremely the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, farmers have even hired accountants to try to navigate this shiny online calculator, but they've been told they would go broke before they received any money. Will the government admit that this is just a fig leaf before any actual assistance will come to Canadian farmers? hon. Chair, very many farmers, and certainly many of the farmers of my acquaintance, have worked with accountants for a very long time. The last time I questioned the Prime Minister and the minister about the secret carbon tax data, they said that only part of it was secret and that the rest of it would be given to the House. Will that be tabled today, in both official languages, to justify to Canadian farmers why the government has increased the carbon tax in the midst of a pandemic? hon. I am proud of the sophistication of Canadian farmers, and I'm proud of the support we offer them. Some honourable members: Oh, oh! the chair: I want to remind the honourable members that the background noise and the heckling really make it difficult for the members who are tuning in via Zoom. I just want to make sure they're aware of what they're doing to our colleagues who are online. Chair, for 64 days the finance minister has failed to deliver on his promise to assist Canada's energy sector. Small oil and gas companies still can't qualify for BDC loans, and last week's announcement for large employers, in my opinion, was nothing of exploitive. If the government doesn't fulfill its promise to provide support for the energy sector, it is in turn supporting unethically sourced foreign oil and costing good reliable Canadian jobs. After 64 days, when will the credit options be available to Canada's small and medium-sized energy companies? hon. Chair, I agree with the member opposite about one thing: The energy sector and energy workers are absolutely essential to our economy, and we support them. One of the things I am most proud of is the $1.7 billion our government has committed to cleaning up orphan wells. alexis brunelle-duceppe (lac-saint-jean, bq): Mr.Chair, I'll try not to spend too much time. Will the Liberal Party of Canada pay back the money it took from the wage subsidy program, yes or no? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, the purpose of the wage subsidy is to support workers, help them keep their jobs and keep them connected to their workplace the chair: Mr.Brunelle-Duceppe. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, I'll take that as a no. The company doesn't qualify for the wage subsidy because it has suffered losses of28% instead of30%. Does the Liberal Party of Canada consider itself to be in greater financial difficulty than the historic village of Val-Jalbert and Trillium Media? hon. member opposite what we're doing to support Canadians: more than 8million Canadians have received the Canada emergency response benefit. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, I'll take that as a yes. colleague take into account the fact that the billions of dollars that are currently being handed out come from taxpayers' pockets? It even comes from the pockets of people who have lost their jobs and who pay taxes when they go to the corner store. On the other side of the House, is it considered justified for multi-million dollar parties to finance themselves with public funds, yes or no? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I would like to continue by reminding my colleague opposite what our government is doing today to support Canadians and Quebeckers: 293applications for the Canada emergency wage subsidy have been approved. Over 2million Canadians today have the chair: Mr.Brunelle-Duceppe, you have the floor. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, I'll take that as a yes. It's fantastic! The money that the Liberals are going to get from the wage subsidy is going to go directly into their election kitty. When they go to get their election expenses reimbursed, they're going to get 60%of that money back. We think we all need to work together to continue to help Canadians and Quebeckers the chair: Order. alexis brunelle-duceppe: I don't know how to take it this time. I think it's necessary to stop, eject and throw the tape out, and provide an honest answer to the questions we ask. Can my colleague across the way answer a very simple question? Are their employees going to be used for political fundraising and so, once again, make the generous wage subsidy they receive work for them, yes or no? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I want to point out something important when we talk about our work and our economy. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, we've already seen a Duceppe who denounces the use of federal programs by the Liberal Party for the Liberal Party. colleague tell me if she's able to look the entrepreneurs in her riding in the eye and tell them that they don't deserve the wage subsidy, because their loss of income is only28% or29%, while her party is dipping into the cookie jar, yes or no? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I am absolutely willing to look into the eyes of the entrepreneurs and workers in my riding because they know that our government is doing a lot to help Canadians in this historic crisis. Our economic support program is the largest program in Canada's history the chair: We will now continue with Mr. Will the government admit today that there is no room for profit in the care of our seniors? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, that's a very important question, and I would like to thank the member for asking it. Chair, experts and advocates have all pointed out that in the for-profit model of care for seniors, there is more emphasis on the bottom line than on care for seniors. Will the Liberal government admit that there is no place for profit when it comes to the care of our seniors? hon. Chair, I want to start by saying one thing, and that is to publicly thank, in this House, Brigadier-General Conrad Mialkowski and his team for compiling the assessment that they did of long-term care homes in Ontario. What they did is historic, and we all need to the chair: We'll now go back to Mr. However, they don't need our thanks right now; they need to see some action on what they have pointed out. What is the government doing to protect seniors in the long-term care homes that they own? hon. Chair, I agree with the member opposite that after what we have learned this week, all options must be on the table when it comes to how care for our elders will be provided in Canada in the future. jagmeet singh: If all the options are on the table, will the Liberal government commit to removing profit from long-term care, particularly in the Revera long-term care homes, the second-largest number in Canada, which the government owns? Will it commit to removing profit from long-term care? hon. chrystia freeland: What we will commit to doand I hope with the support of all members of this Houseis work very carefully and also very urgently in close co-operation with our provincial partners, under whose jurisdiction this falls, to ensure that these heart-wrenching reports mean that as a country we turn the page the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, Revera is a Crown corporation owned by the government, so let's not hear excuses. Is the government doing anything to ensure that seniors are cared for? Is it providing for robust inspections, yes or no? hon. One of the strengths of Canada is that we have non-partisan government institutions, and they serve us extremely well. Will the government commit to ensuring there is no profit anymore in Revera? As we've seen, it is facing a $50-million lawsuit, and there's been horrible negligence. Chair, as I said at the outset, the ownership structure of long-term care facilities needs to be on the table. I also want to emphasize how important it is for us to do what we have been doing, which is to work very closely with the provinces, under whose jurisdiction this falls. In just the past 24 hours, I have spoken with Premier Ford, Premier Horgan and Premier Moe, and our conversation included long-term care facilities. karen vecchio (elginmiddlesexlondon, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Today I join critics from the NDP, the Bloc and the Green Party who deal with women's issues and gender equality to ask where the $75 million toward sexual exploitation and human trafficking has gone. Last week organizations had to close their doors and the programs that help vulnerable women and girls, so the simple question is this: Where is the money? hon. I agree that human trafficking, which is a crime of coercion and exploitation, is unacceptable, and we have to ensure that we provide the supports necessary to the victims of this crime. As the member knows, we have launched a new, comprehensive national strategy to combat human trafficking, and we've incorporated a new pillar in that strategy of empowerment to ensure that the focus the chair: We'll go back to Ms. karen vecchio: With all due respect, it's great that we have a strategy, but when money is not going to the doors of these organizations that provide these services, a strategy is nothing. Chair, let me pick up where my honourable colleague left off by acknowledging that trafficking is a heinous crime and that hundreds of organizations across the country are working to solve the challenges that come with human trafficking. I remind my honourable colleague that hundreds of organizations have received supports, and we will have more to announce to further support the chair: We'll go back to Ms. What should we tell the young women and girls looking for these supports right now? What is the answer from the government? hon. Chair, no one should have to live a life with violence, whether it's sexual, physical, financial or emotional, and that the government of Canada the chair: We'll go back to Mrs. Yesterday I happened to be part of the health committee, and the Battered Women's Support Services representative was there as a witness. She shared with me that the organizations that she is associated with, over 500 organizations that deal with sexual assault and shelters, did not receive funding. They are receiving funds through Feminists Deliver, but there are hundreds of organizations that will receive additional funds to provide the critical care that they need to support front lines and the most vulnerable in their communities, and we will have more to say soon. Chair, we know that calls to centres like Battered Women's Support Services have gone up by 300 times, so this is a huge concern I have. As I said, hundreds of organizations like the Battered Women's Support Services are going to be receiving funds from the federal government in the coming days. Chair, some organizations are seeing demands up as high as 400% with their capacity limited by 400%. We've centres and women's shelters, and 700 have received funds, with more to come soon. I appreciate that this Parliament includes consensus among all colleagues that feminism and supporting women the chair: We'll go back to Ms. karen vecchio: If we're talking about being a feminist government, I have one single question. Yesterday the minister was not willing to answer the question, so I will ask the Minister for Women and Gender Equality. How can a feminist government support the Wet'suwet'en First Nation women whose titles were stripped from them? hon. We are happy to do that, and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations has been working very hard to move this historic agreement forward. karen vecchio: These women have lost their titles, and the decisions were made with the hereditary chiefs and not the elected chiefs. Why is this government not standing up for these women hereditary chiefs who were stripped of their titles? hon. Chair, I think the honourable member knows that the route to self-determination is to have first nations, Inuit, and Mtis determine their own governance and abide by their own laws. Right now the Wet'suwet'en nation is in that process of determining what kind of governance they would like. The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act has passed both houses of Congress in the United States and is now on the way to the Oval Office for signature. What is Canada's position on this Muslim minority being jailed and re-educated by the Communist Party of China? hon. Chair, we are deeply concerned by the human rights situation faced by the Uighurs and other minorities in China. Their Muslim minority was driven out and now languishes in Bangladesh, which is a commonwealth partner in the midst of this global pandemic. We will continue to call on the Chinese government to ensure that human rights of all of its people, including the freedom of religion, are fully respected. david sweet: Yesterday the rubber-stamp National People's Congress passed the national security bill undermining Hong Kong's autonomy and strengthening a grip of the Communist Party of China. mary ng: Canada, with our international partners in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., made a joint statement in which we are expressing our deep concern regarding China's imposition of a new security law for Hong Kong. david sweet: Canada has an admirable history of doing the right thing and helping when the situation is bleak. The Suez Canal, Cyprus, the fall of apartheid, child and maternal health in Africa, and Afghanistan are examples in my lifetime of how Canada has weighed in significantly. Chair, with hundreds of thousands of Canadians living in Hong Kong, we have a vested interest in Hong Kong's stability and prosperity, the foundations of which are Hong Kong's relative autonomy and basic freedoms. Canada will always support and promote freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedoms of the press around the world. david sweet: I think the 300,000 Canadians who are in Hong Kong want a little bit more than interest from the government. What exactly is the government going to do to help those 300,000 Canadians who are in the breach between democracy and tyranny now? hon. Chair, Canada has expressed deep concern regarding China's imposition of the new security law for Hong Kong. We are going to continue to support and promote freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press around the world. After being fired at with pepper bullets and tear gas yesterday, 300 students were arrested in Hong Kong while peacefully protesting. Where is the outrage from this government with regard to what the CPC is doing in Hong Kong? hon. Chair, as we have said, we are deeply concerned about the arrests of political figures and about the law that has been imposed on Hong Kong. Chair, I'm going to give the minister another opportunity to answer the third question that I asked. Yesterday, the rubber-stamp National People's Congress passed the national security bill, undermining Hong Kong's autonomy and strengthening the iron grip of the Chinese Communist Party. mary ng: Canada will continue to support Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy and freedoms under the Basic Law and the one country, two systems framework. Canada and our international partners, with the U.S., Australia and the U.K., have made a joint statement deeply expressing our concern regarding China's imposition of a new security law for Hong Kong. steven blaney (bellechasseles etcheminslvis, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Steven Blaney: I am pleased to represent the city of Lvis, because it is a privilege, Mr.Chair. It is the city where Alphonse Desjardins, who spearheaded the largest financial cooperative movement, was born. We thought it was to improve the program, but can the minister confirm that the budget remained the same between April7 and9? hon. We have added flexibilities, including the ability to have part-time work and the ability to have the jobs extended until February of next year. It remains at 70,000 job placements for 70,000 students, with 100% of them being subsidized at 100%. steven blaney: The minister confirms that the budget remains the same, but that by subsidizing each job more, they are reducing the number of jobs in the midst of the pandemic. Why reduce the number of jobs offered by our businesses in the midst of the pandemic, when our young people want to work? hon. Chair, I can assure the member, all members and all Canadians that despite the fact that he's singling out the Canada summer jobs program, we also created an additional 76,000 jobs through our youth employment and skills strategy, with an additional 40,000 placements for students. I can assure the member that we are the chair: The floor goes to Mr.Blaney once again. steven blaney: How many jobs are vacant right now? The program is lagging behind compared to other years. Why, and how is it that there is still money to be invested in our businesses to create summer jobs? hon. We created flexibilities in Canada summer jobs so that we can assuredly fill all of these 70,000 positions. I can assure young Canadians that there is work for them there, and I encourage them to check out the job bank. steven blaney: The minister confirms that there are delays in the midst of the pandemic, when the university year is over and businesses are waiting to hire young people. Why refuse to create additional jobs this year under the Canada summer jobs program, when businesses need them to adjust to the pandemic? hon. We've increased the number of jobs funded through our government's youth programs by over 100%. We've added flexibilities into the Canada summer jobs program to maximize that program in ways that it never would have been maximized had we not done this. I can assure the member opposite that we are doing our utmost to make sure that young people have good-quality job experiences this summer. steven blaney: When the minister says maximize, she is actually saying that there are fewer jobs this year for young people because the budget has remained the same, but that each position is funded more. My question is very simple: why not fund more jobs through the Canada summer jobs program instead of having open-ended programs like the Canada emergency student benefit, which does not allow young people to get work experience? We need young people and they want to work. carla qualtrough: I agree, absolutely, that we need young people to work this summer. Canada summer jobs is being maxed out, and that's a good thing, because we've increased the number of jobs and added an additional 76,000 jobs. I can assure the member that we're creating so many jobs, and it's so exciting for our young people. steven blaney: The Canada emergency student benefit does not encourage young people to go to work, and employers have difficulty hiring them. Chair, I'm sure the member opposite is not implying that offering young people income support that they take out of necessity will make them not want to work. Yesterday my colleague asked the Minister of Public Safety a question, and he did not get a good answer. Why are asylum seekers being allowed to cross the closed border and reunify with their families when Canadians are not being allowed to reunify with their counterparts in the U.S.? hon. Chair, to correct an error that was just repeated, we have put in rules that have excluded people from non-essential travel. We currently have an agreement with the United States that people crossing our border irregularly are being directed back to the United States. I have another citizen who's married to an American woman who needs medical services every three weeks who is not being allowed to go over and come back. I also have parents who have not seen their children in months because they're not allowing custody arrangements between Canadians and Americans to continue. At the same time, we are exercising all due diligence to ensure that we prevent non-essential travel to protect the health and safety of Canadians. We've been working very hard to ensure that we have a solution for those individuals who need and want to reunite with their families. Chair, the Minister of Agriculture has known there's been a capacity issue on cattle processing for more than a year and has done nothing. We don't have a BSE exemption that would allow us to use American processors, and there's been no incentive to create additional capacity to process. marie-claude bibeau (minister of agriculture and agri-food): We have done a great deal for the meat sector lately. We have invested $100million in the beef and pork sectors through the AgriRecovery program. That's a significant increase, because in the last few years the program has provided between $7million and $15million only. We have also invested $77.5million to improve the capacity of processors the chair: We'll go back to Ms. What is the minister going to do to help the cattle farmers who are struggling, especially in this pandemic? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, once again, we have helped the meat sector through the AgriRecovery program and we have put in place a $77.5million program to help meat processors deal with the situation and reorganize their work environment in a way that is safe for workers the chair: We will go back to Ms. To the Minister of National Revenue, I've had complaints from seniors in my riding that paper tax filings are not being processed. When will we begin to process those paper tax filings so seniors can get the refunds they need? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): Mr.Chair, we consider this to be a difficult situation for Canadians, and our government will do everything it can to support them. I can confirm that the CRA is still processing paper returns, but because of the reduced staff on site and the physical distancing, Canadians can expect delays. We regret the inconvenience this causes for those who file their returns on paper the chair: We will go back to Ms.Gladu. andranne larouche (shefford, bq): Mr.Chair, I have a point of order. I'm not sure whether there's anything we can do now, but we'll see if we can sort it out for the next meeting. Chair, obviously with COVID, many people are struggling with the loss of loved ones and their grief. The Canadian Grief Alliance has submitted a proposal looking for a very modest sum of funding from the government to extend their virtual grief counselling. patty hajdu (minister of health): I'm not aware of that specific proposal, but I commit to asking my officials to bring it forward to me and I will take a look. Can the Minister of Health tell us what she is doing to increase the capacity to help people who are suffering? hon. patty hajdu: I know I don't have much time, but let me repeat our infomercial to Canadians. They should visit Wellness Together Canada, the portal that will provide access for Canadians to a variety of mental health supports, including connection to professionals. Major events and mass gatherings being really out of the conversation for the foreseeable future, many event venues right now, such as concert halls and fairgrounds, are looking at the possibility of going more than a year without any revenue. I can think of many in my riding, such as the Saskatoon Fringe Festival, Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, the jazz festival, the folk festival, along with WDM and the Aviation Museum. Can the Minister of Canadian Heritage tell us what support has been made available to date to these organizations that are left up in the air? hon. steven guilbeault (lauriersainte-marie, lib.): As the member knows, we have done a number of things in the past weeks to help the arts and culture sector. We have provided advance help to a number of organizations from Canadian Heritage programs or the Canada Council for the Arts on top of the $500-million program, which has started to be deployed and will continue to be deployed in the coming weeks specifically for these types of organizations. The reality only makes the allegations of predatory behaviour being levied against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation even more disturbing. I asked the minister on May 7 about these allegations, and he said he had not been informed of the allegations but would look into them. We can't afford to have a Crown corporation using its status to try to wipe out its competitors in this country. Has the minister begun the investigation into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and does he have any information that he can share with us here today? hon. steven guilbeault: As the member said, these are allegations, and as you well know, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is an independent body. Chair, is that these allegations against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came from an organization in the minister's own province of Quebec, so can the minister take action to address any predatory behaviour on behalf of the CBC, or can the government's friends at the CBC simply get away with anything? hon. steven guilbeault: Allegations are allegations, whether they are made in Quebec, Ontario or Alberta. kevin waugh: When I last rose, on May 7, the committee responsible for the government's massive $595-million media bailout package had not met. Has the committee met? If yes, when can the media organizationsand I hear there are only 29 publishersexpect the support promised? If it hasn't met, when is it going to meet? hon. steven guilbeault: As the member is well aware, this program is a tax-break program. In order for organizations to qualify, they had to file their income tax forms, which they have done over the last few weeks. The program is in place, and we are confidant that media organizations will receive the money by the end of the summer. kevin waugh: There was $30 million rolled out to media organizations, some 1,400 organizations. Has the $30 million been distributed so far in this country to all 1,400 media organizations? the chair: Honourable minister, go ahead for 20 seconds or less, please. I would be happy to provide the list of those 1,400 media organizations that have received funding through that ad campaign. martin champoux (drummond, bq): Mr.Chair, I'm feeling generous today, and I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Pierre-BoucherLesPatriotesVerchres. At the beginning of the crisis, the government called on entrepreneurs in Quebec and Canada, inviting them to set an example in the situation we are experiencing. Many of them turned to the supplemental unemployment benefit plan to maintain the employment relationship and to preserve some security, enabling their employees to get through this difficult period with more peace of mind. However, on May22, despite the fact that these entrepreneurs had made sure that the SUB program would still be in place when the CERB was introduced, they were surprised. Employees were told at that time that they would have to repay the CERB because of the alleged gains they had made under the SUB program. At SOPREMA, one of the large employers in the Drummondville region, 150employees are affected. At Bridgestone, in Joliette, 1,100employees are affected by this decision. At Goodyear, in Valleyfield, 150employees are affected, and there are dozens more. Does the minister intend to correct this mistake so that employers who are able and willing to do so can treat their employees better during this difficult period? hon. carla qualtrough: When we put in place the Canada emergency response benefit, the underlying goal was to make sure that every worker who needed it had access to income support as they were losing their employment for COVID reasons. We understood that meant some workers would not have access moving forward, although let me clarify that SUB plans that existed prior to March 15 are definitely in place. We consider the fact that workers have access to $1,000 a month in addition to CERBand we've spoken with employers about thisto permit employers to assist their employees in an equitable way. martin champoux: Mr.Chair, employers received absolutely no news from the government before this measure was implemented, despite the fact that they were assured that this measure would be transferred to the CERB. Does the government intend to fix this mistake, which would simply be the right thing to do? hon. Chair, I can assure the member opposite that the SUB plans that were in place prior to March 15 are indeed in place now. In addition, employees who are now on the CERB as an alternative have access to $1,000 of income in addition to their CERB. xavier barsalou-duval (pierre-boucherles patriotesverchres, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. On April27, Option consommateurs sent a letter to the Minister of Transport to warn him that the airlines' refusal to reimburse their customers for cancelled flights was contrary to Quebec's laws. marc garneau (minister of transport): Mr.Chair, I sympathize with the people who would have preferred to get a refund, and I understand their frustration. A few hours ago, the following motion was passed unanimously: THAT the National Assembly ask the Government of Canada to order airlines and other carriers under federal jurisdiction to allow customers whose trips have been cancelled because of the current pandemic to obtain a refund. marc garneau: Mr.Chair, as my hon.colleague knows, the Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled on this issue and has ruled that, in the present circumstances and in a non-binding way, it is acceptable for airlines to offer credits for up to two years. the chair: Mr.Barsalou-Duval, you have about 15seconds for a question. xavier barsalou-duval: Mr.Chair, I find it rather odd that the Minister of Transport and the Canadian Transportation Agency are telling the airlines that Quebec's regulations and laws are not important and that they can override them. Theoretically, under the famous Canadian Constitution, which they imposed on us, that is not how it should work. colleague probably knows, the Canadian Transportation Agency is a quasi-judicial body that operates at arm's length from Transport Canada and the Government of Canada. We're going to take a short break to allow employees supporting the meeting to switch in safety, including myself. Chair, I'll be sharing my time with the member for GlengarryPrescottRussell. Minister, in Etobicoke Centre, we are mourning the loss of 42 residents to COVID-19 at the Eatonville Care Centre. This week, we received a disturbing report from the Canadian Armed Forces documenting appalling and completely unacceptable conditions in the Eatonville Care Centre in Etobicoke, Orchard Villa in Pickering, Altamont Care Community in Scarborough, Hawthorne Place in North York, and Holland Christian Homes Grace Manor in Brampton. As I said in the House of Commons on May 7, we need immediate action and comprehensive reform of long-term care. The four other MPs who represent the residents of these homes and I wrote to Premier Ford yesterday to urge him to appoint a third party manager to oversee all operations, to call a full public inquirybecause a government commission is not enoughand to work in partnership with the Government of Canada to establish enforceable national standards for long-term care homes across our country. Minister, will you call on the Government of Ontario to establish a full public inquiry, and will you work with provincial governments to establish and implement enforceable national standards for long-term care homes across Canada so that our seniors from coast to coast to coast can receive the quality of care they deserve? the acting chair (mr. I think all Canadians were horrified, shocked and saddened to hear about the conditions that elders were living in in those particular homes and that many seniors struggle with across the country. I know the Prime Minister has been very vocal about the need to do more to support provinces and territories to provide better care for seniors, no matter where they live. francis drouin (glengarryprescottrussell, lib.): Mr.Chair, we know that farmers across Canada have been going through some difficult times in recent months. I was very pleased to hear that the government has enhanced the youth employment and skills strategy program to help create 700new jobs for young people in the agriculture sector. Can the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food tell us when and how our farmers will be able to apply for this new program? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, in these unprecedented times, our producers are working that much harder to feed Canadians while facing challenges that are not always easy, particularly in terms of access to labour. To help them, this week, the Prime Minister announced an increase in the youth employment and skills strategy program to help young people be hired in the agricultural sector. This is a $9.2-million investment that will help to attract young Canadians between the ages of15 and30 and to provide them with an exceptional experience in the agricultural sector. In early April, the NDP asked for a commercial rent abatement program so that tenants could apply for help instead of depending on their landlords, but the government chose to leave commercial tenants helpless if their landlord can't or does not want to apply. On Monday we wrote to ministers again, asking them to negotiate a nationwide moratorium on commercial rent evictions with the provinces and territories so that tenants can't be kicked out. Will the minister take action to ensure that no small business owner is evicted during COVID-19? the acting chair (mr. We recognize the challenges that small business owners in particular, as well as landlords, are facing during the course of COVID-19. We have worked together with the provinces to come up with an approach that would provide an incentive for landlords to give a rent reduction to commercial tenants. Of course, we recognize that this is a jurisdiction of the provinces, so it will be up to the provinces to consider the next steps, if any, in this regard. I would like to take this opportunity to encourage landlords to sign up for this, which not only gives them a sense of security but also their tenants. If the government won't negotiate a moratorium, will it at least let tenants apply for the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance program so they can get help with 50% of their rent? hon. The federal government is working through the CMHC to provide support to landlords, which is conditional on their working with their tenants, but of course, it is a provincial area of jurisdiction, so any further actions and any decisions on restricting evictions are in the provincial jurisdiction and not ones that the federal government is able to move forward on. Chair, they talk about wanting to support small businesses, but their failure to make rent support work is putting businesses out of business. Many people in my riding could not make rent on April 1 and May 1, and June 1 is coming up. For businesses, of course, we've put in place not only the business account for small businesses but additional support through the wage subsidy program. leah gazan: I just want to remind my honourable colleague that his response is supposed to be within the same time period as the question I asked. In fact, the minister was just coming up to the same amount of time it took for your question. I am monitoring that, and we will interrupt if one of the ministers responding goes more than just a short time over. In fact, we try to cut it off at the appropriate time, allowing a word or two perhaps to finish a phrase, and that's the extent of it. Chair, Winnipeg Centre is the third-poorest riding in the country, and COVID-19 has put many of the residents in my riding on the verge of homelessness. Instead of bailing out its corporate buddies, when will this government provide proper rental assistance so that families and individuals do not end up on the streets? the acting chair (mr. In addition to that, we have provided over $157.5 million directly to community entities for homelessness all across Canada . How can the government not show leadership and provide the support that people need to afford their homes? Will this government provide support, yes or no? hon. Chair, once again, we have provided support to families and individuals so that they have the ability to pay their rent and pay for essential supplies and expenses. In addition to that, we have moved additional dollars, in the amount of $157.5 million, to the most vulnerable, including the homeless population in Canada. rachael harder: As this pandemic began to spread, the government propagated China's talking points about how human-to-human transmission was impossible. Chair, the member opposite's continued lack of awareness of how science works is somewhat disconcerting. I'm sure she understands that this is a novel coronavirus that appeared on the scene in late December, and as the research community worldwide struggled to keep pace with understanding how the virus was adapting, the information changed. rachael harder: I'm simply wondering if the minister would like to do the honourable thing and acknowledge that that information was misleading. Chair, since the very beginning, we have been advising Canadians that they need to protect themselves from the novel coronavirus. rachael harder: The minister also said that face masks weren't necessary, that they wouldn't help Canadians. Chair, as the evidence changed about the novel coronavirus, as our amazing researchers gave us new evidence, we adapted to adjust our advice to Canadians. rachael harder: Why is the minister not able to acknowledge that she fed the Canadian public misinformation? hon. rachael harder: Back in January when we started noticing other countries closing their borders to stop the spread of COVID-19, Conservatives asked the government if it would do the same. As the member opposite knows, we took strong measures at the border, as recommended by the international health regulations, and we were able to contain the virus for quite some time. rachael harder: I cannot agree with the minister more that providing misinformation is, in fact, incredibly wrong, which is why the government should simply apologize to the Canadian public for telling them that there was no emergency at our doorstep, that they didn't need to wear face masks, that we didn't need to close our borders, that human contact or contraction was impossible. Why will the minister not just do the honourable thing and retract them and apologize to the Canadian public? Some hon. Chair, I maintain that the member opposite does not understand that as new evidence comes forward, that as new advice comes forward.... I'm just wondering if the minister will retract the statements that she made previously, now that she understands that they are misleading. Chair, I am so proud of Canadians for being able to adapt to new evidence and public health advice as it becomes clearer and clearer what kinds of actions can protect our health. rachael harder: On February 3, Conservatives called on the government to treat this virus as a public health emergency and to take immediate action. Unfortunately, Minister Hajdu scolded Conservative MPs, stating that we were spreading misinformation and trying to sensationalize the risk of the virus. Chair, very early on it was quite clear there were members of our community who were stigmatized by misinformation that was floating around in various circles in the Canadian community. We took strong action to assure those Canadians that we would be with them as we also fought the coronavirus in Canada. rachael harder: Would the minister like to retract her statement that this side of the House somehow blew this up into something bigger than it is? hon. Tam was convening members of the Canadian medical community to ensure that we would have a robust Canadian response to an issue of potential concern. Chair, while the government has told the Canadian public that the virus was not something to be concerned about, that we didn't need to close the borders and that face masks weren't necessary, they were misleading the Canadian public. Now they are crowning themselves as the arbiters of truth, spending millions of dollars to censor what information is and is not available online. Would the minister like to respond to why she is misleading the Canadian public and then crowning her head with the ability to monitor the acting chair (mr. Chair, I want to thank our public health officials and medical community for their incredible work in ensuring that Canadians have accurate information about how best to protect themselves. bruce stanton): I invite the honourable member for MganticL'rable to take the floor. luc berthold (mganticl'rable, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. One million dollars is the cost of installing air conditioning for a number of rooms in a CHSLD; it is a new fire station; it is 200more student jobs for day camps in Quebec. With $1million, the Liberal government plans to give an annual bonus to the president of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Does the Minister of Infrastructure agree with the bank's board, which is being so generous to its president with Canadians' money? hon. catherine mckenna (minister of infrastructure and communities): Mr.Chair, I am very proud of what our government has done to invest in communities across the country. We are building by investing in renewable energy, green infrastructure and public transit, including in the member's riding. Chair, could the infrastructure minister explain to Canadians how it is better to give $1 million in bonuses to the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank than to invest in roads, schools, hospitals and long-term care homes? hon. Perhaps he isn't aware of our $33 billion infrastructure program in which we are working directly with the Government of Quebec to build infrastructure that's making a huge difference, including projects in the member's riding. On April3, the previous president of the Canada Infrastructure Bank left his position for reasons that remain unclear. How much did he receive in bonuses for his years at the helm of the Canada Infrastructure Bank? hon. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, the change of management at the Canada Infrastructure Bank marks a new phase in the development of the bank. We are working to build a modern, public infrastructure, to create jobs, and to make Canada more competitive internationally. What were the evaluation criteria that led to the decision that the former CEO had delivered a performance worthy of a bonus, when few, if any, projects were financed by the bank? hon. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, I would like to thank the former CEO, Pierre Lavalle, for his contribution to the establishment of this new institution. luc berthold: Did the minister approve the bonuses paid to the former president of the Canada Infrastructure Bank? hon. catherine mckenna: As I have already said, the compensation range for the CEO is determined by the bank and is public knowledge because of the legislation the acting chair (mr. If the new president stays in the position for five years, he could be entitled to a bonus totalling $4million, in addition to his salary of $3million. Does the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities consider that this is a good way to spend taxpayers' money? hon. catherine mckenna: We have to build our country, create good short-term jobs, ensure that we have a cleaner future, invest in renewable energy and green infrastructure in order to build bridges, public transportation the acting chair (mr. Chair, if the new CEO stays in office for five years, he will be entitled to a total potential bonus of $4 million, in addition to his salary of $3 million. Does the Minister of Infrastructure think this is a good way to spend taxpayers' money, yes or no? hon. Chair, I'm very proud that we have Michael Sabia, who is now head of the Canada Infrastructure Bank as the board chair. We need to move forward in building infrastructure that's going to create jobs, including in the member's riding; that's going to help move us to a cleaner future; that's going to grow our economy and increase Canada's competitiveness. Chair, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important it is to be able to move our goods interprovincially. Christian Buhagiar of Supply Chain Canada called for the government to revisit interprovincial trade regulations to ensure we can quickly move production and distribution from one region to another during times of emergency. Will the government commit to immediately examine all our trade barriers that can affect interprovincial trade of essential goods due to COVID-19? the acting chair (mr. Chair, the federal government has a regulatory reconciliation table as part of the Canada free trade agreement, focusing on breaking down interprovincial trade barriers. Due to COVID-19, it has been announced that deadlines for all of these items may be delayed. Chair, it is absolutely right and appropriate for first ministers, who have been meeting every week for more than two months, to be focusing on the urgent threat posed by the coronavirus. However, I agree with the member opposite that we need to lift barriers to interprovincial trade. Chair, while many of these items were past due prior to the pandemic, two important items from the list that should be worked on now are meat inspection and food inspection. Considering serious issues from these industries during the pandemic, would the minister commit to restarting the work on at least these two items? the acting chair (mr. I can assure you, as far as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is concerned, that we are very open to that issue. Moreover, the authorities are front and centre in cases where there may be a food shortage in one region of the country or another. Does the government have a comprehensive plan to ensure the movement and resiliency of our national supply chain? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, since we are discussing the food supply chain, let me remind you that we are committed to spending $50million, specifically to buy surplus food and redistribute it, through the food bank network, to regions where the need is greatest. Chair, reports state that activists' rail blockades earlier this year cost the Canadian economy $275 million, and it took three to five days to catch up for every day that our transportation network was down. The supply chain industry just caught up, and then the pandemic hit, creating new issues and backlogs. We are hearing from those in the industry who are concerned about future blockades affecting essential goods getting across the country. Will the government commit to immediately dismantling any potential future blockades? the acting chair (mr. Chair, I couldn't agree more with my colleague that it is important for our railways to be transporting all the goods that we produce in this country. Certain products are moving very well at the moment, including grain, potash and coal, but other goods haven't moved as quickly, because they have been affected by the pandemic. We are very vigilant with respect to moving our goods as efficiently as possible, whether it's by our railways, by trucks or by ships. Chair, at the standing committee for industry this week, David Montpetit of the Western Canadian Shippers' Coalition stated that they believe shippers are going to face a container shortage over the next six months. This could backlog essential goods interprovincially, including food and medicine, if the capacity isn't there. With respect to trucking, we do have issues with respect to a lack of truckers for moving some of our goods across the country. Young and new farmers are struggling, as they don't have enough equity built up to borrow money to survive these difficult times. Price insurance is key, but the premiums are so expensive due to COVID that they can't participate. marie-claude bibeau: Yes, Mr.Chair, we are encouraging the use of private programs, as well as the risk management programs. cathay wagantall: Has the minister worked with her provincial counterparts to secure a short-term cost-sharing agreement to reduce premiums where price insurance already exists? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, I can assure my colleague that I am working very regularly with all my provincial colleagues. cathay wagantall: Is cost-sharing of premiums already available for crop insurance? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, for insurance protection, our proposal to the provinces is to include the possibility of recognizing a labour shortage as an insurable risk. cathay wagantall: Without price insurance, how many ranchers have had to address cash flow by selling cattle at the bottom of the market? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, we have established a number of programs in order to help our beef producers. For example, we are providing $50million through the AgriRecovery program and $77.5million for food processors. cathay wagantall: On May 1, the Young Cattlemen's Council asked the minister to extend the deadline for attaining calf price insurance. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, we discuss different options with representatives of various organizations almost every day. We are trying to work with them to improve the various programs and to meet their needs, in addition to the risk management programs, of course. cathay wagantall: She didn't respond to the request of the Young Cattlemen's Council. The minister is telling farmers to access the BRM program, but just now I got a text from a young cattleman in my riding who's losing $250 to $300 per head and just told me that those programs in no way increase their capacity to deal with this crisis. The Farm Credit Canada lending capacity was increased by $5 billion, but only to service and manage loans of current customers. marie-claude bibeau: However, Mr.Chair, there is a whole range of programs for our producers, whether they be specific programs for the agriculture sector, or the Canada emergency business account, the CEBA, the criteria of which have been broadened. This allows us to provide more loans, also with a forgivable portion of 25%, which could amount to $670million for the agricultural sector. cathay wagantall: What percentage of Canada's farmers are customers of Farm Credit Canada? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, Farm Credit Canada is well-established from one end of the country to the other and it is ready to meet the needs of our agricultural producers. cathay wagantall: Of the 25% of farmers who use FCC and have applied, how many have received assistance? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, I stand to be corrected but, according to the most recent information I have received, $4billion in flexible loans to producers have been made available since the crisis began. cathay wagantall: Is the minister concerned that cow-calf numbers will sharply decrease if producers aren't able to protect the value of their herds, which they cannot do, jeopardizing the future of the Canadian beef supply chain? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Mr.Chair, I can assure you that I am extremely concerned about the future of the agri-food sector. That is why we are working extremely hard with the sector every day to improve existing programs and create new ones, especially in support of the meat industry. cathay wagantall: They made it clear that the BRM programs don't work and there's not funding in place to assist them. How many beef operations are facing the real danger of going out of business because of this pandemic and the lack of support by the agriculture minister and this Liberal government? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Once again, Mr.Chair, we know that the risk-management programs are not perfect. The Minister of Employment has stated that measures would be forthcoming for individuals with disabilities, similar to the one-time payment increase given to seniors on OAS and GIS. Could the minister please provide some more details with respect to the statement she made? When can individuals with disabilities expect meaningful financial assistance? the acting chair (mr. Chair, we know that Canadians with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by COVID in terms of both their own personal health and the access to supports that they have, or don't have, more specifically. We are three days away from National AccessAbility Week, the first week after we legislated it in the Accessible Canada Act. My office has heard from many constituents who are frustrated over the lack of information on eligibility requirements from the government regarding the business credit availability program. How will the government ensure that the messaging for BCAP and similar programs is articulated properly? the acting chair (mr. Nothing is more important to us right now than making sure our small and medium-sized businesses are supported. The lending program through BCAP is available through financial institutions; that's banks and credit unions across the country. Chair, members may not be aware, but there are ongoing restrictions on when some civil servants can access government servers and their files due to the pandemic, to ensure that those dealing directly with the pandemic have priority. Can the government please tell us when the system will have sufficient capacity so that all civil servants can do their work remotely and without limitation? the acting chair (mr. Thank you to my colleague for her important question, which indeed speaks to the importance of public servants continuing their important jobs for Canadians, being mindful, of course, of the difficult circumstances in which many of those workers find themselves, both personally and professionally. We know that, in particular, indigenous communities need that support, and particularly so in the context of the crisis. jody wilson-raybould: As current and former parliamentarians call for a national inquiry into long-term care homes, something I would strongly support, can the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations please give the members an idea as to when the action plan on murdered and missing indigenous women and girls will be released? In asking this question, I certainly understand the need for consultation and the reality of some delays due to the pandemic. There are of course many actions that we all know need to take place now that do not need more consultation. As we approach the first anniversary of the release of the final report, we are grateful for the work of all of our partners as they really try to do what they can to end this national tragedy of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and those who are two-spirited, plus. Despite the challenges of COVID-19, they have put in good initiatives, and we look forward to releasing a national action plan that will include all provinces and territories as well as all of our indigenous governments and partners. Wilson-Raybould, you're down to about the last 30 seconds, so please ask a short question. Does the government have any plans to step in and encourage airlines to return money to customers rather than vouchers? I've heard from many constituents and businesses in this regard. Chair, as I mentioned before, we're very sympathetic to the situation that those who would have preferred a refund are in at the moment. However, the airlines are going through an extremely difficult time, and if they had to reimburse at this time, some of them could fail. daniel blaikie (elmwoodtranscona, ndp): Thank you very much, Mr. I want to begin by indicating that I'll be splitting my time with the member for SkeenaBulkley Valley. Across the country, a lot of Canadians are preparing to go back to work right now and some employers are doing a good job of ensuring that there is a safe workplace, with the right procedures and the right equipment. For Canadians who are employed by them, that means making a really tough decision between going back to a workplace where they don't feel safe and which may present a threat to their families or communities, and staying home and worrying about not being paid because they're not at work or because they will lose access to the CERB. I am wondering what guidance the federal government has for people who feel that their workplace is not safe at this time and that their employer hasn't done its due diligence, and are concerned about losing access to the CERB. Chair, we are very concerned about the safety of our workplaces and we don't want workers to feel unsafe as they go back to work. We are taking an all-of-government approach to ensure that workers are safe, that they don't have to put their lives or the health of their families in jeopardy and that we can support them in these efforts. Chair, I think the issue here is that Canadian workers really need some certainty about what the federal government would consider an adequate employment offer, or an offer to come back to work, so that they wouldn't be on the CERB. Can Canadians be confident that they can stay on the CERB whether they go back to work or not, whether their employer makes them an offer or not? I think a lot of people have anxiety about this and it's a difficult time. When is the government going to release some formal guidance on how people go about refusing unsafe work? hon. Chair, we know that the provinces have their own workers' compensation programs and refusal-to-work mechanisms, but the point for us, here in government, is to work with employers and with the provinces so that we make our workplaces safe. Canadians depend on municipalities across Canada for vital services, especially during this pandemicservices like transit, drinking water, parks and sanitationyet the government has left municipalities in an unprecedented financial crisis. Local government leaders across the country have called on the government for help, yet mostly what we've heard are excuses. Does the minister acknowledge that the federal government has a leadership role to play in getting financial help to municipalities at this difficult time? hon. chrystia freeland: What we do acknowledge is the essential role municipalities play in our country at all times, and the particularly essential role they play today as our country gets ready to restart our economy. We are working closely with the municipalities to talk about ways we can support them and are working closely with the provinces, in whose jurisdiction the municipalities fall. taylor bachrach: Through you to the minister, we've seen deep cuts and more cuts are on the way. We've seen thousands of municipal workers laid off, and it's been over a month since municipal leaders called on this government for emergency financial relief. We are very aware of the difficult financial situation they find themselves in, and we are very aware of how important it is to keep our municipalities functioning, particularly as we move into the restart. We're working with municipalities and are urging them to work with their provinces, as we are doing too. Are there emergency federal dollars on the table for Canada's cities, yes, or no? hon. marilne gill (manicouagan, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. At a time when we are asking our fellow citizens and Quebeckers to make sacrifices and even greater efforts, the Liberal Party, the government, is directly pilfering from a subsidy program that should be going to those who need it, not to rich political parties and their millionaire supporters. At a time when the work in the House is even more essentialwe should be working even harder, just as we are asking the people to dothe government, with the complicity of the NDP, decides to suspend the work of the House. Can the government confirm to the House, and simultaneously to the NDP, that the measure involving 10days of leave is absolutely not something it can do? It is not in its jurisdiction, so it is a measure that it cannot implement. pablo rodriguez (leader of the government in the house of commons): Mr.Chair, in order to be part of any agreement, you have to negotiate and be sitting at the table. The Bloc Qubcois says it wants to make gains for Quebec, but in order to do that, it must be sitting at the table, not outside the room. It's like a hockey game; if you want to score goals, you have to be on the ice. The other day, I asked this question: how many of Guy Lafleur's 560goals were scored when he was sitting on the bench? mrs. marilne gill: Let me shoot the puck back to the Leader of the Government in the House. But when you play a sport, when you are on a team, and when you are in Parliament, you still have to play by the rules. We have had discussions and we have reached a number of agreements with our friends in the Bloc Qubcois. It was going very well, but there was one agreement they did not like and they went off and sulked. When you are not happy, you do not go off and sulk; you stay at the table and negotiate. When a player decides not to play by the rules, I do not let myself be taken in twice. I prefer to negotiate here, as we should be doing all the time in Parliament, not trying to play with someone who never keeps his word. I would just like the Leader of the Government in the House to tell us that the measure about the 10days is not up to him and so he will not be able to make it happen. I could also ask him whether he found out from the Government of Quebec whether it agreed with the measure. What does she have against the fact that, from now on, people will be able to ask questions about anything, not just about COVID-19? What does she have against the fact that we are going to meet again this summer? What is it that she does not like? the acting chair (mr. First, 37.5hours per week, as well as the time we spend sitting on our normal committees, is quite a bit more than the eight short hours each week he is giving us. pablo rodriguez: Mr.Chair, it all depends on government decisions, and clearly, we are having discussions with the provinces. However, I still do not understand what she has against having more time than I do to ask questions. bruce stanton): We will now take a brief pause so that the technicians can spell each other off. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Sweet, the member for Flamborough-Glanbrook, got up and was raising a number of issues about the Hong Kong protests, where 360 people have been arrested. The People's Republic of China, the regime in Beijing, and their rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, are circumventing Hong Kong legislation and the Hong Kong government in putting their own will upon the people of Hong Kong. Chair, I'm asking if you would rule on this and schedule an emergency debate so that Parliament can actually discuss this crisis, this human rights crisis, as political protestors are being imprisoned because of their standing up against the communist regime in Beijing. He may know, and for the benefit of other honourable members, that we're operating in this Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic under the auspices of an order made earlier this week. Of course, he'll know that discussions of this sort are being shared, so he might want to pursue that opportunity. Minister, I've been informed by some of my colleagues that CRA officials have been directing constituents to phone their member of Parliament to resolve CRA-related issues. Why on earth would CRA direct individuals away from the agency during this stressful time when they're just trying to get their tax information and file their taxes? hon. You really should be answering that question and not just talking about how inappropriate it is, although I appreciate that. Also, on your website, it says that the telephone service for the individual-inquiries line will be available to Canadians until June 5, and there is no further information about further live service. When will you get your agency under control and make sure it provides an actual person on the other end of the line to provide the information that taxpayers need? the acting chair (mr. I've talked to my colleagues, and no chair, including the chair of the finance committee, has ever asked me to address a question through the chair. So with the greatest of respect, unless this is in fact Parliament, which I'm told it's not and the Parliament voted that it's not, we really should be able to address the witnesses directly, should we not? the acting chair (mr. This really is a question around the way in which this special committee on COVID-19 has been structured. We're operating under the rules that were agreed to by the House in an order that was passed and adopted on Tuesday of this week, so we're bound to manage the affairs of this committee in that way, and one of those includes asking members to address their comments and questions through the chair to other hon. So I ask you to abide by the rules of the committee, and we'll pursue that. diane lebouthillier: Mr.Chair, I must thank the officials who have done excellent work during this historic COVID-19 period. I must tell you that CRA call centres are an essential service and the agency is able to answer calls quickly. marty morantz: Some of my colleagues have spoken to the CRA about drop-off boxes for paper returns actually being removed at some locations, citing COVID-19 as a reason. Has the CRA removed these boxes at all locations? Given this, will you commit today to make paper filing postage-free, since paper filers can no longer drop off their returns at all of the locations? hon. At the CRA, we continue to process paper returns and to do the work that we usually do. marty morantz: On the subject of paper returns, there have been numerous reportsin fact I asked you on May 10 for a written response at the government operations committee, OGGO, which I have not yet receivedon the delays in processing paper returns. When will Canadians who filed paper forms have their returns processed so they can get the refunds they need during this difficult time? hon. diane lebouthillier: Mr.Chair, I can confirm that the Canada Revenue Agency continues to process paper returns. Because of COVID-19, we have had to implement distancing measures to protect the employees. The minister has been the minister since 2015 and should be able to answer this question off the top of her head. How many successful prosecutions have there been in Canada for the illegal use of tax havens? hon. diane lebouthillier: Mr.Chair, as we have said, one of our government's priorities was to invest almost $1billion to establish a system intended to fight tax evasion. bruce stanton): That concludes the 13thmeeting of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Speaker Rota asked me to remind all honourable members that during the next meeting, which will be next Monday, we'll be watching more carefully the time for members' statements. We ask members who are providing those by virtual conference to time their statements to within one minute, as he will start to cut off members who go beyond the one minute<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the sixth meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic. members that if you want to speak English, you should be on the English channel; if you want to speak French, you should be on the French channel; and should you wish to alternate between the two languages, as I just did, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking, each time you switch languages. In addition, please direct your remarks through the chair and speak slowly and clearly at all times to help our interpreters. I recommend the headset for your fellow members, but also for the interpreters as it gets loud, up and down, and it squeaks. I understand that there are no ministerial announcements today, so we will proceed to presenting petitions, for a period not exceeding 15 minutes. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. World Maternal Mental Health Day took place last week, and today I'd like to take a moment to present a very important petition on behalf of the Canadian Perinatal Mental Health Collaborative. Whereas perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are the most common obstetrical complication, whereas in Canada and worldwide 20% of women and 10% of men suffer from a perinatal mental illness, resulting in an annual economic cost to Canada of approximately $11 billion, and whereas the U.K., Australia and parts of the U.S. have perinatal mental health strategies and screening guidelines in place and Canada does not, the Canadian Perinatal Mental Health Collaborative is calling upon the House of Commons in Parliament assembled to create a national perinatal mental health strategy that will provide direction, policy and funding to develop specialized, comprehensive perinatal mental health care services, which include universal screening and timely access to treatment for all women and men during pregnancy and the postpartum period. If we were in the House now, as May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, one of the days this month we would all be wearing yellow roses in sympathy and solidarity with those who suffer from what is the number one disease killer in Canada of young people. The petitioners have asked us to look at the situation with the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which is scheduled to go through some important and potentially detrimental regulatory changes very soon. They ask that the amendments to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board be rescinded, as these will restrict Canadians from receiving life-saving medications for cystic fibrosis and other illnesses, but in particular, a medicine called Trikafta, which can have the effect of treating cystic fibrosis in the case of 90% of cystic fibrosis sufferers. They ask the government to work with the provinces to find a strategy to jointly allow for the delivery of this life-saving medicine to Canadians across the country and to take a leadership role in negotiating a price for gene modulators throughout all the provinces of Canada. Petitioners in my community point out in this petition, which, of course, predates the pandemic, that the family doctor shortage is severe in this country. This problem is particularly profound in more rural areas, including, as the petitioners reference, the community in which I live, Sydney, British Columbia. The petitioners call on the government to work with provinces and territories to find a collaborative, holistic solution so that every Canadian has a family doctor and we address the family doctor shortage. I'm presenting a timely petition today that emphasizes the concerns constituents in my riding of MissionMatsquiFraser Canyon have with the Liberal government's inherently flawed and undemocratic approach to firearms legislation and regulation. The petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to stop targeting law-abiding firearms owners; to cancel all plans to confiscate firearms legally owned by federally licensed RCMP-vetted Canadians; to focus taxpayer dollars where they will actually increase public safety, which is on keeping at-risk youth from being involved in gangs and on anti-gang enforcement; and to provide our men and women in uniform at the Canada Border Services Agency with the resources they need to stop the flow of illegal guns into this country. Through this petition, my constituents take issue with how the Liberal government continues to target law-abiding firearms owners instead of the gangs, drug traffickers and illegal weapons smugglers responsible for the violence in our communities. They note that the use of the phrase military-style assault rifle is purely political posturing, as the term is undefined in Canadian law. They also draw attention to the numerous inaccuracies about current firearms legislation and regulation the chair: I'd like to remind the honourable members that this is a concise prcis of what a petition says, not a speech. It's a huge honour to table e-petition 2512, which was signed by 1,198 petitioners, primarily from the province of Nova Scotia. The Province of Nova Scotia invited multinational companies to scope out and develop expansive open-net salmon farming operations. The petitioners cite that the expansion would increase environmental degradation, as seen in similar aquaculture operations in British Columbia, Newfoundland, Norway, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. It also, they cite, would pose risks to native fish stocks, pollute coastal ecosystems, impair at-risk wild Atlantic salmon, and threaten established fisheries and tourism operations. They also raise concerns that open-net fish farming would not create significant employment and would undermine existing lobster and other fisheries. They are calling on the government to uphold Bill C-68 and species-at-risk legislation, protect our oceans, ban expansion of open-net finfish aquaculture in our oceans, work to phase out any existing open-net fish farming operations currently in place and, lastly, invest in land-based, closed-containment finfish aquaculture. I want to thank these petitioners for fighting for clean oceans, for their local economy and for the well-being of Nova Scotia. It calls upon the House of Commons to commit to upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by immediately halting all existing and planned construction of the Coastal GasLink project on Wet'suwet'en territory, ordering the RCMP to dismantle its exclusion zone and stand down, scheduling nation-to-nation talks between the Wet'suwet'en nation and the federal and provincial governmentssomething that has already happened, thankfullyand prioritizing the real implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. yasmin ratansi (don valley east, lib.): Thank you, Mr. The petitioners are asking that the Government of Canada not provide any financial assistance to Canadian airlines until they promptly provide full refunds for flights that were cancelled due to COVID-19. dan albas (central okanagansimilkameennicola, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Today we've learned that federal workers have been told to ignore obvious signs of fraud when it comes to applying for government benefits. Can the Prime Minister confirm that 200,000 applications have been flagged as potentially fraudulent? right hon. We moved very quickly to get the Canada emergency response benefit out, to get the wage subsidy out and to help Canadians in this unprecedented situation. Chair, can the Prime Minister confirm that the instruction has been given to federal employees to ignore these 200,000 applications being flagged as potentially fraudulent? This is important. Our decision from the very beginning was to get the help out to people and figure out, with retroactive action if necessary, where and when there may have been fraudulent use. justin trudeau: Again, in this unprecedented situation, our focus has been on helping as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Other parties might have made a different choice had they been in government, but our focus was getting help to people when they needed it as quickly as possible and cleaning it up afterwards. Did the Prime Minister or his minister sign off on this memo that was issued by the deputy minister, yes or no? right hon. Chair, we have been focused entirely on getting help to Canadians when they need it, and that has meant that yes, there will be things we will need to clean up after the fact and work to fix, but getting that help into Canadians' pockets during this pandemic was our priority. Will he at least then commit to investigating every individual case of fraud, or will he write them off, as the story said? right hon. Chair, in this unprecedented situation Canadians have lost their jobs; they've lost their paycheques; they don't know how they're going to be able to support their loved ones and pay for their groceries. We made a decision as a country that we would be there for them and that has been and will continue to be our priority. Will he commit as a government to enforce the rule of law and to enforce the attestation that says that if someone commits fraud, the fraud will be pursued? right hon. All along we've been told fraud would be detected through audits after the fact, and we expect that to happen. justin trudeau: When we made the determination that we needed to move quickly to help Canadians, we knew there would be a need to clean up after the fact, to go after fraudulent cases. Our priority now and in the coming months is to ensure Canadians get the support they need, and our economy comes roaring back. gabriel ste-marie (joliette, bq): Mr.Chair, yesterday, the Prime Minister announced the large employer emergency financing facility. One of those conditions forces companies not to resort to tax evasion or tax avoidance through tax havens. Excellent! Unfortunately, I quickly became disillusioned because it is more about abusive tax evasion and avoidance. Companies that legally take advantage of tax havens to avoid paying their taxes will have access to the large employer emergency financing facility. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we will always be there to counter tax evasion and tax avoidance. In the current situation, our priority is to help workers across the country who could lose their jobs or who have lost their jobs. gabriel ste-marie: Mr.Chair, I'm delighted to hear the Prime Minister say that there's no tolerance for tax avoidance. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, when we announced the large employer emergency funding facility, we recognized that those who wanted to receive tax dollars had to have paid their fair share of taxes. That's why we're putting in place measures to carefully assess the tax structures of these businesses before we loan money to them. gabriel ste-marie: Mr.Chair, sometimes a bank will relocate its most profitable activities carried out in Canada and register them in a subsidiary in the Bahamas, Barbados or another tax haven. Does the Prime Minister consider this bank to be paying its fair share of taxes in Canada? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we will assess applications for the large employer emergency funding facility on a case-by-case basis. Before we provide any money, we're going to make sure that whoever wants to access these funds is transparent about how the money is being managed, including internationally. Consumers are paying more and more with their credit cards, which allows contactless payments in shops, not to mention online shopping. This benefits Visa and Mastercard, which charge appallingly high user fees, known as interchange fees. These are almost 10times higher than in Europe and Australia, and it costs our merchants a fortune. Can the Prime Minister follow the example of Europe and Australia by capping interchange fees at0.3%? right hon. We have worked with the big banks and the financial industry to ensure that people who need it have access to the help they need. Right now, we're sending money to consumers across the country who need it to get through this crisis. A credit card company, such as Visa and Mastercard, that charges a fee of 2.5%to3% per transaction undermines the merchant's profit margin and gets richer at the expense of consumers. I invite the Prime Minister to follow the example of Europe and Australia by capping these fees at0.3%. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we continue to work with financial institutions and the big banks to help consumers during this exceptional and difficult situation. Instead of providing a universal direct payment for all, the government has decided to implement a complicated program that leaves many people behind. A single parent with four school-age children lost her spousal and child support due to COVID-19. Will the Prime Minister step in and fix this gap so that the single parents and their children can get the support they need during this pandemic? right hon. Chair, to correct the honourable member by pointing out that we actually moved in the most rapid and simplest possible way in providing income replacement to millions upon millions of Canadians who needed it through the Canada emergency response benefit. However, as the member points out, when one moves quickly and efficiently, there will be gaps, and that's why we've been working diligently to try to fill those gaps. jenny kwan: While the Minister of Employment has been aware of this for three weeks and says she is looking into it, there's still been no action. The truth of the matter is that single parents and their children who depend on spousal support and child maintenance are not getting support. justin trudeau: We recognize the particular challenge faced by families, single parents and families with young children, which is why we increased the amount of the Canada child benefit to be able to support people in this particular moment. On top of that, we have looked to fill further gaps that have existed with the Canada emergency response benefit. Well over seven million Canadians have access to CERB, and we will continue to work with them ms. Across the country there is no national standard to address the homelessness crisis amidst this pandemic, leaving communities at heightened risk from COVID-19. Canadians who are homeless or living in substandard housing have no access to bathroom facilities for basic hygiene. government has implemented an initiative to house some of the homeless population in empty hotels in the short term, support from the federal government is needed to secure permanent solutions post-COVID-19. Will the Prime Minister commit to providing matching funds and take the right to adequate housing seriously? right hon. justin trudeau: I know that the honourable member wouldn't want to inadvertently mislead the House. The fact is, the federal government almost immediately sent significant resources, hundreds of millions of dollars, to shelters across the country to enable them to create facilities, including renting new spaces, to be able to house homeless people without increasing the danger of the spread of COVID-19. I recognize there's always more to do, but as we demonstrated with our national housing strategy, we are serious about fighting homelessness and supporting vulnerable Canadians, and we will continue to do that. Cutting chronic homelessness by 50% over the next decade is not good enough, and that is this Prime Minister's national housing strategy. Will the government stop just making empty promises and ensure that every Canadian has the right to housing? Will he top up the support for provinces to at least match their funds? right hon. Chair, cutting chronic homelessness by 50% is an ambitious goal that no one else has ever been able to do as a government, and we are well on track for it. I would suggest that the member opposite not dismiss that as an empty promise, because we have demonstrated actions on it. jenny kwan: I would remind the Prime Minister that it was the federal Liberals who eliminated the national affordable housing program in 1993, so we have this homeless crisis today as a result of the Liberals. We in Vancouver East have the third-largest urban indigenous population in the country, yet we got less than 2% of the pandemic urban indigenous housing funding. We have moved forward, both through the Minister of Indigenous Services and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, to address the challenges facing urban aboriginal populations. We will continue to work with them, recognizing that they are among the most vulnerable people in Canada who deserve the right support from all orders of government, and we will be there to support them increasingly in the coming years. Chair, I'm hearing in my riding of PortageLisgar that individuals who are dealing with Service Canada through the mail are experiencing delays. In fact, one of my constituents sent documents, including a doctor's note, two months ago on March 12 and is now being told that she must resend them because they've never been opened. Can the government tell us whether this is a widespread problem, and how are they dealing with unopened mail at Service Canada? the chair: The honourable minister. Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we are doing everything that we can in Service Canada to meet the expectations of Canadians. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had unprecedented volumes, but we have redeployed thousands of staff to front-line services by phone and by other means. We had to close a number of the centres because of COVID-19 concerns and the safety and well-being of Canadians. candice bergen: Is the minister aware whether this is a widespread problem? Is this happening rarely, or frequently? I'm hearing about it. I know, from many MPs, we are at the front lines of dealing with and helping constituents who are not only wanting to get support but also are trying to get programs unrelated to COVID-19. Chair, the Iver Johnson single-shot rifle is a standard farm gun used by many farmers in my riding, in fact, passed down from generation to generation in some cases. Why are the Liberals making this gun illegal? What's the purpose of banning this particular farm rifle? the chair: The honourable minister. I just wish to advise the member that we worked very closely with the Canadian firearms program, with law enforcement and with their firearms verification to identify the makes, models and variants of nine rifles, all of which had in their earliest provenance a design for military use, for soldiers to use in combat. We're hearing from front-line officers that they are concerned about gangs, drug dealers and illegal weapons being smuggled across the border. They are not concerned with these types of farm rifles that are being used by our farmers and, in some cases, hunters. Chair, we'd like to see the evidence on why the Liberals are once again targeting law-abiding Canadians, ignoring gangsters and drug dealers. bill blair: It's a great opportunity, I think, when the member opposite says what the police are saying. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police declared that military assault rifles were produced for the sole purpose of killing people in large numbers and urged the government to enact legislation to ban all military assault rifles, except for law enforcement and military purposes. They said, In our view, these weapons have no place in our communities and should be reserved for use by Canada's military and law enforcement. Chair, we've seen this before, where the Liberals introduced a long-gun registry that cost billions of dollars and did absolutely nothing to stop violent crimes. bill blair: Actually, what I'm saying, and what our regulations say very clearly, is that weapons that were designed not for hunting and not for sport purposes but for soldiers to use in combat to kill other soldiers have no place in Canadian society. Is it true that Canada Revenue Agency employees who process applications for the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB, have been asked to send the payment even if fraud had been detected, as was pointed out in a national media report today? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): Mr.Chair, our government considers these to be very difficult times for Canadians. We're going to do everything we can to support them by helping them pay for their housing and their groceries. alain rayes: I repeat my question, which is extremely simple: Is it true that the Canada Revenue Agency sent a memo to its employees asking them to ignore the fraudsters and still send the CERB payments?? hon. diane lebouthillier: I'll finish my response, which was interrupted: Nearly 7.8million Canadians have applied for the Canada emergency response benefit. alain rayes: Yes or no: Did the Canada Revenue Agency send a memo to its employeeswho are doing an exceptional job, I'd like to point outso that they would ignore the 200,000potential cases of fraud that they detected? hon. The federal government website clearly states that if an employee returns to work, the employee must pay back the CERB. Can the Prime Minister tell us whether employees who decide to return to work have to pay back the full $2,000per month, or only $500for week of the month? hon. diane lebouthillier: As I mentioned, we believe that Canadians are going through a very difficult time, and we need to support them. That's what our government is committed to, and that's what we'll continue to do. alain rayes: Mr.Chair, the extremely simple question I am asking the Minister comes from companies and workers. None of the officials dares to answer it when we call on technical matters, even though they are supposed to give us information that we can pass on to the public with complete transparency. If an employee is called back to workwhich is perfectly fineagrees to do so and wants to reimburse the CERB, must he reimburse $500for each week he works during the month, or the entire $2,000? hon. Chair, I can clarify that Service Canada will work closely with anybody who transitions either from the CERB to the wage subsidy or from the CERB back to employment to ensure that there's no overpayment, but of course that there's no undue hardship on the individual. It seems to me that my question is not complicated: do people have to reimburse $500for each week they work in a month, or the full monthly amount of $2,000? hon. That's why Service Canada is reaching out to individuals to make it as seamless as possible for them. If an employer complies with the hygiene conditions, can employees still refuse to return to work, and therefore continue to receive the CERB? hon. Chair, I can assure all Canadians that at the same time as employees have a right to refuse work and employers have an obligation to ensure healthy and safe workplaces, we want all people to be able to go back to work and feel safe. There are established processes and federal and provincial labour processes for refusal to work, and at the end of the day the CERB is there for workers who aren't working due to COVID-19. jamie schmale (haliburtonkawartha lakesbrock, cpc): Thank you, Chair. The Wet'suwet'en elected chiefs and community members have been excluded from negotiations on a memorandum of understanding affecting land rights and titles. The elected chiefs have issued a press release asking for the government to halt the joint announcement scheduled for May 14 on the MOU until the community has had a chance to look at and understand how the MOU will affect them. Will the minister agree with the democratically elected chiefs and the Wet'suwet'en people they represent and delay any announcement until proper consultation can be completed? the chair: The honourable minister. carolyn bennett (minister of crown-indigenous relations): I want to reassure the member that communication is ongoing with and between our partners on how to go forward on implementing the Wet'suwet'en rights and title with a Wet'suwet'en-led solution. We encourage the leaders to continue their ongoing, necessary and important conversations with their community on how they want to proceed on a path toward implementing their rights and title. As we work to rebuild Canada's relationship with the Wet'suwet'en, we need to give them space for these important discussions. jamie schmale: Minister, is that a yes that the signing will be delayed until the elected chiefs have a chance to look at the agreement? hon. jamie schmale: The current health crisis should not be used as an opportunity to sideline the Wet'suwet'en people and their elected chiefs. The federal government should be bringing the community together rather than actively excluding Wet'suwet'en members. The chiefs are so concerned that they are now calling for the resignation of the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations for failure to engage in proper consultations, which has stoked divisions within the community. Will the minister reconsider and put in place a consultation process that honours both their traditional house system and the governance responsibilities of elected chiefs and councils? hon. carolyn bennett: Yet again, it's very important the member understand the engagement must take place and be led by the Wet'suwet'en nation. That means the elected chiefs and the hereditary chiefs need to work with all clan members as they determine how they wish to work with Canada and the Province of British Columbia to implement the rights and title of the Wet'suwet'en people. jamie schmale: I agree that the Wet'suwet'en should have the opportunity to look at the proposed agreement, but we are still seeing news coming out of the elected chiefs and the people they represent that they have not had a thorough chance to look at this proposed agreement. carolyn bennett: I think the member will agree that there's a lot more work to do with all the parties. I believe, in terms of the kind of engagement that has taken place in the feast houses and the notification that took place even before COVID-19, that the work is under way and it will have to be Wet'suwet'en-led in terms of what eventually will be their choice as to how they implement their rights and title. Chair, for two weeks now the Liberals on the indigenous affairs committee have shut down Conservatives and witnesses every time we mention the word Wet'suwet'en. They don't want to talk about the issue, an issue that is very much aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis. I don't believe that there's, at any time, an interest in shutting down discussion or debate. I think, though, that at the COVID committee the issues facing indigenous communities, first nations, Inuit and Mtis around COVID-19 are very important to them. jamie schmale: I would argue with the minister and challenge her to talk to her committee members. Each time Conservatives have brought up the topic of the Wet'suwet'en and the situation happening with the elected chiefs and the people they represent, we have been shut down every single time. carolyn bennett: Again, in a committee, it is the work of the committee and the decision of the committee. I believe the chair and all members want first nations, Inuit and Mtis to be able to keep their communities safe during COVID-19. It has been three months since this pandemic started and the Liberals just got around to announcing help for seniors. I've just had the opportunity to introduce additional measures today wherein we are introducing a one-time special payment for those who receive OAS. stephanie kusie: Nearly two months into living in some form of isolation, watching their retirement savings take a hit and having to take additional health precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, eligible seniors are set to receive a one-time payment of up to $500. deb schulte: I just want to make sure that my honourable colleague remembers that we have already given a GST top-up of almost $375 for single seniors and over $500 for couples. This is in addition to what we've just done today where, as you said, it's $500. stephanie kusie: According to Abacus Data, 69% of Canadians feel that there will be a second wave in the pandemic, and 52% of Canadians believe that there is a shortage of medical equipment, including personal protective equipment. Given these surprising figures, what is the government's plan to bring in enough personal protective equipment, should there be a second wave of the pandemic? hon. anita anand (minister of public services and procurement): Our government is aggressively buying life-saving equipment and supplies that Canada needs, from a diverse range of suppliers around the world and here at home. We're working directly with businesses across the country to rapidly scale up domestic production capacity to meet current and future needs. At this point, our primary focus is on front-line health care professionals, but we are also exploring federal government assistance in areas of essential services so that PPE exists where workers need it. stephanie kusie: According to Public Services and Procurement Canada, despite 1.8 billion units of PPE being procured, less than 6% of N95 respirator orders have been filled, less than 8% of surgical mask orders have been filled, and just 1.4% of face shield orders have been filled. anita anand: Let me start by saying that we are working in an incredibly difficult and competitive global environment and are procuring millions of items: face shields, gowns, hand sanitizer, and N95 surgical masks, and ventilators every single day. There is a delay in the production of these goods, but we have had many deliveries coming into Canada, including over two million face shields the chair: We'll have to go back to Mrs. stephanie kusie: A national security expert from the University of Ottawa has said that the national emergency strategic stockpile has failed in the current crisis, resulting in some provinces such as Saskatchewan using expired PPE, and provinces such as Alberta using faulty PPE that cause rashes and headaches. What is the government doing to expedite procurement and to counter the risk of faulty PPE, given that 34 of the suppliers are from China, which has already supplied significant faulty PPE? hon. anita anand: I will start by saying that we have multiple supply chains operating at the same time, from China, and domestically, and from the United States and other countries around the world. Our first priority is to make sure that we get safe, effective equipment and supplies into the hands of our front-line health care workers. Given the global supply chains and their competitive nature, this is an ongoing project and we are having success for our front-line health care workers. Ten weeks ago the Minister of Fisheries, in responding to my question in question period, acknowledged that the lobster fishery was being negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and was facing losses of up to 95% of its Asian markets. Chair, on April 28 I asked the minister what she was doing to support harvesters who were left out of the $62.5 million aid package. Can the minister tell us what the government's plan is to directly support seafood harvesters? the chair: The honourable minister. bernadette jordan (minister of fisheries, oceans and the canadian coast guard): Thank you, Mr. We know that the fish and seafood sector has been extremely adversely affected because of COVID-19. We've started to put measures in place to address the issue with the $62.5 million for processors, as well as to make sure that the CERB is available for seasonal workers as well as people who have run out of their fishery EI, but we know that more needs to be done. The fishery enterprises are uniquely structured, which is why we're looking at measures to address the concerns they have. Chair, most fishermen are not eligible for the wage subsidy program due to the stipulation that it cannot be used for employees who are related to their employer. Many fishermen have their wives, their sons, their uncles or their fathers working for them, and sometimes it's the whole family on the boat. Can the minister explain what the government's plan is to support fishermen who do not fit into any actual program and who desperately need direct financial help from the federal government to survive? hon. Chair, we know that, because of the unique structure of fishing enterprises, they are not eligible for many of the supports we have put in place. We have made changes to the CERB to make sure that people who run out of the fishers EI are eligible as well as seasonable workers. We have put in place measures to address processors' concerns so that harvesters continue to have a place to sell their product. I am working with my cabinet colleagues to find solutions, and I hope I will have more to say about that very soon. chris d'entremont: In recent weeks, lobster fishermen in the gulf region of the Maritimes were shocked to read an additional subsection of regulations that was added to their fishing conditions for the 2021 fishing season. This addition was for a catch limitation or quota to which none of the harvesters or advisory members were privy. Can the minister tell us how these detailed regulations managed to get added without her authorization, and can licence-holders expect to see these same regulations in their conditions when their season gets going in the future? hon. Chair, I want to thank the people who brought to my attention the conditions that were put on licences in the gulf. Chair, on Wednesday, February 26, after the death of 23-year-old Chantelle Lindsay from Nova Scotia due to complications from cystic fibrosis, I asked the Prime Minister whether the government was going to make Trikafta, which might have saved Chantelle's life, available to Canadians. Now that almost 12 weeks have passed, we understand that Vertex Pharmaceuticals has not yet applied to Health Canada for study. Many of my Conservative colleagues and I have recently sent a letter to the minister asking for an update on how we support those negotiations with Vertex. Can the Minister of Health tell us when this drug will be available to CF patients in Canada? the chair: Honourable minister, the floor is yours. In fact, the majority of people who have applied through the special access program to get access to the drug have received access. chris d'entremont: Mr.Chair, the tourism season is already deeply affected by COVID-19. In my constituency, tens of thousands of tourists use the ferry between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. What is the government planning to do to help the ferry to survive and to resume service next season, if the borders remain closed this summer? hon. mlanie joly (minister of economic development and official languages): I have had the opportunity to speak to my colleague Mr.d'Entremont about solutions to assist people in the tourism sector all over the country, and particularly in the Atlantic region. In light of the new funding for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ACOA, I will be happy to work with him and with the leaders of the tourism sector. simon-pierre savard-tremblay (saint-hyacinthebagot, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Despite all the upheaval it causes, the crisis we are experiencing, considerable in scope though it is, can also be an opportunity to begin a transition. Many of us in Quebec feel that, when a company knocks on the state's door to ask for assistance, it is totally legitimate for the state to impose conditions before providing its support. We in the Bloc Qubcois feel that there should be a limit, a ceiling, on the assistance provided to large companies, in order to avoid abuses in executive compensation. A few years ago, after the Bombardier affair in QuebecI will not dwell on that because Quebecers are all too familiar with itthree of the four political parties that sat in the National Assembly and that still sit these took a position of that kind. The United States, which, you will agree, is no bastion of socialism, has already implemented similar policies for periods of crisis. According to a report published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on January2, the 100highest-paid CEOs in Canada earned 227times more in 2018 than the average worker. Given that inflation was then at 2.3%, it can be said that there was practically no increase. By contrast, the salary increase for CEOs in the same period was 18%, even in cases where the companies suffered losses. Does the government intend to put a ceiling on executive compensation to ensure that they are not the only ones to profits from the support at this time of crisis? The question is clear and I am asking you to give me a clear answer. If I don't get one, I am going to have to demand a new version of the Clarity Act. We know that our approach has to help small and medium-size companies, but also large companies in order to provide a bridge to the end of the crisis. Yes, we do want to make sure that the facility is available for companies that are going to continue to support our economy, to protect their employees, and to make a significant contribution to our communities. We are going to consider the rules and conditions that are needed in order for the facility to be available to the companies, the operations and the employees. Of course, conditions are required to ensure that the facility is available for operations, not for dividends or share buybacks, for example. sgro (humber riverblack creek, lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. In my own riding of Humber RiverBlack Creek, 30% of the population are 65 or older. Can the minister please tell us what our government is doing to ensure that vulnerable seniors get the support they need during this very difficult time? the chair: The honourable minister. Seniors have faced increased costs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and our government today has responded to that with additional action. We announced a one-time, tax-free payment of $300 for seniors eligible for OAS and an additional $200 for seniors eligible for GIS. This means there will be up to $500 for the most vulnerable seniors to help them with their financial security to get through this challenging time. Beyond this, we announced $20 million to expand the new horizons for seniors program to kick-start initiatives and services that will help seniorsfor example, to get grocery deliveries right to their door and to stay connected. We've worked tirelessly on this as well as on other recent measures like the GST credit to help the most vulnerable seniors. I know she's been working extremely hard to make sure that we get some additional announcements over and above all of the ones we have already made, so congratulations. Seniors across the country have been communicating with us and letting us know their needs, and we have been responding. It's always a privilege to have a chance to speak on issues that matter to Canadians, whether it's from the floor of the House of Commons or, indeed, from my house here in Nova Scotia. Like my colleagues, I'd like to thank the staff of the House of Commons for their continued work to make sure that we have this forum to be able to continue the democratic process. I would also quickly like to thank my staff both here locally in KingsHants and in Ottawa for their continued work for my constituents. We have the Kentville Research and Development Centre and the Hants County agricultural exhibition, the longest-standing exhibition in North America. Can the minister specifically provide an update to the House on the measures our government has taken on those two particular commodity groups that are so important in my riding? the acting chair (mr. Last Tuesday I was proud to announce our emergency processing fund for a total of $77.5 million, $50 million for the surplus food program and $125 million through AgriRecovery to support our beef and pork producers. Concerning the dairy sector in particular, I'm hopeful that tomorrow we will get the support of all of the parties to be able to respond to their request for an increase in their loan capacity from $300 million to $500 million. I would like to encourage all farmers to apply to the business risk management programs, including AgriStability, for which we have improved some of the mechanisms. bruce stanton): We'll go on with questions, but I'll also just ask Mr. brian masse (windsor west, ndp): During the COVID-19 pandemic, the State of Michigan has become an epicentre of the outbreak. The border communities of Sarnia and Windsor have higher per capita infection rates than the rest of the province. With the premiers of B.C., Quebec and Ontario opposing the opening of the border at this time, will the restrictions be extended, or is the Prime Minister discussing changing the restrictions? the acting chair (mr. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Let me assure the honourable member that, first and foremost, all decisions about Canada's border are taken by Canadians and with the health and safety of Canadians first and foremost in mind. When it comes to the current agreement's coming up next week, we are in very close conversations with Americans about next steps. chrystia freeland: Let me just be clear that I didn't speak about any changes; I spoke about a very collaborative conversation with our American neighbours about next steps. chrystia freeland: I found during the NAFTA negotiations that negotiations are best not conducted in public, but let me just assure Canadians that the health and safety of Canadians is first and foremost. chrystia freeland: Let me just say that I think the honourable member was actually seeking to know what exactly is being discussed with our American partners. brian masse: Will more information be shared between your government and the American government on Canadians and Americans crossing the border on both sides? hon. chrystia freeland: I'm not sure what the member is alluding to, but let me just say that the current arrangements are working extremely well. brian masse: With border communities having more rates of infection, will they receive additional PPE and financial assistance to deal with the loosening of current border restrictions that is being discussed? hon. chrystia freeland: Let me just emphasize to the honourable member that on a couple of occasions he has implied that a loosening of the current restrictions is being discussed. I'll move to the large commercial banks who are profiteering off or squeezing Canadians during this public crisis. Will the government use its statutory powers and force the banks to offer the credit card relief that Vancity has already done? the acting chair (mr. I would like to say that we recognize the challenges that Canadians face, especially with issues like credit card rates. Most recently, during the COVID-19 crisis, we've negotiated with the banks and encouraged them, and they have come out with reductions in their credit card fees that are significant, and deferrals for customers mr. brian masse: Will you use your statutory powers, yes or no, to do what Vancity has done to help Canadian consumers? hon. We're continuing to work together with banks to make sure that they are giving the kind of support necessary to their customers, and we've seen actions in this regard, supporting customers. brian masse: Why do banks have to profit at higher interest rates on Canadian consumer and retailer exchange rates during COVID-19? hon. Chair, I think it's important to clarify that banks have come forward and given deferrals to customers in trouble and cut their interest by half Mr. brian masse: Will the minister use his powers if the banks continue to charge Canadian consumers interest rates that are higher than Vancity's? hon. Chair, again, we will continue to work with banks to ensure that they're supporting their customers. What banks have done on credit cards by cutting their fees in half is an important nod in that direction. jacques gourde (lvislotbinire, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Quebec is Canada's biggest producer of hydroelectricity, a renewable energy that is the pride of the Quebec nation. The only problem is that it seems to be a tough sell west of Quebec, in Ontario, for instance. Will the government show leadership and allow Canada's provinces to share renewable energy through an energy corridor, as we proposed? hon. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, Canada's dairy processors have been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis and the new CanadaU.S.Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA. Will the government commit to granting import permits under CUSMA to Canada's dairy processors, not retailers directly? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I can assure you that dairy producers will receive fair compensation. That is important to Canada and Quebec, and I'm very pleased that we were able to do that. Canada's dairy processors invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year to bring high-quality products to consumers, while contributing $19billion to GDP. Will the minister commit to giving Canada's dairy processors import permits, instead of encouraging American multinationals? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I'd like to thank the member for his question. I fully understand, as we all do, the important role processors play in our system and our country. I can assure the members of the House that we will continue to work with Canadian processors as the agreement comes into force. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, when it comes to the COVID-19 crisis, what Canadians will remember is that those with access to reliable high-speed Internet will have fared better, feeling less financial strain, than those who are cut off from the rest of the world. Is the government ready to invest in making high-speed Internet available to all Canadians, no matter where they live in the country? hon. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, the current economic situation could lead to the disappearance of Canada's tourism industry. The pain will be felt by thousands of Canadians, who will have to find new jobs in order to survive. Is the government going to protect the tourism-based economy by investing in tourism infrastructure and upgrades to ensure Canada's tourist regions are ready when the economy reopens? hon. That is why we're here, providing a helping hand at this difficult time so they can come out the other side. bruce stanton): Continuing with questions, we'll go to the honourable member for SaskatoonUniversity, Mr. With respect to entering Canada, does the government consider spousal reunification as essential travel, yes or no? the acting chair (mr. bill blair: The CBSA has exercised the appropriate discretion in determining when a non-Canadian citizen, who has no status in Canada, attempts to enter the country for any consideration considered non-essential. Changing gears a little, all Canadians would agree, or can agree, that the Prime Minister requires suitable accommodation. Why did the government simply not tell Canadians that the Harrington cottage needed to be rebuilt and massively expanded? the acting chair (mr. The work at Harrington Lake is part of a broader program to preserve and maintain and restore all official residences under NCC management, and we will support the NCC in its important work. corey tochor: Was there something in particular that this government did not want Canadians to know about the cottage, or is secrecy all this government knows how to do? hon. corey tochor: Respectfully, Canadians feel misled on this, and we're not clear on what the expenses were, how large an expansion it was the acting chair (mr. Chair, I believe this has absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic, so the questions are out of order, in my opinion. Certainly the scope of the special committee on the COVID-19 pandemic does expect and anticipate that the subject matter will be related to the matter at hand, so I would ask honourable members to continue to keep within those bounds. Of course, members will also know that we're unable to gauge that until members have spoken, so I would ask members to keep on subject. The point I was making was about transparency or lack of transparency that is hurting our efforts with COVID-19. Changing gears onto CERB, who came up with the number for CERB? Why is it $2,000? A senior gets $1,200, people with disabilities get $1,600, and now we've added another ad hoc program on top of those. carla qualtrough: Working collaboratively between ESDC and the Department of Finance, we determined that that would be an appropriate amount, based on what workers were earning and what we anticipated they would need to live on, and what we anticipated they would be losing by way of employment income. corey tochor: I have a really quick question, which I've heard in my office, on charities and non-profits that do not have their own payroll number and are ineligible for the wage subsidy. Does the Prime Minister have a program fix coming so that charities and non-profits can receive the wage subsidy? the acting chair (mr. Chair, we understand the important role that charities and non-profits are playing to help vulnerable Canadians at this difficult time. We have announced supports in the amount of $350 million to ensure that not only do they continue that great work, but also expand it to serve the most vulnerable to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. Chair, last week markets were shocked when leaks regarding the state of our economy came to light before the market even opened. This caused worry to investors at home and abroad about the integrity of our markets and the nature of the leak, which is, in itself, unprecedented. Section 34 of the Statistics Act indicates the following: Every person who, after taking the oath set out in subsection 6, is guity of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars or to impreisonment for a term not exceeing five years or both: wilfully discloses or divulges directly or indirectly to any person not entitled under this Act to receive the same any information obtained by him in the course of his employment that might exert an influence on or affect the market value of any stocks, bonds or other security or any product or article, or uses any information described in paragraph for the purpose of speculating in any stocks, bonds or other security or any product or article My question for the minister is this: Does the government consider this case to be subject to paragraph 34 or 34 and a criminal offence, yes or no? the acting chair (mr. colleague is absolutely right that the current situation with regard to the COVID crisis is deeply problematic, and we want to make sure that any information we share with the Canadian public with regard to economic measures or labour market numbers follows the appropriate process. I can assure him that we are looking into this matter and that Statistics Canada is looking into this issue as well. Going forward, we will ensure that such a breach does not occur again, because it's important that we continue to have the confidence of Canadians during this current health care crisis. navdeep bains: As I have indicated very clearly, what has happened is completely unacceptable. This matter is being looked into, and we want to assure Canadians going forward that the acting chair (mr. ziad aboultaif: In that case, the minister said the matter will be looked into. Basically, my understanding of this case is that Statistics Canada is going to investigate itself, or does the minister think that the government should refer this to the RCMP? hon. navdeep bains: Sorry, could you repeat that question? I had a bit of an issue and could not hear the question. ziad aboultaif: Will Statistics Canada investigate itself or will the government refer this to the RCMP? hon. Those protocols will be followed, and the appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such breaches do not occur going forward. ziad aboultaif: The minister indicated that this will be investigated, but during the investigation into the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Liberal staff refused to co-operate. navdeep bains: Again, we've been clear that it's important that any such breach be taken seriously. What has happened is unacceptable, and we will ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to make sure that such breaches do not occur going forward. ziad aboultaif: There's no doubt about the general terms, but I need to make sure that the government will commit that its staff will co-operate. The law is very clear, and we will make sure that the process is followed and the law is upheld. david yurdiga (fort mcmurraycold lake, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Before I start my questions, I would like to thank the various ministers, parliamentary secretaries and the Speaker of the House for reaching out to me during the severe flooding in Fort McMurray. Over the past number of years, we have seen tremendous pressure on the federal government from anti-oil and gas lobby groups demanding that the oil sands be shut down. The federal Liberal government's response to the anti-oil lobby was the introduction of the no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, which will prevent any major oil and gas projects from being developed in Canada; and the oil shipping ban, Bill C-48, for the northern coast of British Columbia, which also had a negative effect on the oil industry. These two bills alone pushed over $200 billion of investment out of Canada, causing the Alberta economy to retract to recession levels. To compound Alberta's economic problems, we have an international oil price war and the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a huge drop in demand for oil. Chair, 48 days after the finance minister promised liquidity loans to oil producers and service companies, there are still no applications open for these loans. Chair, I'm happy that we were able to announce today some liquidity measures for large cap corporations in the oil and gas sector. These measures will provide them with the liquidity that they needed, and this is also the liquidity that they asked for. It was on April 17 that we started liquidity measures for small and medium-sized businesses in the oil and gas industry, and those are the ones in which 85% of workers are affected. I'm very happy that we've had such people as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers come out and say that this is what they asked for and this is what they need, and we have produced what they need in order to ensure the future competitiveness of Canada's oil and gas sector. Many of these contractors are indigenous companies, and they are having a difficult time qualifying for programs to save their businesses. Can the honourable Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations inform us of the measures the government is taking to ensure there are no gaps in the current programs, and commit to review the eligibility criteria for owners of aboriginal businesses struggling to qualify for financial help? hon. Chair, Canada's oil sector provides jobs for more than 576,000 people, including 11,000 indigenous people, in every part of Canada. It is essential that we support the many indigenous people who work in our oil and gas sector, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan. We have provided supports for those businesses, and we will continue to do so, also keeping in mind that in many of these communities the importance of public health and safety is foremost in our minds. If the global oil markets remain oversupplied into the summer and industry must shut down production, what is the government's plan to ensure Canada's energy security and the economic future of the oil sands with the potential shutdown of oil production? hon. Chair, we have worked with industry and with provinces on every front to ensure the stability of the oil and gas sector of our country. We need the workers in our oil and gas sector in order to lower emissions and achieve a greener economy. Therefore, we are looking after workers and we are looking out for companies that hold onto those jobs for those workers. Chair, the government's assistance package for the Canadian oil and gas industry provides some hope to the industry. Can the minister clarify? On a medium-sized energy company's eligibility, if the company is in default to financial institutions, does it still qualify for the business credit availability program? hon. We have the impacts of COVID and the effects of a global price war, and we have been tackling both of these on each front. As well, through the BCAP, we are making sure that more companies are eligible so that they can remain whole and so they can hold onto the jobs that we need. As we all know, we're being told we need a vaccine, and the quest for a vaccine is all-consuming globally. However, people who think about this issue and the question of the power structure and profit motive, particularly Dr. Can we ensure that public dollars for finding a vaccine will result in a product that is shared globally, openly, and is not for profit? hon. We have an open science model, and we're working with different partners and different jurisdictions to help develop vaccines and look at countermeasures and other therapeutics. Our goal is to make sure that we do so in a collaborative fashion, because this is a global pandemic, but make no mistake: If it's Canadian ingenuity and Canadian IP that's driving it, we want to support them as well. elizabeth may: As a follow-up to the minister's comment, I note it was interesting to see the claim made by this public health institute at Dalhousie about the wonderful research that was being done in Winnipeg on an Ebola vaccine. Because of the for-profit motive and the interests that big pharma had in seeing their market before they developed the product, it is alleged that the Ebola vaccine was actually delayed by the for-profit model. I wonder if we might consider examining this profit motive around the development of life-saving vaccines and other drugs. I'm working very closely with Minister Hajdu and the chief science advisor to look at all options. We are engaging with them and empowering them, and we will continue to share details of this with the public. elizabeth may: Changing gears, we know that the new regulations limiting what are described as military-style assault rifles and guns have been very controversial. It's very clear to me as an opposition member why we haven't seen legislation on any fast track. Wouldn't it be wise to table for first reading the entire legislative framework so that we know what we're talking about in the long term with regard to the buyback program and other aspects of this issue? hon. I want to assure her that at the first opportunity, we will bring forward legislation dealing with a number of aspects of our commitment to strengthen gun control in Canada, including legislation to deal with a buyback program, which we've indicated we will put in place. There are a number of other significant measures as well that we intend to bring forward to strengthen gun control legislation. The pandemic does not diminish our responsibility to do what is necessary to keep Canadians safe, and we will bring that legislation forward at the first opportunity. Some that are being run by not-for-profit societies are actually running very well, certainly in my community, but they are facing increased costs that could bankrupt them. As yet, there's no program to help a well-run seniors home that is not experiencing a loss of revenue and has lots of staff working hard. patty hajdu: I offer my gratitude to the many people who are working in these long-term care facilities day and night to keep seniors safe. The member certainly highlighted that there are not only additional expenses for some of the not-for-profit seniors homes, but also additional new measures that will increase all kinds of things, including costs. We continue to work with the provinces and territories and support them through, for example, generous transfers of money to boost their health care systems in ways that they think are most appropriate. To the Minister of Health, is her government prepared to take strong action to address this crisis in seniors health care? hon. Chair, the member has illustrated some of the horror stories that have appalled us all as Canadians and certainly as parliamentarians. We know that seniors deserve to live in dignity and safety with the utmost care, and that just hasn't been happening in this time of COVID and certainly, in some cases, in previous times as well. As the member knows, I've said publicly that I believe we need to hold long-term care homes to stronger standards. I am working with many ministers across our government to think about how we do that, how we the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, if we treated children the way we do seniors in this country, social services would seize them. Over 80% of the deaths in Canada from COVID-19 have occurred in long-term care homes. Canada has the highest proportion of deaths in long-term care home settings among 14 comparable countries, including France, Germany, Denmark and Ireland. Chair, the member opposite knows that long-term care homes have rested largely in the jurisdiction of provincial governments and, in fact, municipal governments, which often run them and fund them partially as well. That's why it's important that we have those conversations with our provincial and territorial partners, but the member can rest assured that it is on the top of my priority list to engage with my colleagues all across the country, including many experts who have studied this issue multiple times, to come up with stronger standards so all seniors have quality of life, safety and dignity in their elder years. Chair, Canadians don't want politicians pointing fingers at each other; they want our seniors taken care of. Not a single province or territory in Canada is meeting the minimum standards of hands-on care for seniors, and death rates from COVID-19 in private, for-profit facilities are two to three times that of public or non-profit homes. Will the minister agree with New Democrats that we need strong national standards, federal funding tied to enforcement and public delivery of care to effectively improve care for seniors? hon. As a matter of fact, what I hear from my colleagues at the provincial and territorial level is the willingness to collaborate on how, first of all, we get through this crisis together and strengthen safety for seniors in homes right now and then how we look to the future to build a stronger network of long-term care or care alternatives that will ensure that seniors have the right and the ability to live with dignity and safety in their homes. Chair, what I'm not hearing is a single concrete proposal or measure that this minister is suggesting her government can take, but let me move to another subject. Like long-term care, COVID-19 has exposed other major gaps in our health care system. Millions of Canadians lost their prescription benefits when they lost their jobs, revealing the fundamental weakness of medical coverage tied to employment status. Will this government finally move to ensure all Canadians get the medicine they need by bringing in universal pharmacare at the earliest opportunity? hon. Chair, as you know, in the mandate that the Prime Minister gave to me, working on a national pharmacare plan is still there. I know it feels like a lifetime ago, but the member has very aptly illustrated why affordable medication is so important as part of a robust health care system. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister made a big announcement expressing his desire to launch an economic recovery plan that fast-tracks the transition to a green economy. MinisterGuilbeault, MinisterMcKenna and MinisterWilkinson were appointed to a group tasked with doing just that. Today, I worry that the group is nothing but an empty shell, a convenient post-crisis political pitch. Perhaps there is an environmental component, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around yesterday's announcement by Export and Development Canada. That's $500million for a pipeline project that will eventually produce 8.6million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. How does the government reconcile that with its desire to transition to a green economy? the chair: The honourable minister has the floor. Certainly at this time, Canadians are most particularly focused on ensuring that support is provided so that they can put food on the table and pay their rent. Certainly as we move forward, we need to be thinking about the kind of society and economy that we want to create for the future. In that context, we need to learn lessons coming out of this experience, and certainly we need to ensure that we are addressing challenges that are on the horizon, including the challenge of climate change. Those are conversations that will need to be had as we move beyond this phase of the crisis, but at the current time, the focus is clearly on combatting the virus. monique pauz (repentigny, bq): There was absolutely no interpretation while the minister was speaking. the chair: Since so many are having issues with the interpretation, let's take a quick break while I try to fix the problem on my end. I'm going to ask the minister to repeat his answer, and we'll see whether the interpretation comes through this time. If not, please let me know, Ms.Pauz and anyone else who doesn't hear it. That means not just climate change, but also other challenges that we saw during the coronavirus crisis, challenges we need to take into account. Of course, we need to think about the future, but I want Canadians the chair: Mr.Simard has the floor. I want to tell you that, of all industries, the one best positioned to make the energy transition is probably the forestry industry. Unfortunately, in Canadaa petro statethere always seem to be two sets of rules when it comes to helping key industries, including providing liquidity support. Yesterday's announcement suggests that the $500million being provided by EDC is for a single project: Coastal GasLink. In 2017, under the softwood lumber action plan, EDC's entire budget for the forestry industry was exactly $500million. Now, EDC is shelling out $500million for just one project, Coastal GasLink, even though the whole of the forestry industry also received $500million when it needed EDC's support under a 2017 action plan to deal with tariffs. The industry accounts for 58,000jobs in Quebec and $6billion of Quebec's GDP. Does he think this situation is fair? Will he commit to providing the forestry industry with the same amount of liquidity being made available to the fossil fuel sector? hon. Building on our work today, we have included traditional investments to make sure this sector innovates, diversifies and grows. Over these past two and a half months, I have spent an inordinate amount of time with CEOs, with heads of the forestry sectors from coast to coast to coast. A few days ago, I convened a meeting of CEOs from all parts of this country, from Quebec to British Columbia, to talk to them about solutions, about answers. We will continue to work closely with industry to make sure we are there for them and that we stand by them through the COVID crisis, so we make sure that the chair: The next question will go to Mr. I'm hearing from small business owners like Joel, who runs a fitness club here in Pitt MeadowsMaple Ridge, and is very concerned that their landlords refuse to participate in the rent assistance program. These businesses have seen revenue drops between 50% and 100% and are asking for just 25% off their rent. When will the government help small businesses whose landlords refuse to be team players during this pandemic? hon. That's why we've moved forward with a number of measures that are designed to be of assistance. It allows for small businesses to significantly reduce their rent and for landlords to be protected with up to 75% of the rent. A number of my constituents, including Kathy, who owns a beauty salon, are concerned about meeting the PPE requirements. What is the federal government doing to ensure businesses in my riding can get access to the PPE they need to keep their employees and customers safe when they reopen? hon. However, we are actively involved in trying to ascertain how the federal government can work with the provinces and territories to provide essential services and other businesses with PPE. Chair, Craig and Matt are co-owners of Wanstalls, a firearms retail outlet in downtown Maple Ridge that employs eight people and serves thousands of law-abiding firearm owners in my riding, people who are now made to feel like criminals by the Liberal government. Further, they are now stuck with tens of thousands of dollars of inventory that they can no longer sell. What are they supposed to do to keep open in this already tumultuous COVID environment? hon. bill blair: It's important to understand that none of the restrictions that we have put in place, the new prohibitions, in any way impact weapons that are used for the lawful purposes in Canada of hunting and sport shooting, so those weapons remain available to Canadians engaged in those lawful activities. We have prohibited weapons that were not intended for the legal purposes of hunting and sport shooting and for which firearms are available to Canadians. Chair, according to the CERB website, if a recipient earns over $1,000 in a reporting period, their entire $2,000 benefit must be repaid. They're worried that if they take an extra shift, they will lose their CERB, but if they refuse a shift, they will also lose their CERB. Does the government intend to make them repay all their CERB if they barely go over the threshold? hon. Chair, that is why we're working with individual eligible CERB recipients to make sure they are not put in positions of undue hardship. At the beginning, the registration restricted it to basically not working, and then we relaxed the condition to earning up to $1,000. alexis brunelle-duceppe (lac-saint-jean, bq): I have a point of order, Mr.Chair. alexis brunelle-duceppe: There were some technical issues earlier during my fellow member Mario Simard's turn. The good thing is that this is all being filmed, so we can watch the video back to see what happened. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, because the ministers chose to answer in French owing to a technical issue, their answers were unduly drawn out, which cost my fellow member speaking time. the chair: As I said, I'll check what happened and we'll have a solution for next time. steven guilbeault: I hope the member isn't suggesting that, because some members of the House are making an effort to speak French, they are unduly dragging out the time, as he seems to have said. Good for them, I say, for trying to speak a language they aren't necessarily comfortable in for the benefit of other members. the chair: I think a debate is brewing, but I'm sure that's not what people want, so I don't want an argument to break out over the fact that different languages are being spoken. Mr.Chair, many farmers in my riding and elsewhere are afraid they won't have enough workers this summer and fall. What is the government going to do to make sure those receiving the CERB and CESB have the right information and know about the job opportunities in the agri-food sector in our communities? the chair: The honourable minister has 15seconds to answer. Chair, I can assure the member that while we are supporting Canadians through both the CERB and the CESB, we are creating tens of thousands of jobs, including in the agriculture sector, to make sure there is labour available in this important and essential sector. When I first got elected as Speaker, one of the things I mentioned was that you would want everyone who was watching, including your families and your friends, to be proud of you. I didn't see anybody answer without one, and it is very much appreciated, not only by our fellow members but also by the people who are translating into the other language that you are not speaking

Hon. Mary Ng proposed that Canada, along with international partners in the U.S., Australia, and the U.K., issue a joint statement expressing deep concern over China's new security law for Hong Kong. This is particularly important as there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians living in Hong Kong, and the Canadian government has a vested interest in maintaining the stability and prosperity of the region. The foundations of Hong Kong's stability and prosperity lie in its relative autonomy and basic freedoms, which Canada is committed to supporting and promoting globally, including freedom of speech, expression, and the press. In addition, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has called for a ban on military assault rifles, stating that these weapons are designed for the sole purpose of killing people in large numbers. They have urged the government to enact legislation that would ban all military assault rifles, with the exception of those used by law enforcement and the military. Hon. Bill Blair emphasized that these regulations clearly state that these weapons are not intended for hunting or sport purposes, but rather for combat situations where soldiers are meant to kill other soldiers. This aligns with the values of Canadian society.

Question: What were Hon. Ahmed Hussen's thoughts on the bill for disabilities and the summer jobs program in relation to employment and workers' safety? Article: anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number 22 of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. A reminder to all members that in order to avoid issues with sound, members participating in person should not also be connected to the video conference. For those joining via video conference, I would like to remind you that, when speaking, you should be on the same channel as the language you are speaking. I understand we don't have any ministerial announcements today, so we'll proceed to presenting petitions. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. For members participating in person, we ask that they please come and drop the signed certificate off at the table once the petition is presented. Chair, it's an honour to rise in meeting number 22 of the COVID-19 committee, otherwise known as something like the House of Commons. I'm here to present two petitions containing hundreds of signatures on the issue of the treatment of Falun Gong practitioners by the People's Republic of China, particularly the practice that's alleged of involuntary organ harvesting. The petitioners ask the Government of Canada to condemn this practice and to publicly call for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in the People's Republic of China. The second petition is from residents throughout SaanichGulf Islands concerned about what was, at the time this petition was submitted, a future problem. It remains an issue, and I present it on behalf of petitioners who wish the Government of Canada not to put public funds into purchasing or maintaining the Trans Mountain pipeline or towards any expansion of the pipeline. The petitioners note the pandemic is having a devastating impact on many Canadians nationwide, especially those who have low to modest income, small business gig workers, freelancers, artists, film industry workers, non-salaried workers and individuals on fixed incomes such as seniors and those on disability. It further notes that rent, mortgage and utility payments are due at the end of each month, putting countless Canadians at risk of losing their housing. To that end, the petitioners are calling for the government to immediately enact a nationwide rent freeze, eviction freeze, mortgage freeze and utility freeze, enforce mortgage deferrals for homeowners without penalty or interest charges from financial institutions and provide direct assistance in the form of a monthly, universal, direct payment of $2,000 per month for all, with an additional $250 per child immediately. Trans Mountain, in building the pipeline, brings massive environmental and economic risk with no substantial benefit to British Columbia or to local residents. Approximately 40,000 barrels of oil have already leaked from existing Kinder Morgan pipelines, including two major spills in Burnaby since 2007. Chair, that just this past weekend there was yet another spill to the tune of 1,195 barrels here in British Columbia. There is no known scientific technology to clean up the bitumen when there is a spill, and the number of tankers would go from eight to 34 per month into the Burrard Inlet. I want to remind all members in the House that when presenting a petition, the idea is to be as concise as possible. The petitioners are calling for the government to immediately act to prevent this new oil pipeline from proceeding through British Columbia. The first petition reflects the outrage of my constituents at the ever-expanding order in council from the government banning more and more firearms. In particular, the petitioners highlight the failure of the government to act on the issue of illegal guns. The petitioners note that virtually all violent crimes committed in Canada, including the recent shooting in Nova Scotia, involve illegal firearms in the hands of those who are already not permitted to possess them. First of all, it asks that we reverse the order in council banning certain firearms, but also that we propose measures that will effectively address the illegal use of firearms by criminals while respecting the rights of law-abiding citizens. It also asks that we ensure that substantial changes to firearms laws in future actually be made by Parliament, not by the government acting in an unaccountable manner. The second petition deals with Bill C-8, which is the government's bill around conversion therapy. They're asking the government to support amendments to fix the definition to address the issue of conversion therapy and ensure that the definition is correct and doesn't criminalize certain forms of counselling that individuals may voluntarily enter into. The third petition is regarding Bill S-204, a bill in the Senate that seeks to make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad to receive an organ without consent, dealing especially with the horrific practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking in China. There's been much discussion in this House about the need to do better in terms of long-term care. Rather than working to do better in long-term care, unfortunately we've seen the government removing vital safeguards in the area of euthanasia. I think our focus should be on assisting life rather than removing safeguards that are required in association with the euthanasia regime. The petitioners are particularly concerned about the government's plan to remove a 10-day reflection period that normally takes place. That period can already be waived under certain circumstances, but Bill C-7 proposes to remove it entirely as well as reduce the number of witnesses involved. The petitioners are quite concerned about what's going on in Bill C-7 and call for it to be stopped or amended. Racialized and marginalized communities have been disproportionally affected by the pandemic. We need to do the same for the climate crisis, because humanity and our planet are too big to fail. At risk of neglect and assault, many of the most vulnerable older persons reside in our long-term care facilities. They are the seniors who have built our country and shaped our communities, who have shown us resilience, courage and selflessness, who have made us stronger, and whose work and teachings continue to inspire us. We have not been there for them in the same way they've been there for us throughout their lives. The Canadian Forces report, alongside the climbing disproportionate death toll in our long-term care facilities, has reconfirmed the ugly, indefensible reality of elder abuse and neglect in Canada. In my community, we mourn the deaths of 68 seniors from one long-term care facility alone, Camilla Care. the chair: Before proceeding, I just want to bring up to the members in the background that we want to keep it as simple and as parliamentary as possible in keeping it neutral. michael barrett (leedsgrenvillethousand islands and rideau lakes, cpc): During these trying times, the residents of LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes have risen to the challenge. They've made sacrifices and gone above and beyond to make the lives of their neighbours better and to keep our communities safe. It would be impossible to list everyone who has emerged as a community hero, but I'd like to highlight a few, like Lily, an eight-year-old from Elgin who raised funds for her local food bank by building and selling squirrel picnic tables, and Louise Boardman from Spencerville who's making masks for long-term care facilities and selling others in support of the Breast Cancer Action centre. The Knights of Columbus in Prescott raised funds and are distributing some $27,000 in support of charitable groups throughout the region. Who can forget our top-notch health care workers like Hannah and Mary at the Brockville COVID-19 testing centre? It is the people of LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes that make it so great. Chair, the Indian Act enshrined racism into Canadian law in 1876, and, through residential schools, the child welfare system, our legal system and our police, we criminalized and tore apart indigenous peoples. The deaths of Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi and the assault on Chief Allan Adam are recent examples of systemic racism within the RCMP. Anti-black racism has resulted in more young black men being jailed, children being streamed or excluded from schools and negative police interaction due to profiling. It is now time to reimagine and rework our institutions, starting with our police, to ensure that all Canadians can achieve their truest potential. andranne larouche (shefford, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. That's why the increase in the old age security benefit and the guaranteed income supplement must be extended beyond the pandemic. In three weeks, our seniors will receive their first cheque, when they should be receiving their second. A date must also be announced for the new horizons for seniors program, which helps several groups develop projects to break the isolation of seniors. In closing, I would like to mention the organization Justice alternative et mdiation that during the pandemic, along with other organizations in Shefford, has set up the project Une histoire pour la tienne, which also serves to mark this day. It's a virtual meeting between young people and seniors, allowing them to exchange some inspiring life experiences. Since age prejudice is very much present, I applaud this project, which aims to make us understand each other better and judge each other less. Chair, in the time of this terrible crisis affecting all Canadians, when we are all thinking about how best to deal with it, let's all think about the people around us. Let's show our representation not only to those in the sector of sanctioned workers, but also to all those Canadians who day by day stand up and make a difference. I want to acknowledge and celebrate all the contributions made by the people of Brampton Centre, all religious institutions, civil society and community organizations like Knights Table in my riding. Chair, whether graduating from elementary school, high school, Georgian College or graduating from colleges or universities across the country, I am proud of the accomplishments of all the graduates across BruceGreyOwen Sound. I would also like to congratulate and thank all the teachers and parents who have adapted to teaching online or from home and who have supported these graduates over the course of their academic careers. I'd like to extend special congratulations to Cameron Lovell, who just graduated from grade eight, as well as to Neebeesh and Neebin Elliott, originally from the Nawash unceded first nation on the Bruce Peninsula, who will be headed to Michigan State University, and to Jared Lumley from Owen Sound, who just graduated from my alma mater, the Royal Military College of Canada. The college motto of Truth, Duty, Valour is something all Canadians should aspire to live by. serge cormier (acadiebathurst, lib.): Today I pay tribute to RichardLosier, an entrepreneur, visionary and builder who died on June9, 2020, surrounded by his family. In1968, he co-founded St.Isidore Asphalte, a company that now has more than 200employees. He was unifying and generous, a philanthropist who cared about young people and never missed an opportunity to improve their lives. I met Mr.Losier when I was 14years old, and I can say that he has been a positive influence in my life. Every time I met him, he gave me a lot of advice and encouragement, which I've never forgotten. I offer my most sincere condolences to his children, Richard Jr., Ronald, Nathalie, Caroline and Stphane, and to his family and friends. julie dabrusin (torontodanforth, lib.): Hello from my community in east end Toronto. People talk about how a city the size of Toronto can be cold, but that's far from the truth in my community. Wong of Earl Grey Senior Public School, who delivered home-baked cookies and handwritten notes to all of his students, or Monsieur Steve, who's offering online French classes, or the teachers of Riverdale Collegiate, who paraded through our streets to celebrate our graduates. Our local Michael Garron Hospital put out a call for community members to sew masks and received over 60,000 masks, including those made by Lisa Tancre of Chartwell Avondale Retirement Residence. Restaurants, even while facing adversity, have been generously donating food, like the members of the Leslieville BIA or Mezes. There are so many more stories of generosity that I could share, but I'm out of time. Chair, on Saturday night, Calgarians, particularly those in the northeast, in my riding of Calgary Skyview, witnessed a devastating storm, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. Homes, vehicles, community buildings and structures suffered significant damage due to large hail, floods and high winds. My heart aches for those who have been impacted by the storm in an already incredibly difficult time, but we are resilient. We know that in the coming weeks there will be a lot of cleanup required, both to personal property and in the community. I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to the people of West Nippissing who organized Pride activities to celebrate the LGBTQ community in June. I thank the public servants for their dedication to the Nickel Belt community and the Valley East and Rayside-Balfour areas. Chair, when COVID-19 began spreading across Ontario, Markham, like many other communities, was unprepared. When Markham residents heard about these shortages, my office was flooded with calls from people who had PPE and wanted to donate. Since then my office has been able to deliver tens of thousands of PPE supplies to front-line health care workers and five masks to each family in need. This pandemic has shown that no matter what the challenge is, the Markham community will overcome it. As we start to see local businesses reopen, it is important for all of us to remember to follow best practices outlined by local public health. It is important for all of us to respect social distancing, to protect all workers and their families. the chair: Again, my apologies for skipping over there, but now we'll to to Ms. Chair, in commemoration of Italian Heritage Month, I would like to pay tribute to the Colombo Lodge and Italian Cultural Centre in Kamloops, British Columbia. Recently they began Colombo Cares take-home dinners with proceeds distributed to different non-profit organizations throughout the region. Last month they very generously gave away hundreds of dinners to Royal Inland Hospital staff and paramedics for their tireless work throughout the pandemic. In their own words they say, Colombo Lodge is very proud of the Italians that have made Kamloops their home. Community members of Italian ancestrypast and presenthave helped and continue to help Kamloops prosper as a giving, welcoming and inclusive community. People are worried about what will happen when the CERB runs out in two weeks' time, and the coming tourism season looks very grim. The province itself is in serious financial crisis due to the pandemic and the decline in oil prices. The federal government must overhaul and enhance the fiscal stabilization program to help Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and other oil-producing provinces through this crisis. This is a challenge and an opportunity to transition to a sustainable energy future, but it will require significant investment and support by government to keep the industry strong and make this a just transition for workers. marie-hlne gaudreau (laurentideslabelle, bq): Mr.Chair, all 44elected municipal officials in the riding of LaurentidesLabelle and I have sent a letter to the government asking that cellular and high-speed Internet networks be made available to all. The territorial complexity of the Laurentians means that there are areas where the signal is weak, unstable or non-existent. Also, because of the lockdown, Internet failures are being felt, and they prevent distance learning, telemedicine and teleworking, among other things. How can our municipalities develop economically if they can't provide their community with adequate communication tools? We are therefore calling on the government to put the interests of its people first by investing massively right now in the construction of high-speed Internet and cellular infrastructure. kevin waugh (saskatoongrasswood, cpc): I rise today to pay tribute to Sir Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of Great Britain and one of the greatest leaders history has ever known. In what can only be called a lifetime of service, Churchill's contributions to the Commonwealth and to the world are without equal. During the Second World War he led the allied forces in Europe against the tyranny and fascism of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. When our world was in its darkest hour, Churchill's leadership was a beacon of hope and freedom. I am reminded of something he once said, All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope. Sir Winston Churchill himself embodied all of these great things and will forever be a symbol of freedom, democracy and hope. Chair, I would like to add my voice to the recognition and celebration of Pride Month, which is celebrated annually during June. However, I know the ongoing pandemic will not stop us from showing our love and support for the LGBTQ+ community. To celebrate Pride Month this year, my office distributed 3,000 pride maple leaf pins across the country; whoever asked received one. Although the majority was sent to constituents in my riding, over 500 pins were sent to the neighbouring ridings of LanarkFrontenacKingston, LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, and HastingsLennox and Addington. Please note that we will suspend the proceedings twice to allow employees who provide support for the sitting to substitute for each other safely. grard deltell (louis-saint-laurent, cpc): Mr.Chair, I am very pleased to take part in today's meeting of this parliamentary committee. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Mr.Chair, I thank the hon. I agree with him that Canada and Canadians are doing an excellent and difficult job in the fight against coronavirus. As for the economy, our government is there for Canadians, for workers and for businesses, and it will continue to be. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, Canadians know that the government is there to support them. grard deltell: Canadians and Quebeckers also know that the Government of Quebec will table its economic update this week. members and to Canadians what the government is doing for the economy the chair: We return to Mr.Deltell. Chair, it is a real pleasure for me to explain to the minister and everybody in the House of Commons that today the Saskatchewan government will table its economic update. Chair, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share with Canadians what our government is doing to support workers, businesses and the economy. We see governments acting correctly for their people, except for the Liberal government, which cannot table an economic update. When will the Liberal government table an economic update, which Canadians would like to see? the chair: The honourable Deputy Prime Minister. Chair, I am delighted to share with the member opposite and with Canadians what we are doing practically that has meaning for Canadians. Everybody is working hard in Canada, and the business community would like to know where the Liberal government is going. I've spoken about the CEBA, and let me point out that more than $26 billion of support has been given through that essential program. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, this is starting to get interesting; the minister is revealing some of these expenses. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I will continue in French by explaining what our government is doing for Canadians and workers the chair: Mr.Deltell. Chair, this is a little bit concerning for all Canadians, because this government cannot say when they will table the economic update, cannot identify how much money they have spent in the last three months and cannot say what is the deficit of Canada. christine normandin (saint-jean, bq): Mr.Chair, there are times when Quebec and the provinces are not just two solitudes, but they get along and speak as one, such as when the time comes to tell the government to mind its own business. On reading section91 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which sets out the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, nowhere do I find that the federal government must meddle by attaching conditions to health transfers. Will the government do the only thing within its authority, which is to take the cheque, sign it and put it in the mail? hon. We fully understand the importance of federal support for the provinces, especially in our national fight against the coronavirus. I would also like to point out the importance of the support of the Canadian Armed Forces, who are doing an important and excellent job in Quebec and Ontario today, right now. christine normandin: Mr.Chair, I am glad to see that there is recognition of the importance of transferring this money. My question is whether it can be transferred unconditionally; that's what I'm asking. In the past, we have seen that it takes a long time to negotiate conditions with the federal government. We saw it in the case of the Quebec City tramway, and we are still seeing it now in the case of transfers for housing in Quebec, for which there is no agreement and, therefore, no transfer of money. member said in her first question that the only thing the federal government had to do on health care was to sign the cheques. I can't agree because, today, at this time, at the request of the Premier of Quebec, the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces are in Quebec today; they're there to save the lives of seniors the chair: We now return to Ms.Normandin. What I'm saying is that, at present, the provinces are unanimously asking that there be no conditions. This is where there should be negotiations so that we can work, among other things, to send money to people living with disabilities, to make sure we fight CERB fraud and to make sure that court time limits are effective in the current crisis. Can the government focus on the issue in order to respect the provinces and transfer money for health care? hon. member that the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces are in Quebec today at the request of the Province of Quebec. member will agree with me that being there for Quebec's seniors, that saving the lives of Quebec's seniors, is much more than simply signing cheques. I think we all should thank these people who are working for Canada, for Quebec, and who are doing an important and excellent job. christine normandin: Mr.Chair, I think the Deputy Prime Minister misunderstood me when I was talking about the importance of acting quickly. Negotiations between the government and the provinces take an awfully long time because the federal government decides to place conditions where there shouldn't be any. Right now, the only important thing is to transfer the money quickly so that it can be used in our hospitals and our long-term care facilities, where the need is desperate. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I would like to point out the extent to which the federal government is there to support the provinces, including Quebec. We have increased funding to the provinces and territories by $500million to help them prepare for COVID-19 outbreaks. This funding is in addition to the $40billion that we already provide annually to the provinces and territories. Chair, I thank the member opposite for the extremely important question, and I'll take this opportunity to acknowledge the work that he has done for many years fighting racism in Canada. Chair, I thank the Deputy Prime Minister very much for the response, but there are some specific actions we need to take. When someone is in need of a wellness check or a mental health check, money, financing and support should go to mental health workers and health care workers, not the police. Chair, the member quite rightly began his questions by speaking about systemic racism against indigenous people in Canada, and I would like to speak about that for a moment. Chair, will the Liberal government commit to a review of the use of force as outlined for the RCMP? Will the Liberals commit to that change? hon. Chair, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety had many conversations last week with the RCMP. Will the Prime Minister or the Liberal government commit to something simple and ensure that at the federal level, racial profiling, street checks and carding are expressly prohibited? hon. Chair, sadly, I can't agree that rooting out systemic racism is going to be simple, but I can agree that racial profiling is absolutely inappropriate. jagmeet singh: Well, I'm going to try to get another commitment from the government, because they don't seem able to commit to something as clear as ending racial profiling. We know that millions of Canadians in a couple of weeks are going to be faced with the reality of their CERB ending. These families are worried about how they're going to put food on the table, because they can't return to a job. Will the Liberal government commit today so that those families will have some concrete support, yes or no? hon. Chair, let me be clear, as I was in my previous answer, that our government clearly is opposed to racial profiling. We know that Canadian workers, Canadian families, continue to need the chair: We'll now pause for a short time to allow staff to change within the safety parameters for the COVID-19 virus, and as we resume, we will go to Ms. Chair, the Prime Minister has mandated his ministers, and I quote, to govern in a positive, open and collaborative way. Opposition parties have little opportunity to hold the ruling party to account, private members' bills cannot be tabled and legislation cannot be debated. Trudeau himself, help us understand how all of this fits into his definition of so-called open government? the honourable pablo rodriguez (leader of the government in the house of commons): Well, Mr. Chair, we're here, right? We're here, and the opposition is asking questions. They have more time than before, so I don't know why they're not happy about it. rachael harder: That's like when I'm asking for a full meal and your handing me a few jellybeans and saying, Why aren't you happy with that? Mr. It's like switching a light on and off when it's convenient for the Prime Minister and for the Liberal Party. Trudeau do the right thing, turn the lights on and get back to work for Canadians? hon. Chair, on this side of the House, we're all actually working very hard and we're answering the questions from the opposition. On the Liberal Party website, under the platform commitment, it says that Parliament works best when its members are free to do what they have been elected to do, and that is be the voice for their communities and hold the government to account. The thing is, I think we've reached a balance whereby MPs can come from different places, mostly around Ottawa, and ask questions; but also we can have colleagues from across the country asking questions. rachael harder: Does the Prime Minister value democracy, or does he still look up to China's basic dictatorship? hon. Chair, we're answering all the questions from the opposition, not only from the people in this room, but we're answering the chair: It's back to Ms. I'd like to know from her why it is not important to her that her colleagues participate directly. Trudeau wrote to his ministers and said to them that they continue to raise the bar on openness, effectiveness and transparency. Trudeau has shut it down and has prevented us from being able to do to the good work that Canadians expect us to do. Chair, do they want to talk about shutting down Parliament? How about the time they prorogued Parliament twicenot only once, but twice? The Conservative government shut down Parliament twice. I want to remind honourable members that questions and answers are being given, and we want to hear both sides. rachael harder: In 2014, the leader of the Liberal Party developed a policy resolution entitled Restoring Trust in Canada's Democracy. At the time, the Prime Minister said, Canadians want their Members of Parliament to be effective voices for their communities in Ottawa, and not merely mouthpieces in their communities for an all-too-powerful Prime Minister. Chair, I'd like to know why my colleague wants to shut down the voices of her colleagues who could not speak and could not participate in this room. Chair, how would we vote on private members' bills, for example? As you know, it is not a government vote or a party vote; it's per row. Chair, through youthat we have electronic voting, yes or no? the chair: We'll go on to Mr. Chair, we know that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has champagne tastes and London flats, but it's his champagne mortgages that Canadians are concerned about. Specifically, why did the minister only disclose the complete extent of his personal debt to the Chinese government on June 4 of this year? hon. Chair, as you know, since the minister entered politics, his two mortgages and other liabilities and assets have been fully disclosed to the Ethics Commissioner and placed on the online public registry. We're in the middle of a pandemic here, trying to help Canadians, and the best they can do is ask questions about the chair: We will go back to Mr. garnett genuis: When the minister owes over a million dollars to the Chinese government, people have a right to ask him questions. I still don't know why they ask the chair: We'll now go back to Mr. Where is the minister? Why is he hiding? Why won't he answer questions about his personal debt to the Chinese government? hon. What is the impact on the decision-making? Three-quarters of Canadians don't want Huawei involved in our 5G network. Will the minister put the interests of Canadians ahead of the interests of his creditors and say no to Huawei? hon. We have been absolutely clear with allies and with Canadians that we never have and never will compromise Canadians' national interests. Chair, that is not an answer, and it is completely out of step with what our allies have already recognized. Reports are emerging of multiple deadly viruses exported from Winnipeg's microbiology laboratory to the Wuhan Institute of Virology right before scientists were expelled for policy breaches. In spite of that, scientific co-operation between Canadian institutions and the military-affiliated Wuhan Institute of Virology is continuing. Why hasn't the government put in place new guidelines to prevent the export of sensitive pathogens and information to China? hon. Chair, he's right that in 2019 the National Microbiology Laboratory shared lab samples with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The National Microbiology Laboratory routinely shares samples with other labs to help advance the international community's understanding of viruses and the research that is ongoing around those viruses. There are strict protocols in place for these transfers, and these samples were transported according to Canadian laws and regulations. Chair, I think Canadians would be concerned to hear that it's routine to transport viruses to Chinese military-affiliated labs. When Champagne was the parliamentary secretary for finance, the government decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, bankrolling Chinese state-controlled development projects in Asia with weak standards in labour, human rights and environment. Will the minister put Canadian taxpayers ahead of his personal creditors and support a pullout from the Communist Party-controlled development bank? hon. Chair, my colleague is trying to connect the dots, and I don't know exactly where he is going from here, but everything is public. I'm sure this exchange will also be available on Google, and the public can draw their own conclusions. We have failures on 5G, failures when it comes to the transport of deadly viruses and failures when it comes to giving over $400 million to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It's time for the minister to settle his debt with the Communist government and not settle it on the backs of Canadians. michael barrett: Canada's ambassador to the United Nations sent a letter last week to all member states of the UN promising that Canada would consider providing more funding for UNRRA, the same UNRRA that is a front for Hamas, which allows weapons of terror to be stored in schools and provides textbooks that call for the destruction of Israel. Do these Liberals have no shame when it comes to their quest for a seat on the UN Security Council? hon. More than ever, Canada is playing a positive role by being a champion in diversity and inclusion, supporting the global fight against COVID-19, addressing climate change, leading peace and security efforts and helping the most vulnerable. A seat on the Security Council will allow Canada to be a strong voice for a fairer, more inclusive and prosperous the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, I received a letter from Bob Anderson this week, who's advocating for his neighbours like Jean Grevelding, who owns a cottage at Butternut Bay. Of course, our priority is and always has been and always must be the protection of the health and safety of Canadians. That's why we put in place these restrictions for non-essential travel and have required, through the Public Health Agency of Canada, a 14-day quarantine. I don't know the specifics of the person for whom you advocate, but we want to make sure that if they come into Canada, it is for an essential purpose and that they do it safely and respect the quarantine that has been put in place. michael barrett: With nine branches throughout my riding, the Royal Canadian Legion offers a great deal to veterans and rural communities alike. They have been experiencing hardship and a loss of revenue, to the point where they may be forced to shut their doors. The Zone G2 commander and local mayors such as Roger Haley have reached out to me expressing their dire need. Will the government offer support to Legions across the country so they can continue to carry out their vital work for our veterans? hon. Indeed, we're doing everything we can to make sure that we help the Legions and other groups that do so much to help veterans right across the country. michael barrett: On May 21, the minister stated that her team was working as quickly as it could to fill the gaps in CEBA. It has now been three weeks, and many business owners, such as mortgage broker Corinna Smith-Gatcke, are still left in the lurch amid the delays, which are pushing businesses closer to shutting their doors for good. Those businesses can absolutely have access to the loan at their financial institution this Friday, and I would encourage them to go and see their bank or credit union. I want businesses to know that nothing is more important for us than making sure they get the support they need during this difficult time. michael barrett: The County Road 43 expansion project is critical for my riding and the region as a whole. This project will widen the road, increasing safety for the 18,000 motorists who travel the road every day. It's been 334 days since the provincial and local governments announced funding, but there has been nothing from this Liberal government. Today, there is still nothing, and for the last month the minister's team has not even found the time to respond to my request for an update. We're always happy to work with members of Parliament, but they must also work with provinces and territories so that projects are advanced by them to our office. MacAulay read ombudsman Dalton's May 2020 report, Financial Compensation for Canadian Veterans: A comparative analysis of benefit regimes? hon. Wagantall, we'll freeze the time so that there's no extra time taken. MacAulay has read ombudsman Dalton's May 2020 report, Financial Compensation for Canadian Veterans: A comparative analysis of benefit regimes. I've done everything and worked with him in order to make sure that we bring the proper compensation to veterans the chair: We'll go back to Mrs. cathay wagantall: As a result of that study, are the financial outcomes Canada seeks to provide for ill and injured veterans now clearly defined within the Department of Veterans Affairs? hon. Chair, as the member would know, I am to bring a report to the veterans affairs committee, and there are a number of things done in order to make sure that report is the chair: We'll go back to Mrs. cathay wagantall: Then I would suggest that we get our committee up and going as it should be. lawrence macaulay: Well, of course, lockdown, but just under $90 million that the government put in supplementary estimates to make sure we address the backlog for Veterans Affairs. cathay wagantall: Minister, are Canadian Armed Forces members provided with a copy of this document? hon. In Ombudsman Dalton's recent report, did any one of these three provide the best compensation in all nine scenarios that were studied? hon. lawrence macaulay: Of course, as she knows, there's been a lot of work done in order to make sure that we provide the proper compensation to veterans. cathay wagantall: In the undisclosed settlement of Sean Bruyea's legal case against Seamus O'Regan and the Liberal government, a joint statement says ...Canadians, especially all Veterans and their families, are encouraged to enter the public debate about policies and programs that affect our Veterans and their families. lawrence macaulay: I can assure you that anybody is welcome to enter any discussion on compensation of veterans. We're always open to what we can do in order to make sure that we provide appropriate compensation. I don't think the term would be appropriate, but it would provide some compensation to veterans who truly deserve it. Ms.Larouche, did I understand correctly that the interpretation didn't work for both speakers? ms. andranne larouche: The sound didn't allow the interpreters to do their job. the chair: In that case, I would ask both members to maybe put their mike a little bit close to their mouth. cathay wagantall: On a point of order, quite often while I'm trying to speak, there are lots of other voices in the background. the chair: I would ask everyone to please be on mute, as well as for anyone in the chamber to please refrain from speaking loudly. cathay wagantall: You said next question, so we're not going backwards, Chair? the chair: Did we have an answer from Minister MacAulay? No? We'll go to Minister MacAulay to finish up the answer. Then, because of all of the confusion, we'll start at one minute and 45 seconds when we get going again. cathay wagantall: Should I repeat the question, sir? the chair: Please do. In the undisclosed settlement to Sean Bruyea's legal case against Seamus O'Regan and the Liberal government, a joint statement says, Canadians, especially all Veterans and their families, are encouraged to enter the public debate about policies and programs that affect our Veterans and their families. Anybody is quite open to indicate whatever they wish in order to make sure we provide as appropriate a compensation as possible. You can never totally compensate veterans truly for what they deserve, but we want to make sure we provide the best compensation possible. cathay wagantall: If that's the case, is Minister MacAulay aware of the practice of red-flagging veterans' files? hon. cathay wagantall: Since the deputy minister has indicated that he runs the department, will the minister ask him for the names of veterans and the dates and the reasons that they are, or have been, red-flagged by VAC? hon. I will do anything I can to make sure that the veterans the chair: We'll go back to Ms. cathay wagantall: Do the most ill and injured still receive from the pension up to $300,000 less for life? hon. Chair, as you know and as the Prime Minister indicated when the pension for life was put in place, it was stated that if anybody receives lessthe Prime Minister himself indicated it quite clearlythat must be adjusted. cathay wagantall: For veterans in similar circumstances, should the date of their application for compensation be a factor in determining whether they're treated equitably? hon. Retired Major Mark Campbell in my riding of Sturgeon RiverParkland lost both legs in the line of duty in Afghanistan. He is an avid sport shooter, but understandably, due to his disability, he is very limited in the kinds of firearms he can use, and all of these firearms have now been banned under the Liberal OIC. My question to the Minister of Public Safety is this: Did their department do a legal analysis and consider the section 15 charter rights of disabled Canadians not to be discriminated against when they passed their OIC? hon. bill blair: Yes, there was a very thorough analysis done by the justice department to ensure that the prohibitions we put in place were, in fact, charter compliant. We have prohibited them, and we believeand this has been echoed by many people across the countrythat this will make Canadians safer. Chair, is the minister aware that the AR-15 is the most popular sporting rifle in Canada, and is he aware that disabled veterans like Major Mark Campbell are unable to participate in the sport of sport shooting because of his OIC? hon. bill blair: I can assure the member that what I am aware of is that the AR-15 and other weapons like them have been used in mass killings in Canada on many occasions, such as at cole Polytechnique, at Dawson College, again at the Quebec mosque and in Moncton. The AR-15s in particular were also used at the terrible tragedy in places like Sandy Hook, where a bunch of kids were killed, so there is no place for the chair: We will go to Mr. Chair, it has been months since the Liberals shut down this Parliament and months since the Minister of Finance should have presented a budget or at least an economic update to Canadians. Well, that didn't stop Stephen Harper and the Conservatives from tabling a budget in the depth of the last great recession. We're working for Canadians and bringing forward supports to make sure that businesses, workers and Canadians can put food on the table and pay their rent. We will continue to support Canadians, and when we have a clear projection to present, we will do that. Chair, the results are in, and businesses aren't happy with the so-called support programs from these Liberals. When is the government going to recognize that their business support plans have been an absolute failure with only a fraction of the billions promised being accessible to businesses? hon. We had the BCAP, which is critically important to providing liquidity to support the SMEs that make up 85% of the jobs in our sector. We are helping hard-working Canadians, small businesses and large businesses right across the country, but in particular in our energy sector. He tweeted recently to praise the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and the North West Redwater Partnership refinery in my riding. Can the minister tell us what, if any, support they have given to the innovative carbon capture and sequestration technology in this country? hon. Chair, we see carbon capture and sequestration as an integral part of lowering emissions, making emissions more competitive and making our oil and gas industry more competitive. dane lloyd: I note that the minister couldn't name a single example of government support for carbon capture, utilization and sequestration technology. We have spent a lot of time talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, but Canadians are living with another horrific reality, that being the intensifying opioid overdose epidemic. Reports indicate that in the past four years, 14,000 Canadians have died, and the numbers during COVID-19 have been skyrocketing, with British Columbia seeing a 39% increase this year alone. When is the government going to take this scourge seriously and take action to save the lives of Canadians? hon. Chair, I share the member's deep sadness about the number of lives we've lost to opioid overdose. Our government has been steadily making it easier for people who live with substance use to access medications to treat substance use, such as prescription Suboxone and methadone. We have made it easier to rapidly establish safe injection sites in communities and have supported community-based projects that work with people who are using substances. We need to understand that this is a complex issue, and we need to support people to get the help they need. carol hughes (algomamanitoulinkapuskasing, ndp)): The hon. louise chabot (thrse-de blainville, bq): MadamChair, I will come back to the bill introduced last week. As parliamentarians, we felt like we were watching a very bad play, as I imagine the public did. However, the government did not see fit to negotiate with the opposition parties, even though it is in a minority position. One of the things we proposed was to split the bill so that we could give this support to people with disabilities, but the Conservatives did not want to do that. We came back and asked for time to negotiate and give support to people with disabilities, but the government defeated the motion. We asked that the House be recalled today so that we could pass this part of the bill concerning support for people with disabilities, but we are still in the dark. We know this pandemic has deeply affected the lives and health of all Canadians and has disproportionately affected Canadians with disabilities in particular. From the very beginning, we've taken a disability-inclusive approach to our emergency response to ensure that Canadians with disabilities get the support they need. That is why we announced a one-time payment of $600 for persons with disabilities to address these expenses. We're confident that this measure, along with other investments, will benefit Canadians with disabilities, and we hope to get the support of the other parties very soon. louise chabot: MadamChair, I remind you that this measure wasn't passed because we weren't allowed to do so. We've tried here, in the House, to provide the means to give that support, so I ask again, can the government be counted on to give a response to people with disabilities? hon. It contained assistance for the disabled, of course, but it also contained assistance for our seasonal workers, as well as a number of other measures that the Bloc Qubcois opposed. They refused to debate and, when the question of splitting the bill came up, the Conservatives refused to do that. This bill proposed changes to the wage subsidy program, it was supposed to make the CERB more flexible, it proposed fines for fraudsters and, since there was a little section about a benefit for the disabled, the government took it for granted that we would support it without any negotiations with the parties. However, we set one very important condition: that the Liberal Party must get its hands out of taxpayers' pockets in terms of the wage subsidy. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, as we listen to the Bloc Qubcois members, we might think that they invented peanut butter and apple pie. This bill contained a number of measures that all Quebeckers and all Canadians needed, but the Bloc Qubcois refused to debate it. No, we did not follow the Bloc Qubcois' example in splitting the bill; we had thought of it a long time previously. louise chabot: We asked on a number of occasions for the House to be able to sit starting today to pass the part of the bill dealing with those with disabilities. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, my colleague knows very well that things are not as simple as that. I hope that, one day, we will be able to pass this bill and be able to provide assistance for those living with disabilities. yasmin ratansi (don valley east, lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair. Several measures have been implemented for phasing out coal, making polluters pay, providing climate incentives, investing in green technologies and much more, which all together have created a climate plan that is doing more to cut pollution than any other in Canada's history. One area of particular interest is our government's work to protect 25% of Canada's land and 25% of its oceans by 2025. Could the minister update this House on the new conservation projects announced on June 5, World Environment Day, and on how our government is protecting our environment? hon. seamus o'regan: Madam Chair, protecting nature is an important part of how we will address climate change and the very real challenges it presents. That's why on June 5, World Environment Day, our government announced over 60 conservation projects under development across Canada. They'll conserve Canadian nature and biodiversity and protect species at risk, enhance ecological integrity and connectivity, and enhance the size of Canada's vast network of protected areas. Nearly half of these projects are indigenous-led, with the aim of creating indigenous-protected conserved areas. Madam Chair, projects like these move us closer to our goal of protecting 25% of Canada's lands and oceans by 2025. By working together in partnership with the provinces, territories, municipalities, indigenous peoples and Canadians, together we can protect our natural environment for generations to come. Ratansi, since you have 25 seconds left, we will go to the honourable member for Surrey Centre. randeep sarai (surrey centre, lib.): Madam Chair, there are many small and medium-sized businesses in my riding of Surrey Centre. They saw a decrease in business or needed to close their doors completely in order to adhere to public safety measures to manage the spread of COVID-19. These measures helped keep our most vulnerable citizens safe and ensured that our hospital and health care providers did not become overwhelmed with a sharp spike in cases. Thanks to our government's COVID-19 emergency response, many of these businesses have been able to keep their employees and access important liquidity through the Canada emergency business account, which provides loans to small businesses and non-profits, and the Canada emergency wage subsidy, which is helping businesses to keep and rehire their employees while their revenues are down by providing up to 75% of wages for up to 24 weeks. As we begin to reopen the economy and Canadians across the country return to the job market, those benefits will be even more important to help businesses and industries rehire their staff and make important adjustments to align with public health guidelines to gradually increase their operations. Can the minister please update the committee on how many Canadian businesses have taken advantage of CEBA and CEWS since applications for each have been opened? hon. mary ng: Madam Chair, I want to begin by thanking the member for Surrey Centre for all the work he does to support his constituents and small businesses. Canadians across the country need to know our government has been working tirelessly and will continue to work tirelessly on their behalf. This is why we put in place the important programs to help them get through this crisis during this difficult time, programs such as the wage subsidy program. The wage subsidy has helped these businesses keep their employees on the payroll and are now helping in their rehiring as they slowly and safely restart. There are 348,000 businesses being helped with the wage subsidy program, and this means that 2.6 million workers are being helped. Businesses are also being helped through the interest-free $40,000 loan they can access through CEBA to help stay afloat and pay their expenses during this crisis. I'm pleased to inform this House that to date more than 669,000 the acting chair (mrs. Madam Chair, with so many recent reports and videos of police using force, sometimes deadly force, and violence against indigenous and black people in Canada, I've called for the public safety committee to reconvene. If the members agree, will the minister come to the committee and provide concrete answers as to how the government intends to address racism inherent in Canada's law enforcement, and in particular the RCMP? hon. Madam Chair, indigenous people, black Canadians and other racialized people are far too often experiencing systemic racism and disparate outcomes within the entire criminal justice system. In order to respond appropriately, I think it's necessary to begin by acknowledging the lived experience of people who've known bias and discrimination at the hands of the police and our courts and within our prisons. We remain committed to working with all racialized people and all of the members of this House to ensure that we work toward social justice for all Canadians, and I look forward to discussing the member's motion further with him. jack harris: Will the minister and the government commit to facilitating such a meeting of this committee virtually? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, the decisions of the committee are the committee's, so I'm sure that this will be a discussion within the committee, but if called, I will certainly be pleased to come with my officials to provide the committee with whatever support and information it needs to contribute to this very important discussion. jack harris: In light of what we've seen with Chief Adam in Fort McMurray and the RCMP accepting that the actions were reasonable, will the minister commit to a full review of the use of force by the RCMP, in particular the philosophy, tactics and training that is given to RCMP officers in dealing with the public? hon. bill blair: I thank the member and I want to assure him, first of all, that this is work that is ongoing, not just in the RCMP but throughout the police community. May I also take this opportunity, Madam Chair, to say that I think all police training has to begin with one very important principle, and that's the preservation of all life and the respect for all Canadians. We're committed to continuing to work with indigenous communities, racialized communities and with police services and all participants in the criminal justice system to make sure that it is fair for all Canadians. lindsay mathyssen (londonfanshawe, ndp): Madam Chair, we need more justice for black, indigenous and racialized people in Canada. This government recognizes that systemic racism exists but refuses to collect race-based data that would allow us to quantify and truly address this injustice. bardish chagger (minister of diversity and inclusion and youth): Madam Chair, our government agrees that it's important that we collect data, and that's exactly why, in the anti-racism secretariat and the anti-racism strategy, there is a commitment to have money go to Statistics Canada to collect race-based data. lindsay mathyssen: Madam Chair, we know that Statistics Canada will start to collect job numbers based on race. This will allow us to identify systemic racism where it is and where we need to ensure a fair and more equal job market for black, indigenous and racialized people in Canada. Why is this government refusing to follow suit so we can tackle systemic racism everywhere, in every sector? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I'd like to thank my honourable colleague for her question. She's absolutely correct in her assessment that we need to collect more data, reliable data, data that will help us deal with some of the challenges we're seeing with systemic discrimination, but, more broadly, we want to make sure that we continue to engage with an anti-racism strategy that will allow us to collect that disaggregated data. That is why we allocated $6.2 million to that initiative through Statistics Canada, but we know we must do more and we will do more. lindsay mathyssen: We know that all people are susceptible to catching COVID-19, but health authorities are clear that parts of cities like Montreal and Toronto have been more impacted than others. For black and racialized people living in these cities, this data is a matter of life and death. Will the government collect and share disaggregated data so we can identify and erase systemic racism, yes or no? hon. bardish chagger: Madam Chair, making decisions based on science and evidence is essential for our government. It is exactly the step we will take moving forward and that's why we are making those investments to ensure that data exists. I look forward to continuing to work not only with all ministers, departments and agencies, but all allies and all parties to get this work done. carol hughes): Mr.Blaney, the honourable member for BellechasseLes EtcheminsLvis, has the floor. steven blaney (bellechasseles etcheminslvis, cpc): Thank you, MadamChair. Last week, my plumber told me that, each time Justin Trudeau comes down the steps to make announcements totalling several billion dollars, he feels like someone is rifling through his pockets. My question is simple and goes to the Minister of Finance: where is this money coming from? hon. steven blaney: The answer I would have liked is simple: we are borrowing the money and we are going to have to pay it back one day. That is another Liberal craze: they borrow money, they make campaign promises, and off they go. Under the Conservative government, the Chantier Davie in Lvis had 1,700workers for the supply ship Asterix. david lametti (minister of justice and attorney general of canada): MadamChair, we are very proud of the Chantier Davie and we completely understand its role in the system. We are going to establish the process for the polar ice-breaker, which is essential for the work of the Coast Guard in northern communities, and we are going to make sure that the acting chair (mrs. There is money in the Canada summer jobs program: in my constituency alone, $150,000has been approved. What is the minister waiting for in order to confirm those positions? In my constituency, and everywhere else in the country, our young people want to work. What is the government waiting for in order to send some cash to the Canada summer jobs program? hon. We are introducing flexibilities into the system to enable employers to be able to hire summer students. The money is available; where is the announcement? MadamChair, our young people are not the only ones who want to work. Let me use Jessie Gito as an example; he has been working at Plate2000 in Saint-Anselme for years. When the time came to renew his work permit, he found out that he has to have some biometric tests. Is the minister going to allow Jessie Gito and the thousands of other temporary foreign workers who want to work to be able to do so until the government biometric testing centres reopen? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, it is important for the honourable member to recognize that we are in the early recovery stage of the pandemic. We will ensure that we support both our students and our temporary foreign workers to make sure we get the recovery right. We've introduced flexibilities into the program to ensure that employers are able to take advantage of the program and give opportunities to young people. Then, when the government's biometric testing centres are open again, he will gladly go to one. Young people want to work in agriculture as well, and the minister has told us that the government wants young people working and that their files will be processed as quickly as possible. She wants to create 700positions and she knows that people can fill in an application on a first-come first-served basis. Of those 700positions, how many have been confirmed to date? The good weather has arrived, the corn is starting to grow, and this is the time when farmers need the young workers. marie-claude bibeau (minister of agriculture and agri-food): MadamChair, the program for young workers in agriculture is open. This is a program that is not only intended to provide summer jobs, but also to interest young people in making a career in agriculture. doug shipley (barriespringwateroro-medonte, cpc): Thank you, Chair. Over the course of the pandemic, has the government been using all avenues possible to source much-needed PPE in Canada? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, we have been very clear that we have a made-in-Canada initiative that has engaged companies across the country. Over 700 companies have retooled and scaled up their operations for personal protective equipment to help front-line health care workers. doug shipley: Madam Chair, I need to ask very quickly which ministry and minister are responsible for the sourcing of PPE in Canada. I work with the Minister of Health and the minister for procurement , and we coordinate with the provinces and territories to make sure there are appropriate levels of PPE to help front-line health care workers and essential workers across the country. For over 37 years, it has provided front-line health care workers with an extensive line of PPE and other essential products required when dealing with respiratory illnesses. Southmedic currently employs over 700 people, and it has been recognized as one of Canada's best-managed companies by Deloitte on numerous occasions. Since the beginning of the pandemic, both I and the member for BarrieInnisfil have been attempting to obtain some assistance for Southmedic from the federal government. I received a letter back from the minister dated May 27 indicating that this issue of Southmedic falls under the mandate of the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. When will the federal government reach out and help this great Canadian company and therefore ensure that all front-line workers will have the proper PPE they require? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I'd like to thank my honourable colleague for his question. Since then, we've seen over 6,000 companies step up to offer solutions and ideas, and over 700 companies have retooled their efforts. I acknowledge that some companies are still engaging with the government, and we'll continue to explore all possible options to make sure we continue to procure the necessary levels of personal protective equipment to protect Canadians and to protect front-line health care workers. Moving on to a different issue, while walking to my office this morning, I stopped at my local small family-run coffee shop and was discussing the current economic situation with the two owners of the establishment. The only thing keeping them hopeful is that soon the public service will start returning to work, and therefore their business will begin to return. Could the government please give us some indication as to what the plans are for returning the civil service back to work safely, and when? hon. This is a very important topic, but I'd like to take the opportunity first to thank our public servants, who have worked very hard in the last few weeks, both personally and professionally. In fact, today is a wonderful day to say that, because today is the start of National Public Service Week. They've been at work for the last few monthsin different circumstances, but they have been working very hard to deliver the services and the support Canadians need and deserve. carol hughes): Next we'll go to the honourable member for SelkirkInterlakeEastman, Mr. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): Thank you, Madam Chair. First of all, I want to thank the great men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces for the fantastic job they're doing in Operation LASER, serving on the front lines battling COVID-19. Can the Minister of National Defence give the House an update on exactly where we are at with the number of Canadian Armed Forces members who have been infected with COVID-19? hon. sajjan (minister of national defence): Madam Chair, I want to echo the member opposite's comments in thanking our Canadian Armed Forces members. Currently, we have 13 active cases in the Canadian Armed Forces, but in the long-term care facilities we currently have 50 cases. james bezan: Through you, Chair, Minister Sajjan, does that number of active cases include the active cases that are in long-term care facilities right now in Operation LASER? hon. sajjan: Madam Chair, as I stated, the 50 cases are strictly from the long-term care facilities. Sajjan say how many of those cases in long-term care facilities are active and how many are recovered? hon. What I can say to break it down further is that in Quebec we currently have 36 and in Ontario we have 14. The President of the Treasury Board has said, The Canadian Armed Forces will be present as long as their presence is needed in Quebec. This contradicts what Prime Minister Trudeau is saying, which is that we have a hard deadline of June 26 for the withdrawal of our troops for Operation LASER. We've been in very extensive discussions with the Province of Quebec, with my counterpart Minister Guilbault, and we are working very diligently to ensure we have a sustained, appropriate response to the request from Quebec for assistance. That response will result in a transition from the currently deployed Canadian Armed Forces to the deployment of paid volunteers, trained personnel who will take on the important role of providing services to those Canadians who need our help in Quebec. The Department of National Defence auditors have called out the Liberal government for mismanagement over the $553-billion investment in our Canadian military through the defence policy. This is a $553-billion investment in our armed forces, and only three people are managing it. Could the minister tell us how that is even possible? Is this the reason that over 100 projects are currently behind schedule? hon. sajjan: Madam Chair, first of all, I want to highlight the unprecedented investment that we're making in defence. When it comes to the management of this, it's conducted by me and the minister of procurement . Are we going to see more cuts because you have been unable to actually roll out these dollars? hon. carol hughes): Before I go to the next speaker, I want to remind members that they are to address their questions and comments directly through the chair. david yurdiga (fort mcmurraycold lake, cpc): Madam Chair, the Canada summer jobs program has many challenges. I've seen many indigenous communities in my riding rejected for funding even though they had received funding in previous years. Here are a few examples of communities that were rejected: Beaver Lake Cree Nation, Buffalo Lake Mtis Settlement and the Mtis Nation of Alberta, Region 1. Could the Prime Minister explain why so many indigenous communities have been denied funding from the Canada summer jobs program? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, we recognize the important role that the Canada summer jobs program plays in supporting employers and young workers in our community across the country every year. We're working very hard to help employers adapt to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and are supporting young Canadians as they begin to look for summer employment. We are introducing increased flexibilities into the Canada summer jobs program to hire youth, while also providing more supports to employers that deliver essential services to Canadians. Why are so many indigenous communities left out of the Canada summer jobs program? This is very important to my community and to communities throughout the province. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we, of course, value the important role that the Canada summer jobs program plays in all communities, including indigenous communities in Canada. I will certainly have an off-line conversation with the honourable member, if he so wishes, about a particular issue, but I can assure him that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to assist employers to introduce flexibilities the acting chair (mrs. david yurdiga: Madam Chair, in my riding, the City of Cold Lake has been in dispute with the federal government for many years over payment in lieu of taxes. Could the Minister of Public Services and Procurement give me a rough estimate of when I will receive a response from the minister's office to my first letter, from 2017, and my letters from 2018, 2019 and 2020? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, I can assure the honourable member that I will go to the minister, and we will come back with an answer to his question. david yurdiga: How much longer does the minister intend to perpetuate the ongoing PILT dispute, which is in excess of $11 million, with the City of Cold Lake? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, once again, I can assure the honourable member that I will speak with the minister and get an answer to his question. david yurdiga: Well, do you know what? I've been writing letters to the department for many years. When you say you're going to get back to me, I really have a hard time believing that. Will the minister agree to follow the prior recommendations of the dispute advisory panel that were accepted by the minister? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, I can assure the honourable member that I will check with the minister and that she will return to the member in due course. david yurdiga: Madam Chair, the drug Trikafta has been proven to increase the quality of life for 90% of cystic fibrosis patients. Two weeks ago, my office sent a letter to the Minister of Health about the boy in my riding named Cael, who through the special access program is able to get Trikafta in Canada. I requested that the minister use her powers to fast-track Trikafta for commercial use, but I have yet to receive a response back. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, I'm glad to hear that Cael was able to access Trikafta through the special access program. In fact, that program is very helpful for people who are seeking access to medication that's not currently marketed in Canada. As the member opposite knows, Vertex has not applied to market Trikafta in Canada, but we look forward to their application, and I encourage him to write a letter to the manufacturer to also encourage them. I was very troubled to hear that a CBC radio host in the Yukon felt compelled to resign because, as an indigenous person, she could not speak her truth. While we know the Broadcasting Act states that the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of indigenous peoples, it would seem there are some challenges. Therefore, does the Minister of Heritage share the concern of some journalists that problems of systemic racism in Canada are still existing within the institution of the CBC, and will the government now acknowledge the need to recognize the jurisdiction of indigenous governments? hon. steven guilbeault (minister of canadian heritage): Thank you, Madame Chair; and I thank the member for this important question. As stated by the Prime Minister on numerous occasions, our government recognizes that systemic racism exists in Canada, and we have made a commitment to do everything we can to combat it in whichever organization of the Canadian government. I understand these issues to be ones that challenge societal norms, that are not politically expedient to address because they can lose you votes, even though addressing them is morally right and a smart thing to do. In the justice system, examples include mandatory minimum penalties, defunding police, and even investing in restorative justice. Surely now these issues are politically less of a consideration than the tragic reality of even more slain indigenous Canadians at the hands of police, or thousands of indigenous people still incarcerated or living in poverty. Will this government please finally commit to the necessary work originally promised in 2015 and repeal in the justice system the vast majority of mandatory minimum penalties, assuring the necessary discretion for judges, and meaningfully invest in restorative justice measures? hon. david lametti: Madame Chair, I thank the honourable member for her question, as well as for her work as Minister of Justice, and indeed my predecessor. This is a time when we recognize systemic over-incarceration of indigenous peoples, of black peoples, in our criminal justice system. This is a time when we need to look at all potential options to reduce what is a shameful overrepresentation in our criminal justice system. Too often racialized peoples and indigenous peoples have experienced prejudice and systemic discrimination in our justice system, and that has to change. Many of the deaths are related to COVID-19 measures that have prevented people from accessing supervised consumption sites, so they are overdosing alone. While the provinces welcomed the federal backing of safe supply exemption back in March, it is to expire in September of 2020. Will the government provide the necessary supports to the province and help support safe supply initiatives in the provinces? hon. patty hajdu: It's been a pleasure to work with the Province of British Columbia on innovative ways to work on the tragic situation of opioid overdose. I remain committed to working with the province and in fact any province that wants to work towards solutions that treat people who use substances with the dignity they deserve. We're working closely with our partners to make sure that we can prevent more lives from being lost. carol hughes): We will go to the honourable member for South OkanaganWest Kootenay, Mr. richard cannings (south okanaganwest kootenay, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. They've been serving great food for 40 years, but now they're struggling, because they don't qualify for the emergency wage subsidy. The new owner can't use a year-to-year comparison to apply for the wage subsidy because he didn't own the restaurant last spring. He is forced to use receipts from January and February, the darkest doldrums of the restaurant year, to compare with the results from May, traditionally one of their best months. When will the government fix this inequity and let Theo's compete and survive? hon. mona fortier: Madam Chair, the Canada emergency wage subsidy is supporting over 2.5 million workers across the country. To help even more businesses support their workers and rehire people as they reopen, our government is extending the CEWS, and we will continue to extend the CEWS for an additional 12 weeks to August 29 to ensure that Canadian workers continue to have the support they need during these very difficult times. By extending eligibility, our government is ensuring that more Canadian workers in more sectors have the support they need. richard cannings: The owner just wants to be able to apply for the wage subsidy, and right now he cannot, and he will not be able to. Canada's forest sector has been declared essential during this pandemic, but it's been hit hard after a very difficult 2019. Despite soft markets and thousands out of work, government support programs have left many Canadian forest product companies behind. In my riding, the pulp mill in Castlegar is closing for the month of July because local sawmills aren't producing enough wood chips. What is the government going to do to finally support Canadian forestry workers and communities? the acting chair (mrs. carol hughes): The time is almost up, but I will allow for the answer from the honourable minister. In fact, in Quebec, partnering with Les Bois Francs DV Inc., we have widened market access to our products and updated technology systems. In Vancouver we're working with FPInnovations to create the indigenous forest sector technical support program. carol hughes): Now we go to the honourable member for SkeenaBulkley Valley, Mr. taylor bachrach (skeenabulkley valley, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to pick up where my colleague left off, with B.C.'s forest industry. are multiple rounds of mill shutdowns and start-ups, and in some cases this has made it difficult for forestry workers to qualify for EI. My question to the minister is this: Will the minister work to make the EI program more flexible for forestry workers, similar to what this government has done for oil and gas workers? hon. That has been key in the inactive and orphan well program, which we are working on with the provincial governments of Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Alberta. The focus on workers has assured that success, and we will continue to focus on workers in all the industries, particularly our natural resource industry, as they go through this extraordinarily difficult time. taylor bachrach: Madam Chair, reforestation is a very important part of the forest industry in the riding I represent, and people were keenly interested to hear this government's plan to plant two billion trees in the next 10 years. I'm wondering if the minister could tell us how many trees are going to be planted under this program by the end of this season. We are working with forestry associations, the industry and with individual companies to ensure this tree-planting season will be one of the largest the country has ever seen. rhal fortin (rivire-du-nord, bq): MadamChair, last week, the government introduced BillC-17 and the Minister of Justice sent us briefing notes in which he said that it was important to suspend a number of time limits and to extend others, and that the failure to do so could have important repercussions on Canadians, their families, their situations, their finances and their ability to exercise their rights. We have addressed the mandatory time limits in federal legislation as well as certain time limits that courts may not be able to handle. The minister's briefing notes say that, among other things, when it comes to divorcewhich means children are involved people are waiting on custody rights, child support and visitation rights. The minister pointed out that the national security review would require consultations if no decision is made in the prescribed time frame. rhal fortin: MadamChair, what a coincidence, because I beseech my colleague opposite to debate it with us. Last week, the leader of the Bloc Qubcois asked the Liberal government to debate BillC-17 today. Richard Wagner, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who is hardly a dimwit or greenhorn, told us that the justice system needs to be modernized. As recently as this past Saturday in LaPresse, Justice Wagner said that it is essential that the Criminal Code be amended to address the backlog of court proceedings. When will the Liberal government opposite pull up its socks, do its job, govern the federation, sit down with the opposition and discuss the vital matters in BillC-17? hon. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, if I were my colleague, I would be a little embarrassed, because the bill was sent to the Bloc Qubcois several days in advance. When we asked for the support of the Bloc Qubcois and the other parties to debate itwe were not even asking them to vote in favour of the billthey refused. For example, we asked the Liberals to put the money back into the wage subsidy fund and to commit to dip into it no longer. pablo rodriguez: Can my colleague explain to me what the emergency wage subsidy has to do with a bill about justice? This is an absolutely fundamental piece of legislation. rhal fortin: MadamChair, I would like nothing better than to explain it to him, but I must remind him that he is the leader of the party in power, the party that is supposed to govern the country. I am thinking of families, child support, child custody, labour law disputes in Federal Court, marine transportation, interprovincial transportation, aviation, banks, and those with grievances waiting for a Federal Court ruling. The whole system, the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, everything is on hold because nobody in the government wants to do their job. However, when we asked the Bloc Qubcois if they wanted to debate the bill, they said no, instead of doing what they usually do and saying yes. When the CERB runs out, many workers in my riding of Essex will not have sufficient hours to collect their EI benefits. Because of the shutdown, a mom-to-be who had just returned to work in January, and several hundred of her fellow employees, may not have the 600 hours required for regular or EI parental benefits. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, the Canada emergency response benefit has been providing much-needed help to Canadian workers across the country who have stopped working due to COVID-19. We know that there is still a lot of uncertainty for many Canadian workers, and we know that many will be exhausting their benefits in the weeks to come. We will have more to share soon, as early as this week, on our continuing efforts to support Canadian workers and make sure that help is available during this the acting chair (mrs. We will continue to make sure that we make the necessary investments in the EI delivery system and modernize it to continue to meet the acting chair (mrs. mary ng: Madam Chair, today we are seeing small businesses that have been helped, whether it is getting access to the small business loan, which some are also using in the restart as they are safely restarting, or getting help with their payroll, helping them keep their employees the acting chair (mrs. How will the government incentivize workers to return to their jobs when recalled? the acting chair (mrs. mary ng: The Canada emergency wage subsidy is an excellent program to help those employees stay employed and for those employers who are looking at rehiring them right now during this restart process. chris lewis: Madam Chair, many of my constituents are in a committed cross-border relationship and have not been able to see their partners in quite some time. bill blair: Madam Chair, as we said from the outset, we've implemented restrictions at the U.S. border on non-essential travel with a single purpose in mind: to protect the health and safety of Canadians. As the member is aware, just last week we introduced new measures that allow people in family relationships to stay together as long as they commit to the necessary 14-day period of quarantine. chris lewis: Madam Chair, with regard to child care, as our economy continues to open, parents are facing a stark choice: Who will care for their children? What's the plan to provide access to child care so parents can confidently return to work? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, we are of course committed to continuing to make the record investments that we've been making in child care. We're committed to creating an additional 250,000 before-school and after-school child care spaces. It sounds as though this government has a desire to force parents to choose between their job and care for their child

The government's announcement of a one-time $600 payment for persons with disabilities to address their needs was met with opposition from the Conservatives, despite expectations of it being passed quickly. Hon. Ahmed Hussen also expressed appreciation for the summer jobs program, highlighting its benefits in terms of financial resources and necessary experience for young people, and confirming the continuation of investment in the Canada summer jobs program.

Question: Summarize the discussion on product requirements, including the User Interface's opinion on using titanium for product cost and quotation, as well as the findings from the market survey. Article: So , we will have the three presentations from the In Industrial Designer , User Interface Designer and industrial designer: Industrial Design . project manager: And after that we will have the new product requirements , the decision on the remote control functions , and we will close the meetings after . project manager: No , industrial designer: Three three , it's three project manager: I'm participant one . The first I will present the technical function design for user interface for our remote T_V_ control . As we know our remote c rem remote T_V_ control it's very has very soph sophisticated functions , as we show from this picture . So how can we design a user interface with so sa with so many sophisticated functions ? , let's move to next slide . As we know Google it's a very successful because his powerful function , but with very easy to use user interface . project manager: user interface: So my job is to design a Google T_V_ controller which I want to have sophisticated functions while with very easy to use user interface . So industrial designer: user interface: That's the end of the talk the end of the presentation . user interface: With sophisticated functions , project manager: So powerful , user interface: but with very yeah powerful . marketing: So , I dunno , it's maybe difficult to have both , industrial designer: To merge the two system huh . marketing: industrial designer: But But this is user interface: But if we have very very good user interface marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah you maybe you have some international standards , where you know , if you can use one is the other are or almost the same , so the sign . project manager: Oh you mean for the yeah pic pictograms or things like that ? industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . For example , I dunno here , escape , you know , you have escape in computers you have , so if you see escape , you know that it should be the same . industrial designer: So you have to The sh the user there for example the power off button it is something very international , you know that So . project manager: Go on , go back and industrial designer: Yeah , but the question is how to merge you know the Google system to the system , alright . marketing: industrial designer: It you project manager: So , you will propose us something which is yeah so powerful and easy to use . marketing: industrial designer: The rationale must be design , or project manager: So , Baba is the the Industrial Designer . As you all know , you know m my job is to design you know to give an industrial design of the remote control . So the re basically the remote control will be , you know , infrared control , so the problem is how to relate the project manager: industrial designer: how to relate the remote control device , like for example this one I h I'm holding in my hand and the T_V_ . industrial designer: but I propose a nifra infrared base you know , so so for me I think that it is better it's bet it's better to control T_V_ project manager: marketing: industrial designer: so you know , so it's it will be cheaper and it is less technology than , you know For the cheap price we have , for the cheap price we want to marketing: True . project manager: So you mean that infrared control is a cheap technology ? industrial designer: I think it's cheaper than laser , so . Do y you know the requirements for the remote control ? Twelve , nearly thirteen , marketing: What the cost is ? project manager: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , I think for the cost we want for the cost we want it's better to have Let's see . So the di the differen the findings you know what you find inside the re i the the system here inside it is just , you know a bulb and an infrared bulb , so here for example the infrared bulb will be here project manager: You have the b the bulb , it is a blue the blue stuff here and the infrared and the infrared bulb it is the red stuff project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: you know and so and you have the other subcomponent that are not really here so important , so . project manager: What is this ? industrial designer: This is in fact some other component that are in between the electrical de the electronic device . industrial designer: So and the next slide , it is the last one it's So it's I think it should be wire wireless re remote con Because you know , it's easier to manage and you know because you f the b the the battery problem can hold you know will you use a battery or the a wire to connected you . Or maybe some kind of thing that we can have both , but you know , I at my side prefer a wireless . industrial designer: Okay , so if you have some question I didn't answer ? marketing: What's the average price of this technology then ? industrial designer: Well the avera the average prices I think that this technology will cost , I dunno , around eight Euros , so . Or at least you know , the user interface: So what , the wireless remote control ? There's a wire with remote control ? industrial designer: You'd yes , you can . It's so so bres you have to decide how how you will you know , put some energy inside , so you can think about wireless or you know it's it's a question that we can raise , so . project manager: So you think that a cable between the remote control and the T_V_ won't be a good idea . project manager: No it wou maybe it will be cheaper I dunno , I just may maybe you making a solu marketing: But this is what you would like to ask the user first and I don't think the user would be ready to have a industrial designer: project manager: Yeah , user interface: Wireless remote control . project manager: but marketing: I don't think well , yeah , I don't think he would , industrial designer: Yeah , but some pa I always want to have you know , project manager: marketing: but in a sense industrial designer: sometime I want to have wire because you know . project manager: Yeah but as Industrial Designer , do you think that it will be feasible to have linked or to have link between the remote control and the television ? industrial designer: project manager: I'm just asking you . Do you think it will be cheaper ? industrial designer: I don't think it will be too much . industrial designer: Have to think about the question , you know , 'cause it's I think that you know you can always you know project manager: Okay . industrial designer: I think wha wha with the wire it's cheaper but you know the wireless it's more practical , so . Mayb maybe you have just to to kind of research or try to ask people if they will like something wireless or not . marketing: Now the project manager: So industrial designer: Yeah but , it should be an agreement , you know , because even if you can think of the wireless , it is it's it is the job of the the the g Graphical User Designer , but you know . If it is a lot cheaper and if you want to reach for example some the the money you have , if you want to use , so it can be good to have a wireless , it it is a question . project manager: I think it's would be easier to have a link between the remote control and the television , marketing: Well that's actually one of the point , yeah ? True . So just trying to answer all the questions , if the user would be happy to have something or something else . We had one hundred subjects , we observe their remote control use in a lab and then after all the experiments they had to fill up a questionnaire , and see what was okay or not for them . actually seventy five percent of the users find m the most remote controls ugly , okay , so that's project manager: You mean the loo the look , the outside ? industrial designer: The look , how it look like . So this is where we could have yeah , good market , I guess , if people are ready to pay more . And then yeah , the remote controls like the one you've shown previously it's not so doesn't fit the user requirements sometime , because it's too many buttons and so on . And users are actually zapping a lot , so they're using the device intensively , that's something to take into account as well . project manager: marketing: So this is from the experiments we've done , project manager: marketing: so if we could solve this problem this would be interesting for the user , I think . it takes too much time to learn how to use the remote control for thirty five percent of the people . And remote control are really bad for R_S_I_ problems for twenty six percent of the users . project manager: What is R_S_I_ ? marketing: R_S_I_ is like , when you're using the same doing the same movement several times , then you get injured . marketing: Okay ? So , those numbers are less important then the previous one , but still it has to be taken to count . marketing: And definitely if it could have less buttons , still maybe the same number of functions , but less buttons , user interface: Functions . And just to have an idea , do you think you as the User Interface Designer to would it be possible to have less buttons and still have the same functionality and to have powerful remote control , you think it's possible ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , but do you think it will be easy to use ? user interface: But I'm not sure project manager: Because if you have many functions just for one button it would be quite difficult for the user to know . project manager: I think the marketing: It's user interface: No you you can have a switch menu , so you can project manager: Yeah , but it has to be intuitive . Then for you can have a switch menu , so you put the switch menu to it it tend to this kind of this category of functions . Okay , user interface: Then you you put the switch button , project manager: but user interface: then it switch to another category of functions . For example , if you have remote control you you can rem you can control your T_V_ and also you can control your recorder . industrial designer: With a user interface: So there's a different functions , but i if you you there's a button you can switch between control T_V_ and control your recorder . project manager: Yeah , but user interface: But what I'm not so sure is about how to make the remote control look funny look fancy , not funny . marketing: industrial designer: This is a question that should be asked to the If you ask the people , maybe the the marketing people . user interface: marketing: Yeah , this is something we sh user interface: Because maybe a colourful is fancy for some people , but maybe simple and uniform colourful is fancy for some for other peoples , so . industrial designer: I think the solution is to have many colours of you know instead of having one grey standard project manager: Yeah , but I think it will increase the price of the production of the remote control . user interface: Yeah , because maybe some people prefer a red remote control , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah , yeah . project manager: And also f user interface: Maybe we can have di di we can have several options , marketing: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , but as soon as you speak about options , it means that the price increases , marketing: Yeah , user interface: project manager: and we don't really want the price to be too too high , because we wanna be able to produce it . So , we want something fancy , as previously said , Florent , something very easy to use , powerful and also as it's written here , seventy five percent of users , they zap lot , so maybe just having many functions in one button is not that good if you want to zap a lot . project manager: And they don't really want to zap between functions of their remote control , they want to zap between channels on T_V_ . project manager: So I think you have quite lot of points to to think about industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: So , is it okay for your presentation ? Nothing else to to add ? marketing: Yeah , it's done , just yeah . If we would if we could remember like , not too many buttons and make it look fancy , I think it would make it . project manager: So , I had some new information about the product requirements , so you will have to take care of it of it in your thinking , in your designing of the remote control . So the first one is that for the designing of the remote control we don't really want to use the teletext anymore , as it's something that's user interface: project manager: It's is marketing: Lame , or project manager: No yeah , because now everybody has internet at home , so it's better to use internet then teletext . project manager: So , you will have to think about it in your in in the design of your remote control , industrial designer: Yep . project manager: and also the remote control will only be used for television , so for y for you your designing , you're not you won't be you won't had buttons to just to manipulate yeah to control the recorder or maybe the garage door or things like that . project manager: It's marketing: - project manager: because if we want to to do remote control user interface: . project manager: which will be used for for the television , for the recorder , for the camcorder and all the others , it will become too complex and it will increase the pli the price and we can't do that . project manager: So maybe it will be easier for you to to design it , to have very powerful and easy . project manager: And also we want the image of the real reaction be recognisable in the product , such as the colour and s the slogan . project manager: that's if you want to buy a remote control and if you go in a shop and if you see the remote control you will recognise directly that s it's our product . project manager: So you will have to use the colour of the product , of the user interface: Okay . As we say , we put the fashion in electronics , so it has to be a fashion remote control . Yeah , 'cause what I'm thinking is how will you will connect the T_V_ to internet , so . project manager: industrial designer: This is marketing: I don't think it's part of the remote control design anyway . project manager: but mayb industrial designer: Yeah , but this this mean that your T_V_ would be able to , you know , connect to internet , you know , surf the web . user interface: A pi There's that box in the T_V_ , so with the set box you you can connect internet with your T_V_ . industrial designer: It's pop I don't think it's popular , so that's the problem so . industrial designer: the global usage , user interface: Global , industrial designer: so if people don't have the technology . project manager: So everybody is okay with the new requirements ? user interface: So I I so As as for the colour , what what do you think ? project manager: I think it has to be yellow . user interface: Yellow ? T_V_ remote control ? marketing: Min project manager: Maybe you can change the colour , but the image of the society has to be recognised . industrial designer: I think if you have you know th like a yellow ribbon here is the double R_ . Doesn't need to be completely yellow , project manager: So you have to user interface: Okay . It's okay ? marketing: Regarding the first line , what So we're just expecting no more use of the teletext . Y you You will have as the I_D_ I don't remember what is industr Industrial Designer to put pon marketing: Industrial Designer . project manager: And by the way , Mister David Jordan , please record your presentations in your own folder <doc-sep>project manager: Then I guess that's your bit ? I I didn't s see anything about it , marketing: Yeah . marketing: project manager: I'll show you how we're going to do with financing this design . project manager: Well the finance we'll do later , so firstly I'll show you the notes . project manager: Well user interface: marketing: project manager: We ge we went through the agenda , industrial designer: project manager: and well we had some some presentations from you three . marketing: industrial designer: it's pretty much like Mike draw drew the in the during the last meeting . industrial designer: and later we'll put out more interesting covers with different patterns and pictures and everything . You can see it also on the on the on the side view , that only this part is the front , and the rest of it , the under the under side of it , yeah , the back side and the lower part of the front is of course titanium made of titanium , and has the titanium colour of course , the look . industrial designer: which is made which is also part of the back , part of the titanium titanium part . user interface: Yeah , it's a double R_ , but industrial designer: Yeah ? user interface: It's a double R_ . industrial designer: it's difficult to draw so small , but it's our double R_ logo is in there . it's difficult to draw again the little oval or round I think oval will be better for the for the d for the different channel buttons . And then we have the m The m user interface: Channel up and volume ? industrial designer: Yeah the the con the the the , yeah , the t volume and the channel controls in the middle here . with kind of arrow shapes , which makes it also a bit more exciting than basic round or square buttons . Oh nei we the Okay button's here in the middle of the of the operators , of the channel and volume changers . project manager: Well if I look at it , the side the side view user interface: Well , at the back industrial designer: Maybe we maybe we should finish first our talk user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Maybe I I don't want to I don't want to suppress you but n I'll finish this quick . project manager: industrial designer: okay I've had everything I guess on the front ? user interface: No the back . user interface: No I don't think And the industrial designer: And the company slogan , we thought in a kind of arc shape above the logo . industrial designer: and project manager: W user interface: And about the side view This the front won't be as thick , industrial designer: user interface: but again th the the drawing technique makes it very difficult to to really project manager: Well I see , but industrial designer: Oh and before I forget . industrial designer: And you can record it using , yeah , the the the back of the f w device . marketing: project manager: When I look at when I look at this side view , I think w when I have that in my hand , it's terrible . ? project manager: If if you look if if this this is thick , and this is thin , th th then it that it lies over your hands . But industrial designer: Why ? Well it fits it it it it fits the hand , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: mean the the the the project manager: Well what what what I what I agree is that when when you have such of an arc in the middle , so that the the a the ends and the fronts is a bit thicker , so th then it falls over your hands . user interface: If y If you handle a remote , you you usually don't have your hand straight like this . H What do you suggest we do ? This was Mike's prototype , project manager: Well marketing: industrial designer: and y you seemed to agreed on it . project manager: Well the sides I haven't seen yet , ? industrial designer: But now you have a totally different . industrial designer: The size ? Yeah well the size doesn't really matter w project manager: They the the the the the side view , industrial designer: Side ? oh the side ? project manager: we didn't industrial designer: W we we he drew the s the side , user interface: Yeah yeah . user interface: Yeah you you don't you don't grab it , industrial designer: You're not holding it like this or something . user interface: you you industrial designer: You , yeah , y How do you call it ? Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: You you you're using buttons this way , or if you're right-handed , this way . industrial designer: And maybe you can you can grab it a bit higher , marketing: Yeah , I agree on this . That's not the point user interface: No but but industrial designer: Well the the Well that's a reason to to to put the L_C_D_ screen of course on the upper side , but user interface: Well f for as far as I can see , three of us agree project manager: Yeah well user interface: and only Nils project manager: I think if you t if you three agree then then that's it . industrial designer: But are d Can you live with it ? project manager: Alright , if you think that that's the way it should user interface: Yeah ? industrial designer: Y Yeah , y y y y you said it was totally unusable . project manager: No No , industrial designer: But do you project manager: when I I my personal taste is that I want it to fall over my hands with a thick But In the market industrial designer: But d you don't think this is completely unusable I guess . industrial designer: Not totally , well project manager: For me , I I wouldn't buy it . project manager: Yeah , we don't know , industrial designer: Maybe a thousand people , project manager: but that's that's that's that's more market research . user interface: industrial designer: any other suggestions ? project manager: No , I think it's great . You can do the evaluation criteria on this ? user interface: industrial designer: You're very personal again . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: So I made a I made a few questions on the hand of the impor most important requirements and trends . marketing: I think you have all seen this kind of evaluation , so I don't have to explain it . the first question is , is the device good-looking ? Because normal p most people thought that earlier devices were ugly ugly . So what do we think ? industrial designer: Well d we designed it , so of course we are very user interface: . project manager: To the customers ? industrial designer: So and we ha we have answer now ? project manager: To potential customers who have to take this questionnaire ? industrial designer: Yeah . We designed it to be good-looking , so industrial designer: I Yeah , I think it marketing: Yeah , but , you know We dis we di we designed it to be perfect . Easy to find t industrial designer: Well l well let's start with the beginning , just one by one . is it good-looking ? industrial designer: Well , I guess I think it's it's it's pointed towards the youth of course , if you look at the design and and the colours and everything . it's it's not f a device that marketing: The titanium might be f for older people . industrial designer: Yeah , that's that's for older people , it's it's more that classical look . I think Yeah they like black of course , but I think they'll they they think the the titanium look of it is also I think it's also good for them , so I think we both have consider considered the youth and also a bit older people . user interface: I think we shouldn't discuss any points points that long , because I don't know how how many points there are but project manager: No . user interface: no it's marketing: Easy to change channels ? project manager: No , not false . industrial designer: D we d we don't we don't have that s user interface: Well it's easier to find than a a normal black one or something , project manager: Well six then . industrial designer: Well we don't have the device that beeps when you lost it or so , project manager: Are the functions easy to learn ? industrial designer: but project manager: Well w I we do want we have a l f f less of an user interface: We have so few functions , so Yeah . project manager: And the device R_S_I_ sensitive ? user interface: Well , I should I think two , project manager: Yeah . Two ? industrial designer: ? project manager: Yeah , but just do some We we marketing: Yeah project manager: I th I th I think this is too time consuming . industrial designer: Are we take too much time ? project manager: not not towards you , marketing: Yeah , I agree . marketing: Right , R_ R_S_I_ sensitive ? R_S_I_ sensitive ? project manager: well well a bit , so four . project manager: Is the device easy to use ? user interface: The project manager: Yes we have not many buttons . project manager: Are the trends about fruit and vegetables implemented ? user interface: T industrial designer: F project manager: Well in our covers , in our fronts . industrial designer: Four ? marketing: If you look at this industrial designer: Well , it doesn't really resemble any fruit , that's true . project manager: industrial designer: But but we have the the the the the sparkly fruity colours of course . user interface: This is the last meeting ? project manager: Yes , but we we have to design much more , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: The what ? project manager: The sample speaker , industrial designer: The marketing: Out . marketing: Batteries are quite project manager: L_C_ three ? Yeah hand dynamo ? Y t come on , marketing: no , no no no . user interface: Well well why why why should we use a advanced chip ? industrial designer: Because project manager: Well be for the L_C_D_ you had said . user interface: Why not ? industrial designer: Because that y project manager: Well what what's the difference between simple and regular ? industrial designer: because my information says it . project manager: What's the difference between a simple and a regular chip ? industrial designer: Huh ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: And simple ? industrial designer: well yeah I I read something about it , but user interface: Simple . So Well you have to use the advanced chip , if you have the L_C_D_ screen . user interface: We we we Why ? project manager: user interface: We have very little options furthermore , for the project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: But if you have a regular chip , you can't have the L_C_D_ screen . project manager: Well , we could say , well this special colour , that isn't that that isn't there , marketing: No project manager: because the the fronts they will buy it . industrial designer: it d it doesn't marketing: No , that's n It's not relevant . marketing: No , Then the whole concept is industrial designer: Yeah , I know but that's what my information says . user interface: You you we have an advanced chip-on-print , industrial designer: user interface: and we have an L_C_ display . industrial designer: Well and what do they mean with curves again ? Because we you have uncurved project manager: Well I I did single curve to Well you said s double curved , user interface: I ? project manager: he , user interface: ? project manager: because I thought it's a b a bit cheaper already . industrial designer: Well marketing: No industrial designer: But what what did what do n marketing: no no no . project manager: But industrial designer: Sorry , but What do they mean with the curves ? project manager: Curved ? industrial designer: Is th Is this a curve ? project manager: Yes , that's curved . Come on , if we if we if we make this fifty million , they won't hesitate to congratulate us , so user interface: industrial designer: marketing: If if you make people brand-aware , they are willing to pay more . industrial designer: But I user interface: Yeah or we could replace it marketing: If you if you make it cool to have project manager: By the way , we also have this one . industrial designer: Hey but I think you'll agree that that we that now we have this screen , it's it's very not practical to ha to consider this after we have designed the entire thing . marketing: industrial designer: Well that's pretty l user interface: Why why don't we replace the titanium with plastic coloured titanium , marketing: That is pretty stupid . Well user interface: titanium-coloured plastic ? project manager: Who ? marketing: project manager: You want to dump the titanium ? user interface: Yeah well if we we we have to get cheaper . industrial designer: I think project manager: Th then you have a ugly , stupid , l ugly looking , dumb remote that that no-one would buy . industrial designer: I think the titanium just provided the the tough look and the and the marketing: Y project manager: Yes . project manager: and th that it is strong , and industrial designer: And also the the older people will like it because of that . industrial designer: Alright it's not our target audience , but it's it's useful if it's important for old people . project manager: We still we had to focus to get more people from the younger group , industrial designer: Yeah . But I think you could better change titanium to hard a hard kind of plastic looking like titanium than lose the L_C_D_ screen . project manager: I'll put in the report we that we think that fourteen point one is the l m lowest price you can make a remote for that's trendy d these days . project manager: Titanium , I thi I think this this is this is e really good re remote . But user interface: industrial designer: Yeah this is good , marketing: Osl industrial designer: but it it's not good enough . project manager: Ah those those account managers , what do th d what do they know ? user interface: Well project manager: Come on . user interface: industrial designer: What do we Well what do we know ? All we want is a is a fancy design but we don't really consider the costs . So marketing: So s If you don't have the money , you can't make it . industrial designer: And on plastic times two and then we are there ? project manager: Well , no it's just all plastic . W marketing: project manager: What do we want , guys ? industrial designer: I want gold plating . user interface: Because you y have that curve industrial designer: We have we have to fill user interface: and you have that curve . project manager: Finance ? user interface: this this ain't titanium , but it looks like it . project manager: Well , guys ? industrial designer: We get more salary , if we make if cheaper than twelve twelve and a half . project manager: Guys ? user interface: project manager: We have to dump our titanium , marketing: Shoot . project manager: and we'll hate the managers for that , but now we're going to evaluate our project , of project , user interface: industrial designer: Objection . Well , satisfaction on for example , are we satisfactory about our creativity ? industrial designer: Well I can't get no satisfaction , but marketing: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: I think it's Well in in if we consider the costs then this is the best , yeah . user interface: project manager: I think it's terrible that we got those costs at the last moment . But that that that's that , yeah that's a reason , industrial designer: Its it's ridiculous actually , but user interface: And unrealistic . We had nice design , and then you get the cost , and you had to dump all your creativity . project manager: I al I I've filled that in in a the questionnaires each time , so user interface: marketing: Yeah yeah . user interface: project manager: But o alright , the teamwork ? industrial designer: Well they they didn't think of the requirements . project manager: No they said , oh we won't d we won't use teletext , we won't use the D_V_D_ . project manager: well what do you , what did you think about the SMARTboard ? industrial designer: It was a complete disaster . Yeah ? industrial designer: No it it it it is project manager: Well user interface: No , that's a SMARTboard , and that's a digital pen . marketing: This this this isn't a SMARTboard , right ? project manager: Well it's both a SMARTboard . marketing: You u you use the project manager: It's both a SMARTboard , but this one is used for a desktop , and that one is used to to draw . But project manager: Well , wi w which one did you like ? user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Well I didn't use marketing: Yeah , but I think there's a big distinction between the these th project manager: We're now talking about the SMARTboards . user interface: Well we we used that one , industrial designer: Nei It it's much m user interface: and we needed it . user interface: Yeah alright , but project manager: Or install a laptop to a beamer , or have this one standing here in an I I like it . project manager: And the digi the digital pen ? Did did you like that one ? industrial designer: I I didn't use it . project manager: I used it just to check it out , but industrial designer: That's the marketing: Yeah . project manager: You you can't send that to anyone , because you you've scrabbled something on a page for yourself , user interface: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: So what's the what's the th what's the point of importing it into project manager: It's , no , it it's useless . industrial designer: you can bring your paperwork along and p Well of course if you have a lot of paper project manager: But marketing: Yeah , it might be useful for drawings . industrial designer: If you've If you've project manager: But for notes , it i you you have to put that in a strict you have to put a name , standard date , and all those things . So if you were to write them down for yourself , and then put that in your computer , you still have to type it over to Word . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: So it doesn't d doesn't have any marketing: Yeah , right . industrial designer: But I think d this option is only useful if you've got a lot of paperwork . industrial designer: Well did you really Did you really take take those in account ? I half of time I didn't notice they were there . project manager: Well w why not ? etcetera We industrial designer: project manager: N new ideas found ? industrial designer: Right . user interface: project manager: What kind of ideas for n a future schedule What ? For future meetings you have got ? industrial designer: marketing: user interface: Well I missed the option to to email , marketing: Communicate in between . project manager: But two t But th then you have to have a lot of drawings , because if I had a company and I'm going to buy those expensive huge expensive things , I and I have to w pay those papers that are expensive , I'm not going to user interface: industrial designer: Well No marketing: For people who sketch th the whole day , I can imagine that it's useful . project manager: Well th then still they they they should have a a nice graphics programme on the laptop . industrial designer: But it's still an expensive expensive project manager: Because this is huge marketing: Well project manager: this v very very expensive paper . user interface: Well you you can't you can't draw on a laptop like you like you paint of or draw with your hand . industrial designer: Well and if marketing: Mouse is ju just isn't working if you're sketching . industrial designer: And but what if maybe this this board SMARTboard is malfunctioning or someone . But suppose it was working correctly , what would it be useful then , if it wasn't off all the time ? A project manager: Well no . industrial designer: Really ? marketing: Yeah , but he's saying if it is correct , and you can draw very , yeah , very precise industrial designer: Anything you want . project manager: Well th th then still it's it's it's very expensive towards a a just a green school board . industrial designer: Well it isn't , but maybe that thing is is marketing: Yeah , mu industrial designer: Yeah , board , a school board , yeah . user interface: Yeah , but but then you can save it in instantly , and and and re-use it , and industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: This if it works correct , maybe this thing this thing is just malfunctioning . project manager: industrial designer: So if we get in if we get another one and you make sure it does work , project manager: Yep . project manager: Se user interface: Yeah , we can go to the bar and with our newly earned money . But industrial designer: Maybe till four o'clock or something ? marketing: industrial designer: Well dunno . project manager: Well yeah , it is a bit Well we still have to make the end report and all those things . project manager: I Di did you save this one in the folder ? marketing: You better get started . industrial designer: They also want to see my cat and his rabbit , and user interface: My big bird . project manager: marketing: project manager: Where is this ? marketing: industrial designer: Maybe the pen is just broken and the board isn't . user interface: industrial designer: Who is she you're talking about ? project manager: She already knows . industrial designer: Because then we have to confront her with our user interface: So she can see we're ready . project manager: I'm going to resign after this project anyway , so marketing: Oh , that's just great <doc-sep>project manager: So who has the fir do you ha Anna do you have your presentation ready ? marketing: I have a presentation , I'm just making this industrial designer: Yeah I think yeah the Matthew it is it's important that Matthew yeah is here project manager: Okay . Ah industrial designer: because it's really a a team project with a team project manager: there is Matthew . industrial designer: user interface: So project manager: So did you manage user interface: Yeah I sent you the slides , you didn't see them ? project manager: Oh yes I see him , good yes . Okay so this is just a presentation on the trends that we're gonna use to make the product stand out from the rest of the products out there at the moment . can I just put this on ? So we have to work out a way what we can do with our product to make it stand out and make it so people wanna buy it . We basically used some focus group surveys which I went through with you last time , the main results of that , and some research on the current design and fashion trends that are out there at the moment , industrial designer: marketing: and as part of this The important aspects that came out were things that we've already discussed really . Most people find remote controls boring at the moment , we need to have something that looks interesting , that looks exciting , that will stand out . That was twice as i important as the next item on here which is that it has to be technologically innovative has to have something else , apart from just the look of it . Third on the list , and again innovative was twice as important as this last aspect , it has to be easy to use . So they have to be able to be able to look at it and have some intuitive idea of how to use it . This is basically talking about just the the feel of it , so probably not the smell of it , but the bright colours , eye-catching , really bold designs , and a spongy feel . marketing: I had a talk to the design people about this , but having a remote that's tactile , that feels different , that would be really cool . industrial designer: So can you repeat and be more precise about what you just said ? project manager: Spongy feel ? industrial designer: about the feeling yeah yo marketing: Well user interface: You can marketing: ma make it not necessar sp spongy is the current thing . Spongy is the current texture , but basically there are no reports no remotes at the moment which are spongy or tactile at all , so if we make it like maybe furry or soft or something , that'll be something that sets it apart , industrial designer: Okay . marketing: So as far as the design goes , the very most important aspect was the design , to the customers . So going with the fruit and vegetable idea , we've got the bright colours , so makes it stand out , the oranges and the the bright yellows and the florescent colours , part of the fruit and vegetables . Going back to the idea of taking inspiration from mobile phones , they've all got those a lot of them have the changeable covers , so they can choose what colour the outside is . marketing: So if it's part of the the changeable covers then may maybe they can choose a different texture , a spongy one or a soft one or something like that . So they can choose it li as they want to to maybe to fit in with their decor in their living room , or just what they like , their sports team or whatever . marketing: and yeah , still taking the inspiration from the mobile phone design so functionality , the way the mobile phones work , the way the keypad looks . People put a lot of thought into that so we can leverage off that , and we can start using some of their ideas . we talked about having a way of finding a remote control if it's been lost , that's one thing we could look at . There are other aspects like L_C_D_ screens and speech recognition which weren't I don't think , in my personal opinion , gonna be worth the extra expense and the extra effort that will go into them . I had no real specific ideas for this , maybe we just , the basic idea of having your core functions big and at the top maybe , by themselves , project manager: . Yes well marketing: and then project manager: maybe Matthew can can give some more information on the marketing: yeah user interface: Yeah . marketing: and then th th the finer details of buttons you don't use as much either hidden away or completely separate . marketing: So does anyone have any comments or ideas on that ? I think you project manager: Maybe we yes well we maybe can decide later on the l the the look and feel of I've it was a good idea maybe to to industrial designer: To let the people choose , you mean ? project manager: Yes the the the there are changeable covers , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: but on the other hand I I don't know whether my superiors would be so glad with it because you have to introduce a complete new l line of of supplies marketing: . project manager: it would be very complicated organisational industrial designer: marketing: Well we're selling so many units of this . This is gonna be a mass marketed product , we can afford to have two or three different designs at least . industrial designer: Sure that fits the project manager: Yes and of course it will be a we we get a if it works we can get after-sales marketing: . project manager: That's a very good idea And then maybe we can go a th Matthew's presentation because user interface: Yeah marketing: user interface: s project manager: the user interface: then we could discuss later like we can put all ideas together . project manager: because you ma might have some some information on the the easy to use , industrial designer: Yeah yeah I agree . user interface: so Okay so m so then the the idea of having a remote is generally you have different keys and different structures , different forms , and they could be like buttons and they could be of a varying sizes if you want to to basically emphasize a particular key more than the other , and maybe like you can have different colours for example having the r red for the on off switching on and off the button . user interface: So what I have found was that currently the they are mostly that the T_V_ , V_C_R_ , music system operated ones actually , and they are very specific to each other , but there are some common keys for example if you want to follow the V_C_R_ and if you want to follow the g s some soundtrack on the w w see they have the common thing actually you can have marketing: . user interface: and There is also a speech recognition to store channel information , names , like You can basically if you have a multiple functionality , say T_V_ , V_C_R_ or something I say it to the T_V_ and the T_V_ , and you can programme the keys if you want to , certain keys are even the channel information . I like the idea though of having speech recognition for like the n the name of a channel like B_B_C_ , rather than having to remember the the number of it on the keypad . user interface: Yeah yeah so you you you can just because as more and more channels come then you have more and more problems to remember the v v exact channel numbers ex exactly , industrial designer: . user interface: even if you arrange it by however you arrange it , you still have the problem to remember exactly which channel you want to marketing: . industrial designer: So what functionalities do you suggest for that ? For facing this problem ? user interface: So it it it's like it limited one . In the present market I saw it that says something like they are looking for eighty word thing , eighty word , marketing: Basically you want you don't want to store all the channels in the remote control , marketing: . user interface: And basically it depends like the remote with L_C_D_ display for browsing because you have multiple functionalities for example you are watching a movie , and you are having a universal remote control and you want to you don't know really which functionality is now , so I am using the T_V_ so every time I use it , it could be like , for example I can use a simple toggle switch , and a display , so I press it so the display says , okay , I'm in T_V_ or D_V_D_ or whatever it is , instead of having three keys separately for four keys , marketing: And well there can be children friendly where you can programme your remote so that they they are not allowed to browse certain channels which you can block them , and you can operate them . user interface: I personally would look at things like having a u universal remote , is is a good idea , like instead of having unusual ones for all of them you can think of having , with multiple functionality possibly with speech recognition . user interface: I got a mail from the the coffee machine interface unit that they have integrated the s speech recognition into a into the coffee machine , industrial designer: marketing: b user interface: and so if you say hello coffee machine , it say hi Joe , or something like that , you know , and marketing: But a coffee machine , there's not too many words they'd be using with that it's a it's a small vocabulary . user interface: Yeah you you won't be using it , so it's a limited vocabulary thing , and very isolated word marketing: . user interface: and it's it is interesting , and basically storing the channel through voice or other ways of programming your keys , on the display for the browsing marketing: . user interface: which is again and maybe having something like a blinking thing , like it could indicate you're it it could indicate what is cal like the whether you you have enough battery in your in your remote , the blinking . user interface: At the same time , if it's a dark room , it can be used to locate the remote also marketing: user interface: or industrial designer: And you want okay for coming back to one point marketing: Two thirty five supposed to finish . industrial designer: y you want to let the user to programming the keys ? Some of them ? user interface: Yeah you can let them to do that . industrial designer: And isn't that too difficult for the we want w I don't know if we still want the R_C_ to be easy to use , marketing: . user interface: N no but the if you give it d depends on the easiness like the user how much effort he can put . user interface: Like for example I would like to store in certain way , so if you want to give the full freedom to the user marketing: . marketing: You can have it so it's easy they can pick it up and use it straight away without doing anythi without customizing it , industrial designer: A standard . project manager: maybe you can give a hand to us because I I'm not sure whether that that we can implement that for twelve Euro and fifty cents . project manager: I'm sorry to have Every time I have to come down on this price again marketing: . project manager: but it's it's it's the real We have to consider it . project manager: do we think these ideas an and my sp speech recognition , maybe it's possible for for twelve Euro but then then it will be at cost of other functionality we might implement like the the the the furry case of the marketing: . industrial designer: - yeah like I would say that for programming keys , you said , it could be easily done within the the package of twel twelve Euros , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: but for the A_S_R_ system , I'm not sure if it's feasible to have this user interface: We well we can still look at we can talk with the coffee unit industrial designer: We user interface: and you can check how much how much they industrial designer: Exactly yeah i if if it's a low vocabulary it's already implemented , user interface: yeah yeah marketing: . user interface: Maybe we can come we we can talk to them , and we can come with that , project manager: . user interface: And also well you can think of having since you have a you know something maybe if you added little bit of display , you might need the to che keep checking the battery , so you really need a some kind of indicator , marketing: . user interface: so it could be a blinking option of L_E_D_ project manager: . marketing: I like the idea too of being able to use the remote in the dark , project manager: . user interface: So marketing: so either having the buttons so you can feel the difference between them or if they if they light up or something . user interface: No actually i if i it is like you know it tells you , it can be for two purposes , marketing: . user interface: like if you have an L_C_D_ display and all those things it's not going to be the standard remote , marketing: . user interface: which is having which need just six six volt th sorry three volts of D_C_ . user interface: It may need more actually , so y you you may need to check your battery usage it and then you need that , some functionality to indicate the battery limit . user interface: And then if the battery limit is indicated , if it could be ind indicated through a blinking something industrial designer: It's true . user interface: and it can change the colour depending on your how much is the battery , well that is good enough to even locate even if you want to . user interface: Yeah so industrial designer: I don't know how if if I have time to talk about the project manager: yes I would user interface: You you have time some more ? Yep . So what I'm gonna present here is very yeah basic knowledge about the all the the components that are inside a a R_C_ a remote control , and how is it manufactured h what is the process , just to explain you . industrial designer: So the method is ther there is a a set of components in a in a remote control like , and what cost the the components in themself do not cost a lot but the the way to assemble everything costs obviously , and I will show you my preferences at the end . So there are two different types of Two different ways of using the the components for making a a remote control . industrial designer: the basic way is to use a an integrated circuit and some transistors with an that aims at communicating the message and to to send the message to the to the led that will transmit to the receiver . And yeah the other components and the circuit board buttons , infrared , led , etcetera , for the components . So you finding , just to say that the chip can detect when a key is pressed , and then it translate to the key , to a sequence , something like morse code , as you know , with a different sequence for each key , project manager: industrial designer: and that's , with the components we will use , we will have different messages , different sequences , and the chips sends that signal signal to the transistor that amplify to make it stronger . And so I think for our design we want some b programmable you know V_ V_L_S_I_ or F_P_G_A_ high technology , user interface: Yeah industrial designer: and this is important , and also we'll use yeah like in any high-tech devices a chip of fi fibreglass to them and connect them . industrial designer: So my personal design we need to find a solution what what is the material of the cover we want to use . industrial designer: or you said that yeah you had some ideas like fruit , veg or project manager: Well well industrial designer: I dunno . marketing: project manager: m m maybe m maybe we can give the the the case a very normal a v very normal case but , with the changeable covers to fancy it up . project manager: So like a normal cheap plastic case which can be covered up in , for instance , a wooden case . So they also emailed me that they have available a bunch of different buttons , a scroll wheels , integrated push buttons s such as a computer mouse . And very cheap L_C_D_s , so liquid crystal displays , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: so I'm wondering , I think we might be able to integrate L_C_D_ into our R_C_ . industrial designer: So we have to know that the push button requires a simple chip , but the scroll wheel and that kind of higher high-tech stuff needs more money which is a higher price range alright . And the display requires an advanced chip , which in turns is more expensive than the regular chip , but I think with twelve Euros and if it's made for four million items , then I think w we could be able to handle that . industrial designer: So to to sum up we need yeah so I I just said that the components the list of components has to be yeah listed and and assembly is a an important process that has to be taken into account . And for the designing of the cove cover layout then it's better to to to maybe see that with the the U_R_ exp U_R_I_ Expert user interface: Sorry . user interface: Yeah so industrial designer: right ? user interface: of course for example I wanted to know like if you want to have a a fo if you want to have the L_C_D_ display over there , industrial designer: Yes . user interface: or if you want to store a programmes with a keys What kind of things you'll need inside your thin inside W wh what industrial designer: Yeah it's kind of simple pro progra programmable device , and we have to insert . industrial designer: I think we could insert one that could underlie several functions user interface: Okay so industrial designer: of user interface: in that case you can even look at the technology what the mobile phone is trying to use with the card . How f cost effective it would be to put that car chip into it and do the programmable things . project manager: so I understand when we want a display we need a expensive chip , but when we want a scrolling wheel w we also need the expensive chip , so can we use same chip , so with one expensive chip we can implement several complicated or advanced features . industrial designer: we could have one main chip that could handle , it's called F_P_G_A_ chip , that could handle both like scrolling wheels as well as L_C_D_ project manager: project manager: when the more expensive chip you mentioned there is is possible in the in the given budget , maybe we should go for for the more expensive chip , so all features which you mentioned can be implemented based on the same chip . user interface: D well project manager: Do you think that's feasible ? user interface: Well I don't know if it'll fit into our cost of twelve point five Euro you know . user interface: Is it possible to fit in to that ? industrial designer: Yeah also thinking , I think both if we had a budget of twenty twenty Euros , it will be okay , user interface: Sorry . Actually do maybe two designs and then cost them out and see which one is gonna fit in our budget better . project manager: wh when you make a a design ca you can next meeting you can give an quite an exact cost price . user interface: Yeah that's that's something which I wanted to ask you also , like what will be the each individually the cost of it . For example if f if you want to put wood I wouldn't suggest for wood industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: 'cause it's I think it's m much easier to use a plastic or a rubber rather than wood . user interface: It will be much ch much expensive th though it's the most natural thing , but project manager: Yes but I can I think I think we can just use more cheap plastic for a kind of basic edition , and then people can fancy it up with with more expensive materials marketing: . user interface: it's Yeah we we can give a preference to them , but it is but with plastic or the rubber or whatever it is it's much better with that rather than going for project manager: Do do you agree ? marketing: yeah sure . industrial designer: Yeah but i it's a detailed yeah yeah plastic versus wood , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and we need maybe to centre our description on the the really the what buttons what functionality we want to offer to the user , and maybe with graphs or I don't know user interface: Yeah . So Let let's say next meeting w you produce two designs , one one one less advanced and one more advanced and with the cost price . project manager: which can be later fancied up with with addit additional , how do you call them , these like like mobile telephones you can put a cover over it . Smooth keys with bigger s So that you know The the problem most of the time we've seen , the keys is that it's small , project manager: . user interface: and every time we have to be very but if i the if we if we go to a different ways of designing those keys , then you can merge them together marketing: So is there any of these that you're looking at particularly user interface: to marketing: or is this just ideas ? user interface: Oh you can actually , for example , if you see , they are they are they are quite small over here , marketing: user interface: and now you can , for example , as I was if you make them big , it may change the look of the thing also to the people . user interface: At the same time , it is m more like it would be more interesting for people who are having this R_S_I_ and all problem . user interface: big keys may better for them actually and marketing: You see ? industrial designer: I agree yeah , marketing: Yeah . marketing: one I've had before , a r r remote control we have at home is one that's actually got a cover on the bottom user interface: Yeah . marketing: so the bottom bit is just , covers half the keys most of the time , and then you can slide the cover back to get to the the more advanced keys . project manager: w but then you have still have when you don't use it you have such a a an extent of your remote control marketing: . So maybe it's possible , I don't know whether you can can indicate this , that you can elsewhere open your remote control and on the inside are buttons you don't use that much . industrial designer: That's what you mean ? project manager: Yes I I th that's what user interface: Yeah . marketing: Can we have can we think about maybe having a a non-recta non non-rectangular one , so with not just the straight little box industrial designer: Yeah I like also this one . industrial designer: Yeah , the point is w maybe we need to also to make a decision on how how how big we want to be and how many buttons like n we should dec decide numbers or marketing: 'kay . Is this for the next meeting though ? user interface: We should make a marketing: I think we might be out of time out of time for this meeting . user interface: Yeah that yeah next meeting we should be project manager: Ju just make two designs , industrial designer: Okay . So is this is there anything else I need to do from a marketing point of view for the next meeting ? project manager: yes I come to that user interface: Maybe it would be interesting if you could look for the cost inventories of other devices , if you're using speech recognition or something like that . project manager: Yes well m maybe , I don't know whether that's possible , marketing: . marketing: Okay well is this me designing a way to evaluate it so Thinking about how to set up test groups and things ? project manager: I don't know whether that's possible in the given time marketing: . project manager: So you two will be together w working on a o on two prototypes industrial designer: Exactly . user interface: One for like cost and the one with like higher-end industrial designer: Two ? project manager: I industrial designer: Okay . project manager: and then user interface: so that then we can be easily comparing them industrial designer: Yeah project manager: . user interface: or you know find a compromise between both of them , industrial designer: and find maybe a compromise

The User Interface team suggested replacing the titanium exterior with titanium-colored plastic to reduce costs. They proposed saving the LCD screen and replacing the titanium cover with hard plastics. This suggestion was agreed upon by the majority of the group, including Marketing. The Marketing team emphasized three key aspects for the product: a unique and standout appearance, technological innovation, and user-friendliness. The group then discussed specific ways to meet these requirements. Based on presentations from the User Interface designer, Industrial designer, and Marketing expert, the Project Manager concluded that the new remote control should be powerful, easy to use, fashionable, recognizable, and exclusively for television. Additionally, it was decided that the remote control should utilize the Internet instead of teletext, considering the widespread use of the Internet.

Question: Summarize the discussion and outcomes of stakeholder workshops on early help and enhanced support. Article: lynne neagle am: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Children, Young People and Education committee this morning. We've received apologies for absence from Siân Gwenllian and there is no substitute this morning. Can I ask if Members have got any declarations of interest they'd like to make, please? No? Okay. Item 2 this morning, then, is a further session on our follow-up on our 'Mind over matter' report. I'm very pleased to welcome Carol Shillabeer, who is chief executive of Powys Teaching Health Board, and who manages the Together for Children and Young People programme. Thank you very much for attending, and thank you for the written update that you provided in advance to the committee. We've got a lot of ground that we want to cover this morning, so if it's okay we'll go straight into questions. If I can just start and ask you if you're satisfied with the progress that's been made since the programme was established in 2015. So, the key focus of the programme in the early stages was about improving access to specialist child and adolescent mental health services. Other models that are very similar have been talked about as well, and our big focus was on ensuring that we could make immediate progress around access to specialist CAMHS. It's some years ago now since this committee did the original report, and obviously Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the Wales Audit Office had done reports in the past, and I think there was a need for a programme that could focus on action. You'll see in the written update that we covered quite a large number of areas, and so therefore had to make a prioritisation. We have provided the committee with a red, amber or green rating of where we feel that we were, and that was just before submission of the evidence. Certainly over the last nine months or so, we've seen a real momentum around the whole-school approach work, which we're not actually leading now as a programme, although we facilitated the workshop held in September. But that's got a real momentum, and the absolute priority now is the early help and enhanced support part of the work moving forward, and I'm sure we will come on to that in more detail. But we know there is more community workforce in specialist CAMHS, we know we're seeing children in a shorter time frame, and we know we're accepting more referrals, so our indicators are telling us we are making progress. And you referred to the work on the whole-school approach, which is very welcome, and I recognise that the programme has been involved in driving that as well. But I'm sure you'll also recognise the emphasis that the committee has placed on this being a whole-system approach to children and young people's mental health, and we feel very strongly that if any of the areas get out of balance, then it will jeopardise the progress in other parts of the programme. Are there any particular areas where you feel you haven't made enough progress that you'd like to draw the committee's attention to? carol shillabeer: This is maybe about what the programme's done, but really around the broader sense as well. I'm going to be very straight and say we should have made more progress on psychological therapies. I'm assured that we've got capacity in place now and the drive in place to get the Matrics Cymru framework developed for children and young people. I've had discussions with the national psychological therapies committee, who have owned this, and we're working together more on this area. That's not to say for one minute that health boards and local areas haven't been working on psychological therapy service provision and changing the models, but that is an area we should have made, I think, earlier progress on. There's been a general reflection from myself and the Together for Children and Young People programme board over the phase of the programme. I think we started very strongly; I think we probably had a bit of a lull in the middle, if I'm truthful about that—we had a change of personnel, and we really gathered a momentum over the last year or 18 months, and that has helped to push us from a focus on specialist CAMHS into that whole-school approach. But, if I could just agree with your comments about the whole system, it has to be the whole system and that's why the real focus now on early help and enhanced support is critical. If I can just say, in case I don't get a chance to say this later, I was delighted to see the focus on youth work yesterday, because what is clear is for that part, the early help and enhanced support, this isn't just about the NHS and it's not just about education, it's about every part of the system, really, which does make it more complex. But I just wanted to say that I think that youth work has perhaps not have the recognition that it's needed and yesterday was a positive step. In terms of local primary mental health support services, what is your understanding of the issues leading to some health boards not meeting the Mental Health (Wales) Measure 2010 targets for assessment and therapy for children and young people, and how much of this is due to an increase in demand? carol shillabeer: Yes, thanks very much. So, it's important to say, I think, at the outset, just by way of reminder, that the target, quite rightly, changed for children and young people. The target changed some years ago for adults, so it was only right that there was an equalisation around children. So, the services were working, a couple of years ago, with significant demand and then a change in the standard. I think you're absolutely right; your question alludes to the fact that some health boards are struggling to maintain the full performance around seeing children, particularly within the 28 days. And we've had some discussion about whether the impact of the mental health Measure has actually drawn perhaps some of the workforce, the staff, who would have been working at that earlier stage in local primary mental health, into a bit more of the secondary element, which is why the review being undertaken by the NHS delivery unit into primary care CAMHS is so critical, because, actually, if we don't have—and I believe we don't have—enough capacity in that part of the system, then referrals will move towards the more specialist end of this. So, I think we will have seen, by the evidence submission, that demand has increased, not just in Wales but in the UK, and it has increased significantly. We are doing reasonably well at meeting that demand—so, we have more contacts, more staff, shorter access times, so that is a good news story. We've not got it completely sustained at this stage, and therefore the focus of the delivery unit's primary care CAMHS report is what more can we do in that part of the system to help to see children and young people or provide consultation and liaison to others and support people at that level of intervention. I know, from my own experience as a constituency AM, I have families who tell me that they can't get into the early interventions and eventually things just become so—they end up in the more specialist ones and believe that that's—. And I don't like to put it in resource terms, but it's false economy in terms of the impact on the child and the family, but, obviously, in terms of cost as well. Do you find that that's a common theme across Wales? carol shillabeer: Yes. So, we absolutely need to see children and families at the earliest intervention and that's why this is a whole system, not compartmentalised. I think there have been really good attempts in a couple of areas of that greater reach out and that earlier help—hot clinics and those sorts of initiatives that help people not to get in a long queue for specialist CAMHS, but can be supported, often by telephone, at that earlier stage. My sense of where we go next, in terms of, you know, you talk about early help and enhanced support for all the 'missing middle', as you referred to it in your report, is to make sure we've got a fully joined-up, multi-agency team approach to that. But yesterday's announcement about youth work, the Government's commitment to primary care, CAMHS, et cetera—that's all going to be very helpful to prevent those young people having to go into specialist CAMHS. And just a final note on that, if I may—at the beginning of the programme, we had a report from Hafal called 'Making Sense' and there were 10 key asks, if you like, of the system and the service from young people who had experience of the service. They said, 'Please don't medicalise it'—I'm paraphrasing now, of course—'Please don't medicalise it; please focus on supporting teachers and others who can support us at an earlier stage and then, when we really need help, please ensure that it is there at that more specialist level.' That's been a bit of a guiding principle for the programme. What are the outcomes of the stakeholder workshop held last week on early help and enhanced support? And how are the actions going to be taken forward and implemented? And also, given that the Together for Children and Young People programme comes to an end in October of this year, who, in your view, is best placed to forward this work stream, and what will be the biggest challenges? It's a bit of a long question, so, break it up however you like. janet finch-saunders am: And what will be the biggest challenges that they will face? carol shillabeer: Yes, I think that's helpfully laid out in three stages. So, you're absolutely right, there was a highly successful workshop last week really focusing on early help and enhanced support. It brought all of the agencies together, which was—and actually had a bit of a waiting list, apparently, for places. In relation to the next steps, there is a planning group reflection in early July, in terms of the outcomes of the workshop or the outputs of the workshop, and there are three commitments that have been made to this stage. One is that we develop those values-led approaches that will bring multiple agencies together to have that common purpose. The second one is to develop the ingredients for successful working in this area, and then, thirdly, to determine or propose priorities and sequencing of next steps. I'm pretty sure we'll come on shortly—or hopefully—to the potential of the regional partnership boards. There is some work that we are doing as a programme with the children's commissioner in terms of working more with the regional partnership boards in taking forward this work. But during the summer, then, we will be developing that framework approach, and we will be participating in the Association of Directors of Social Services conference in September, and then a follow-up workshop in October on this matter. On your question of 'Well, what happens after the programme?' we are currently working on legacy arrangements for the programme. That will move, most likely, to the CAMHS network, which is part of the NHS mental health network. The whole-school approach element is already settled in Government and we've got a connection in to that. The question that's outstanding is where the early help and enhanced support and the neurodevelopmental will go. I can be very clear of my own view that there needs to be a confident and clear legacy arrangement for this work. I don't see there would be any obstacles—I hope—in getting that commitment translated into a strong approach, as we move forward. So, I'm not in a position to say, 'And the legacy arrangements will be—', but I am in a position to say that I'm having those discussions with Welsh Government officials. They know my view that we've got to put something in place that is strong and secure as we move forward, and I believe that they are supportive of that. lynne neagle am: Janet, I think those two questions have been touched on, the remaining questions. We are going to discuss in more detail the legacy arrangements, but if I could just ask on psychological therapies: you referred to the fact that you were a bit disappointed with progress in this area, and the area hasn't been directly led on by the Together for Children and Young People programme. Do you think that means now that there is more of a threat to progress in this area, because, you know, we've got different compartmentalising of actions, and this is absolutely key, isn't it, really? carol shillabeer: Yes. There is some refinement to be done, I think, in making sure the connections are there. So, I think, as we move to programme end, we'll want to be absolutely assured that there are no strands left hanging, so to speak. I am confident—I mentioned the mental health network board that I chair—that we have those strands nailed down, but recognising that the early help and enhanced support and the provision of psychological support is beyond the NHS. So, this will be an area that needs to be very much seen as a key part of that. So, in the evidence that I've provided, you'll see the First 1000 days, all the adverse childhood experiences work, the Cymru Well Wales partnership, et cetera, et cetera. So, there is a bit of what I would call tidying up of the landscape to be done, and this is the ideal opportunity to do that. We've got some questions now on specialist CAMHS—if I can just ask about the impact of the specialist CAMHS framework, and how effective you feel that has been in promoting a consistent delivery of care for young people. Without wanting to go back too far in history, I remember coming into this area back in 2014 as I was asked to establish a CAMHS network. When we spin forward five years, I can confidently say that there is a strong and well-connected clinical community around specialist CAMHS. The programme has helped; the emphasis and the focus of the programme has helped to bring people together with that more common endeavour to understand, actually, there is a good case for consistency in the main, with local variation. If I just give you an example—you'll know that the community intensive service teams were put in place in 2015-ish. We do have inconsistency in that, but the consistent part is there is a service now right the way across Wales for more intensive support to children and young people and their families in their own homes, which helps to prevent admissions and then, where there are admissions, helps to support people to be at home. The key thrust of this is that there is a backbone, if you like, of a consistent approach with that local variation. So, things like frameworks for improvement—there is a coming together of the clinicians and the professionals to agree what that framework for improvement is. So, if I just refer to the previous question that I had, and I talked about hot clinics and different ways of reaching out; that's been tried in one area, been evaluated—let's see the spread of that. So, you'll know my view on internet counselling, for example; I feel that is quite a strong offer for children—not necessarily in the specialist end. If that works in one area, why aren't we rolling that out to other areas? So, I think the framework for improvement has provided a vehicle for those clinicians and professionals to come together. You've referred to there being some inconsistencies in terms of crisis care, but are you able to assure the committee that all young people are now getting at least a consistent service, especially in terms of interventions in the instances of young people self-harming. Wherever you live in Wales, is that help there for you now? carol shillabeer: Well, in your work to produce the 'Mind over matter' report, I clearly listened to the views from the police and the recommendations in relation to the police. We've taken that as a further piece of work under the specialist CAMHS umbrella, to truly understand what the experiences of the police are and what some of the root issues may be in relation to that. For example, is it that because the CIT, CAT, COT, CITE—the community intensive service—closes at 10 o'clock in a certain area, that actually it's after that that the network of support isn't as strong, and, if that is the case, what are we going to do about that? There's certainly potential in working more regionally or even working between adults' and children's in terms of the crisis resolution services that work beyond those hours. So, we are taking an extra look at this, because I could not be 100 per cent confident that, throughout the 24-hour period, we've got this fully settled. I continue to hear some stories from the police that they are picking up young people and feeling that they've not got that solid place to go, and we're following those through. hefin david am: I think, Chair, I should have declared an interest here, as my daughter has been diagnosed with autism and is currently going through the process of receiving neurodevelopmental speech and language support particularly. We're seeing an increase in neurodevelopmental referrals, and that will increase further in the future. Can you give us an explanation as to why this demand is growing and how we're going to meet capacity to deliver and for support for those children? carol shillabeer: Thank you. I'm not sure that anyone really knows why, if I'm honest, although there is a lot of academic research going on. What we do know is that we are starting to see the scale of those referrals coming through. So, in the information provided, I refer to the NHS digital prevalence report in England, which indicates that about 5.5 per cent of two to four-year-olds have a mental disorder. Now, that sounds a bit shocking when we say that, but that's in the international classification scaling, and, of that, certainly, 2.5 per cent is around autism. So, if I just take my own health board for a moment, we usually have about 75 referrals per year. If I can just give you a sense of what we've done so far and then what I think is next, I want to recognise the work of Dr Cath Norton and the steering group that's been established on neurodevelopmental issues under the programme. We now have a community-of-practice-type environment, and we're really getting into this. One is that most referrals that come through, the clinicians tell me, are seeking support to move through what they perceive to be a gateway for educational support. Now, that is obviously going to be linked to the whole-school approach and how we can support that. So, if I just take my own example of 300 in the last year, we're looking to try and put some additional capacity in to support seeing those families, but also then to understand what the long-term trajectory is going to be. Because we've put these teams in, because we've got the new pathway, has that opened a gate and we've got a lot of backlog or is that the pattern? hefin david am: Can I just ask a question there? carol shillabeer: Yes. hefin david am: So, with regard to the 75 to 300 increase—in the space of a year was that? carol shillabeer: In a year, yes. hefin david am: Did you anticipate that or was that something that just came totally unexpected? carol shillabeer: I think we anticipated a few more, and just to say that in my— hefin david am: But not on that scale. And in my own health board—I'm just referring to my own, and I'm happy to share the information on this—we already had a service in place. We had a NICE-compliant service already in place, but we knew we needed to expand that, which we have done, but we didn't anticipate 300. So, this is happening not just across Wales, actually, but across the UK—so, this greater recognition, the desire for families coming forward to access that support and them seeing this as a route, which is really important. What I would also say, and this is part of the bigger picture that we need to consider going forward, is that only about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of those families that come forward have what I would call or the clinicians would call a diagnosis—so, a threshold or whatever term you want to use that takes people through to that educational support. So, we've got a lot of people who are under that threshold, but that's a lot of people who still need help and support. I'm trying to very fairly and, I hope, appropriately represent the very strong views coming from the group—the workstream under the programme. It's not going to be good enough for us just to focus our attention on those children and young people and their families who reach a threshold, because there are needs elsewhere as well, and some of that will overlap with the early help and enhanced support. Can I just mention a few more things, as I'm on roll on neurodevelopmental? hefin david am: It's up to the Chair. carol shillabeer: Is that all right? Sorry, I know it's a very long answer. There is a concern from the neurodevelopmental group to get across that whilst there has been a lot of focus on autism—and we recognise the private Member's Bill—there are other neurodevelopmental presentations and there's a real—. Having the broadest view would be advised by them, and I think they're particularly keen to understand what a future vision and what we call, say, a 'perfect world' would look like. In terms of giving advice at the end of the programme and into legacy arrangements, about what the big, big things are, we are still needing to tackle. hefin david am: I personally took a very personal decision when it came to the Member's Bill on autism you were talking about—and that was the advice I received. Because I didn't vote for that Bill, and I'm glad you said that because it gives me some personal reassurance there. But what I do have concerns about is if the increase wasn't anticipated to the extent that it was and that the Together for Children and Young People programme has a duty to review capacity, after October who's going to make sure that that capacity's reviewed on a strategic basis? carol shillabeer: So, I should have probably added in that we've got a piece of work under way at the moment—Welsh Government commissioned it—by a person called Patrick Holton, and he is specifically looking at the demands on capacity in relation to neurodevelopmental. I think getting that slightly more independent view of what we think the trends are going to be over the long term will mean we can plan for the long term. We know that money's been put into this and it has had an important impact, but we now need to be planning for the next three, five, 10 and many years beyond that. I think there are some conversations, when I talk about the landscape being quite busy, about the sense of where this links as we support people through their lives with a neurodevelopmental issue. So, it's not just about a childhood thing; as people move through, we've got to get much better at that long-term planning. We will get the report of that over the next couple of months in order for this sort of perfect-world picture that we want to try to describe to be informed by that. It also connects to the early help and enhanced support, because recognising if we just say half of the people who come for an assessment don't meet a threshold for a certain category, that's a lot of people who will need help and support to manage and cope with their condition and their situation. If we can just move on now to in-patient care, and if I can just ask you what the programme has been doing to address some of the challenges and opportunities we face in terms of CAMHS in-patient care, particularly in light of the restrictions that are in place in Abergele and Tŷ Llidiard. Again, quite a lot of progress has been made in the early part of the programme around in-patients, and you are very well aware of the challenges over the last year or 18 months in relation to both units. I think, certainly, there is some recovery in the position in north Wales, and the programme did a peer review visit to north Wales, which I think was very helpful. In terms of where the programme has been on this issue, there is some work under way, at quite an advanced stage, around the art of the possible around enhancing the scope of the services. This was quite a tricky thing to start off when you're in a position where, actually, there've been some restrictions, to then ask the service to think about going even further, but we really wanted to see what the art of the possible would be if we could attract the right workforce, get the right environment, et cetera, et cetera—so, that piece of work, the review of the specification about what could be possible. Clearly, we work very closely with Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee as the commissioner, so we don't commission that. But, if I can just say, probably the most important part of moving forward now is the longer term work between health and social care in terms of having a much more integrated and joined up approach for children. We haven't got that mature approach in terms of these being joined-up teams; we've got social care and we've got healthcare. I've previously had conversations with the chief inspector of Care Inspectorate Wales, for example, and we have now got, I think, a consensus growing that we need to do something very different for children and young people who are in this sort of need for the future. It has been largely successful, the work that has taken place over recent years, but not without its key challenges. And, just briefly on the new specification that WHSSC are developing, that will enable admissions at weekends and out of hours. How concerned should we be about that being a challenge, particularly in Abergele, where staffing has been a major issue? carol shillabeer: Yes. I think we need to be very mindful of ensuring that the right workforce are in place before that gets implemented. The peer review highlighted the challenge of the physical environment, where the unit is, the challenge across north Wales of the workforce. These are issues well known by the health board, by the way, so it wasn't a surprise to them. But that dialogue about how do we ensure that we've got the right workforce, because that unit, potentially, could—you know, it's an isolated unit, and they’ve been risk-managing. They've been managing the types of young people that they can take bearing in mind the workforce that they've got available, and that's been entirely the right thing to do. With regard to the increased CAMHS posts that have been made available between 2016 and 2018—a 62 per cent increase in CAMHS posts—we know that there's likely to be labour market demand, high labour market demand, in those instances, so are the vacancy rates higher in Wales than elsewhere, given the increase in those posts to be filled? carol shillabeer: So, you're absolutely right. There's been quite a lot of investment, and there have been quite a lot of new recruits coming to the service. We had in the early days a situation where we were largely robbing Peter to pay Paul, to be quite frank. So, as new services were being developed, people would move from one part of the system to the other. That has improved slightly, but we're in a national context, particularly around nursing and around some specialties in medicine, of a national shortage, so this is not a quick fix. So, if I can mention psychology assistants, for example, my own health board is employing more psychology assistants as part of a skill mix team, rather than going to where we might have been more traditionally based. We're perhaps a little bit— hefin david am: More of what? carol shillabeer: They have more skill mix in their workforce. hefin david am: Just to clarify there, what you're referring to—there are more nursing and medical staff in the Wales system and more psychological staff, experts, in the UK picture. So, England had a programme called IAPT, which is about psychological therapies, and had therefore looked at the skill mix. We've chatted to colleagues in England, trying to learn—we're all trying to make improvements in this area, of course; it's a UK and international issue—what were their experiences of this psychological therapies approach. Because of their vacancies they had to skill mix, and because of the money that they had available—they didn't have as much of a cash injection as perhaps we've been able to secure. And if I can just make a plea, really, around recognising the input of the third sector—so, it doesn't always have to be an NHS-employed person to work in service provision, direct front-line service provision, and the third sector are offering a significant contribution in a number of areas of our services. And that is one that we will need to cultivate, because, to be quite frank, our recruitment challenges won't be solved overnight. We've recognised that the commissioning numbers for nursing and other professionals have gone up over recent times, but, with the training time, it's not a quick fix. hefin david am: Does the workforce profile remain different, or are they starting to—? carol shillabeer: They're starting to come together. Each year we do the NHS benchmarking, and we can see where we are compared to others, and I would expect over the next year or two that we see a bit more narrowing. hefin david am: So, if you compare a child in Wales with a child in England in the last two years who's been through this, would they have had a different experience as a result, and different clinical advice as a result, or is there consistency despite the difference in workforce profile? carol shillabeer: That's quite a big question. Hand on heart, could I tell you I absolutely know the detail of that? No, I couldn't. The practice in this area is guided by National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidance, so it's pretty much guided. When you skill mix a team, you enable the right referrals to go to the right person, so you wouldn't necessarily have a child or young person with particularly complex needs—well, you would match them to the right practitioner for their needs. And we've seen some of that; if I just make reference to the panel approach in Gwent that's been developed, a multi-agency panel come together, a referral comes in, it's then about matching the right service and the right person to the needs that are being presented. So, we can be much more flexible in relation to that, and we have to be careful to use the right resource for the right person, because, if we've got a resource that is highly specialist, we want them to be dealing with those children and young people. hefin david am: And one of the things you're able to do—because there's a lot about the labour market you can't control, but one of the things you can control is workforce development and ongoing workforce development. What other things are being done in addition, and how do the communities of practice work might be a good question, but what else is being done in order to upskill and develop and grow the existing workforce that is presented to you? carol shillabeer: Thank you for that. I think there's a huge focus on staff retention now, not just in Wales but across the UK. What are the factors that affect retention? Actually, well-being, well-being at work—and you'll know that within 'A Healthier Wales' the focus on staff engagement, staff well-being, has been laid out—the ability to work well in teams and the culture of organisations and services, and, then, as you rightly say, training and development and career opportunities. I think the community of practice—it's something that has become a bit of a standard now across these areas—actually brings people together doing collective audit, doing collective reflection on service improvement, and being very clear about learning from one another. And, if you're a clinician, that gives you a lot of motivation to keep driving forward. So, I think we have the fundamental building blocks in place, but there is more to do around the environment in which our practitioners and our staff operate. hefin david am: What about the Welsh language in the health board? carol shillabeer: Thank you very much. In your report of last year you highlighted the need to do further work on the use of the Welsh language, and have we got enough Welsh language practitioners where we need them. I'm pleased to say that, over the last few years, I think all health boards have really stepped up in terms of being able to understand the levels of Welsh speaking amongst employed staff and where their Welsh-speaking communities are. We're particularly looking at it in terms of in-patient CAMHS and community intensive services, because, particularly when people are feeling at their most vulnerable, they would choose the language they wish to choose. So, we will be in a position to, by the end of this programme, provide that position statement on what happens next. I would also say, of course, we've got the Welsh language standards that we are all working on at the moment, and we've got a very clear programme of when we have to be compliant with those standards. Obviously, everything you've been speaking about already, particularly about workforce development, applies to children in care as well, where there's other work also going on in terms of support. Can you give us some indication about how the programme intersects, then, with the outcomes for the children in care work programme? carol shillabeer: Thanks very much for that. So, we have one of our members of the programme board also sitting on the outcomes for children ministerial group, which is good. We also have a director of social services on our programme board and, obviously, they're very clearly linked in to the outcomes for children. I just made reference to, under the question on specialist CAMHS in-patients, the need to bring those services together, and that, really, is the need for much stronger working between the outcomes for children group and the Together for Children and Young People programme and the constituent parts. We've got a way forward and there is a consensus that we need to do things together on that. suzy davies am: Can you just perhaps give us an example of how that then looks on the ground? Because it's great that people are talking together, but how would that affect, I don't know, individual members of the workforce, or, indeed, the children we're talking about? carol shillabeer: Yes. So, if I just give an example of a unit in south Wales that is a social care unit, we've been having discussions about, 'Well, actually, shouldn't you have a psychologist and good access to psychological therapies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?' So, we haven't yet got an agreed position on how we're going to do this, but the position is that something needs to be done, and there is an appetite for and an understanding of the case for change, I believe. But what it will mean, I think, in practice, is that you get much more fluid roles moving across sectors, or we could be designing services that are fully integrated. Now, there may be challenges in that, but, you know, let's get them out on the table. So, in terms of this seamless health and social care system for Wales, this is one of the tests of that, I would say: can we, within the next five years, 10 years, really bring that together? That will take quite a lot of work and commitment. On the looked-after children specifically, we have picked that up, particularly following your previous report, looking specifically at the assessment of young people who are care experienced who are in the system. We are questioning whether that needs to be a greater part and what the level of support needs to be, particularly because of the backgrounds of children that have led them to be in those circumstances. That's a core piece of work under the early help and enhanced support work stream, and we'll be ensuring that that is complete by the end of the programme. And you're confident that that will reach children who are being fostered and perhaps don't have very frequent looked-after children reviews, because, from all other perspectives, things are going fairly well. And, of course, there's the edge-of-care work that the Government have been supporting, and, certainly in my own area, under the regional partnership board, we have a Start Well programme, which is the old Children and Young People's Partnership programme, where there's a significant investment in supporting children and young people, families, on the edge of care, which does pick up fostering. We've heard, not necessarily just in the context of this report, because we've heard similar evidence around transition arrangements in another committee report when we did the suicide prevention, and I've in fact only recently—well, just this week, actually—met with community mental health teams in my constituency, and there is still some concern about transitional arrangements from children into adult services. The transition guidance was published a couple of years ago now, and the programme was involved in developing that guidance. But what's your assessment of the impact that it's had? Because we clearly are still seeing people falling through the gaps, aren't we? carol shillabeer: Yes, thank you for that. You're absolutely right; we developed that guidance and we are currently in the process of the evaluation of that. And, in particular, I know that the children's commissioner is very focused on transition, not just around children in receipt of emotional mental health support, but children in paediatric wards, and there is a working group with Welsh Government looking at this. The children's commissioner has used our guidance to put that on the table to say, 'Well, if this works, this needs to be considered as a model for using elsewhere'. If I were just to give an estimate of where I think this will land, I think it will have made improvements, but there may well be some further work to do in enhancing, supporting, auditing that every child is supported in line with that guidance. So, I talked about community practice and clinical audit: is this something that we make, then, a mandatory audit, each year, that we do that double check? Because it's one of those things where we know when a child is 14, 15, 16, 17, so what's stopping us? If indeed the evaluation says it's not happening everywhere, it's not happening early enough, what is stopping us? We really need to get underneath that. So, my sense will be it will show us, it will be better, but there's some further work to do, and following that up in terms of audit and making sure that we've got a systematic approach to dealing with those who haven't had the guidance fully implemented, because it can make a real difference. dawn bowden am: Yes, and it seems to me—you've just talked about having a systematic approach, and it does seem to me that it is a systematic process, isn't it? So, it shouldn't be difficult. I know we're talking about in the health service things shouldn't be difficult and they are, and one of the gripes—I had a meeting with the community health team—was the problems of the new IT systems and so on—let's not go there at the moment. But, really, this is just about referring children and having a smooth transition from the service being provided to them as a child and then just shifting it over to the adult services. It's really difficult to get my head around why that is such a problem and why that needs to be so difficult. carol shillabeer: Can I add one other dimension in, which I think is going to be quite interesting? We talk about transitions being an issue—and we know it's not just in mental health, but it's elsewhere—then you start to think, 'What if we could reduce transitions?', so you reduce the number of transitions and you manage them better. We are doing a piece of work with Government on the potential to explore what a 0-25-type service would be. There are probably some pros and cons, but should we be moving to a 0-25. That is moving the transition at the age of 25, but at least it's not at the eighteenth birthday. What's the argument around what adolescent, young people and young adults services are, for example? That piece of research and understanding— dawn bowden am: You could probably have a gradual transition, then, couldn't you? carol shillabeer: Quite potentially. I've got some people who have joined my own health board who've worked in that 0-25-type service, and we're catching up—'Tell me what was good about it? Tell me what was not so good about it? What did the young people themselves think about that?'. Because if we can manage down the numbers of transitions, there really should be no excuse not to get transitions right, then. We've got some really important questions now about legacy, because throughout the session this morning you've referred to ongoing work, really, and that is a major concern for the committee. suzy davies am: Yes, thank you, Chair, we are a little bit worried that this programme is coming to an end in a matter of months when perhaps its work's not been completed. Obviously, we've got the Welsh Government's strategy for mental health running until 2022, which is a few years longer. Can you tell me whether you think your programme needs to continue, perhaps even if it's just for the same length of time as Together for Mental Health, or is its work done and it needs to be picked up now by a different system? carol shillabeer: Thank you for that. Can I just say, I've given this so much thought over the time, because I think you might have asked me this question when I came previously? There are two ways to look at this. I'm absolutely sure that the issue of children's emotional and mental health will be one that will be with us for a very long time. We have made a lot of progress, I think, as a society, in talking about this now. I talk to my own children and say, 'What's going on in your lives at school?', and they talk about this. This is not an issue, if you like, that I believe you can pick up and solve literally in five years. So, on the one hand, I think my view last year was that, when you have a programme of work, you should have a start, a middle and end, really—otherwise it's not a programme of work, it's almost forever—and there is a moment to refresh and reflect on whether that mechanism has done all it should and it should move into a different mechanism. So, my position last year was, 'This will have been running for five years—we've done a lot of work and made progress on specialist CAMHS, we have made progress on the whole-school approach and there is a different mechanism for this' et cetera. My position now is I want to just be really sure and secure that there is a strong arrangement going forward that takes this work, if this programme is going to close. So, I think, in an earlier question I indicated dialogue going on between myself and Welsh Government officials. I don't think there's a barrier—people aren't saying, 'No, it all needs to just stop; we've solved the issue', but the exact nature of the legacy arrangements, particularly for early help and enhanced support, are not yet fully determined, or for neurodevelopmental. If it was a choice between nothing being there and continuing this programme, I would be supporting continuing the programme. suzy davies am: Well, I don't think any of us would disagree with that, but I suppose there might be a level of concern that the Welsh Government's preferred route from now on would be through the regional partnership boards and public services boards. You mentioned that you've done that work in Gwent, down in the south-east of your patch there. It's quite difficult for us to try and get a picture of how that will work successfully for the whole of Wales. I know you've got your experience in Gwent, but have you thought a bit more about how it might look elsewhere, if that's the route that Government decides to pursue? carol shillabeer: Yes. I think the key question in my own mind is: are the regional partnership boards yet ready and mature enough to take this forward? I'm the chair of the Powys regional partnership board, so I should declare that. There's a lot being asked of the regional partnership boards at the moment— suzy davies am: Well, we'll be asking them to go with the 'Mind over matter' report, to make sure that that's delivered upon. carol shillabeer: There's a lot, you know, 'A Healthier Wales'—. Everyone does feel that the regional partnership boards are a route to really secure multi-agency working, so there is quite a high expectation. My understanding—and this is a rather informal understanding—is that different RPBs are in different places. So, some have retained what used to be the old children and young people partnerships, and perhaps where they have been retained, they may be in a more progressed position. So, my sense of this is that, I think, possibly the RPBs aren't yet in that position to be ready. Our piece of work on early help and enhanced support, in terms of your earlier question about what's the commitment—that feels that that may well be another year or 18 months of development work, alongside the RPB development work, to get that ready, before we can then more confidently say where we can hand over. suzy davies am: You may not feel able to say it, then, but would be wrong in saying that, actually, it would be quite a good idea to extend the current programme, just to make sure that anyone else who might be able to run on with component parts of it is in the position to do that to our satisfaction? carol shillabeer: I'm happy to respond to it. My sense is that, whether it's the programme or whether it's something else, something needs to be there. The next stage is really multi-agency, so it may well be that the programme currently has been NHS-led—maybe it needs to be led elsewhere, maybe not. It may be seen as a convenient mechanism—it's already established, we've got a programme team et cetera, so it may be seen as a ready sort of solution. What I feel strongly about is that we've got to have the right mechanism to take it forward. suzy davies am: Can I just push you on one thing there? You mentioned, perhaps, the NHS could lead on the work, for example. Is there a risk of fragmentation if we start looking—? I'm just thinking—, we've got the elements here: we've got the NHS, there's the whole-school approach, early help and enhanced support and intervention, as you mentioned earlier. If that goes to one of the players in that multi-agency approach, is there a risk that they might become too dominant, inadvertently—? carol shillabeer: If I can just clarify—apologies if I wasn't clear. Anything else you want me to pursue on that—? lynne neagle am: Can I just clarify for the record, Carol—because we put this to the Minister last week—are you looking at asking the regional partnership boards to take this work over from October 2019? Are you saying clearly to the committee that you do not feel that all regional partnership boards are ready for that challenge at this point? carol shillabeer: I'm saying that on a more, if you like it, uniformed and informal basis, we're doing some work with the children's commissioner now in terms of—. I know the children's commissioner's very interested in how RPBs are managing, developing and dealing with the issues of children and young people's concerns. We're working with her to understand and to mirror alongside her the understanding of the RPBs. So, for example, in the integrated care fund guidance last year, there was a specific reference to child and adolescent emotional mental health, which I welcomed. I've also welcomed, literally last week, a letter to all RPB chairs giving an allocation of £200,000 per RPB to support this further work in terms of child and adolescent emotional and mental health and the early help and support element. My sense, and I need to stress it's a sense because we haven't done that piece of work, is different RPBs are in different places. So, how confident can we be at the October date that we could hand over? My sense is, just to safeguard, having a mechanism in place for the next 12 to 18 months to guide this through might be advisable, and that's what I'm talking to officials about. lynne neagle am: And that would either be an extension of the Together for Children and Young People programme or something else. Because I think there is a question, isn't there, about whether the RPBs will make this enough of a priority? I'm a bit nervous that it might get lost in that huge amount of work you said they might have. Just a final question from me: how are you establishing what the young people themselves think about the end of the programme? Are they bothered about the structure of this at all or are they just concerned that they're getting help? How's the stakeholder group feeding into this? carol shillabeer: I've not been blown over in the rush of people saying, 'Don't go anywhere.' [Laughter.] It's a really important matter for young people. I know that later on you're meeting with the Youth Parliament, you're having a joint session, which is fantastic. We've had contact with the Youth Parliament because we know it's one of their top three issues. So, it runs in the vein of that this is going to be a long-term matter for young people, I think. But I'm pretty sure they will be vocal in saying, 'We have to have these developments continue.' It is a major issue, we're not there yet—maybe some progress has been made but there's still a lot to do—and I think we'll need to be able to respond to that. suzy davies am: Anything particularly you want in addition to that? lynne neagle am: No, I think that's fine. And if I can just say that it was really great last week at the early help and enhanced day to see young people so central to the day all the way through. We might need to drop you a line about a couple of things that we haven't covered, but can I thank you for your attendance this morning? As usual, you'll be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you very much for your time. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Education clarifying some issues around the Welsh network of healthy schools scheme, following the task and finish group. Paper to note 3: letter from the Minister for Education on the implementation of the Diamond reforms, and that's ahead of our session on 4 July. Papers to note 4 and 5 are a letter from me to the children's commissioner and the Minister for Education seeking the update we agreed on the issue of elective home education. And then paper to note 6, paper to note 7 and paper to note 8 are all letters regarding the concerns that we discussed about the expectation of a target being set for looked-after children, to the First Minister, Children's Commissioner for Wales and the Association of Directors of Social Services. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting

The Mental Health Measure in the UK experienced a significant increase in its target, leading to the implementation of a program that aimed to meet the demand through increased contacts, staff, and shorter access times. However, sustainability was not fully achieved at that stage. Despite this, there were commendable efforts in providing intervention resources. A stakeholder workshop was held, which successfully supported early help and enhanced support. In terms of legacy arrangements, the CAMHS element would be transferred to the CAMHS network, a part of the NHS mental health network. The workshop served as a platform for various agencies to come together and discuss their demands and interests. A planning group reflection took place for the next stage, resulting in three commitments. The first commitment involved the development of values-led approaches to foster collaboration among multiple agencies. The second commitment focused on identifying the ingredients for successful working. Lastly, the priorities for the next step were determined.

Question: What were the group's discussions about the merits of including speech recognition? What was Marketing's opinion on the merits of speech recognition inclusion? What were the group's discussions about speech recognition commands? What were the group's discussions about speech recognition in general? What was the conclusion regarding the choice between a regular chip and an advanced chip for speech recognition when discussing the remote features? Article: Then I'm going to talk about the project management , what I'm going to do , and , of course , I'm doing the project management and secretary both , okay , to take the minutes of the meeting . And I have come up with the management come with the new proposal , okay , and I have to discuss a few points on this . the one is the teletext becomes outmoded , okay because if because of the computer systems and the new technology . So we don't need to consider really about the teletext all in our new project design . And the third point , it's very very important to establish our marketing or corporate image , okay , with this new project or new product . So I will invite Agnes , can you go to the third slide ? user interface: No , this is the third slide . user interface: Do you want the mouse , or do you want me to industrial designer: I'll do the notes . project manager: industrial designer: So well I I figured we should identify some user requirements , and from my experience , I wanna , and from research I did , the the device has to turn the television on and off the first time you press on the big button , you can't can't have like waffling on this point , you know . project manager: industrial designer: Really have It needs to be able y y have to be able to find it . So , I also , since we have to establish our corporate image on the basis of this new product , thought we better look at things that are popular and ex go beyond those , and , as I said in the first meeting , and then we might wanna talk eventually about the materials that are appropriate to use in in the construction , especially in the the the outside of the product project manager: industrial designer: so that it gives the appearance , and it is reliable , and so forth . I did a little history on the the remote controls and when they were invented and so forth , so , I guess this guy Zenith created the Flashmatic , which I kinda like the idea , 'cause it made me think of maybe the remote control made a big flash when you turn the T_V_ on and off , that might be interesting . And so it was highly directional flash light that you could turn the picture on and off , and the sound on and off , and change channels c so I think those are still requirements we have today , fifty years later . industrial designer: And it was really a pioneering innovation , but it was sensitive to the sun , so that it would get would start off by the you'd get it would easily cause problems . So , I in addition to looking at the the functional requir so all these devices are examples of where they represent examples that are available today which I think the one in the middle is r really something to keep in mind . And it would y you'd you could throw it at things if if the T_V_ didn't turn on and off , you could use it for something else . And since I'm not really Industrial Designer , I didn't really know what to do with this slide . But I just took some different schematics and I put them into this , and I guess this is what a slide might look like if you were drawing a circuit board . So , personal preferences , user interface: industrial designer: I think we could I I'm really thinking outside the box here , and I think that we should consider perhaps having an an an a a size a remote control that changes in size depending on the user preference . user interface: industrial designer: So something that's very very flexible and inflatable and then you could shrink it . I think it could either be you could go either one extreme , be very colourful , or you could make it clear , and kind of blend in with things , so you didn't have to have a problem with the th the decoration of the of the user's home . I think it needs to be waterproof , because sometimes they fall into cups project manager: industrial designer: and , you know , it might be out by the swimming pool or something like that . if you mi one of one of my requirements was about needs t to tell you when it's done its job or not , because half the time , I keep pushing on the remote control , and I don't know if it's actually understood my message , so I think it should give you some sort of an oral cue . So , marketing: industrial designer: that's those are my f preferences , and that's my presentation . project manager: Yeah , let me interrupt you if you can add other facility , other feature , like unbreakable . project manager: Okay , because especially today , you know , you have the family and the kids , user interface: project manager: okay , and the kids throw it and they they play with their remotes and . Okay , so if you can add the feature , okay , for your fabric whatever in your outline design okay , with unbreakable , okay , I think that will give a lot of advantage for our product , if I'm not wrong . project manager: Okay , thank you Christine , and any questions or clarifications , or any discussion on the functional design ? user interface: Do you have any preconceived ideas in terms of materials ? 'Cause , for example , in the unbreakable thing , doing something plastic would be harder , industrial designer: . user interface: whereas having something like , I dunno , steel or titanium isn't really economically viable . industrial designer: No , I haven't really I wanted feedback , I think we need to rate rank these , but we'll see what your personal preferences are and your thoughts . industrial designer: you know , nobody told me how mu what our financial objective is , so project manager: Yeah so industrial designer: It'd be hard to inflate something ou made out of titanium though . project manager: Yeah the the I'm sorry because the last meeting we supposed to discuss about the financial thing . marketing: I don't know , project manager: Okay , marketing: I think verbally we can we can pretty much sell . project manager: I will I will send you a mail , okay ? The project may be the the project aim , okay . Okay , that maybe Eddie will talk to you about how much the price and what's how much its cost for the manufacturing and how much it's going to be we sell in the market . This remote control , okay , it can be for like universal , to use for any T_V_ . Okay , and it will be slim , okay , and industrial designer: Not fat ? project manager: Not fat . But let's try it , okay , with the different the designs , okay , the functional designs . project manager: Okay ? So any other questions ? marketing: from her side , I don't think there's too many more questions . Thank you Christine for time being , marketing: If you can come to the project manager: so then Ed , so can you tell about marketing: Okay , from the marketing yeah , from the marketing side , just to to give an idea what the management is looking for , I was looking for a a remote control to have a s user interface: S 'scuse me for one sec . marketing: I have a sales price of twenty-five Euro , with a production price of twelve and a half Euro . For what I think from what we're trying to find , we're tr we're looking for , I don't think that price is exactly in the market . marketing: I'll explain myself here now in the sense that in a in the recent surveys , from the ages fr from fifteen to thirty-five , eighty percent are willing to spend more money for something as fancy as trendy . project manager: marketing: Twenty-five Euros , that's that's a preson reasonable price . Now if we're gonna take a risk , and push this up a bit , make it more expensive , project manager: Yep . But , I think there's one other thing interesting two things that are interesting is that from the fifteen to thirty-five year-old group , which always spends more money on trendy new things , speech recognition is requested . marketing: And we're talking between seventy-five to ninety percent of this group is willing to pay for speech recognition on a remote . That might be a possibility , even though it costs more , to be the first on the market to produce this . industrial designer: marketing: So maybe one word speech recognition commands , say remote , and there's a beep beep beep , and they can find it through , you know , ten tons of newspapers , magazines , whatever you have at home . project manager: marketing: But , in the cost that the management is looking for , that's not gonna be possible . But if it's trendy , if it's fancy , it's got some colour to it , if it's very easy easy to use , if it's got simple remote speech remote control , like I said , louder , softer , change channel , on , off , remote , it goes beep beep , I can find my my remote without spending half a day looking for it and getting all upset 'cause I can't turn the T_V_ on . So we're gonna have to look at it in a in this global idea , with the ideas of the industrial design . So what do you think about the design ? Do you think you can make it or industrial designer: D I'm sorry ? project manager: What do you think about the design , what he was talking about of the speech recognition ? marketing: Speech recognition . industrial designer: So might we can perhaps do it if the user is willing to spend some time in the training process , it could reduce th th the overall cost . And so , maybe what we'll have to do is add something where you can recharge it wirelessly so that y you know sen send power to it . So or maybe set it out in the sun and it , you know , gets , from the light , a a solar cell inside there user interface: . user interface: It seems also like with the speech recognition , yeah , it's a great feature , but if you're watching T_V_ , there's a lot of ambient sound , and it's words . It's actual speech , so then you have to make sure that the speech recognizer is good enough to filter out the T_V_ speech , and the the user's speech . user interface: But if someone on the screen is saying the same thing , all of a sudden , you have someone in a movie saying off and your screen dies , because they've triggered the remote control and it's turned off your T_V_ . So , I think if we can find a speech recognizer that can handle those types of problems , then yeah , it'd be a really good marketing gimmick . marketing: Because tha w with speech recognition th I'm not that good at that idea user interface: marketing: but th if it's a one-word recognition , 'cause I know with telephones and cars and things I've seen in the States , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Because I think s with speech recognition , if the the remote or like the telephone it has a exact word that it has to hear . If somebody's speaking on the se the television , they're not gonna stop and say remote , user interface: No , I think it's a great idea if we can design it to to suit those requirements . No because I this is this is years ago in the United States where we're driving down and he said call home , and the telephone called immediately user interface: Yeah . project manager: Well , what I can suggest to you , Christine , okay , if you need some the technical feedback , or some training , okay , about this facility , especially for the speech recognition , I can recommend you some companies like Intel or I_B_M_ , okay , because they're already in this speech recognition part , okay . Okay , and if you want , I can coordinate , okay , to get some information , okay , and you can let me know , okay , so what kind of the details you require okay , to add this feature in this project . And we need to know how much is the timeframe you need to develop , apart from what today . marketing: From from your side , you're gonna have to go back the management and s be more s precise . marketing: a risk , take a risk on the market ? Something that's gonna cost more , but could very easily s make a boom in the market ? project manager: Yes . project manager: but end of the day , you're the sales guy , so I will come back and sit on your head because you are going to give your sales projection , marketing: user interface: project manager: okay . It's of course it's good to tell the management how much it's cost us marketing: And , so I don't mind to convince , okay , the management to spend some more money on the project , okay , if you can make out of marketing: Obviously . project manager: Yes , okay I don't mind to convince the the management , user interface: project manager: okay . project manager: The management says , okay , so they they don't want certain facilities , which it's already worked , okay , they want something new , okay . I think like speech recognit definitely they will agree , I don't think they'll say no for that , okay . So if you have any new ideas , okay , for your you can always come up and you can tell me if you need any s special , okay , coordination , okay , between any technical companies , which you can hide their technology backup , okay , for your functional design or technical design , okay , then I am ready to do that . And what's your comments about user interface: well , maybe if I go through my presentation , you can sort of see what the user perspective is , and how it ties into the other two comments . So , basically , the method that we usually use in the user interface design is that we need to look at what people like and what people don't like about existing products . And then , what the good ideas are , and what the bad ideas are , and why they're bad and good , which isn't always as obvious . We seem to have intuitions about why things are good or things are bad , but when you look , technically , at how it works , sometimes that's not the case . Then we need to decide what functionalities we really want to keep , 'cause that'll feed into both Ed's work and Christine's work . and then what the remote control should look like , obviously , once we've got a good idea of what the functionalities are . So , in terms of the functionalities that we need , you obviously need to be able to turn the T_V_ on and off . You need to be able to control the volume and then control any menus on the T_V_ to regulate contrast or whatever . So , the problems that people have expressed is that there's too many buttons on remote controls , in general . often , you need to know specific button sequences to get certain functionalities done , which you don't necessarily always remember , especially if it's a functionality that you don't use very often . So , here we've got two examples where here on the left-hand side , you can see a remote control that has lots and lots of buttons . they're hard to see , and okay , they're labelled , but the labels don't necessarily tell you too much . Whereas , on the other side , you have a much simpler remote control that I think basically has the minimum functionalities that are needed . So , I would be inclined to go sort of towards this , in terms of design , rather than this . And if there's specific functionalities that require more buttons , then we can figure out how to do it with existing buttons . So my personal preferences are to keep the number of buttons to a limit , or to a minimum , sorry , make frequently used buttons bigger and more strategically placed , so like the on button being really obvious one , the channel changing and the volume , and to keep the design basically sleek and simple . so , that's pretty much it , an I don't know if you guys have any questions or industrial designer: Oh , it's , seems very understandable . industrial designer: and the only thing that I saw missing from your your research that we found was this ability to find the doggone thing when you need it . That's why we're all here at the table , so that if we think of it and our research indicates certain things and w we it's complementary . industrial designer: I also think that th f the the feel of it is , when you hold it , is something that was expressed more in in in in my design user interface: industrial designer: and that's logical and normal 'cause those are the parameters that an Industrial Designer's more thinking about , th th the look and the feel , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and , you're user interface: Oh , that's definitely a very important factor , especially to users who are gonna be buying the thing and then using it almost on an daily basis in a lot of cases , I think . project manager: So for anybody need any help , for time being , on this subjects , okay , so please come back to me , user interface: Oh project manager: and Christine , maybe I can try to help you to get some the technical the companies to help you for make a design slim , okay , and to add some features , like we are talking about , the speech recognition and all . user interface: Should we maybe make a decision about what features we actually want to include , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause we've thrown a lot of features onto the table , but do we actually want to incorporate all of them , or have we missed anything ? marketing: . industrial designer: Do you wanna go back and look at the closing slide , maybe that would provide some guidance ? user interface: Sure . industrial designer: it says user interf so I'm supposed to do the components concept , supposed to work on the user interface concept , user interface: I think we should do as many features as start with all of them right now user interface: I thought industrial designer: and eliminate them later in the process , that's my suggestion . And I'll send you the the minutes of meet industrial designer: You can object if you want to user interface: No , I I'm just thinking in terms of time , marketing: She's objecting . No , I was just thinking is it really practical to start designing something with features that we're just gonna end up throwing away ? , it takes a lot of time and effort for everyone to consider different features , and s if we spend that time and effort on features that we're not gonna use , maybe it's better to spend it on the f thinking more about features that we actually do want , but industrial designer: I think we should take that as an action item for after the meeting , marketing: Oh th we s we still have user interface: guess industrial designer: 'cause w our meeting time has run out . project manager: Okay , what we'll do is now we'll take for lunch break , okay , then we can discuss furthermore , okay , with our areas , and then we will come back again in the in the next meeting . So thanks for coming and I'll send you minutes of meeting , and please put your all information in the sharing folder so everybody can share the information <doc-sep> then each of you will have your presentation , and then we will need to make a decision on the concept for the remote control . industrial designer: project manager: we decided that , or we know that we need to use company colours , company logo . industrial designer: project manager: and that they often lose the it's easy to lose a remote . I think we decided that the expense was not necessarily worth it , and that it was probably a gimmick , that would increasingly wear on the consumers' nerves . and some personal preferences that were found in that would be that it should be a user-oriented remote , something simple . the user interface then would connect to a chip , which would work with the infrared controls to send the signal to the T_V_ . I believe then we came up with a couple of ideas for what we think the design of the remote will be . I was given a brief executive summary , and then an update on some recent fashion trends that we might like to look at . okay the most important finding was that the fancy look-and-feel seems to be twice as important to the users as the current functional look-and-feel design , which I think we've kind of already discussed before . And again these are all things we've kind of already come up with on our own , but this just backs it up . As far as fashion update , we've learned that fruits and vegetables will be the most important theme for cloths , shoes and furniture . industrial designer: marketing: So that might be a bit of a challenge to incorporate this into our remote , but we can try . and also , as opposed to last year , this year the material is expected to be spongy in feel . Okay so from that , as we've already said , we need to focus on a fancy look-and-feel . I think we've already discovered that it's kind of hard to go away from the traditional rectangular design . But I think that , even if it's very subtle , we need to kind of trick our consumers , so they at least get the idea that they're getting something that's new and modern and sleek and Whether it's through the shape or the colours or all of that . And Manuel had suggested the energy source and the user interface , discussing some of those , that we could change a little bit . We need to keep it simple , have limited buttons , which I think the two piece idea might be really beneficial for . I don't know , I guess the two options are if we had our remote in the shape of a fruit or vegetable . But my question is , the stereotypically speaking , you kind of picture males with their remote controls , and I'm not sure how they'd feel about having fruity logos on the outside . project manager: marketing: So maybe we could have something that's somewhat removable , or I don't know , different options for female , male target groups . C and look at different types of material that might please our users who want spongy-feeling remote controls . Possibly like a cover like they have for mobile phones ? marketing: That's what I was thinking yeah . project manager: You have one with a flag , and one with a banana and one that's a spongy user interface: marketing: Yeah . yeah I talking about the interface concept and how the customer relates to , will use the , consumer will use the actual device . I was sent some information from the company saying that they , the technology department have devised a new speech recognition technology , where you can program questions into such devices . They gave an example of a coffee machine where you program a question , you program the answer , and the machine responds accordingly . and then it ju that's just to point out the sort of inconsistent u sort of use of interface in remotes . You can't really see that picture well , but there's various different remotes , once again with lots of different buttons on , making it more complicated . industrial designer: user interface: So , then I had a look at new products that are on the market . this is the voice , there is a voice recognition remote control , which can control mus multiple devices . Store up to eighty speech samples , controls four devices , T_V_ , cable , satellite , V_C_R_ , D_V_D_ and audio . the one on the left is very similar to what we drew up on the board in the previous meeting , where there has scroll down functions on the side . And then on the right is obviously an iPod , which is you know possibly one of the simplest things to use out there , and really is , and all that is is just a a nice big scroll menu that y you sort of go through . then there's things like this , which is a a a kid's remote , where the the parents have the facility to control and program what children can watch before . So the remote control it o only allows them to access the channels that their parents want them to watch . So I don't know if there's a possibility of having one remote contr you know like we just had two components , maybe it can have more components you know , different remotes . the point made at the end there here is that you have to be sort of be need to be clear on your devices , as to what , you know , things you use . Sometimes an arrow pointing down , which may suggest volume down , could become confused just as a V_ for volume . I think , d carrying on from what I've already said , a user friendly remote with minimum buttons . Maybe we've so suggested this two-part thing , where if it was to have a speech recognition thing , you could maybe control that on the do it or program all that on the control bit . And then just have the simple sort of hand-held thing that we sort of devised earlier , as the actual remote . I don't it could be a graphical display , the actual remote contr the actual control port maybe could have like an iPod where you just sort of control through the menus . Which is just for your gr ninety year old grandma yeah ? project manager: marketing: industrial designer: That's industrial design for cranes , stuff like that . project manager: marketing: industrial designer: Just to to make it more obvious what we have to fit in there , and that we do have to fit the stuff in there . but let's just wait for this to load up and I'll show you what we're talking about here . The details of the components' design , as you can see there , what we have is the board , main board of the remote control . The underside , that's pretty cheap piece of of technology really top left side you can see the chip , which is the , what we were talking about , this was is the device to recognise the signals the input , and it passes it on to a row of further transistors and stuff like that on the right side that actually amplify the signal , which later on is being , is being transferred to a infrared lamp which then of course shines infrared light onto the television which then will recognise what signal it's getting and will do what you tell it . Its job is to wait for you to press a key , then to translate that key press into infrared light signals , that are received by the television . Transistor amplifies the signal and then sends the m sends the signal to the L_E_D_ which translates the signal into infrared light . The sensor in the T_V_ can see the infrared light , and seeing the signal reacts appropriately . the lower part of it , I don't know if you can see that properly , with the green greenish board is is what we what we saw in the first the first slide just flipped over . what you do is you have , don't have cables , but you have the connections actually in these in these lines on the on the board . which sends it over to the transistors and all that stuff that marketing: industrial designer: amplify the signal and all that is being sent to the infrared lamp up there . we are also restricted in the use of our outer shell , or in the material that we could use for our outer shell . I've gotten some information that we could use for the case material plastic , rubber , as well . project manager: What's the approximate per hundred thousand for the titanium ? user interface: marketing: user interface: industrial designer: Oh fya marketing: industrial designer: I don't have an information on that . However our company obviously can provide us with with the titanium , so I assume , I'm , I was given an okay to use it . project manager: industrial designer: It certainly is an expensive material , project manager: industrial designer: I'm aware of that , but I was given an okay . what we could use is , or what I was offered , or what we could use , is a basic bateer battery . Where you just move them m move the the actual device and this pr provides it with with some energy . marketing: industrial designer: You don't wanna wind up your remote control before you can use it right ? solar cell is interesting . project manager: Works well in Arizona but in Edinburgh not so industrial designer: Always the you But marketing: Y probably not yeah . marketing: industrial designer: So I'd say what we're stuck with really is the basic battery . however when it comes to the scroll wheel of the iPod I've one big objection and that is that we have to fit an L_C_D_ into the remote control as well . If you have a squishy kind of remote control , then an L_C_D_ screen may be affected by the movement . If we have a more sophistic sophisticated scroll wheel rather than this very basic set-up that we that I've just presented , the chip has to be more s more sophisticated and thus more expensive as well . I don't have any details to , when it comes to the cost but it will be a significant difference . I'd rather say drop the titanium and therefore let's have a more sophisticated chip , but that's not up to me to decide really . it limits our choice and squishy is hip , so I'd say rather not go for for that . But obviously that's not our problem since we have decided or against solar cells , I assume right ? Or is anybody still marketing: . user interface: Would the sort of spongy and the the plasticky thing y you can get those mobile phones that initially have a it is plastic but then they have sort of a a s a cover on it which is just sort of soft and stuff . user interface: So I don't know if that would still be possible to have you know in plastic . marketing: The we can have the fruits and vegetables on the spongy parts , so they can remove it . user interface: So you as the the possibility of having a a graphical display on it , like a screen ? Like the iPod ? industrial designer: You can have an L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: Alright ? So plastic yes , titanium yes , but this will of course influence the form . So the way to go is if you want a scroll wheel you either make it flat and angular , add an L_C_D_ screen , and then you can basically choose either plastic or titanium . Add an L_C_D_ screen , add a scroll wheel , that'll be fine . project manager: So the ru wait the rubbery we can shape it however we want ? Or the rubbery we cannot ? industrial designer: With rubber we could sh pretty much shape it the way we wanted it , project manager: 'Kay . industrial designer: but we cannot add scroll wheels , and we cannot add an L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Could we not you know have a shape with a scroll and the screen , and then j just sort of that initial shape we had , just which is sort of banana-esque . user interface: And you know you just p stick on just sort of rubber things that that sort of grip the thumb bit . project manager: Is that an option , a plastic shell with a rubbery coating on at certain spots ? industrial designer: S Certainly can be done yes . So The fruit design How about affecting the surface of the actual remote control ? Say we don't make it p a particular fruit shape obviously , marketing: . user interface: I don't suppose we have to stick to co industrial designer: Well we we're supposed to stick to the company colours though , user interface: Stick to the colours yeah . industrial designer: Grapefruit marketing: industrial designer: is what we'd go for , when it comes to the outer appearance perhaps . project manager: I would say , if I were to make a decision , I would probably put the fruit aspect at the lower lower end of the spectrum of of importance . project manager: marketing: I think having a shape could be a little ridiculous , project manager: marketing: like user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: So project manager: Well perhaps the implied shape will be enough to lure that fruit-minded remote buyer . project manager: It's sort of industrial designer: Well so why not add a couple of grey stripes and make it look like a banana ? project manager: couple of couple of grey stripes . project manager: We could put the grey stripes on the bottom so that that person could turn it over . project manager: Rather than rather th industrial designer: marketing: user interface: It could and then you could actually h put the banana-shaped thing on the fruit bowl , on the coffee table , marketing: Oh . project manager: Maybe the holder , if we were to have a holder , it could be shaped like a fruit . project manager: Do you have more to your presentation ? industrial designer: That's pretty much it . I informed you about the materials , what the interior has to look like , and what the limitations to certain materials are on project manager: Oh . marketing: So is the two piece idea out ? Or have we not decided ? user interface: Well we sort of rid of that because gonna use a battery . industrial designer: Well we can still design a two-piece remote without having a base , having one of them be a base station , user interface: Yeah . marketing: industrial designer: but just have it be an optional either big remote with lots of functions , or you take out the smaller piece . industrial designer: So which then , as I understand it , would probably limit the , limit again the the the use of certain materials , because they would be too expensive . Say like have a scroll wheel and on both of them , or have an L_C_D_ screen and so on so on . for our components concept we need to come up with the energy source , the chip-on-print , and the case . and then for the user interface concept we need to decide what the tape , what , what the type is . Energy source I think we've , I think we've decided batteries , although not exciting , are probably our best bet . industrial designer: Okay when it comes to the chip-on-print , as I said , the the more advanced features you want , the fancier the chip has to be and the more expensive . if you want just a normal button version , the chip-on-print is gonna be marketing: . If we go with the plasticky case , or the the plastic case , then the chip-on-print is still kind of , we could have either or . user interface: just maybe marketing: finger grips just on top of the plastic ? user interface: yeah . So we would , we would have the L_C_D_ screen ? industrial designer: as long as the pla the rubber is nowhere near the controls , yes . So I guess the case would be plastic , with Perhaps that's not even enough rubber to qualify as being part of it . marketing: So then for the scroll , are we going for the iPod type ? user interface: Yeah I think so . project manager: Which will require a more expensive chip-on-print right ? industrial designer: Yes . So I guess that , is that , is that about it ? So we have a good idea of what we're gonna need to to do on this ? industrial designer: Right . And the two of you get to play with the modelling components and user interface: marketing: project manager: maybe and and get us a prototype . user interface: project manager: So that basically just be working on the prototype , we'll accomplish your other two actions <doc-sep>project manager: So marketing: So project manager: I hope you're ready for this functional design meeting . we want to know to at the end to know the new project's requirement so we need to know the the user needs that we want to fulfil to fulfil the from the technical part we want to know how it going to work and third part I don't remember marketing: project manager: which is not very good . marketing: So I dunno if I can do that like this ? Yeah ? So it's being modified . I am the expert in marketing and I want to tell you about what people s want and like and dislike in remote controls , and I hope this is going to help you to to design it correctly . marketing: So basically what I suggest is that instead of deciding ourself what what could be and what should be a good remote control , let's ask people who are users of remote controls how they feel about w the current remote controls , what they like , what they don't like and and what they do with them by the way industrial designer: marketing: because they are supposed to be useful . So we've we've conducted a a survey on on the use of remote controls and I'd like to show you some of the results we found on this survey . Yeah , so basically what we found was that there are several things that the user don't like in remote controls . Current remote controls as you know they're the same as this one they're not nice colour , not nice shape , they're all the same , and they're not l good looking . what is interesting is that in fact it seems that they were people are ready to pay for nice and look and fancy looking remote control , so I think we should probably spend lots of time in and effort in that . And the other thing is that the the current remote controls are not so easy to use and it it the the current facilities that they offer do not match what people really want to use their remote controls . For instance we see that they zap very often so I think this is a very important functionality that it should be easy for them to to zap in one way or another . And most of the buttons on current remote controls are not used , so I think we should design something where some of the buttons which are those that are used should be easier to see and use than others that only a couple of people are using . Now people are very frustrated w with their remote controls industrial designer: marketing: and they for instance they don't even find it project manager: marketing: it's it's often lost somewhere in the in the in your home and nobody knows where it is . marketing: Maybe if we have something where we could ask the remote control please , where are you ? industrial designer: Yeah . of course phone you can always phone your phone project manager: marketing: but you can't phone your your remote control . industrial designer: marketing: And because of the fact that there are so many buttons in these remote controls that nobody use , industrial designer: . marketing: in fact they don't even know how to use them , so most of the the people say they they don't know how to they to use properly their r remote controls . And they are bad for R_S_I_ but I don't remember what is R_S_I_ . nobody has any idea about that ? Well I'll check with my industrial designer: Yeah , it's electromagnetic waves or something kind of maybe effect . marketing: I think it's a technical thing industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: which our industrial designer: because infrared uses some electromagnetic technology , project manager: industrial designer: and those waves have high marketing: So , it seems that it's a lot of people for a concept that we don't know user interface: But twenty six percent , do you know project manager: Or something we don't know . marketing: So anyway user interface: One of us marketing: that's for what the biggest frustration of the user and industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: s functions that may be used by u the user in the current available remote controls and well the tables look very nice to read but what is important is to understand that the power button is not used often because in general you use it only once per session , but it is very relevant . project manager: marketing: Ah now I remember what is R_S_I_ project manager: marketing: it's repetitivity stress injury . marketing: I continue my presentation so yeah , user interface: marketing: channel selection is very important , very often used . It seems that people find teletext teletext relevant , even if I personally never use it but seems that it's average relevant at least , so . project manager: I have been told that we don't consider teletext , that it's out of date now because of internet . marketing: I can tell you that in a l in a scale between one and ten relevant not relevant to relevant people scored a six on this , which is not as these these two one were had I think ten I think . marketing: Not very relevant , so if if there are good reason not to put teletext it's okay but just know that people find it somehow relevant . project manager: marketing: That's for the main functions I think and then we can ask ourself what people don't have that may be useful . One of the thing the trend that you are probably aware of is the possibility the eventual possibility of having speech recognition in your remote control , so you wouldn't have to tap tap in your buttons but just tell your remote control or whatever you need you have what you want . So we've conducted a survey about whether people would like or not to have this kind of functionality in their remote control and as we can see it really depends on the age . marketing: So now it really depends on the kind of targeting wha who are we targeting with this remote control ? industrial designer: 'Cause marketing: I think if we are targeting young people then it's probably something we have to consider . If we are targeting you very old people this is something they really don't know why they this should be so now project manager: And I don't have any conclusion , I didn't have time the meeting was very tight , so that's basically my findings . marketing: Yeah one question , user interface: you are a Market Expert marketing: yeah ? user interface: so marketing: I am . user interface: should we aim at the young people or not ? marketing: I think we should aim at the young people . marketing: In general the the early adopters of a new device are young people , less than more than user interface: Okay , then teletext is used less . project manager: So now I think it's the turn of the the I'm not sure marketing: project manager: Of the technical function , so marketing: So I think it's you , huh ? industrial designer: it's marketing: No ? user interface: That's me . project manager: what effect industrial designer: techni function of marketing: No , user requiremen industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: I have to do working design so project manager: So you're user interface: That's but this but number three , yes . marketing: user interface: However , Project Manager asked me to give you some presentation about technical functions design . , as I'm a more an artist marketing: project manager: user interface: that's gonna be less technical functions but more User Interface and current intentions and everything which is linked with this . marketing: project manager: user interface: 'Cause current remote controls they are never easy enough to use . marketing: project manager: user interface: It's quite a standard one , but it's not from a T_V_ , it's from a much easier device like air conditioning or something . Only buttons we need is on off , volume , channels and maybe some options or something else , and please make a click , compared to this one marketing: industrial designer: It's user interface: which one would you prefer ? I guess this . marketing: I would say the simplest one as long as there are the I find the buttons that I need every time I need a button . marketing: industrial designer: Maybe it can be yeah middle of like , between those two user interface: Yeah , and our method is going to be , provide simple industrial designer: li project manager: Oh sorry . user interface: Our question of the style , we should remember that our company marketing: user interface: puts fashion into electronics and we should never forget about it . user interface: it's very well , it's it's not an easy field to to play , you know ? So be simple . marketing: user interface: For personal preferences I think that to make a baby-proof remote control it got to be a titanium . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: It's a really good style , it going to be look like like this . And all these buttons should be easy to find and to click , 'cause when you watch a movie and you want to change something , you always try to find a good button and click it , but you should do it by touching it and finding it easily just by touch . So Press project manager: user interface: I would propose this concept for design , just few buttons , a screen with a back light which can change colours , titanium industrial designer: . And let us include two nice features into this device , first , power on and off can be made fully automatic . When you go to the sofa , take your control and point it to the T_V_ , project manager: It's off . marketing: And when does it turn off ? user interface: When you don't touch the control but you go out of the For for enough time marketing: Oh so you have a user interface: like you marketing: sensing sensor machine that knows user interface: It's a question to our technical design , our two engineers . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: Tech user interface: And another nice feature that I would like to implement is volume control . Suppose you set u you set up some volume and then you move out or you move to the other corner of the room and take your control with you . Like , you want to to change the chair or you want to move to the armchair from the sofa or something , and then the volume changes . user interface: you just control the marketing: According to your distance to and the angle maybe , if you have a stereo system . So marketing: I'm not sure about the screen , wha what is the use usefulness of the screen ? is it a touch screen by the way ? user interface: I think it can be just a menu which can be controlled with a left , right , up , down and enter . user interface: which makes it easier to find , and each can it can respond for your voice , like it can turn on the light for you just to f find it easily , yeah ? project manager: . project manager: I see that you target several s application not only T_V_ but i like we talk about universal remote control . user interface: Let it be universal , so you want to use it for your hi-fi system . S user interface: All the rest , we sh we'll put it into this menu on the screen . Since we were targeting a really soon date for the the the i issuing of this remote control I think we will only concentrate on T_V_ for the moment and then maybe m make it more generalised yeah . marketing: So for instance if I want to go to directly to channel twenty five , how would I do can I do that with this ? user interface: twenty five . marketing: that's not so easy to go just next next next when you have hundreds of channels . marketing: Or is it ? user interface: Basically you use just four or five channels , right ? marketing: Most people user interface: Yeah . user interface: So set up your T_V_ set like channels that you use they're one , two , three and five , and you will never have to go to a twenty fives channel . marketing: In fact in in one remote control that I've seen , instead of doing that d you could just say these are the cha ch channel three , twenty eight , forty eight and sixty four are those that I want to by cycled with my next button . industrial designer: But even we can have some L_C_D_ display , like you can de you can just button the number marketing: Go to channel twenty five . industrial designer: and then it go marketing: One thing is that as I said in my presentation people really do like to z zap . marketing: So even if they are only watching four or five channels , I think they want to zap out of the one hundred channels , user interface: But otherwise like we can put some display on numbers and then they can just press suppose two five they just press two and five marketing: So it would be industrial designer: and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: if you want to go for a universal then we ought to limit for functions for each of our devices . user interface: Could we carry out some research if we w really need this , like how many people really need to go to channel number twenty five and then to sixty four ? marketing: Well I could could have a look at that maybe . I am an expert in industrial design of all electronic devices and I previously devised many like digital calculators and electronic calculators . Well , as you know the basic function of remote control is sending some message to the the device , like T_V_ or V_C_R_ or D_V_D_ player etcetera . So we will have a p portable device which will send message to the the main device like T_V_ . So we need to have some energy source to do what to do the functions , what we want on this portable device . And usually this so to do these functions we need an interface , which basically some kind of pressing buttons or keys or like moving jack or something like that . And then these messages these key buttons can be transferred into some kind of message and then it will process by the chip and then it will generate some information to the main device . So , basically we need since we are focusing on our interface device remote control mainly the energy source like the battery and then we have user interface like the keypad and you know buttons we want , and then we have some chip , it's mainly digital signal processing chip because since we are I am one doing mostly digital devices we ought to have some kind of processor which take care of all these functions and put it in some digital format . And then we'll have the infrared L_E_D_ source which sends the information to the main device . Then we'll have switch in our main device to do particular operations , and we ought to do different codes for different T_V_s , project manager: industrial designer: so some T_V_s will have different encryption codes for doing s s channel changing and these things . industrial designer: Yeah yeah , because the people don't use one particular brand so project manager: . industrial designer: So we need to check their specifications and do their encryption that's passing information to the T_V_ device . industrial designer: Then , components , so we have the main energy source and then we will have some buttons and then we will have infrared source and then we have some inside some chip in in the device . And since I also want to know feedback from our Marketing Expert and User Interface , project manager: Yeah , I'm sure , because since our User Interface speech recognition and also Marketing Expert for the speech recognition is really handy , project manager: industrial designer: we can have another , like s simple speech recogniser on our D_S_B_ chip . industrial designer: Since we have some kind of energy this is our this normal battery , so this battery , once you s switch on it will take power and we can have some speech recognition and in our g generally small digital signal processing chip so that and we will put the small simple speech recogniser project manager: On industrial designer: and we can also train the speech recogniser for particular user so you just project manager: train it , okay . No , even in you can find even simple mobile device like any mobile brand you can have these voice dialers or these things , yeah . marketing: Think of a all these young people who would love to say that this remote control only works for them , user interface: Okay . project manager: And what about the price of this component ? industrial designer: So maybe we can make it in five Euros and even less than that , project manager: It okay . industrial designer: because we have only very few words like like power , switch on or some like project manager: industrial designer: then we'll have something like this we'll have volume and then we will have s particular channel , so users can listen . marketing: The user will just be able to say please can you pump up the vo pump up the volume project manager: industrial designer: Ye No , yeah , a user can use any kind of sender but they should have this prompt volume and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: yeah volume and decrease or increase , so we try to only recognise those words marketing: Okay . industrial designer: and and because we can't really say user to say same wording marketing: Couple of words . industrial designer: And then we can have channel they can say , okay I want eight , because we don't know like users have different programmes , they don't really follow same channels strict so we just want channel number , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: we don't want like B_B_C_ or C_N_N_ or something else marketing: Of course it has to be industrial designer: because it will be complicated so we'll have only these three main basic anyway volume is not really speech recognition problem , marketing: Okay . user interface: No you know it's a conceptual question , 'cause now I see th this the picture in front of my eyes like a user taking his remote control and shouting into it , volume up , volume up , project manager: marketing: But then I think you you user interface: and and he's coming you know , he's really annoyed with this , down , up , down . project manager: marketing: First of all I I think this is not functionality that it is going to be instead of using the buttons . industrial designer: Yeah actually we we can have one switch to like switch on , on and off , this processor and This really , suppose like here we have our main chip which controls power , volume and this part and this D_S_P_s . industrial designer: Again , this to have some interaction like suppose people use D_S_P_ then it particularly sends some information to the chip like in some form , like volume and like this key . industrial designer: So it may not be like very expensive , because since we are only focusing on T_V_ remote control marketing: T_V_ . industrial designer: so and we have only few things here project manager: Sho to to train , okay . user interface: Like , if I want to put volume up I like do I take my remote control do like something like marketing: user interface: roll 'em up industrial designer: this point we didn't consider user interface: or roll 'em down . marketing: Very expensive , industrial designer: because it's it's very expensive marketing: no ? industrial designer: because v our target is only like twelve point five Euros project manager: And well , what about the idea of automatic on off on the button , yeah . user interface: why ? industrial designer: and user interface: That's just industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: And volume control . industrial designer: even automatic on off is also a bit problematic , because it different criteria for different people like so suppose people are really they just they don't touch the remote and y you don't know how much time you need to switch on or switch off marketing: So but industrial designer: and marketing: Sh should we target a a user personalised remote control ? So in in a given room there might be more than one remote control . Yeah that can be possible , especially for power settings , so user can say okay , suppose they're watching a tennis match or something then they can say okay after one hour I marketing: . project manager: Wouldn't that make arguments ? industrial designer: They can make marketing: Yeah , of course . project manager: I want user interface: industrial designer: Yeah we can have marketing: That's no problem , we will sell more . project manager: And we can increase this the strength user interface: We got a really good Market Expert . project manager: y you can buy one with user interface: Let's send more , let's sell more . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: I think , okay , we're just on time . project manager: Then we will work again for thirty minutes individual work , and we will meet again for the next meeting , and in this one want to to be more focused on the individual actions the on the components so you will focus on the component concept industrial designer: Yeah yeah . project manager: of course the U_I_D_ Mark will be focused on the user interface concept industrial designer: Mark will project manager: and our m Market Expert Sammy Benjo on the trend watching . And we have maybe we have to we say , only for T_V_ , not teletext ? marketing: project manager: I think automatic on off control it's not possible . user interface: should it be equipped with the , with speakers ? marketing: Speakers in the remote cont user interface: Like , you want to find it , you shout marketing: Oh yeah . project manager: yeah user interface: control , project manager: that's user interface: and it answers is I'm here ? Or marketing: It just beeps . project manager: yeah ? Think industrial designer: Yeah , especially the power , it really consumes project manager: -huh . industrial designer: because it should be all the time on and project manager: And marketing: Well I I heard of devices where you just whistle them and and they project manager: And it's answered . industrial designer: But it's a good feature I guess yeah we need to think about more how to incorporate it . user interface: Just don't interfere with other devices like 'cause like all these people do that their lights are turning on with clapping . marketing: Oh that's e that already exists user interface: Yeah , I got it at my home , like . Good project manager: So , marketing: we're done ? project manager: yeah , industrial designer: Yeah <doc-sep>user interface: Why won't it wake up ? Is it on ? marketing: The power light doesn't work . Okay , so I just show you the m the no the the the the the the minutes , minute . project manager: Okay , so we just talked about Oh you want me to show that there or user interface: No , industrial designer: no . And the functions are volume , channel to choose channels , an on-off , a mute button , and a text T_V_ button . project manager: So I just want to give you Mike again , the first presentation of your marketing: Shall I start ? project manager: Yeah . I searched the web , and I searched on this d document , recent investigation of the remote control market . but they found out the most important aspect for remote controls happens to be a fancy look-and-feel , instead of the current functional look and feel . And then that This is a point of discussion , because we just decided that we don't make use of L_C_D_ or speech recognition . marketing: But this is the second important aspect , and I think we must use some of the new technology , to be innovative . And it says fashion-watchers of Pari France and Italy , yeah , have detected the following trends . marketing: But the the next aspect also in contrast to last year , the feel of material is expe is expected to be spongy . marketing: But spongy , what what does spongy says ? industrial designer: Spongy . project manager: because you've you're you drop y your remote control very often on the ground . project manager: Is it a bit like like the the the the remote control ? user interface: How are you gonna make it ? project manager: R_ soft . industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: industrial designer: I've some material information , but I'll give you it later in my presentation . marketing: Okay ? project manager: marketing: What do I think ? because a fancy look is the most important thing for remote control control , I think about changeable fronts . Yeah , how do we do that ? Maybe speech ? We ma must have some kind of gadget . marketing: Intro project manager: Because it's only twelve and a half Euros you have to spend on every remote control . user interface: So industrial designer: Yeah , well actually we have don't have an idea how much it's gonna cost . But maybe it's cheap user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: and it's easy to implement . I d They don't say how much it will cost , so but marketing: user interface: if we implement speech recognition , I think it would be better to implement L_C_D_ as well . So you can say , you can user interface: Since you have to configure speech thing . project manager: But that's definitely more expensive than user interface: Yeah , that's that's something I dunno . But a telephone also have a L_C_D_ and and it's about t two hundred Euros . user interface: Yeah , so we gotta de project manager: So user interface: We have to decide on that . That was this ? user interface: industrial designer: Oh I got an email And it says the chip can be simple , regular or advanced . So user interface: L_D_C_ doesn't require industrial designer: it's m the most expensive . industrial designer: I I haven't got anything about speech recognition , but user interface: I'll I'll give you my design . 'Cause remote con control , you can see it here , you have to bo reach both out both sides . project manager: Yeah , maybe the teletext tel user interface: Yeah , text button , maybe there and there . user interface: but it's marketing: No , I don't I don't like it . And you can't use them now with your thumb , because the thing is not , it's not easy to control . industrial designer: Yeah okay , m maybe we cho should put that on top , and buttons we we don't use on , in the bottom . user interface: They're on top ? project manager: Yeah , just th th th other buttons like text T_V_ . industrial designer: But I I think w you'll use the switch channels buttons more often than the normal channel buttons , like one two three . I dunno , but yeah we'll industrial designer: Like zapping is just switching one channel at a time . user interface: And if you don't light 'em up , they don't you don't see 'em very good . industrial designer: That's that's good , but user interface: I think it's modern to light this area up , and to light this area up . It's s We have to look what's easy to use , and how it's easier to use . user interface: I dunno if it l will look good , if you put those on t on the bottom half . Yeah , maybe industrial designer: But we we can switch those two , user interface: Those two , yeah . user interface: And , yeah , you have to make sure it's easy to Yes , it has to be big enough so you can hold it , right . And well if we want to put in speech rec recognition or something , we I don't think we should put it on top then . I think that , if we're gonna put in more technology , that you need to be able to switch it open . project manager: We have to decide this this lecture , or this this this fifty minutes , yeah , how it is gonna look . If you aim at a young public , you should use materials that are soft with primary colours like green , blue , red . I don't know exactly what that means , but it should be , well yeah , popular kind of project manager: Yeah , we have to put our Real Reaction logo as well on the on the remote control . user interface: Yeah , it's project manager: So we have ha to ma make it in black , black , yellow . industrial designer: Yeah , n Not that weird , because we definitely want to make it kind of flashy , to attract a young public . user interface: Yeah , but I don't think the the colours black and yellow go well together . But project manager: We make i Maybe you can put yellow on the side and black on the on the front . That's a that's a sen That's just a matter of tastes , but user interface: Yeah , okay . user interface: can't we use different fron fronts , with all with the the logo on it ? Can we do that ? So project manager: Yeah , it's cool . industrial designer: S user interface: You can Just like a mobile phone , you can make different fronts on it . user interface: A more Yeah , just marketing: project manager: That's better prob industrial designer: With the hard hard buttons . The the the new new modern remote controls , the buttons are part of the the style , I think is part of the remote control itself . it's n doesn't Is a button How do you say it ? industrial designer: Yeah , it's it's all on one level . marketing: It it didn't it i it don't come out of the on the background . project manager: basic remote control from normal plastic , marketing: project manager: and industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: But I think we have to make the case transparent , otherwise the back light won't work . industrial designer: So if you put project manager: Y i if you The numbers could be can be user interface: you can just make them around the buttons project manager: Yeah , that's right . user interface: Or it runs the whole industrial designer: Yeah , but we can still make it transparent . user interface: Yeah , you can halfs transparent , industrial designer: Or no user interface: or just that it's comes out a bit . user interface: depends on the colour of the project manager: Yeah , but you can't choo You can't choose it when you buy it . Is marketing: but can you change it if you already bought the the remote control ? user interface: Yeah , it can . project manager: industrial designer: I don't know what it is , but it should be there I think . marketing: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: this is the normal circuit board , like a chip board in in a lot of things . project manager: Yeah , we have to hurry up a bit , so industrial designer: W So we d we just need this and this transistors and resonators . user interface: industrial designer: they they basically said that that's almost the same on any remote controls . project manager: We still want to have a recharger , don't we ? industrial designer: Yeah but project manager: Is that still the user interface: Yes . industrial designer: Yeah , but it i We don't wanna have a ar an How do you call it ? Accu . user interface: project manager: It's just batteries , industrial designer: so marketing: project manager: that's cheaper . So we need the expensive , most expensive chip , if we use an L_C_D_ . industrial designer: are are we using a a rubber case , or project manager: Oh just sk industrial designer: We haven't decided yet . It's user interface: I don't think a rubber case looks industrial designer: L marketing: but we have to do something about the trend . Or should we do it in the next meeting ? user interface: I_D_ and U_I_D_ work together on prototype drawing on smart board . industrial designer: So we should did it here ? project manager: That's for th user interface: So we're staying here ? project manager: that I think that's the next next meeting . user interface: Okay , so now we're ka thirty minutes alone again ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Just a bit cur Okay , I'll see if I can see any of those . You see what ? industrial designer: What ? project manager: If I draw here It draws about four centimetres lower than industrial designer: Oh . industrial designer: I think you'll get a a lot of volume changing when it's not wanted . project manager: And industrial designer: Yeah , but maybe we can make a a plastic , so that you i if you like drop it , it won't change the volume . user interface: Yeah , maybe you just have to make it That's not scrollable too easy . And what's the channel choose ? Where do we put that ? Still on the bottom industrial designer: I think in middle . project manager: or user interface: wh what is the middle part ? project manager: That's the numbers . industrial designer: I think th the numbers should be in the bottom , and and the switch channel in the middle . project manager: It doesn't make a difference , if you put the s the switch channels on side of each other or on top of each other . user interface: Use the dz project manager: Because you already have the volume here , so You can also put it here one butt and the other one there . project manager: So you can also can put it all on the top , and this , you keep this empty . industrial designer: Or you could do the switch channel up button above the the numbers and switch channel down button below . project manager: But that's not want to zap very quick , so user interface: Yeah , I think zapping is the highest priority . project manager: Yeah ? Is this a opportunity , user interface: And then you use those project manager: or you don't want a different user interface: Yeah , of course . industrial designer: but I think we we should bu put 'em on top of each other , so project manager: Why ? industrial designer: Because then it's it's easy to know m if I push the the the up project manager: But still the next It's still the next one . Doesn't make industrial designer: Yeah , but the top the top button is is like you switch channel up , and down button is If you put them project manager: Yeah , but fo from left to right is exactly the same . industrial designer: But but I I think left to right is more often associated with volume , and top down is more with channel changing . user interface: Yeah , I think industrial designer: So so if we use that , they will probably have a long learning time . I You already have the volume on the side , user interface: No , I think project manager: so you can't make it you can't ma make a mistake . project manager: So it's user interface: I think it's s so simple industrial designer: I dunno . user interface: you just project manager: So but that's for that's for you , industrial designer: Okay . project manager: 'cause it's user interface: Yeah , okay I'll d I'll take a look at it . user interface: Think we need to work thirty minutes again ? marketing: Yeah , we have to care that it r looks really new . marketing: 'Cause wha what I see the only difference i i i in fact is that we use a scroll-wheel on the outside . user interface: No , you have It is industrial designer: Yeah , but i i it should be round in in shape . marketing: Some some kind of bling bling can we have industrial designer: user interface: Where you can put a ve we have If we do it like that we have below have we a lot of room to put a nice logo . marketing: and how many fronts fronts do we put on the market then ? five or something ? project manager: Yeah , five . user interface: marketing: Or more or user interface: Maybe you can buy separate ones and marketing: And buy the product . industrial designer: No , tha that will be project manager: So y you can put the bottom of the remote control in recharger ? Is that is that a good good opportunity ? user interface: Yes . marketing: Yeah , we can b It c it could be just just a square , just a packet . industrial designer: But we have to make contacts on the on the remote control and the recharger as well . user interface: I think i marketing: user interface: Yeah okay , tho those are al already a bit cornered . industrial designer: Yeah , but we can we can do all kinds of As long as it isn is in two D_ we can use all kind of round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: It's a bit annoying , isn't it ? marketing: Yeah . I know we can do a lot more , but marketing: Yeah , it project manager: industrial designer: Like in this kind of shape or marketing: it's very annoying . project manager: So we have to make a decision , what kind of form it's gonna have t going to have . project manager: But why do we have to round it on the t bottom then ? Of Skip that one as well . user interface: and marketing: It's not not a lot of trends I I found project manager: Okay , so we have s still one minute left . So just marketing: project manager: I think it's okay if you just keep it a bit square . Yeah , marketing: It The th th industrial designer: I d I don't know n something about ergonomic kind of fits-in-the-hand stuff . It's only annoying if it if it's like that f formed like that , like f Whatever . Just you have a normal industrial designer: Yeah , but we're we're aiming at a young public . marketing: There is one There's just one overall important aspect is that we must make it fancy and it looks original , and I hope we can make it look not like the iPod itself . But you're If you look at the way remote controls are now project manager: But i it is it is it is already fancy . user interface: And if you make it look like the iPod marketing: Yeah , they're all the same . So that's already a very big change project manager: maybe maybe make the the the wha what's it called scroll wheel . Maybe we have to ask to the the to her if it has if it can work better than this . project manager: We just we just skip the the the voca or was it the the speech recognition . Yeah , do we s keep that ? Yeah , I think project manager: Or keep that ? It's okay . But you'd definitely need a industrial designer: S user interface: Well project manager: advanced chip . marketing: industrial designer: And we we have to build in a microphone and user interface: Well that's very easy . We already have the beeping of the home station , industrial designer: Yeah , and I do I don't know anything about that . user interface: so industrial designer: I d I didn't receive any information on speech recognition , marketing: No . Becau project manager: Can we just put it speech recognition in it as well , marketing: Yeah . But project manager: okay ? user interface: So marketing: Ma user interface: shall we it open then ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: Oh yeah , I marketing: But we don't have any f information about the cost . marketing: We started with information about the cost was now th user interface: I just I just received the industrial designer: Yeah , I have I have some some information about the cost . marketing: And how much is the chip ? The the the industrial designer: I don't know how much , but user interface: Yeah , our division has developed a new speech recognition feature , the integrated programmable sample sensor simple speaker u unit . industrial designer: Just in inexpensive or user interface: This is a very small electronic unit , will give a standard answer after it recognise a question . user interface: Yeah th that's just It's a marketing: Does it say does it say something back ? project manager: Okay , we have to stop it now . Yeah , it Well that's integrated in the chip , so if you use the speech recognition , that's in it . project manager: Okay , that's a r That's that's a advanced industrial designer: But i it's a separate chip . user interface: I dunno , but if we use speech recognition , that will be in it as well . industrial designer: Yeah , I don't know anything about this , marketing: project manager: Yeah , we just decide not to put it in , industrial designer: but Nah . project manager: Okay , just user interface: And there's a chip in it that will project manager: We have to stop it now

The group discussed the appeal of speech recognition, particularly among younger people, but ultimately concluded that it is mostly just a gimmick and not widely used unless it works well. Marketing agreed with this assessment, noting that speech recognition can become outdated and is not a priority for the target consumer group who are not the main spenders on remotes. However, despite the cost constraint set by management, the group decided to include speech recognition as a feature in the remote control. Marketing believed that it is worth the risk as speech recognition is a new and trendy function that customers would be willing to pay extra for. The Project Manager also agreed to coordinate with technical companies if the Industrial Designer needed any technological backup. The Industrial Designer suggested incorporating a simple speech recognizer on the digital signal processing chip and training it for specific users, but the User Interface Designer expressed concerns about complexity. The Industrial Designer argued that even simple mobile devices have voice dialers, so it wouldn't be too sophisticated, and Marketing agreed that the product would sell well with the speech recognizer. Emphasizing the importance of technological innovation, Marketing suggested directly integrating speech recognition into the remote and using an advanced chip. The group agreed, and the Industrial Designer mentioned a new and inexpensive speech recognition feature developed by the division: the integrated programmable sample sensor, indicating that the cost would not be excessive.

Question: Summarize the controversy surrounding China hoarding PPE during the pandemic, the impact on children with intense needs, the childcare offer, the overall impact on children, the specific questions and answers regarding the impact on education, and the discussion on data about obesity in children and beyond. Article: We've received apologies for absence from Julie Morgan, and I'm very pleased to welcome David Rees, who is substituting for her today. Item 2 this morning, then, is a session with the Minister for Children and Social Care on the Welsh Government's childcare offer. So, I'm very pleased to welcome Huw Irranca-Davies, Minister for Children and Social Care, also Jo-Anne Daniels, director for communities and tackling poverty, and Owain Lloyd, deputy director for childcare, play and early years. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions from Members, and the first questions come from Hefin David. How has it gone in the early implementer local authority areas, and is it something of a mixed bag? huw irranca-davies am: It's gone well, but I'm glad we've done it through this process of early implementer, actually piloting it, because we're learning lessons as we go along. It's been encouraging, to the extent that we're at the point where we're expanding—we've made announcements on expanding some of the early implementer areas so we can learn more lessons. But, in terms of what we're learning, one is the bureaucracy around the current approach that we're taking, because it's being done on the seven early implementers. So, we're asking parents to come in, provide their wage slips, provide the birth certificates, and so on. You're dealing sometimes with parents and families with complex issues and complex backgrounds, so it's difficult. In one case, it's a whole authority, but it's only one—that's in Blaenau Gwent. So, we're having parents, generally, who are outside the areas entirely saying, 'Why haven't we got this yet? Can we please get into it?', which is encouraging. But the other thing we're having is people who are within pilot authorities, where it doesn't extend to the whole authority, saying, 'Well, hold on now, we think we qualify for something under universal care, we think we qualify for something on tax credits. Why don't we qualify for this?' 'Well, you're not in the pilot area.' So, we're learning about these things, but the biggest one, I have to say, is the administrative burden, and I think that's interesting in how we take this forward for a wider roll-out. hefin david am: What is the administrative burden? What specifically is that? huw irranca-davies am: It is that sheer burden on each local authority, and each pilot area, to administer a scheme where we are asking parents to prove eligibility, to bring in documents to prove their eligibility, to make adjustments as it goes forward based on what their changing work patterns are, what their salary slips say. So, yesterday, when we made the statement following the announcement of the introduction of the Childcare Funding (Wales) Bill, we made clear that our preferred option, as put within that framework Bill, is actually to build on, and to learn from the lessons as well, the model of the HM Revenue and Customs type of model, where you actually have—and this, by the way, is supported by local authority providers out there—one system that is a centralised system, where there is clarity, that is handled, that has elements of information sharing between Government departments, such as the Department for Work and Pensions, and so on, so that the work is done for the parents, and the work is done for the local authorities; much cleaner, much simpler. hefin david am: How confident are you that you can achieve that by 2020? huw irranca-davies am: We are very confident. But, as I say, I'm more confident in the fact that we're actually piloting it, and phasing this in, because I think we've learned from some of the experiences elsewhere, including just over the border in England, where they have a different version of a childcare offer, but they've gone for it in a big-bang approach. And it has led to technical issues, it's led to volume issues, where their anticipation of how many people would buy into it was overwhelmed by the numbers who actually then came forward for it, and the complexity, I have to say, of individual family situations, whereas what we are doing, Hefin, is taking this forward very, very carefully. Each roll-out, each expansion that we're doing of the pilot is not—and I know this has caused some people to come back and say, 'Why can't we all have it now?' It's because we're only rolling out to areas where we now need to learn a lesson about whether it's rurality or, as it will be within densely urban areas, where the cost might be slightly higher, and that's allowing us to have the confidence that we'll have it. We've expanded the whole offer across Gwynedd—the whole of Gwynedd, Anglesey and Caerphilly. Flintshire now have a cross-authority offer. Rhondda Cynon Taf is anticipating doing this by September. Swansea is planning to do it, they tell us, in due course—in short order—as well. So, we have the confidence now that, with that learning going on from different pilot areas, we'll have the full roll-out by 2020. hefin david am: Is it true to say that, in the early adopter areas, the intensity of demand for the services is not spread evenly across? huw irranca-davies am: Absolutely. hefin david am: And why is that? Is that going to cause a problem across Wales? huw irranca-davies am: No, it won't cause a problem. If we were doing this tomorrow, it would cause a problem, but what we're learning is that there are some economic issues and then there are some cultural issues. We're not finding a problem here with capacity, whether it's in English language provision or whether it's in Welsh language provision, whether it's in children with complex needs, we're not finding that as an issue. But what we are finding is, for example, one of the well-known ones—and I've spoken about this before—is that, in some of the south Wales Valleys constituencies, there is a family tradition of doing childcare within the families. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and so on provide free, unregistered, unlicensed childcare of a sort. So, some of the aspects are cultural, but what we're also doing alongside this, whilst looking at the capacity and looking at how we learnt from the pilot roll-out, is that communication with parents and providers and local authorities as well. It's about communicating what the offer is, how simple it is to get invovled in this and where they go to, and, critically, I think, how we do that national roll-out would be important as well. hefin david am: So, given the point you've made about grandparents and family, wouldn't it be sensible, then, to offer a subsidy to grandparents to provide this kind of care? huw irranca-davies am: Unregistered grandparents? hefin david am: Well, through some kind of analysis of that. huw irranca-davies am: Well, we don't think so and there are good reasons behind this. hefin david am: Is it because you say that they wouldn't be registered as carers for their own family member? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, but there's a deeper reason behind that registration as well. The childcare offer isn't only to just provide childcare; it's the wider aspects that come with this. This childcare offer ties into the foundation years offer. There's an element of education linked to the childcare offer—there's that 10 hours of the early education foundation years as well. So, there's an issue here with quality, about socialisation and how children learn in an environment, as opposed to purely—as great as all our grandparents and aunts and uncles are—simply child-minding. So, the focus of this scheme is very much on registered licensed providers, which could be, by the way—because we do have them, and we're discussing this at the moment internally and with the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years and others—grandparents who are actually registered and inspected by the care inspectorate? We're having those discussions. hefin david am: How many of them are there? huw irranca-davies am: We don't think there is a huge number, but we're trying to bottom this out at the moment. We haven't got the exact number, but we don't think they are huge numbers, but there are, in our constituencies, registered, licensed, inspected grandparents who look after other people's children in a little group of four or five or six or seven, but also their own grandchildren. Now that, I would say to you—and I know that Darren raised this on the floor yesterday as well—is markedly different in the nature of it, because it's registered and licensed, than simply informal grandparents or aunts or uncles. I say that as well because we also get people who will say to us, 'I don't want to be paid for looking after my grandchildren; I look after my grandchildren because I look after them'. hefin david am: And what about the view, given that you said that capacity wasn't an issue, of the National Day Nurseries Association, which says that Wales has the most fragile childcare sector in Great Britain? huw irranca-davies am: I don't agree we have the most fragile, but the childcare offer gives us an opportunity to make it more resilient and more robust. We know from the early piloting, and as we roll it out, that there is the immense diversity within the childcare sector, and we're talking about everything from those very small terraced homes that have been licensed and registered to take six or seven children, to large, complex environments that perhaps are on maintained premises within school premises, provided by a voluntary or third sector organisation. So, there's immense complexity and we know that that differs across Wales, and we also know there's immense regional variation in the scale and the type of childcare offer. What the roll-out allows us to do, backed by £60 million of capital money behind it, in terms of capital development of childcare facilities, backed by a 10-year workforce development plan for childcare—and bear in mind this is bolted in as part of our foundational economy approach as well—that means, by 2020, we get to the point where we're putting the money into the capital development but also to the workforce development, because in some areas we're finding it's not to do with lack of provision and facilities, it's to do with lack of staff. hefin david am: That's fair enough, but is it realistic to think that there's going to be capacity growth in the next two to three years to deliver the product? Is that realistic to think that that foundational sector can provide that level of staffing? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, I think it is, absolutely, because, again, what we're finding is we've got several things going on at once in terms of how we monitor and assess the development of this roll-out. One is the work that we're doing on the ground with the phased roll-out, so we're literally learning live time, and I have pretty much weekly or fortnightly updates on how things are going, but also there is a termly update as well. We've also commissioned additional work from Arad to look at this first phase of the roll-out that we've done to see what that tells us as well. But the feedback that we're getting from the childcare providers themselves, on the basis that we're now identifying where either the gaps in the workforce or the physical facilities are, is that, 'Yes, we can do this', because we're putting the money in, we have the strategy for the workforce development, and it's not going to be the same in all parts of Wales. It's not as if what we're saying is, 'Here's what we're going to do all of a sudden—flick a switch and we have a universality of the same type of provision everywhere.' So, let me give you one key example. Alongside this, alongside the £60 million capital fund, alongside the workforce development, we've also identified a separate strain of money into cylch meithrin. We're specifically putting money into developing that, and, in fact, the first one of those will be, from that new tranche of money, opening up, I think, in September. They anticipate, as part of our big strategy with Welsh language development, we'll have an additional 40 of those by— jo-anne daniels: Thirty. huw irranca-davies am: It's an additional 30 by 2020, and an additional doubling of that in the 10 years after that. We can't take this for granted, Hefin. hefin david am: The last thing from me: the £4.50 single national rate—is there a danger that we might be creating a kind of EasyJet-style nursery provision where you get the basics but the wealthier parents are going to be able to pay for better care within those settings because of the add-ons? huw irranca-davies am: We really mulled over this a lot and discussed it, I have to say, not only internally but with childcare providers out there and with parents as well and with local authorities. The first thing to say is the £4.50 rate that we've set has been welcomed, and it's been welcomed because it's unlike the much more complex offer that's in England, where there's a variable rate and there are lots of determining factors on it and it's added complexity and confusion. hefin david am: Can I just ask there, it's been welcomed perhaps in Blaenau Gwent, but has it been equally welcomed in Cardiff? huw irranca-davies am: No, because we haven't rolled it out in Cardiff yet, and that is a salient point. But will it be, then? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, it will be. Some of the more expensive areas like Cardiff and Newport are knocking on our door saying, 'Please can we have this offer?', and we are keen to give it to them. But, as I say— hefin david am: But do you anticipate a capacity problem with the £4.50 in those areas, compared to, say, the Cynon valley? huw irranca-davies am: We can't anticipate it yet, Hefin, but that's exactly the reason for going into that area and then assessing how it works. We're reasonably assured by the feedback that we're having that the £4.50 might work as a universal amount. But if we learn, when we roll it out in Cardiff and Newport, that there needs to be some variation, we can look at that, because we're not doing a big-bang approach. So, that is part of why we will move to roll it out within Cardiff and Newport and other more expensive areas and learn from it, but at the moment, I have to say, the £4.50 amount has been welcomed—it's appropriate. You touched on the other aspect, though, of the wider aspects of beyond the £4.50, because the £4.50 doesn't cover everything. The £4.50 is a contribution towards the wraparound childcare element but it doesn't cover—and we agonised over this—the issues of things like transport out on trips or food or snacks and things like this. Now, we did agonise a number of things that brought us to the conclusion where we are. I have to say, this hasn't been ivory-tower stuff; it's been in discussion with the providers but also parents. One: parents are quite used to—with childcare settings and play care settings and so on—the idea that providers are quite different. Some providers charge a fee that does everything in one; others provide simply the childcare element but they tell the parents—and I'm used to this as a parent myself, although mine are older now—'Mr Irranca-Davies, when you sign on, just to be aware, if we do take your kids down to St Fagans, there's going to be a little bit of a charge for that' and so on. hefin david am: That's fair enough, but it would be the lowest-income working families who would be most unduly affected by that, because the higher income families would be able to afford those add-ons, the lower income ones won't. Isn't that a concern? huw irranca-davies am: If money was absolutely no object, then I think you'd be looking at quite a different offer, but it has to be affordable within what we've got as well. The fact that parents, including those who are on lower incomes, are used to currently discriminating between providers, not only with childcare settings but also within school settings as well, where very often schools now will say, 'We're doing something extra'— hefin david am: That may be the case, but it's not fair, is it? huw irranca-davies am: In a pure argument about equity, and if funding was no object and if the burdens of austerity were released and we were told we had money—'You can do what you want'—I think you'd be looking at a very different approach. But within what we have, I think this works very, very well indeed, because it's very transparent for parents who are used to making these decisions. But within those additional hours, you may be with a local provider in the middle of Powys that actually says, "Within that we provide everything"; you may be with a provider that says, "Well, actually, we do a whistles and bells thing and we take them out on trips, but it's up to you if you want to come, and here's the additional cost—".' Parents are used to making that decision and realistically, in terms of what we can do with this offer, this is actually—the arguments around this have been well rehearsed both with providers and with parents and we're not getting any concerns that this is going to unnecessarily disadvantage. In a total fairness argument, would you make it universal and with no additional charges? Well, possibly you would. But we work within the realistic— hefin david am: Or have a lower top-end income limit. huw irranca-davies am: Depending on how the Bill progresses in the main Chamber and when it goes through committee, there's that flexibility built into the Bill that those things can be looked at over time and adjusted. For the moment, I think there is an attraction, in terms of the upper limit, of saying: one—'Let's try not to add additional complexity, let's go with a scheme that's already working its way through the system, which is, if you like, what they're doing in England, and not add additional complexity. But, secondly, there is an appeal to universality, curiously, in saying to all parents—and I say this regardless of political hues across the committee here—there's an attraction when you say, 'Let's make an offer focused on working parents as it is', as universal to those working parents as possible, and avoid the administrative costs of saying, 'Well, let's take the upper limit down to £80 or £60 or £55.' There's always the question of how much additional cost is incurred in actually doing that tweak of complexity. darren millar am: Just to ask, the labour market costs are changing, aren't they? You've got the national living wage increasing—[Inaudible.]—that's going to have a bearing, isn't it, on the affordability of this project in terms of the childcare offer and the suitability of the £4.50 per hour regime? By the time it's fully rolled out, of course, that £4.50 rate is going to be a number of years old, for example. Do you have plans to review that? Where is it headed? Because it's certainly not going to be enough in the future. huw irranca-davies am: It depends how far in the future you're looking. I have to say, the feedback that we're having at the moment from organisations like the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years and from the National Day Nurseries Association Wales and others is that this is the right rate and it's suitable not only today but for the foreseeable future of rolling this out. darren millar am: But they've raised concerns about the national living wage implications, haven't they, as well? huw irranca-davies am: Of course, and I think it's incumbent on us as well to not— darren millar am: So, it's not fair to say that they haven't raised concerns about the rate. huw irranca-davies am: Yes, but what they're not arguing for at the moment is for this rate to be raised. darren millar am: But they have suggested that in meetings— huw irranca-davies am: That in future— darren millar am: Absolutely. huw irranca-davies am: Well, of course, in future, any Minister, any committee, will want to come back and look at—is the hourly rate, as one element of the scheme, appropriate to the current financial challenges for the sector, and not least, by the way, as we try not only to develop the workforce, but to develop the career pathways through this as well? And I think that's the right discussion to be had, live time, as this is taken forward. But at this moment in time, we're not getting people saying within this part of the roll-out that we need to adjust this amount. darren millar am: So, have you forecasted for any adjustment in the rate going forward in terms of affordability of the project? Because you've still got this £100 million price tag on it, haven't you? huw irranca-davies am: Similar to the point that was raised with Hefin about Cardiff and Newport, if we identify that the rate is not appropriate, if it's—. I don't think anybody's going to come back to us and say that it's too little. But do bear in mind that it's above where the average England rate is, even though there's this complex variability within the English rate that has caused some confusion there, which is why the universal rate with us has been welcomed. If we find, as we pilot it, or if we find because there are more expensive areas for it to be delivered in, there needs to be adjustment, then we'll be back in front of the committee arguing why that needs to be the case. darren millar am: But that won't put the project at risk in terms of its finances? huw irranca-davies am: No, no. We are still very confident, looking forward, on the best projections we have, fed by the live input that's coming in from the pilot, which will be fed again in the autumn—the Arad report coming forward—that we have not only the capacity to actually deliver this—challenging as this is, we have the capacity to deliver it—but also that the funding that's available, on our best estimate—the estimate we've stood by, that broad ball park of that £100 million figure—it's deliverable within that. And if it changes, I'll have to be sitting down with my boss, Vaughan Gething, and with Mark Drakeford, to argue the case on it. But that rate, combined with the other elements of this childcare offer—there is sufficient there allocated to actually deliver the whole roll-out. mark reckless am: Minister, as a parent who's been researching childcare options, it's obvious to me that in Cardiff, and to a degree in Newport and Monmouthshire, costs are substantially higher than this, and I haven't been able to find anywhere that has a six-hour day for £27, which is implied by your rate. Isn't it the case that rents and wages are higher and therefore you're going to need a higher rate to make it work? Isn't that already obvious? Why are you postponing coming back and looking at this until some point in the future? huw irranca-davies am: Chair, my biggest fear is a parent who's actually involved in this area already, but, having been one myself—. Mark, you may be right, that's exactly why we're piloting it and that's why when we pilot in Cardiff and Newport, we know we have lessons to learn over the affordability and the £4.50 per hour rate. mark reckless am: But you're not piloting it in any of the high-cost areas that I've referred to. mark reckless am: When are you starting? huw irranca-davies am: Cardiff and Newport—September. The reason we've gone for the other areas first, by the way—please take this back to any authorities affected—is simply because we've done deep dives into areas that vary from very rural areas in mid Wales, areas in north Wales, areas around Welsh language provision, areas in deep valleys, understanding the cultural and the economic impacts. So, we've held back a little bit from going into what we know is an obvious challenge within the more expensive areas of provision. But it's coming, it's imminent, and we'll learn the lessons from it. And do you know, you may be right? And if you are right, that it's more expensive, and we need a higher rate within those areas, then we're going to have to come back and discuss it with the committee. lynne neagle am: Just before I bring David in on the issue that Hefin raised about the chargeable items, your paper says that providers can charge up to £7.50 a day for food, snacks, transport and consumables such as nappies. Now, that's £37.50 a week, which is a lot of money for parents, and I just wondered if you wanted to comment on that figure? But also, do you think there's a risk that providers who maybe aren't charging at the moment may start charging because of any new pressures that arise because of this scheme? huw irranca-davies am: I think they're the right areas to flag up, and if I thought that was going to happen I'd be concerned as we take this forward and design this scheme. I think part of the evaluation from Arad will also show us that—whether or not, within the pilot areas that we are already in, which are quite diverse, that is happening. We're only one term into learning the lessons, by the way, but I would want to make sure that we design a scheme where we are not heaping on disadvantage or where there was exploitation of disadvantaged families. I think also, by the way, that providers know that this is a collaborative effort to do this here. It's not in their interests, I have to say, as the umbrella bodies or individual providers, to see this as some way that they can unduly rake in additional income from this on the backs of poorer families. But especially, I have to say, the early evaluation that we've seen already suggests that the greatest proportion of those who are taking advantage of this scheme in the early parts—in the early evaluation—are those who are below the average working wage within in Wales. That's by far the greatest number of people who are doing it, and we don't want them then being priced out because of add-ons. So, there has to be some pragmatism, I have to say, and some open partnership working here with the sector, and we do have that. john griffiths am: I want to come back to the £4.50 rate, but in terms of working with the sector, briefly, if I might, Chair, I just wonder, Huw, in terms of that £4.50 figure and understanding the sector in Wales, to what extent are we talking about a market rate and to what extent are we talking about the increase in demand that will come from the scheme and how that relates to economies of scale and capacity? Is it purely a market rate or is there a conversation with the sector in terms of the benefits that will come from this scheme and how they should be recognised in terms of setting the rate? huw irranca-davies am: This has been a very open dialogue with the sector around affordability, around the hourly rate and around what might happen in future as well. This is not a pure hard data-driven analysis that says, 'Here we've calculated everything and this is the rate that will satisfy it', because we recognise that there's great diversity in provision out there, and we also recognise that things will change over time. I think we need to, as we take this scheme forward and look at the full roll-out, continue in that very open dialogue with the sector not about what is purely a market-driven amount but actually what is also affordable for the Welsh Government within the constraints that we have. Just to flag up one issue, it's right that we're focusing on those elements that aren't included within it, to some extent as well, and the effect of that on more disadvantaged families, but that has to be balanced with the pocket of affordability for this scheme as well. Let me give you a clear illustration: some of our calculations have suggested that if we included free food within this offer as well, it would add something like in the region of 50p to that £4.50 rate. That would have, at this moment, impacts on the affordability of this and the roll-out of it. I would need to be going back to my seniors and arguing the case now, okay? But, it's that open dialogue with the sector that says, 'There's one thing about what you're saying you demand as a market; there's another thing about what we're saying that we have affordability from taxpayers' money to actually put into this'. They also understand, John, that as well as an enabling policy—and we're seeing the evidence, by the way; I can cite it—of individuals who are being helped into more flexible options to get back into work, increase their hours and so on, this is also about building capacity in a fundamental foundation sector that is in every single part of Wales. The sector itself understands that if we boost the childcare offer in all its diversity, including, by the way, not just the independent sector but social enterprises and third-sector organisations, such as exist in Neath and elsewhere that I was involved in 20 or 30-odd years ago setting up—that has an economic impact that goes beyond that immediate family who are receiving the provision to the wider communities as well. So, it's an open dialogue on what the rate should be rather than purely, 'Our wonks have crunched the numbers and we've come up with £4.50.' lynne neagle am: David, you had a question on the pilots. Before I go to my question, I want to come back to Mark Reckless's question and the answer you gave. I got the impression that if there is a need to look at different rates because of the higher-end areas, you may therefore have different sets of rates and not a universal rate. Is that also on the cards? huw irranca-davies am: David, it's possible. I think our preference would be, I have to say, to stick with the universal rate, because we know it's—. One of the defining hallmarks of the way that we've taken this scheme forward is learning in live time as we pilot and expand the pilots into different areas and different types of provision. If we learn lessons from that that suggest we need to come back and look at a differential in more-expensive-to-provide areas, then we'll have to look at that, but there might be other ways of splicing it. We might find, Mark, we might find, David, that we go in and when everything is tallied up, the £4.50 per hour works in supporting provision there. If I can now remind you: I don't remember the word 'affordability' coming in the manifesto pledge of the Government. In the situation regarding Welsh-medium, you answered that a little bit earlier, but I have concerns about capacity. There's clearly a need to get more staff, because in your own paper you say that the report in 2016 said you do not have the childcare capacity in Wales at the moment. Do you believe that you can actually deliver the workforce to meet that capacity, first of all through the English medium, but secondly through the Welsh medium as well? Because there's a clear need to look at it. Do you actually think you've got that workforce capacity set up before this is fully rolled out? huw irranca-davies am: I hope, Chair, you'll appreciate that in our submission to you we've been very open. We have confidence that we can do this if everybody is working together across the sector, across the local authorities. Let me talk broadly about capacity, first of all, including English and Welsh-medium provision for children with complex needs, provision for children with disabilities—all of this. The work that we're doing to increase both capacity in terms of trained staff and qualified staff: we have the 10-year plan that I mentioned, which has already been announced. So, we're identifying not only broadly at a national level where we need to develop those qualifications, but also at a regional, geographic level as well, and that's being taken forward. As you can see from what I've said before, it's rolling out progressively, but with all 22 authorities we're working with them on their childcare sufficiency assessments to identify where their shortages are. david rees am: What have the pilot programmes actually shown you about this, and how are you going to move this forward? huw irranca-davies am: Well, it's precisely that. So, within the pilot areas, we have a greater depth of analysis now of where both the workforce and the physical provisions are. Whether those are maintained or non-maintained or third sector or school facilities or whatever, we've got a much deeper granulation of identifying where that is, and we're working, then, with those authorities, with the capital moneys that we've allocated to this and the workforce development, and with local colleges, to develop the workforce and the physical constraints. But we're also doing that with the other 22, with all the 22 authorities as well, in anticipation of the wider roll-out. And by the way, it's not only the Cardiffs and the Newports; it's all the other ones where there isn't full roll-out. We're engaged with them deeply at the moment with that analysis on their childcare sufficiency assessments, both in terms of workforce, but also physical provision. It doesn't mean, by the way, that we exclude the third sector or social enterprise approach, or the independent sector, but co-location could be key to the roll-out of this in the right areas where it can be done, because then we avoid any fracture between the education hours and the childcare hours: the physical transportation of children from one location to another. So, we're engaged with the 22 authorities on that: where could that be developed, who would be the providers that would do it and do they have the workforce to scale up to do it? If not, how do they talk to local colleges to do that? So, we're doing that at the moment. I mentioned we've put the £1 million additional funding into the meithrin over the next two years, targeting 40 new Welsh-medium groups by 2021, which pretty much coincides with the full roll-out of this. So, all of those things, David, give us a confidence that we're going to be in the right place. david rees am: But in particular, take the Welsh language—I understand Gwynedd, and I won't ask another question on that for obvious reasons at this point in time—but in some of the other areas where you've piloted, you've gone partial in some areas. When there's Welsh language education, and the three to five-year-olds go to schools, they go from all areas of the council, basically. They don't actually go necessarily from the local area, and therefore you're getting a different picture. Have you been able to assess the actual impact, properly, upon the Welsh-medium side of things? Because, for example, my grandchildren will go from my area, which may not be in one of the considerations, to a school that may be in that consideration, and that happens regularly. We know that historically we've got, across the country, a shortage of Welsh-language childcare provision—meithrin and so on—but we have not only a strategy in place, but the fact that we've got local authorities now doing their own assessments within their area, across the piste of childcare, but also in terms of Welsh language, that means then that we can start filling those gaps with the money we've put to it, and that includes in all parts of Wales, including those areas within south Wales and others that are less deep in their tradition of speaking Welsh over recent history, anyway, but where the demand for it is massive. So, local authorities are tasked with doing their own assessments of childcare sufficiency for this childcare offer. They're identifying the gaps, David, and we will work with them and with providers to fill those gaps, and that includes with the umbrella organisations for Welsh language childcare provision. And this does mean, Chair, that it will be different, as it currently is in different areas: the type of provision, where the provision is located. This offer won't happen unless the provision is there for those children with complex needs, children with disabilities, Welsh language provision, as well as more generic provision as well, but it will be diverse in its provision around areas. lynne neagle am: I do want to move on now, John, so if I can come back to your question. llyr gruffydd am: I would like to pick up on the last point, if I may. A question from me though, the wider question, is: how do we mainstream Welsh medium into childcare? Because, clearly, leaving it to meithrin is one way of doing it, but there's a lot of existing infrastructure out there that we need to upskill in terms of the provision of Welsh medium. So, it's not a question as such, but I'm sure you recognise that—that there is a challenge there. Because if we are to get to where we want to get to, it isn't about growing meithrin, or Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin; it's about mainstreaming Welsh-medium provision within the wider sector. So, looking at the manifesto commitment that was made in 2016, clearly the main or the principal aim of this policy is around removing some of the barriers to secure employment for parents, albeit with very positive outcomes for the children themselves, and we don't ignore or neglect that at any cost. But I'm just wondering: how would you then reconcile that with the findings of the Public Policy Institute for Wales report, which I mentioned to you yesterday, which was commissioned by the Government to look at policy options in this context, which concluded that there will be no 'substantial impacts on net income, poverty or work behaviour for families with children' and that 'the impact on work participation and work hours for mothers in families with a child of target age is extremely small'? huw irranca-davies am: Well, the first thing I would say is that what we're learning from the pilots is that it is having real-life impacts on parents, including in disadvantaged families, and we're having this fed back from real-life situations on the ground, where parents are making different choices in the areas where it's being piloted. So, the types of different choices they're making could be to expand the number of hours that they're in work, because they now have a choice, they're not constrained to certain hours or whatever, they have a wider choice, with a wider number of providers, and they're making that decision and they're able to expand their hours. Some, by the way, Llyr, I have to say—and, again, these are real-life situations—are saying, 'What we're doing is not expanding our hours, but, because of the increased provision of childcare and the increased offer, we are now able to actually spend more time with our children, because we're adjusting our hours of work, based on the childcare provision offer.' That in itself, I have to say, is a worthy aim. But I would say what we found out, in real-life examples—I'm not saying that in direct contrast to what that paper was saying— llyr gruffydd am: That's what I was going to ask; it sounds as if you're saying they were wrong. huw irranca-davies am: But what we have is the advantage of this phased roll-out, where we are learning, live time, and I think the Arad report in October—we're hoping to see the final report in October—will help put some flesh on this as well. It is already having an effect: the majority of parents who are taking advantage of this are actually in those groups that are below the average wage, they are making positive choices to get into this offer and to either expand, take more hours, adjust their own lifestyles around it or more. I can cite to you examples, because I've asked my own officials on this, of families who tell us they're saving up to £250 a week on the basis of this offer within the pilot areas, who've increased their hours of employment, who've changed their working patterns to suit their work life, but also to suit their families. llyr gruffydd am: So, in effect, you are saying that the PPIW report got it wrong, basically. huw irranca-davies am: No, I'm not saying that they got it wrong and it's wholly wrong, but it is interesting, within that report, that it did identify that there were a range of factors here that play upon this. It's not only the childcare; it is the transport, it's the training and education, it's the employment support and all of those. And we agree with that, but we do think, and what we're seeing, live time, at the moment—maybe at some point, somebody else will produce a report beyond the Arad report in October that will say, 'Well, actually, the way this is designed, that they've done it in Wales, is having a material effect on those families, particularly the most disadvantaged families.' llyr gruffydd am: But you're asking us to support a Bill here, albeit a framework Bill, to achieve a policy aim where you're giving us anecdotal evidence that it's having an impact, contrary to research that's previously been done, albeit with promises that, maybe, an evaluation sometime in the autumn might tell us a different story. huw irranca-davies am: We know, and we are constantly told—I'm sure this is commonplace in constituency surgeries, as well—by parents who say that the biggest mitigating factor for them, actually, either going into work at an earlier opportunity or expanding their hours is purely the cost of childcare in front of them. I think our further reports, both Arad and as we go forward with the pilots, will substantiate this more. It'll go beyond the anecdotal, it will show that parents are having an enhanced opportunity to balance their work life, to make better choices, either in terms of expanding the number of hours they're working and increasing their disposable income within their families, or actually making it simply better for them in their family situation, where they don't currently have that offer. So, I get the fact that we have one report out there, but it's one report. It's a report, and we're not dismissing it entirely, but what we are saying is: we are now working with real-life piloting of an offer, and we are seeing the benefits coming through. As we roll this out, we'll be back in front of this committee saying, 'Well, this is now what we're finding. We can go beyond the real-life stories that I'm relating to you now, and we can say, "Well, here's some hard data that goes with this, as well."' llyr gruffydd am: Okay. You reference in your paper, as well, another report, which is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, 'Starting Strong 2017', and it highlights countries that have, maybe, the most similar childcare offer to what's being proposed here in Wales. I'm just wondering what assessment you've made of those similarities, because, clearly, there'll be different economic contexts in different countries and different levels of public expenditure, et cetera. huw irranca-davies am: We haven't done really detailed analysis of comparisons with other countries far from Wales, but we will be doing work that will be doing some benchmarking against, where we can find similar models, where appropriate—do some appropriate benchmarking. What we have been doing is looking at what's been happening across the border in England and trying to learn from the lessons there, and also the offer in Scotland as well, which are both close to hand. But we will do some work, Llyr, around benchmarking against good comparative international examples, where appropriate. llyr gruffydd am: Yes, there we are, because one of my concerns was that the focus in a number of the countries in the OECD report are for nought to three-year-olds, whereas, of course, the policy focus here is for a slightly older age group. huw irranca-davies am: Yes, and I fully get that, but again, and I know it can be said, 'Well, this is an example' but it's real-life examples. We are having people who are telling us that they're now making the choice to go to work earlier because this is extended to three-year-olds, but they would have delayed. There is a direct outcome there if this childcare offer enables somebody to say, 'Well, I'm going to go a year earlier back into work and bring income into the family.' llyr gruffydd am: Okay. So, moving on, then, to the impact on the child and this whole question around school readiness, of course, which is an important one to address. Clearly, one of the main outcomes of this policy will be the academic performance of children, hopefully, later on in life. I want to come back to this point that the Children's Commissioner for Wales and others have raised: the concern that, actually, the most disadvantaged—those from workless households—are being excluded from this policy. Isn't there therefore a risk that they'll be left even further behind? huw irranca-davies am: I've had long, detailed and positive discussions with the children's commissioner on this, and I know the children's commissioner would want a more universal offer, but I make two points on that: one is, that was not what the commitment in the manifesto was, and it's not the offer that's being taken forward now. It is a different thing, a universal offer, and there are issues around that with complexity, and also affordability. But it isn't the offer that we took forward into Government; this is what we're taking forward. I'd say two significant things on it: one is, this doesn't stand alone purely as 30 hours of childcare. Within this, there are 10 hours of the foundation years, educational input, which is there for everybody. But before that, particularly for those disadvantaged families, before we even get to that stage, you have schemes such as Flying Start, and I know this committee has looked in detail at Flying Start and has said that it would like to see it rolled out everywhere. If I had all the money under the sun, I would really do that, Chair; I would really do it. huw irranca-davies am: Yes, but the fact that Flying Start, we know, is leading to those outcomes where those children, in quite challenged circumstances very often, are more ready to step up to the foundation year, are more ready, then, to step through into mainstream education in later years—those things tie together. So, there are the 10 hours of education provision that sits here for every family, by the way, within this offer, let alone the childcare. That doesn't mean that everybody's excluded, but it does mean, yes, that this offer is focused on working parents. In fact, it does overlap with other offers that other political parties were taking forward into the last election, which was focusing on how we support the biggest thing that we often have in our constituency mailbags, which is, 'I can't afford to go back to work because I can't afford the childcare. Don't tell me to go back to work, I can't afford it.' llyr gruffydd am: The majority of disadvantaged children don't live in Flying Start areas, do they? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, indeed. llyr gruffydd am: So, there's a missing cohort there that can't access one or the other, and the school readiness gap is growing, and, really, are we focusing our resources in the right place here? huw irranca-davies am: Well, yes, in terms of this scheme, but it doesn't sit alone as this scheme—it's the wider plethora of, I have to say, progressive and advanced initiatives that we have in Wales that take different forms. It's not only Flying Start that provides that other support for parents, and readiness not only for the parents and for their children, but also the support into work. So, if, for example, you look at the Parents, Childcare and Employment programme, which is separate from this, there is support there for every parent in terms of helping them get supported into work from disadvantaged families. If you look at the support for the children, we've got the 10 hours that sits within the sphere of the education, but we've also got all the other family intervention programmes that help with socialisation, education and so on and so forth. If you look at this solely on its own and say, 'Well, there is nothing else there; the rest of Wales is a desert and there's no support for parents, for getting parents back into work or for those parents who are not seeking to go back into work but also need the support and for their children in education', I'd be worried. But, actually, this fits as part of the jigsaw that we have in Wales, where I think we are well ahead of the other nations. Yes, we could do more, and I always say, Llyr; I always say, Chair, that if I had—I don't have a chequebook at all, because it's not in my gift—if I had a blank cheque I'd do a lot more, but we don't. But what we can do is get the right schemes in place, and if this helps drive more choices for working parents, including, by the way—. There are niceties within this as well; it doesn't have to be that both parents are working. darren millar am: I am surprised by the answer there, particularly given that one of the ambitions of the Government is to close this attainment gap later in life when schoolchildren get to their examinations, when they're 16 years old. Yet this appears to be driving a bigger wedge in terms of development, which could, of course, lead to a perverse outcome later on in life, but I don't want to ask you about that. If I can just very quickly ask you: has consideration been given to making free childcare available to parents where they're in 16 hours or more of education each week? So, they may not be entering the labour market, but, of course, one of those barriers to them getting back into the labour market could well be their education, so what arrangements are in place there? huw irranca-davies am: Darren, we have considered it, and we haven't included it within the scheme because this is designed to enable parents to go into work, not into training to enable them to get into work. There are other forms of support available for parents in terms of college and so on and so forth, but it's not this scheme. darren millar am: But it's not prescribed support, is it? You know, it's not universally available to people who might be wanting to get back into the labour market over that barrier. You must have done some costings, then, if you've considered it, and you must have tried to identify numbers. huw irranca-davies am: We haven't— darren millar am: So, you haven't considered it that much, have you? huw irranca-davies am: We have actually considered—. We consider it from the point of, 'What is this scheme set up to do?' It's very clear. But, very specifically, when you say you've considered it, what you mean is you thought about it but you've not costed it, you've not identified the numbers that might be involved— huw irranca-davies am: Absolutely, absolutely. darren millar am: And therefore you've not considered whether it might be affordable in addition to the policy objective that this is trying to meet. huw irranca-davies am: No, Darren, you're right: we haven't considered affordability because we've considered it on first principles to do with what this offer is trying to do. It doesn't fit within the offer so, as such, why would we do the costings? darren millar am: Perhaps I can frame my question in another way. Are you prepared to consider it if you're able to identify the numbers and potential cost? huw irranca-davies am: Ah, right, okay. We'd be interested in your thoughts as a committee, but it doesn't actually fit within the first principles of what the scheme is designed to do. Darren, can I just pick up on your point, in case you misinterpreted what I was saying to Llyr? I drew attention in my answer to Llyr to schemes such as the PaCE scheme. In Gwynedd, one of our pilot areas, they are combining the Team Around the Family with this childcare offer. It is not the case, as you've suggested then, that there is somehow more disadvantage being heaped on other families. What this does is tie in in those pilot areas with the existing provision, and that's the way we want to see it work. So, I wouldn't want you to be under any misapprehension that this makes conditions worse for families. Those families who have a registered carer in them where one parent works, and those families who have somebody on incapacity benefit will qualify for the scheme. All families will qualify for the 10 hours of education. In Gwynedd, they're wrapping the Team Around the Family with this offer— darren millar am: But on the other hand, Minister, you've also suggested that this will accelerate child development for those kids who are able to access it, and yet not all kids will be able to access it, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. huw irranca-davies am: But all children can access the 10 hours, and they can access Flying Start— darren millar am: But 10 hours is very different to 30 hours, is it not? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, but they can access Flying Start or they can access the Team Around the Family— darren millar am: If they're in a Flying Start area. huw irranca-davies am: —or they can be in a children's zone area or they can— darren millar am: If they're in those areas. lynne neagle am: Right, I've got John and then David, and the questions and answers are going to have to be brief, please. In terms of child development and how this fits with wider Welsh Government strategy, Huw, I'd be interested in what you'd have to say about the quality of childcare. We're talking a lot about quantity, but obviously we want to up quality, and that's recognised by Welsh Government. I just wonder how that sits within the £4.50, because there could be pressures in the opposite direction there, and some tension between wanting to up the qualifications and quality of workforce whilst keeping affordability in place. huw irranca-davies am: John, you're absolutely right, and two things on that: I visited one of the facilities in the Valleys the other day that was taking this forward—a very good independent sector-run childcare provision, with Welsh language and English language running alongside each other, and I asked the point about the integration, curiously, but what they were doing was—. Their standard of staff was an exemplar of what we'd want to see: not only very well-qualified childcare staff who were qualified within not simply the child-minding but the wider child development aspects—. So, it was hard to differentiate, in some ways, what was happening there from what would be happening in a child development educational surrounding, and including the nutritional stuff and all of that. Now, that is the model we need to see, and the £4.50 seems to work, at the moment, for that. But the quality, I think, is key, and that's why we're focused very much on registered inspected providers, as opposed to every Tom, Dick and Harriet. john griffiths am: If we want to increase salary levels, though, which I think is a necessary part of this picture of improving quality, then obviously that might impact on the £4.50 rate. huw irranca-davies am: Yes, indeed, and we are cognisant—. It's interesting that we focus on whether the £4.50 is affordable, but the £4.50—you know, we're having an interesting discussion internally about how that £4.50 offer per hour sits alongside others, such as the foundation phase offer, and it's more generous. So, I think it's: how do we align, as time goes by, the child development aspects of the whole early years stuff? Now, we're doing some fascinating work that I think I've referred to on this committee before about aligning the early years development entirely. Now, this is an evolving piece of work, but I think the childcare offer should ultimately fit within that. How do you make sure that every offer that is Government-funded works on child development? It's not simply childcare. mark reckless am: In terms of child development and not accentuating disadvantage, another area where this may apply is the kids who are born in the summer term, compared to those who are born in Michaelmas. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that they start with a disadvantage at school and often don't make that up, even as they go through school. What is the rationale for providing the older children with five terms of this, compared to three terms for the younger children who already have the relative disadvantage? huw irranca-davies am: I'm looking to my colleagues here and— jo-anne daniels: Well, the criteria for eligibility for the offer are the term after the child's third birthday, which is equivalent to the eligibility criteria for the foundation phase early education offer. Clearly, then, the number of terms that a child is able to, or parents are able to, access the childcare offer will be influenced by when the child is born, but I think you may be referring to a sort of parallel question, which is about whether—. There have been questions raised about whether children who are summer-born should, in fact, start school in the term after they turn four, or whether actually they should be allowed the flexibility to start school at a later age, which I know is something that has been tested in England, and there is some mixed evidence about school starting age and the birth month of children. That's the compulsory school— jo-anne daniels: Well, that's the legal position, but, obviously, in practice, most children will start school in the term after they're four. mark reckless am: So, given the disadvantage we know that the younger children born in the summer have, relative to the older ones, why accentuate that by giving the older kids five terms of this project, which you tell us will have such positive effects on their child development, but the summer kids only get three? Doesn't that make the situation worse? jo-anne daniels: I'm not 100 per cent sure I understand the question. So, children will stop being in receipt of the childcare offer once they become eligible for a full-time school place, and most children will become eligible for a full-time school place in the term after their fourth birthday. mark reckless am: But the older kids become eligible for this five terms before they start school, where the younger kids, who're already disadvantaged, become eligible for it only three terms before, accentuating the problem, surely. Could more thought be given to this issue? huw irranca-davies am: We'll take that away. Minister, you got, or Welsh Government, really, got the Public Policy Institute for Wales to study this proposed policy and they concluded that it would have no substantial impacts on net income, poverty or work behaviour for families with children, and that the impact on work participation and work hours for mothers and families with a child of target age is extremely small. What do you say to that? huw irranca-davies am: Well, Mark, I can only refer to what I said earlier. Our real-life evidence that is accumulating now is showing us examples of where people are making savings and increasing disposable income—as I mentioned earlier, up to £250 per week within some poorer households; so, real-life examples—but also where it's enabling them to make much better choices about when they work because there's more childcare offer available, or, alternatively, to work their childcare provision and their working hours around being able to spend more time with their children, which they currently can't do. lynne neagle am: And I don't want to go back over Llyr's questions. They said if you had a work requirement, as you do, it would cost £61 million a year on their numbers, substantially less than you're saying, and then they said it would cost £144 million without a work requirement. Now, that implies to me that 57 per cent of the parents wouldn't be working and would continue not working even if there is this available with a work requirement. , are those numbers really credible from PPIW? huw irranca-davies am: It's not quite comparing like with like. Just to draw your attention, Mark, and the committee's attention to that the PPIW analysis was looking at a provision of 38 weeks. And the fact that we are having parents already saying to us that their ability to actually extend that into the 48 weeks—beyond the term time and so on—carries advantages that are not picked up in that report. mark reckless am: And what is your early assessment of the income levels of families who are finding this offer most attractive? huw irranca-davies am: I think, from recollection, we're one term in, so we're one term into the assessment, and I mentioned earlier that the majority of parents are below the average income of £26,000 in Wales— it's around about 60 per cent of families are those. It's disproportionately towards those below the average income, and many of them amongst the most disadvantaged families are opting in to this offer where it is being offered. mark reckless am: And what consideration have you given to integrating this Welsh Government offer with the UK Government offer of tax-free childcare that's applicable across the UK? huw irranca-davies am: Well, that offer, as you rightly say, is available across the UK and still is. The fact that it's more integrated within their scheme within England—the tax offer is more integrated—has caused them some problems in complexity and in the administration of this and the digital platforms that they've had. That offer is still available in Wales and it might well be that parents who opt in to that say, 'Well, we do want to buy additional hours beyond the 30 hours', but this 30 hours is there for every— mark reckless am: I wonder, Minister, whether what you're doing, in a very good way, to promote your project—people will see that as the childcare offer and, at least in my experience, very few parents are aware of the tax-free childcare on a UK basis. That's absolutely one of the lessons we've learnt from even this early stage of the early implementers, because there are elements of a childcare offer within the tax offer, within universal credit, within working tax credit. So, one of the lessons that we've learnt from the Talk Childcare communication strategy alongside this is the importance of communicating to parents and providers who the parents go to what is best for them to access, how they access it easily, and we'll learn more as these pilots roll by. mark reckless am: So, as you go into the Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs criteria—you have a £100,000 cap, as well as the £6,000 minimum wage cap, and you're getting HMRC to say whether people are eligible, which requires them to set up that account with HMRC—will you assure this committee that you will make sure that parents who are doing that are aware of the UK tax-free childcare offer, and that their providers also are? Because we've been looking, say, at the £7.50 extra per day, but, if someone's eligible for this offer, they should also be eligible for the UK tax-free childcare offer and have set up the account to do that. So, will you make sure that those parents know to pay their provider out of tax-free funds, rather than paying them the fully taxed amounts, which might otherwise happen? huw irranca-davies am: Yes, absolutely. owain lloyd: Yes, just to say, as I understand how things currently work with the English offer and TFC, when a parent applies, that automatically happens in terms of, on the one hand, they're given a 'yes' or 'no' in terms of their eligibility for the 30-hours offer in England, but they will also be told in terms of the parental account that's set up under TFC. So, that is integrated in the offer, and we'll be looking to do the same in terms of the Welsh offer. But, obviously, what we're not looking at doing in terms of the 30-hours offer is the setting up of the parental account to make the payment; the payment currently is very much between local government and the provider directly, rather than the TFC model, where the parent pays the provider. Can I thank the Minister and the officials for attending? You are, of course, back with us on 16 May for Stage 1 of the Bill, so we will look forward to seeing you then. So, if Members are content, I'd suggest that we note all of them in a block, if that's okay. Can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Okay<doc-sep>We've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies and Jack Sargeant and I'm very pleased to welcome Jayne Bryant back, who is substituting for Jack today. Item 2, then, this morning, is our sixth scrutiny session on the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. I'm very pleased to welcome our witnesses this morning: Sally Jenkins, who is chair of All Wales Heads of Children’s Services and is here representing the Association of Directors of Social Services; Alastair Birch, who is senior system leader for equalities and safeguarding at Pembrokeshire County Council, who is here representing the Association of Directors of Education Wales; and Councillor Huw David, who is the Welsh Local Government Association spokesperson for health and social care and leader of Bridgend County Borough Council. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so, if you're happy, we'll go straight into questions and I'll start just by asking about your general support for the Bill, which is outlined in the evidence. Can you just explain why you think the current law is ineffective or unclear? alastair birch: Bore da—bore da, bawb. The statement, really, from ADEW is that the rights of the child should be educated and achieved, really, under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The current legislation has been criticised, obviously, by the UN concerning the defence of reasonable punishment still being within our current legislation. So, we will always—ADEW will always—advocate that the rights of the child be upheld, so that is really the fundamental aspect in terms of the statement from ADEW, and the position of ADEW is that the rights of the child are fundamental in this process. I know that the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 made sure that article 3 and article 4, article 12 and article 37 were a focus in terms of making sure that the best interests of the child were put first, that children expressing their views and opinions was a priority. And we know, for safeguarding purposes, that the express opinions of the child and the voice of the child are a fundamental aspect of any safe environment, whether it be a school or college. So, that is—the position is really following that legal position under the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure. Nothing to add at this stage, no? sally jenkins: I'll just add, on behalf of ADSS and on behalf of children's services and social services more widely, for us, this is not a change in our position, this is not new; this is a position that we, on behalf of the leaders of social services across Wales, have taken over many years, going back 20, 25 years. I think what we would say is that we really welcome this Bill and we welcome the proposed change for the clarity it would bring—the clarity that it would bring for children, for parents and for professionals. I think what we would recognise is that this is a very little-used piece of legislation, so it's rare, it's not as if this is something that is going to cast great change across the scene for children and families in Wales, but what it will do is represent a change in the reality of how we care and nurture our children. I would echo absolutely what Alastair has said in terms of the rights of the child, but equally, in terms of all of our policies in Wales in terms of promoting well-being for children, this has to be key. So, for us, this is about a natural progression of change in how we care for our children in Wales. For children's services at the very sharp end of this world, for us, it brings a true clarity. This continues with an ambiguity in how we treat our children and how we care for our children, and the shift for us brings that very much needed clarity. The committee has already heard different views about whether there's clear evidence that physical punishment is harmful to children. What evidence does the work of social services provide about whether physical punishment is actually harmful? sally jenkins: Obviously, what you'll all be aware of is that, as part of the consultation for this Bill, the Public Policy Institute did a further piece of research to look at the impact of physical punishment on children. A number of things that we know—we know from across the world that the evidence is that introducing legislation or changing legislation in this way improves children's positions within their families. What we know is that children themselves, as Alastair has already referred to, really find physical punishment demeaning and harmful, and for children it is an emotionally damaging experience. Now, there may be disagreement about that, there will be different views on that, but that's the voice of the child in this debate. I think what we would also say is that, in the world that we work in, it's part of a continuum, and, whilst this is an element of how children are cared for, what we see is a continuum where an acceptance of how we treat children in a particular way perpetuates throughout our work. By changing this, it helps that shift to that absolute recognition that our children must be cared for in a way that is physically safe in all dimensions for them. We've had evidence from the equal protection network that the reasonable punishment defence undermines child protection and fails to protect children because it permits an arbitrary level of violence, which invades children's physical integrity, making it a potential pathway to more serious physical or sexual abuse, and you did refer to that just now. It is about how we see our smallest and most vulnerable people, and if it is acceptable it opens the door to those other, more extreme versions of violence, which then complicates the issue for us. This is about clarity, and, whilst there is an argument that this is a small episode for a child, it's not a small episode for a child, it is a major episode for a child, and I think absolutely, as you said, the potential for it then to lead on, and over gradation and time to increase the risk for children, is clearly there. The final question from me: your written evidence emphasises the need for greater clarity around the definition of what constitutes corporal punishment, but that contrasts with what we've been told by the children's commissioner and the equal protection network, who've emphasised the importance of simplicity in the Bill. How do you respond to that view, and is what you're calling for essential to be on the face of the Bill? sally jenkins: It's not essential for it to be on the face of the Bill. Absolutely agree in terms of simplicity—I think that is really important—and I've already mentioned clarity. We know that the legislation in different countries has done that, and there are ways that you can do it, but what we would welcome is an opportunity during the implementation phase for discussion. huw david: And, as a principle, obviously we would welcome full involvement, and we know there's the commitment from Welsh Government to full involvement in the implementation, because, as with every piece of legislation, implementation is the most important part, and we would want to ensure there is that commitment to a major awareness-raising campaign, and there is that from Welsh Government, because we need to take families, carers and parents with us on this. Also we need to ensure that there is that support available to parents and carers that do sometimes struggle with parenting, and that needs to be a universal offer across Wales. If we're to progress with this, that has to be an option that is offered to every parent in Wales. sally jenkins: Local authorities have already been very heavily involved in terms of looking at this Bill and exploring what the issues are and the discussions and looking at what the implications from a local authority perspective will be, as Huw describes, both in terms of the awareness raising, early support and intervention and prevention services for families against the backdrop of the current issues that we have in local government, but also awareness raising—because absolutely it is key that families come with us on this journey. [Laughter.] dawn bowden am: You've already said, obviously, that you're looking towards working with Welsh Government in terms of its implementation. What's been your role so far in terms of the implementation of the Bill—local authorities generally, now? Have you had a role? Has Welsh Government been involving you in discussions around the introduction of the Bill so far? huw david: Yes. So, obviously we were consulted—a key consultee—but also our officials have worked very closely with Welsh Government officials to make sure this is implemented successfully, if it is progressed. sally jenkins: Our involvement with this, from a social services perspective, goes back over two years, directly in working towards this point, never mind the history in terms of work towards this area. But, very directly in relation to this Bill, we were first involved at least two years ago, to recollect, and that was in a series of workshops with other agencies, for example Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service Cymru and the police, and looking in real depth at what the implications would be for us as agencies to look at what the likely trajectory would be in terms of our pathways for referral into our services and what that might mean for us. And then particularly, for example, with CAFCASS Cymru in relation to private law, what the fallout might be, and then what, if anything—and that's the discussion that we need to have—that could mean for children's services in particular, given the pressures that we're already under. So, we've been in constant, I suppose, involvement in terms of the Bill already, as part of the consultation, in terms of the focus groups and in terms of direct work with Welsh Government officials to take this forward. You touched there on the pressures that you're already under, which we fully appreciate, but you also mentioned in answers to Lynne Neagle earlier on that you welcomed the Bill in terms of its clarity. So, are you confident that the Bill can be implemented without any major impact on your capacity to deal with it? sally jenkins: We've done—. A number of local authorities—my own included, Newport City Council, has done some work to look at what the likely impact would be and then actually to look at what some of that costing would need to be. I think what we've done is we've looked internationally at what the impact has been elsewhere when similar legislation has been introduced to try and gauge, but that's difficult to do in terms of comparable nations and size and also different systems. And obviously our approach in terms of children and pedagogy is very different from some of the nations that have already done this. I wouldn't like to say one way or the other, because I think, in terms of that culture shift, it could be a double impact on us in terms of increased referrals because of increased awareness, but it could also be, I suppose, as Huw alludes to, that, if we're looking at ensuring greater awareness of preventative services and support services for parents, actually people coming to the fore and asking us for those services as well. So, at this stage, I think what we would want to say is that we continue to be fully involved in the implementation phase, to look at what the cost implications for that could be, and not just for the local authorities but also the police, CAFCASS Cymru, for third sector organisations involved in preventative services. I don't think any of that should undermine the position in terms of children and their rights within our society. So, a difficult answer, in the sense that— dawn bowden am: No, I understand. What you're saying is that this is a piece of legislation that, in your view, is a good piece of legislation. It's setting out to, hopefully, achieve what the purpose of it is and you will deliver what you need to. Can I ask you whether, then, you've also given thought to the impact on—we've talked about social services, but the impact on other services, like housing, education and so on? You're obviously coming at it from slightly different angles in other sections. alastair birch: We are part of the universal service for children, and we very much work in co-operation with the WLGA and our social care colleagues, and we've been part of that consultation. And, in terms of the Bill, there needs to be the clarity—ambiguity would be bad—in terms of making sure that safeguarding leads within all schools have the right training and support. So, really, that's the key element there, and then obviously the preventative services for the parents that schools can signpost, and sometimes possibly even host, in terms of being community schools. I have colleagues who have worked in that area for many years and see the benefits in how those positive parenting approaches make a difference to families. dawn bowden am: So, from your point of view, it's awareness raising, is it? alastair birch: It's awareness raising; it's making sure that professionals are fully briefed on necessary changes, that there's very little ambiguity, that we are aware that—. That'll still be part of the all-Wales child protection procedures. That won't change, and that duty is always going to be there for all our professionals. But that awareness raising and training will be the key, and then, obviously, working in co-operation with our colleagues. Have you been given an indication of how long you've got between Royal Assent and implementation, and whether you've thought through any of the key milestones that need to be implemented? sally jenkins: There's a group proposed that would be a strategic leadership group in the steering group that we're part of, which is now laying out what would happen after Royal Assent if that is given. My final question, Chair, is about some of the responses we've had to this committee that say that the state should not get involved in family life—I'm sure you've heard those views—unless it's in the most serious circumstances. To what extent do you think that this Bill undermines the existing local authority responsibilities, or don't you? huw david: The state's paramount role is to protect children from harm. And there is obviously a view—it's a view that is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—that physical punishment, physical harm to a child is harm to a child, and we should be preventing that and act to prevent that. That would be the position of the Welsh Local Government Association, and we also respect the mandate that Members of the National Assembly for Wales have too. And we believe that children can be raised by parents without recourse to physical punishment, effectively, and we'd support parents in that. We do not believe that in the 50 nations across the world where such legislation exists that the state is interfering in family life unnecessarily. We believe this action reflects a cultural change, a sea change that's taken place in Wales over the last 30 to 40 years, where the vast majority of parents now say that they do not use it themselves, they do not support it, and we believe this is actually a reflection of what has happened in Welsh society. We support Assembly Members in the view that the natural progression of that is that children's rights are protected across Wales. dawn bowden am: So, I've got largely positive feedback from you in terms of the Bill and its intentions, and so on. Do you foresee any unintended consequences for this Bill? huw david: If we implement it carefully, if we implement it with the right resources, then I hope not. But as with every piece of legislation, it is about the implementation, it is about the cultural change as well, and that's why I cannot overstress the importance of making sure that resources are made available, because our social services departments—children's social services in particular—are overstretched. They are at breaking point—make no bones about it—and they are dealing with children who are facing serious harm and neglect. We are having record numbers of contacts from police, from teachers, from doctors and, of course, from children themselves who are experiencing that harm and neglect. Equally, though, we don't want to lose sight of those families and children that are experiencing significant problems, but who we want to support through our early intervention and prevention programmes, and that is why it is important that there is investment in those programmes, so that children do not end up in that terrible position where we have to, for their safety, take them from their birth families to protect them. And the reality is, in Wales, that we are doing that to more children than we've done for a long time, and the numbers are growing across Wales. And that is only because of the most appalling neglect and abuse, because there is no way that any judge would permit us to act to make a child safe if it was not for that fact, and the facts are there. So, I don't want that focus to be lost, but, of course, we welcome and understand the need to progress this piece of legislation. dawn bowden am: That rise that you talk about here, is that due to more interventions, greater awareness, more incidents? I'm trying to link this to the Bill in terms of whether the Bill is actually going to give you more work to do in those areas. sally jenkins: On the reasons for the rise in the numbers of looked-after children in Wales, which are higher than those in England, and also the numbers of contacts that we have across the local authorities, the work of the care crisis review, which was completed last year; the work of Isabelle Trowler, who's the chief social worker in England; countless research and reports that have taken place in the last 18 months; and currently the public law working group, under the auspices of the president of the family court, would all indicate that it's multifactorial. So, what you have is a range of reasons that have led to the increasing numbers of children becoming looked after across England and Wales. There have been headlines that have said, 'Is it increased austerity?' That is clearly a part of this. Is it in Wales an increased awareness of adverse childhood experiences and the emphasis of the impact on children of, for example, domestic abuse? Is it because of our understanding of what happens to children in those households? All of that research would say it's all of those things. And then, when you also add in changes in our practice with our colleagues in the judiciary, changes in our police service, but also changes in our preventative services, you've got that whole range of elements. And there is going on across the local authorities and Welsh Government a huge amount of work to try to address and understand that, and then to ameliorate that. Children who need to be in care for safety need to be in care, but what we have to do is get to a point where fewer children come into care and we're able to protect them, firstly, and secondly where those children who are in care are cared for in a way that delivers the best possible outcomes for them. I think, in terms of this Bill and unintended consequences, I agree absolutely with everything that Huw has said. It takes away even that point of discussion that this could possibly be okay, and I think that's important to hang on to. alastair birch: One unintended consequences is that I think that there will be an increased focus on the UNCRC. And, in terms of children having a discussion around this point, children need to be part of that discussion. It's changed completely in the last 10 years, and it is one of the key things in terms of us driving improvements. dawn bowden am: Would that be something that you would be looking to do in schools? alastair birch: Anything that improves the voice of the child in any educational context is good and it's very powerful for the children. And it improves their educational experiences, encouraging the opportunities for them to discuss the issues, the adverse childhood experiences that they encounter, which are significant, and it's our educational professionals that are facing this day-in, day-out. They've become a very highly trained workforce, they're ACE aware, they're trauma aware, and anything that focuses, even increases, their professionalism and understanding around a particular point, and also—. So it's a positive unintended consequence, shall we say, that it could reinvigorate some of the voice of the child discussion within various contexts. lynne neagle am: We've got some specific questions now on implementation for social services, from Janet Finch-Saunders. If this Bill becomes law, would you encourage members of the public to contact social services departments if they do see a child being smacked? sally jenkins: We already encourage members of the public to contact social services or the police, depending on the circumstances. Interestingly, I'm picking— janet finch-saunders am: What, if a child is being smacked now? sally jenkins: Yes. But if you were walking out, and you saw something happening to a child, in the same way as if you saw something to an adult. sally jenkins: So, I think that the challenge is about—we've all probably, sadly, witnessed incidents in the doctor's reception, or in a supermarket, and we've failed to do something about it. And I think we then walk away and feel pretty guilty about that, realistically, when you see something happening to a child in a particular circumstance. A campaign opposing this Bill, Be Reasonable Wales, have said that 'If the law is changed, the consequences for parents will be considerable.' It also says, 'Anyone accused or convicted of assaulting a child—under the new definition—' so, I suppose you could argue, a minor tap— 'will be subject to long-term social services involvement in their family and social stigma.' To what extent is this accurate, and, also, will thresholds for social services intervention change if the Bill is enacted? sally jenkins: There are a number of parts to that. Firstly, in terms of long-term social services intervention in a family's life, I think, for people to be fully aware of the very few numbers of families where we have long-term intervention currently, even where there is what would be perceived as very significant abuse. What we do is we go in for short periods in families' lives, to support them to work with their strengths, to work with them and their family members. So, in terms of long-term intervention, what we want is for families to find their own solutions. We want families to be able to work with each other, and together, and local community support, and preventative services, to be able to address issues. In terms of thresholds for children's services, we would not be anticipating a huge number of referrals to us. Because we also know that this is actually quite a rare occurrence currently; this is not a defence that's being used with great frequency, this is not something that is happening. And if we look at the data, we know that the incidents of children, and the number of parents who now recognise this as an acceptable form of punishment, has steadily declined over the last 15 to 20 years. janet finch-saunders am: So, on that one then, is there a need for legislation that will—obviously there'll be resources for the Welsh Government and there'll be resources out of hours and things like that—is there a need for legislation if, as you say, natural behaviour and the culture is changing? Let's be honest, as you've rightly pointed out, in social services—I know in my own authority—in your own authority, you're saying that even now you're working with the police, on systematic failings within the system. Firstly, we want legislation that reflects our society—we don't want the two to be out of kilter. It shouldn't be that we've got these rather confusing elements running in parallel, and that continues to perpetuate a lack of clarity and the ambiguity that we currently see. I think the other element is that, again, this is about potentially an accelerating of that awareness and that culture in our society, about how we care for our children. We've got there naturally; we've got there by the change that's happened in Wales over the last 15 to 20 years. What this does is to continue with that change and continue with that awareness and understanding of how we positively, from a strength-based approach, should care for our children, bearing in mind what's required of us in terms of the UNCRC. Are there any comments from anyone else? huw david: Simply to say that I think that, in terms of that clarity for the very vulnerable children out there who are currently being assaulted—seriously assaulted and abused by their parents, which goes on on a daily basis—that is already covered by existing legislation. But at the moment, they don't know, because they could be being told—and they probably are being told—by their parents that's it's okay, that they can smack their child and that that's acceptable. And if you asked most parents, and in fact lots of professionals, they would not be able to tell you, and probably most of you wouldn't be able to tell me exactly where is the threshold— janet finch-saunders am: Yes, where's that line. That vulnerable child, at home, being abused by their parents, does not know where that line is. And they should know where that line is because then they can pick up the phone to Childline or they can talk to a professional and ask them where that line is. I do recognise, though, that what we don't want to do—and the last thing any of us want to do—is criminalise parents who are bringing up their children. That is why we're saying there needs to be an emphasis on the support programmes that are available to parents. And to be clear, there is no way that we want long-term involvement in any child's life, but particularly not in the lives of children who have been smacked by their parents. That is not going to be the result of this legislation, trust me, because we don't want to be involved in—we haven't got the resources to be involved in children's lives. The social worker or the police officer—if they become involved, then there would be a proportionate response to that, and there'll also be a test about whether or not that is progressed. So, if there is an allegation—if this legislation is passed—then that will be looked into and a consideration will be made about whether any action will be taken, and as with any allegation of the law being broken, there would be a proportionate response, as there is now. Can you outline the practical ways in which social services' interaction with parents will change as a result of this proposed law and do you envisage that all referrals to the police will be automatically referred to social services for an assessment? Who's going to make those decisions? sally jenkins: That will be part of the implementation phase about that decision making. Interestingly, the number of referrals that we currently get from the police that we take absolutely no action on is extraordinary. It will be happening now; sitting in the civic centre in Newport City Council will be a whole host of social workers taking in the public protection notifications from overnight. janet finch-saunders am: So, if there's an increase as a result of greater awareness— sally jenkins: What happens is there is a paper assessment of them. There's a look at what's happened, who's involved, what the police have reported, and there's work being done with the police to improve that. Because one of the things that we want to get to is actually where we're not using huge amounts of time to look at that, but what comes to us is what we act on. So, there is work going on with a number of police authorities to look at how you improve that process. But I suppose, to pick up, each incident will be looked at, each one will be assessed in a way that is proportionate, as Huw says, to look at what's happened and then investigated. lynne neagle am: Sally, can you give us a couple of examples of what kind of things might have come in that you would then take no action on? sally jenkins: We get countless referrals, for example, where there's been a domestic abuse incident overnight where a child wasn't present in the property and we then haven't taken action. It’ll be where the level of harm that’s perceived to happen to that child is below the threshold for intervention from children's services. janet finch-saunders am: I’m pretty cynical about assessment, because, you know, I have people come in who are benefit claimants where, when they’ve been assessed, the whole process has been very flawed and I’ve had to fight and fight and fight on their behalf. So— sally jenkins: Assessment processes within social— janet finch-saunders am: But if you're struggling now with those assessments— sally jenkins: Assessment processes within social services are as laid out in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. So, we have within what we carry out, I suppose, that kind of initial look, that look at the information, what else do we know about that family— janet finch-saunders am: And are they qualified people that are doing this? sally jenkins: Yes, absolutely. huw david: And, in fact, in lots of places in Wales now, it’s a multi-agency assessment. janet finch-saunders am: So, what proportion currently would you not be taking any action on, if a report came in of some domestic abuse where a child had perhaps been smacked? sally jenkins: If something came in to us where a child had been smacked and there was something clearly there, we would look at it. lynne neagle am: Can you ask a final question? And I'm going to have to appeal for brief answers, because we've got a lot of ground to cover. huw david: Just very quickly, there may be no action from social services, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t offer support. So, the expectation is that support is offered in those circumstances from family support services, for example— sally jenkins: Or prevention. So, we would not say, if we were aware, for example, that there was domestic abuse at a home, ‘There’s no role for children’s social services’, because there may be an assessment that that child may not be at immediate risk of harm, but we would obviously recognise that there are causes for concern there and we would offer that support. And that’s a process that happens in every social services department in the UK, and it’s happened for a very long time, and, in fact, it’s reflective of the legislation that you have laid down as Assembly Members. lynne neagle am: And are those services there, Huw? Because I’m very acutely aware of the pressure on local government. Are the services there? Is there sufficient resource in things like Families First? Because what I’m hearing on the ground is that eligibility is changing for even those preventative services. huw david: There’s not enough of those services, and, obviously—you may have heard me saying this before—I think we need to invest more in those services, and I hope you invest more in the services, because, obviously, prevention is better than cure. And those pressures that Sally talked about earlier are pressures that are not going away; they’re only increasing by the day, actually, and I would want us to be able to offer those services now. Because that example of a child that perhaps is in a home where there is domestic abuse—we’ll probably have another referral off them in a couple of months’ time, and that could escalate. And what I’d rather do is provide support to that family and try and stop that family breaking down so that, in six months, we're not going back and saying that we've got to take this child into care because the domestic abuse has worsened and that child is at risk. sally jenkins: I appreciate that time is of the essence, but, just really quickly in relation to that, it’s not just social services. So, for example, there are developments like Encompass, which is a piece of work that is being rolled out across Gwent and across other areas, which is where the police automatically notify the school overnight of an incident, not expecting the school to do anything per se, but to be aware, to be able to offer care for that child. alastair birch: Can I add to that? Operation Encompass I know in Gwent has been operational, and we started it in Pembrokeshire 18 months ago. We as a local authority—and it’ll be education that will contact the school around the domestic incident happening, and the school as part of that protocol will provide a level of universal service support for that child when they come in, before 9 o’clock, so that professionals are aware of the needs of the welfare of that child at that point. So, you know, schools play a key role in the universal service of this and we work very closely with our social care colleagues on that. janet finch-saunders am: The Bill's explanatory memorandum refers to an estimate of 274 offences annually where lawful chastisement was used as a defence or considered. It says there is also potential to create extra demand on out-of-hours social services teams due to the time that the offences were reported, and in order to support safeguarding measures. Have you assessed how this Bill will impact on emergency and out-of-hours local authority services? sally jenkins: We have considered that, and again I think that's something that we would very much want to look at as part of implementation. We have out-of-hours provision, we have emergency duty teams already across Wales that operate 24/7. janet finch-saunders am: Are they overstretched at the moment? sally jenkins: I think in the same way as all of social services is. But are they working in a way that protects children day in, day out, and vulnerable adults? Yes, they are, and they will continue to do so. Alastair, you've already mentioned about awareness raising and training, which will be key with educational professionals. How confident are you that teachers and others working in those educational settings will be clear about how to support the implementation of this Bill, if enacted? alastair birch: Training requirements for all professionals in education settings are clear. In that level of general safeguarding awareness and training, the infinite emphasis is on the duty to report. It says in 'Keeping learners safe', which is the bible in terms of education professionals, that there's a responsibility on the professional to make that referral and for that universal service. So, the more specialist safeguarding leads within the schools, who have become highly skilled professionals in terms of understanding what might be significant harm—because that's what we're talking about—they understand the legalities when a referral needs to be made. There's always the collation of safeguarding information, where there might be just general concerns about neglect and other areas, which combined would create a picture that there might be significant neglect or significant harm to the child, and then that referral would be made to the child care assessment team or the police. So, that awareness—it needs to be clear for educational professionals that that duty to report is always there. If they believe that that significant harm has happened then that report then goes to the child care assessment team. But in terms of education, it'll be that awareness, making sure that there's clarity. If there's anything that professionals need to be trained additionally on, it'll need to go into 'Keeping learners safe', which at the moment is being rewritten. But as long as there's clarity, and once that implementation phase and the discussion has happened, as long as it's clear for professionals that the duty is always there and they feel a significant harm, then that report will always be there and will always need to be made. It's making sure—and I'll echo what my colleague said, Huw—that the services are key for families. On a daily basis, professionals are working on that trust with parents, because they are the ones that can engage with those families. The family support officers that are working on the ground with highly complex families, with multiple leads and supporting the children—they are fundamental, and investment in that level of support would also help our colleagues as well. That is already happening in schools and is effective, and is shown to be effective, and has an evidence base—we'd always support that that would continue to be invested in. And you were saying about how important trust is as well, but do you think that there's a risk that those in education settings will have a key role in referring more parents to social services, which some have said could cause potential harm to relationships and cause mistrust? alastair birch: I don't think it's a matter of mistrust—it's a matter of, you know, if a professional believes, based on the evidence that they have, because they're working with that child every day, that there is significant harm to that child, they are under a duty to report that to social care. So, part of the work is with families, and most of the referrals we make are with parental consent. That consent is a key element of this, and conversation with our social care colleagues is usually, 'You need to speak to the parents again and have a conversation with them.' Some of the NFAs—the ones that don't get referred at threshold—it will come back to school for, possibly, some support from the family or a team around the family or some other aspect. The trust in the professionals—it's actually more important that we are seen to be upholding our duties under the all-Wales safeguarding procedures. We're going to move on now to some questions about the importance of awareness raising from Siân Gwenllian. In looking at your written evidence, you say that we must make it very clear to parents, guardians and the public that this legislation is not trying to criminalise parents, and that is clearly very important for you. How do you think we should do that and who should be doing that work? sally jenkins: I think that's really broad. Obviously, colleagues in education, colleagues in social care, colleagues in preventative services, but also Welsh Government and the National Assembly, in terms of those drivers in relation to that awareness raising are really, really key. If you look at some of the other campaigns that have been run, notably in relation to violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, and echoing some of those building campaigns that have been done to raise awareness—I think those would be really good models to begin to consider in terms of how this is taken forward with awareness. We also know that there are a number of routes that we can go through in terms of raising awareness. We have existing preventative services, we have all our universal services, we have the regional safeguarding boards and the national safeguarding boards. In terms of not wishing to criminalise, I think if we look at the numbers, they are very, very small. And I think one of the things we need to hold on to in this is a sense of proportion about what is or isn't likely to happen once or if this Bill ever gets to the point of Royal Assent—they are small numbers who currently use this defence. It is about that wider issue of awareness raising, and using all of those avenues will help us to do that in the broadest sense. sian gwenllian am: Do you, therefore, believe that this needs to be on the face of the Bill? That is, you don't say this in your evidence. Scotland is going to be making it a duty for Scottish Ministers to raise awareness of the impact of the Bill. Wouldn't it make it clearer for you if it was a clear duty on the face of the Bill, for example as it was with the Human Transplantation (Wales) Act 2013? There was a duty in that Act for Ministers to promote transplantation. Surely, that awareness raising aspect would be clearer for everyone if it was on the face of the Bill. Do you have an opinion on that? huw david: Well, Welsh Government have given that commitment, and I know the Welsh Government honour every commitment that they make—[Laughter.] sian gwenllian am: That's why I'm asking. huw david: I don't know whether that is necessary—I'm not a legislator. I think that there's obviously an inherent interest in Welsh Government raising awareness, because we have to raise awareness effectively for this to be successful, otherwise we will have parents who feel that they're being criminalised, and that's the last thing we want. I think it's worthy of consideration, but, as I say, I'm not a legislator or a lawyer, so I don't know what implications that will have long term. But to be fair to Welsh Government, I think that commitment is one that I'm sure will be honoured, because Welsh Government will want to make a success of this Bill if it does receive Royal Assent. But is it clear who would pay for all of that? huw david: I've suddenly changed my mind—[Laughter.] I think it should be a duty on Welsh Government Ministers—absolutely. And that's the WLGA position; I don't need to ask the other 21 leaders on that either. [Laughter.] sian gwenllian am: Wouldn't it make it clearer if there was a clear duty on the face of the Bill that awareness raising had to happen? It would be clearer, then, for local authorities and people in the front-line services what needs to happen. We're moving on now, then, to the contentious issue of resources and we've got some questions from Hefin. hefin david am: Sally Jenkins, you said that the purpose of the Bill is to bring clarity and to remove what is a little-used defence. Isn't this an expensive way of doing that? sally jenkins: I don't think so, no. hefin david am: But introducing this legislation diverts finances from other areas of children's services—or doesn't? sally jenkins: Well, I would say, no, I don't think it will divert resources from children's services. Firstly, going back to the comment made, I think, proportionally, this is a very small number of cases. It's a very small number of existing cases that go through in terms of prosecution, or consideration for prosecution. We know that it's likely, from some of the work that we've already done, that it's not opening floodgates for a sudden sea of referrals to children's services—that's not the way this is going to be, because the numbers are not out there because of the changes that have already happened in Welsh family life and Welsh society. So, I think as part of the implementation phase, we need to have a really clear understanding of the trajectory of those costs and what's likely to happen over the first six months, 12 months in terms of people's awareness and understanding and what is referred and how that's worked. But in terms of a huge number, no, I don't anticipate it being that. hefin david am: But the costs wouldn't just be directed to the number of referrals and the number of cases raised, it's the cost around that, with training of staff, awareness—all those extra additional costs that always come with legislation. And I agree with that—that there clearly are—but if you think, many of those things will be aligned with work we are already doing, but it brings a clarity to that work. So, our teachers, our social workers, our health workers, our police officers already get substantial training around child protection, around safeguarding, around adverse childhood experiences and around a trauma-informed approach to children. But rather than having a part of that training, which has to deal with this as an aspect—that is no longer there; it is a clear message for all professions. hefin david am: I fully appreciate that, and in the briefing note you've given us, you've outlined the pressures on social services. So, do you think this is another way of getting money into social services? sally jenkins: If this was a way of getting money into—. I think this is a clear commitment to the rights of children in Wales; this is not about levering additional resources into children's services. And, do you think those costs are quantifiable? sally jenkins: I think we are currently looking at work and are doing work across my own local authority and across two others to look at breaking down those costs, not just for local authority, but also for health, for police and for Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service Cymru. I think there was a bit about local authorities that Siân— lynne neagle am: Okay. The explanatory memorandum that accompanies the Bill talks about the unknown costs for different agencies. You mentioned there that you're doing work around trying to identify some of those costs, but wouldn't it be useful if the explanatory memorandum did explain more about any unknown or unidentified costs, partly in order to calm some of those fears around that? Giving a title 'unidentified costs'—is that good enough? sally jenkins: I think, clearly, that is a challenge, and that is work that we are participating in and are committed to completing with Welsh Government, to look at what those costs are. huw david: I think this is where it would be helpful in the committee's deliberations and where our concern would be, because the reality is we're not going to know what the costs are until it's actually implemented, because we haven't implemented this before. And, therefore, I think there needs to be a commitment that, whatever the costs are, those costs are met because it is legislation that is being led by the National Assembly for Wales. And whilst we don't see it as levering in additional resources, we don't think it should be at the expense of current service provision to vulnerable families in Wales, and therefore it's important that it is properly and fully resourced. sian gwenllian am: What I would argue on that is that you have to try and forecast. You say it's difficult to forecast how much this is going to cost, but we have to try and forecast that, and part of the argument for trying to have projections is to show that, perhaps, it's not going to cost that much, and that would add to the argument that, 'Okay, this is going to be fine to do and it's not going to put too much pressure on us'. Or we need to know that this is going to cost a lot to do it effectively, and therefore you have to make your argument, then, 'Well, we can't afford that, the money has to come from somewhere else.' We have to get the costs, surely. huw david: Yes, and we will work very closely with Welsh Government to try and establish those costs as quickly as possible. So, for example, a campaign, an awareness-raising campaign, the marketing, if you like, but some of the other costs will be more difficult to establish in terms of the resource implications for front-line workers. I expressed a view that we need to see some additional investment in some of those programmes that are not targeted directly at families that would be impacted by this but support all families across Wales that have different needs, and some of that provision is universal. So, there's no limit to that, but I suspect Welsh Government will take a very different view to that. But I don't put an upper limit on that, because I don't think there's an authority in Wales, and I don't think there's a charity, a police service or a health board in Wales that doesn't think that we need to do more of that and could offer more of that if the resources were available. We've come to the end of our time, so can I thank you all for attending and for answering all of our questions? It's been a really useful and informative discussion. As usual, you'll be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again, all of you, for coming. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Minister for Housing and Local Government—additional information for our inquiry into school funding. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Health and Social Services on in-patient child and adolescent mental health services provision, and I would like to briefly return to that when we go into private. Item 4, then: can I propose a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.<doc-sep>In accordance with Standing Order 34.19, I determine that the public are excluded from the committee's meeting, in order to protect public health. In accordance with Standing Order 34.21, notice of this decision was included in the agenda for this meeting, which was published last Friday. This meeting is, however, being broadcast live on Senedd.tv, with all participants joining via video conference. Aside from the procedural adaptation relating to conducting proceedings remotely, all other Standing Order requirements for committees remain in place. Can I remind all participants that the microphones will be controlled centrally, so there's no need to turn them on and off individually? Can I ask whether there are any declarations of interest, please? No. Can I just then, again, note for the record that, if, for any reason, I drop out of the meeting, the committee has agreed that Dawn Bowden AM will temporarily chair while I try to rejoin? Item 2, then, this afternoon is an evidence session with the Welsh Government on the impact of the coronavirus epidemic on education in Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, Steve Davies, director of the education directorate, and Huw Morris, who is group director, skills, higher education and lifelong learning. Can I welcome you all and thank you for attending? Minister, I understand you'd like to make a short opening statement. And indeed, if I could just begin by, once again, putting on the record my gratitude to everyone who is helping us get through this pandemic. There are a vast number of people who are keeping our school hubs open, looking after vulnerable children, and the children of key workers. Because of them, and their efforts, those key workers are able to carry on their critical roles in responding to COVID-19. They have kept their schools open out of hours, over the weekends, on bank holidays, and Easter. And it is really heartening and humbling to see the way that they have responded to this crisis. And there are teachers, teaching assistants, and many others, who are helping our children and their parents to keep learning at home. I know that home schooling isn't easy, so I want to say also thank you to parents and carers for their efforts at this time. By keeping their children at home, they are helping us to keep people safe, and reducing pressure on our education system, and on our NHS. My primary concern is, and always will be, the health and well-being of our children, of our young people, and of all the staff in our education settings. With regard to your five principles, which you've set out today, regarding when schools will reopen, they're very clear that they require a judgment from you. So could you outline when you think that schools might reopen? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Hefin. I am very clear that schools will move to a new phase—because, already, schools are open in many settings; we will move to a new phase when it is safe to do so and when I have advice from the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer that it is safe to do so. I have made very clear in my statement that that is not imminent. I know that in some cases there has been speculation that a return to normal could be with us quite shortly. I'm clear that a return to normal is not imminent, and therefore I'm not in a position to give a date as to when we will see more schools opening up to more children. hefin david am: Have you been given any indication at all by the chief medical officer as to when, in the longer term, it might be? kirsty williams am: No, I have not been given a date. What I have done today is publish the principles that will aid me in, as you said, me making a decision. So, clearly, we will be relying on the advice of our medical and scientific advisers, but the principles are very clear. Firstly, we will need to consider any decision to have more children returning to school in the context of the safety and the physical and the emotional well-being of children and young people and the staff. It will have to be taken in the context of the wider Welsh Government response to dealing with this pandemic. Thirdly, it is absolutely crucial in making any decisions that we have clearly communicated that to parents and to staff, on the information that we have used to reach any decisions, to build confidence for parents and professionals, but also to give them time to plan. And we also have to look at—and it's been paraphrased quite a lot today—if we are looking at certain groups of children accessing more education within a school setting, which groups they should be. And, finally, how do we operationalise that? How do we make those settings as safe as they possibly can be, and how do we tackle some of the difficult challenges of everything from ensuring that we have adequate numbers of workforce available, to the very real questions about how you would do social distancing in the context of education, school transport issues, how you would avoid people gathering at the school gate, for instance? So, there are very practical issues that would need to be considered and thought through very, very carefully before we could return, before what we could see is a move from where we are now to the next phase of education, and new approaches to what schooling may look like. But, again, I must be absolutely clear to you, members of the committee, and to people watching: it is not feasible, in this sense, that we would move from where we are now to what all of us would regard as normal education and what the operation of schools looked like before the start of this pandemic. hefin david am: So, what is clear from what you've said is that it's going to be phased return. Just reading some of the things that you've said today, can you answer that question? And can I also ask: you said that guiding principle No. 3 will be having the confidence of parents, staff and students, based on evidence and information, so they can plan ahead. What will that evidence and information be, and how will you know that you've got the confidence of parents to return? kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, primarily, we will need to take a lead from our scientific and medical advisers. I want to also say that we are obviously working on a four-nation basis and keeping in very close contact with my counterparts in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. But we're also looking beyond the United Kingdom to approaches to education in the face of this pandemic. So, recently I was able to talk to educationalists and Ministers in Iceland, other parts of Europe, North America, South America and Australia. And, clearly, we will need to be very clear, as today is an attempt to be very clear with parents and our teaching professionals, and the unions that represent them, about the basis of that evidence. hefin david am: And could I just ask, with regard to the principles, do they then apply to further education and universities? kirsty williams am: Well, of course, when we are discussing these challenges, we are doing that with our colleagues in both the school sector but also our colleagues in the FE sector, and we're in close contact with colleagues in higher education to share thinking on these matters. hefin david am: But these principles don't apply in those circumstances; these are principles for schools only. kirsty williams am: These principles are applying to both, and our work in this area is applying to both schools and FE colleges. But I want to be absolutely clear: we are working with representatives of the HE sector to include them in this work. And I have received, not assurances, but from discussions that I've had with Universities Wales and vice-chancellors, they are very keen to be kept apprised of these approaches, because they may well wish to implement something similar within their own institutions. I've got a couple of supplementaries now; firstly, from Suzy Davies, and then I'm going to go to Siân Gwenllian. Now, it is clear that any decisions that need to be taken on reopening schools would have to be made in the context of all of the other issues that the Welsh Government has to take into account. And it is entirely clear that the approach of Government towards testing hasn't been sufficiently developed for us to even start to think about removing restrictions. So, wouldn't it be dangerous, if truth be told, to start to discuss reopening schools when we haven't had the necessary testing in place for the majority of the population? And doesn't it convey a mixed message that we're starting to relax some of these restrictions when, in reality, the restrictions are still in place and still need to be in place robustly? kirsty williams am: First of all, thank you very much, Siân, for that important question. Can I be absolutely clear, and I thought I had been pretty clear in answering Hefin David, that we are not relaxing any of the restrictions with regard to education? As I said to Hefin, it is not imminent that we would see a further phase in the next stage of education here in Wales. What I have done today is to provide clarity on the nature of the principles that I would use when coming to any discussion. It is the responsibility of me, as the Minister, and indeed of the wider Government, to begin to think about planning for the future. But I have been absolutely clear: we are not moving to an imminent change in how education is operating at the moment. And I'm also very, very clear that should we be given the opportunity to see more children in our schools, I will only do that when it is safe for me to do so, when I've been advised by the CMO that I am able to do that, and we have given sufficient time and planning to the sector to respond. It is not going to be easy, and we will need to give them, as a sector, time to be able to address. But if I have not been clear enough, let me say it again: we are not relaxing any issues around schools at present, nor is that imminent. Minister, in your consideration of introducing a phased return to school, in due course, have you taken into consideration how things like school absences are going to be managed? Because, regardless of the amount of good work you do on messaging, there will still be some families that don't realise that going back to school is for their particular family. Will there be a relaxation of, effectively, what we would call truancy rules? Or is that something that schools will be getting guidance on much up-front? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Suzy. As I said in my statement earlier today, returning to school will not be a return to normal, and in recognition of this, I've already made it clear that I will seek, in all opportunities, to reduce the burdens on school. That includes various data collection, the suspension of performance measures and removing the requirement to undertake literacy and numeracy testing, and, clearly, school attendance will want to be an important factor of that. I'm keen to go on now to talk about the current situation as being faced by our children and young people in schools with some questions from Siân Gwenllian. sian gwenllian am: Since yesterday, the Welsh Government has started publishing data on the number of schools that are open, the number of children attending those schools, and the number of staff involved, and they have been making this information available as per capita of the population. On average, I think it's 1 per cent of the children of Wales that actually attend these locations, and some 5 per cent of the staff. So, can you analyse those figures a little further? Can you tell us how many children, according to this data, are children of key workers, and how many are vulnerable children? kirsty williams am: Thank you very much, Siân. As you quite rightly say, on average, we have 518 school hubs open each day, with up to 4,200 children attending. We have seen an increase in the number of attendances since the start of what would have been the traditional summer term. We have approximately 5.6 per cent of the teaching population working in those hubs, and at present, 85 per cent of the children who are attending are the children of key workers, the remainder being vulnerable children. These are small numbers, but we have seen an increase in those numbers since the start of what would have been the traditional summer term. How much confidence do you therefore have that the arrangements are effective in terms of the safety of staff and children at these locations? kirsty williams am: Thank you once again for that. The smooth operation of the hubs, with regard to health and safety, is, of course, of paramount importance. What we have seen since schools closed for traditional statutory purposes and moving to their repurposed function—we have seen a change of pattern over time. So, following my announcement on, I believe, 18 March, the week after, we saw a large number of settings open and operating. As local authorities have been able to understand the demand for those places—from critical workers and vulnerable children—we have seen more local authorities move to a hub model, and we have been able to publish guidance to local authorities on how issues around safe working in those hubs should be followed, and we've been able to give guidance in that regard. Local authorities are asked by us to report any incidents where they are concerned about operation issues on the ground. sian gwenllian am: As I mentioned earlier, testing is crucially important in dealing with this crisis. So, how many school staff have been tested for COVID because they may have experienced symptoms and so on? And how many of those have tested positive? kirsty williams am: My understanding from Public Health Wales is that 15 teachers have been tested for COVID-19, and I believe two of those results have come back as positive. Can I make it absolutely clear, the week before last, Welsh Government issued new guidance around who should be tested? I want to make it absolutely clear to those professionals working in our hubs, if they or a member of their family are exhibiting any of the symptoms, however mild, of COVID-19, they can and they should be tested. And the final question from me on this: how important is testing going to be in this next phase, as you start to think about relaxing restrictions? kirsty williams am: Obviously, the ability to be able to test, to trace and to quarantine will be critical to the next phase and will be a very, very important and significant building block in all aspects of the Government's work to respond to this pandemic. We've got some questions now on the impact on particular groups of children, from Dawn Bowden. Just following on from your answer to Siân Gwenllian earlier about the number of vulnerable children in school, what's being done specifically to facilitate more of those children coming into a school setting or hub at the moment? I'm thinking about the 600 you've talked about, and I know, in one of my local authority areas of Merthyr, which is a very small authority, we're talking about the number of children identified as vulnerable running into thousands, not hundreds, and that's just in one authority. So, this is a particularly difficult issue to address, I appreciate, but how are we going to get more of these children into the hubs? kirsty williams am: Okay, Dawn. The first thing to say is that the issue of vulnerable children attending settings is one that is a challenge to not just Wales, but also to my colleagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. I'm pleased to say that we are working across Government departments—myself, obviously, and colleagues in education—with colleagues in social services to have a cross-Government approach to these issues. I think the first thing to say is that these are complex messages, because the overriding public health message from our Government has been to stay at home and children should be kept at home as much as possible, and to make sure that our hubs run smoothly, safely and effectively, we do need to limit the number of children who are attending those hubs. So, firstly, the fact that numbers are small is in some ways a success of our public health messages, because parents have been heeding those messages, but, of course, all of us will have concerns for some children who remain at home. So, I'm pleased to say that we have seen a doubling in the last week of the number of children. We're working with local authorities and they have assured us that children and young people with a social worker have been risk assessed on a multi-agency basis and are receiving support in a number of ways, and that includes having conversations about some of those children attending the hubs. Of course, some of our children who would be classed as vulnerable—and our definition of 'vulnerable' is one that is shared between the systems in England and Wales—could be children with a statement of special educational needs. For some of those children who, perhaps, have very intense health needs, actually, staying at home is the appropriate thing for that child and that family to do, and we're looking to support families, and local authorities and local education systems are looking to support families, in a number of ways. We also know that just because you don't have a social worker or a statement of special educational needs does not mean that a child may not be vulnerable, and schools are very aware of the needs of those children and have been carrying out regular telephone check-ins where they can—if the age of the child is appropriate—just to keep in touch with those families and those individual children. But we will continue to work across Government to encourage, where it is appropriate, children to attend settings, and, if it is not appropriate for children to be in a setting, that there is contact with those children and young people to ensure that they remain, and their families remain, supported. It's encouraging to hear you talk about the ongoing safeguarding of children that are at home and I assume, within that, appropriate referral mechanisms are still in place if teachers or anybody has any particular concern about a child. Similarly, with special educational needs, whereas some of those children benefit clearly from a one-to-one provision in a school, and they may not respond as well to remote working, or remote contact, with an SEN advisor, are you considering in any way any relaxation of the lockdown rule in particular for those children in terms of them being able to access the support that they need for their particular educational needs? kirsty williams am: Well, first of all, Dawn, you're absolutely right: my expectation is that schools should remain in contact with children and continue to identify vulnerable children, and schools should continue to refer children to children's services if they have any concerns, and that would also, of course, be the case for youth workers who may be keeping in contact with children. So, there is a professional expectation on all those that are working with our children and young people that, despite the circumstances they find themselves in, they should continue to report and refer cases if they see anything or hear or are told anything that makes them concerned about a child's welfare and safety. With regard to children with additional learning needs, I am aware that that can present a number of challenges to families and children, and perhaps Steve Davies could give some further details. We have been keen to work with local authorities to ensure specialist provision, where that is appropriate—so, if I could give you an example of my own local authority in Powys, they have two specialist centres available for children with more profound additional learning needs, and those centres are available—recognising, however, that, even with the provision of specialist hubs, it can be a challenge for some children with additional learning needs to find themselves outside of a routine. Hubs are often staffed on a rota basis and therefore children could be faced with staff that they are unfamiliar with. So, even when local authorities—and the vast, vast majority of them do—have specialist services in place, sometimes that might not be the best thing for a child's health and well-being. But perhaps Steve can give us further details of the conversations that have been taking place with directors of education to ensure that children with additional learning needs have access to the hubs and specialist support. steve davies: Yes, myself and colleague Albert Heaney—colleague-director—have been in regular touch with directors of education and directors of social services to make sure that these children and young people's needs are catered for. We are very aware of all of the special schools—profound and multiple learning difficulties, EBD schools and pupil referral units—that have been kept open in their own way, but also, in some cases, as hubs, to deliver those services for those children's needs, and we're pleased that the directors and the local authorities have responded so constructively. So, we have the details of every school that's open, the pupils who are attending, and we are clear that the risk assessments that the Minister referred to for children with special needs, as well as wider vulnerable groups—they are having risk assessments to make sure that, where there is a need identified for a pupil that is not currently attending a hub, then the local authority can be working with that child and with the parents. How is that, in practical terms, being applied if those children are not actually in school? kirsty williams am: You're right, Dawn: we have to consider how we can support children not only in their learning during this time, but also to recognise the very real impact that the pandemic will have on all of our mental health and well-being—recognising, of course, it is absolutely natural for all of us, including children and young people, to have fears and anxieties at this time. But, of course, there are issues around those children that would have currently been receiving school counselling, and also being able to be in a position to respond to a potential growth in the number of children that are receiving support. So, the additional money will be made available to local authorities to be able to increase and ramp up services to support children and families. In the immediacy, of course, that will have to be done in different ways than perhaps we've traditionally delivered services in the past, because of social distancing and lockdown rules, but we want to get some of these systems in place now, rather than waiting for everything to go back to normal. We need to be able to plan to offer services in the here and now, but also be able to plan for what potentially could be an increase in the demand of those services. So, we've been in close touch with local authorities, asking them what they believe that they will need and how they can use additional financial resources, and we've been very pleased to be able to secure that for them. dawn bowden am: So, that would include things like telephone and video support as well, I guess, then. So, that would include remote counselling as in a fashion that we're doing now, but also, as and when some of the restrictions are perhaps removed, looking at an enhanced family therapy, or a therapy approach. So, when we talk about counselling, I think it's important to recognise that there will be some flexibility around this money and it does not necessarily mean that local authorities have to use it on a one-to-one basis. That might not be appropriate for some children, especially our younger children and their families, and they can use that money to provide counselling or therapy—in the widest possible terms—that is the best method to support individual children and their families. But, clearly, we're having to do that in the confines of lockdown and social distancing at the moment. Some of that money can also be used to support the professional learning and the professional development of counsellors, because, of course, they may be being asked to work in a different way and we need to make sure that they have the appropriate skills and abilities to do that. lynne neagle am: Dawn, before you ask your final question, I've got a couple of supplementaries—firstly from Suzy, and then from Hefin. My question goes back to the comment you made earlier, Minister, about the number of children doubling—sorry, vulnerable children doubling—after the Easter break, if we can call it that. So, was that figure a recovery of a number of children that had been there before the Easter break, and are the people who are there still the same people as were there right at the beginning of the crisis and the lockdown? kirsty williams am: Suzy, what I believe that we're seeing in our schools is new pupils coming into school. So, there has been, I know, a real effort on behalf of educationalists and social services staff to really reach out to families and to make sure that they're aware of the support that is available out there for them and their children, and to be able to give them the confidence that there are—that the hubs are available for them. Those numbers are still small and, I believe, potentially, there is an opportunity to build on that and to have further conversations with families about the support that is available for vulnerable children, whether that—. The initial response—local authorities and schools worked incredibly fast and incredibly quickly to set up these hubs. We've seen an evolution in the weeks since that time and I am sure that we will continue to see some evolution in approaches. I imagine there are many, many parents in exactly the same position—I've heard from them. Should I have heard something or should I be proactive in pursuing it? kirsty williams am: I don't want to comment on personal cases— hefin david am: But there are many others in this position. kirsty williams am: —but what I would say is that if parents have concerns and want to have a conversation about what support is available to them and their children, they should contact their local education authority to have a conversation as to what support is available. dawn bowden am: Yes, my last question is really about the potential for the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. Is that a concern for you? I'm thinking particularly in relation to those less affluent families in having access to technology and so on. What kind of concerns do you have about that and what are we looking to do to try to ensure that that doesn't actually play out? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Dawn. All of the statistics would tell us that learning loss and the gap, potentially, will affect those more vulnerable children the most. Clearly, we will want to consider that as we think about what the new normal for education may look like, or as we develop into future phases. Depending on where that child is in their educational journey, of course, the needs and the potential for loss are slightly different. So, for instance, when we're thinking about very young children, we could be thinking about a lack of social interaction and the development of oracy skills. Of course, that, potentially, then will have a knock-on to their ability to learn to read and then to write, for instance. For other children who are, perhaps, older and heading towards formal examinations, the challenge when they return to school will be a slightly different one. I'm not sure, Chair, whether you want me to give some further details about our continuity-of-learning plan and how we are looking to address digital disadvantage now, or whether there are questions later. lynne neagle am: Well, I've got a question on that coming up, so, if it's okay, Dawn, we'll go on to that now. Before we do that, I was just going to ask how the Welsh Government is paying due regard to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and, obviously, the right children and young people have to an education. I was going to ask you about the risk of inequality due to varying access to digital resources, which are so important in ensuring continuity of learning. Officials are very aware of our responsibilities towards children's rights in this regard and we are doing whatever we can to ensure that children have an equal opportunity and have equal access to learning at this time. We are fortunate in the regard that, because of previous decisions and investments, we have a strong base on which to build because we have our Hwb digital learning platform and because we have invested heavily in the national purchasing of Microsoft Office and Google for Education tools, which are available to all families. We have become the first, I think—we're certainly the first in the UK, and I'm not sure whether we're the first across the world, but I think we probably are—to deploy, for instance, Adobe Spark nationally. Officials are working with local authorities to ensure that all children have access to both the hardware and the connectivity they need to be able to participate in digital learning at this particular time. Just a final question from me: how exactly are we communicating to parents what the expectations are of them in terms of delivering this education at home now? Are there, for example, guidelines on recommended hours of home learning per day of the week or volume of work to be completed? How are we ensuring that parents know how best to lead their children through this at the moment? kirsty williams am: Firstly, can I recognise what a challenge this is? We've just heard from Hefin who is carrying on his day job as the Assembly Member, but is obviously trying to do that as well as care for and provide learning for his children, and I know, Chair, that you're doing the same, and I'm certainly trying to do the same, and it's a real challenge, it's not easy. Stay Learning' policy statement, advice is available to parents and carers on the Hwb platform as to what they best can do to support their children. I think the really important message that I've been trying to give to parents is not to be too hard on ourselves. And if they have concerns, they should be in contact with their child's school, but we do have specific advice and guidance to parents on the Hwb platform. Okay, we'll go on then to questions on higher education and post 16, and we'll come back to examinations, if that's okay. Before we leave continuity of learning, do you mind if I just ask this one question? lynne neagle am: No, that's fine. suzy davies am: Your comment, Minister, on working with local authorities to make sure that individuals have hardware: can you just give us a bit of detail on what working with local authorities actually means? In the process of that, is there any data gathering going on for those pupils who are being educated at home and the levels at which they're engaging? You know, are they sticking with it, or how many are dropping out? Because I think the two of those perhaps go together. So, I'm hoping to make an announcement tomorrow, if not later on this week, about some specific details around support for hardware and connectivity. We're working closely with local authorities to understand just that: to understand from the schools the number of schools that—and a number of them have already done this—have been lending Chromebooks, iPads and laptops to children, and also identifying children who are not perhaps engaging in the activities that have been made available. The first is to use the stock of equipment that they already have to be able to provide hardware to students. So, we have purchased on a national basis software that, when applied to an old piece of kit, essentially turns it into an out-of-the-box Chromebook. Because, as you can imagine, just like other things during a pandemic, there has been a rush to buy new stuff on the market and then there is a scramble and nobody can get what they need. So, we're utilisng kit that is already available in schools and local authorities, and we will look to backfill that to schools at a later point out of our EdTech investment programme. The other issue is, once a child has a Chromebook or a laptop or a device, issues around connectivity. So, we're also looking to purchase on a national level and distribute Mi-Fi connectivity, so students will be able to have access to Wi-Fi where they don't have that already. That's why we need to work closely with local authorities and schools to identify the level of that need and to make sure the stuff gets to the right children. So, if a child hasn't been engaging, is that because they just don't want to and they're voting with their feet—but clearly teachers need to have a conversation about that—or is that because the child simply does not have the ability to do that, and therefore we need to get that stuff out to those children? So, rather than just simply leaving it to local authorities to scramble around in a very crowded market to get the stuff that they will need, we're trying to do that on a national basis and deploy that to local authorities. So, our officials have been having conversations with each of our local authorities to ascertain what's already happened, and there is very good practice out there—schools have been proactive—but where there are gaps, what can we do as a national Government to be able to assist them to do that? We are repurposing some of the resources that we had previously identified for our EdTech investment, using those resources to fill this particular gap. When will vocational learners know what is happening with their assessments, and how will those who have no choice but to wait for a vocational assessment be supported? kirsty williams am: Okay. That's a very good question, Janet, because I know that there has been some concern and anxiety around vocational qualification students and how quickly we've been able to provide certainty for them. You'll be aware that Qualifications Wales have been able, in the last week, to be able to give that greater clarity. They have also published their approach to how health and social care qualifications will be managed, because, of course, those are part of the first set of reformed quals that we have done on a Wales basis. You are right, there are a group of students who fall into the category where there are technical qualifications that require a certificate of competency to be industry ready—I hope I've explained that correctly—and, therefore, we are working to understand how we can accommodate those students in these particular circumstances. But, at this stage, there may be some delay for that element of their qualification being delayed to a further date. What are your expectations for how A-level and GCSE qualifications will be awarded this summer, following the ministerial direction that you have issued to Qualifications Wales? For example, how is an appropriate balance being taken between recognising the progress of pupils in their coursework, mock examinations, and other work to date, and also, the potential of pupils who might have performed particularly well in their examinations this summer? kirsty williams am: Well, Janet, I understand—and today is a day where some students would have been undertaking practical examinations—I understand how devastating it has been to both students and teachers alike for the decision I had to take to cancel this summer's exam series. Qualifications Wales has made it very clear—and for people who would like more information, I would urge them to look at Qualifications Wales's website—how they will go about giving, allocating, and awarding a grade to our A-level and GCSE students. Firstly, teachers will be asked to submit a grade they believe that student would have obtained, should they have taken an exam. And, of course, teachers will have a range of data and their own professional judgment that they will use in awarding that grade. Once that information has been submitted to Qualifications Wales, there will be a process by which that data will be moderated; moderated from centre to centre and across the nation, thus giving us the chance to award a student a fair grade whilst being, and remaining, true to ensuring that we have a robust qualifications system, and allowing those students who find themselves at a critical stage of their education, where they are looking to move on to the next stages—that they will have the grades that will allow them to make decisions about their future. We're going to go on now, then, to the questions on higher and further education from Suzy Davies. I suppose my first question just goes back to the 16-year-olds at the moment and those who are looking forward to either going to college, the older ones going to university, there'll be apprenticeships, all kinds of future pathways for post 16. What's happening at school level, or even at college level, to get those students ready for the next steps, because, obviously, they're not in their usual environments and getting their usual programme of teaching? kirsty williams am: No, that's quite right, Suzy, and I should have said in answer to Janet's question, as well—I'm sure people already know, but just to get the point across—that A-level results day and GCSE day will run as normal across not just Wales, but England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is really important. You're right, Suzy—for those people that are coming to the end of one part of their education this is a particularly challenging time. You'll be aware that, last week, on Hwb, we were able to launch a programme for year 13 students to help them get ready for university. I'm very grateful to the HE sector in Wales, who've worked really hard with us on that. So, for instance, if you were a year 13 student or even a year 12 student that was thinking about or interested in areas around social policy, you could have tuned into a social policy lecturer at Swansea University. If you go to the Hwb website, you will be able to see that there are subject listings, everything from animal science through to law, politics, history and science, with links through to higher education and further education courses that students can avail themselves of. There's also a section on preparation for essential study skills, whether that is report writing or academic writing. So, there is a range of activities and courses available for year 13, so that children—'children'; they're all children to me—young people can get themselves—. They don't have to stop learning, and they can get themselves ready for the next stage of their education. Again, for those children, perhaps, who are coming to the end of their GCSEs, there is a range of information, either within their own schools or within their local colleges about things that can keep them learning. So, for instance, I'm aware of one school where you can go onto the website and there are recommendations of, for instance, what you could be reading over the summer if you're interested in doing this particular A-level in September. I know that there are also moves in schools and in colleges to be able to make sure that those children don't miss out on really important careers advice at this time, as well, and information, so they can make informed decisions. I know that people are working hard to link up children to advice services that are available so that they can make those really important future decisions with the advice of either a teacher or other professional so that they've got those options. You'll be aware that, for the last couple of years, we've been able to send Welsh children to the Yale global summer school. That's devastating for those year 12s who had worked so hard and had won a place on that programme. They will now be able to attend the Yale global scholars programme virtually and remotely, because Yale have moved that programme online. Before I move on to my next question, can you give me some sort of sense of how that Hwb domain is being populated? Where is all this information being sourced from? Presumably, they'll be working with partners, but what does that look like? kirsty williams am: Oh, my goodness. Yes, absolutely— suzy davies am: [Inaudible.] kirsty williams am: Yes, we're working very hard. So, everything from our work with the BBC, for instance, and BBC Bitesize through to our FE colleges and our HE institutions, as well as other organisations in the third sector who are looking to provide those opportunities. Can I just say that, last week, we were looking at, every day, in the region of well over 150,000 logins a day into Hwb? suzy davies am: Well, that's great. Just going back to some of Janet's questions and the assessed grades, I want to talk to you about the unconditional offers and where we are with that at the moment for entry to universities, because there's going to be a scramble now of the available students for further education, but primarily higher education institutions, across the UK. Is the moratorium on unconditional offers still standing? Are there conversations going on to extend that moratorium? Otherwise, this scramble is going to potentially negatively affect our universities quite considerably. We continue to keep in close touch with colleagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland and in the Westminster Government around these issues. Officials are also in touch with UCAS, and in the last couple of days I've had at least three meetings with representatives of the Welsh higher education sector to discuss these matters. I think they're getting, around now, the money going into their bank account that they would normally have expected at this time of year. suzy davies am: What's happening to those students who would normally be living in digs somewhere but are now living at home? Are they likely to be asked to reimburse part of the cost, because obviously it's not as expensive to live at home as away, and what's likely to be happening with the maintenance loans over the summer holiday period, potentially? Because we've had a period now where students can't top up their maintenance loans by going out and working on weekends or working in the evenings, or whatever, so their income has been impacted. Just in the round, what kind of conversations are happening around that? Again, it's probably a four-nation approach, I would imagine. You are correct to say that our student support regime does allow for a lower payment to be made to those students that stay at home during their studies, but I want to reassure students that there will be no change to their student support payments just because they have left their universities and have decided to go home. Also, we are continuing, it should be important to say, to pay education maintenance allowance at this time for our FE students that are eligible for that, even though, obviously, for EMA there is an attendance requirement, but clearly that is not appropriate to enforce at the moment. You are correct—this is a worrying time for many students in higher education, especially for those who are looking to graduate at this time and are going out into an economy that has been tremendously badly hit by the pandemic. At this time, we continue to have conversations with NUS Wales about what can be done within a Welsh context, but, as you quite rightly say, also within a UK context, to support students who may have been affected. We are continuing—on our webpage we have a frequently asked questions section that advises students in the first instance, especially when it comes, for instance, to the cost of accommodation—to have those discussions, and I'm very grateful that, in some cases, some of our institutions have been able to waive or partially waive accommodation fees where students have vacated their accommodation and have returned to their usual home address. But we will continue to have dialogue with NUS Wales and with our counterparts across the country to look to see what more we can do to support students at this time. suzy davies am: Thank you for that answer, and, yes, I was pleased to see that announcement through the NUS as well, so well done to those accommodation providers who have a heart. I think we'll all have seen the Universities UK document that explains some of the difficulties that they're going to be running into if this proceeds much further. My understanding is that the main emphasis at the moment is to try and get all the universities across the UK through this initial period of difficulty by releasing as much money as possible. I can see that your figure to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales was a little bit down on last year's letter—not that there's been a remit letter yet, but an indication. Are you releasing that money earlier so that they can use it more swiftly, or does that not matter? lynne neagle am: Before you come in, Minister, that is going to have to be the last question, just to make you aware of that, because we are coming up to the end of our time. kirsty williams am: Of course, Suzy, we are working closely with Universities Wales and have a lot of sympathy for the proposals that have come forward from Universities UK, which Wales's universities have been a part of forming. Stability in the first instance is really important to us, which is why we've been able to give an indication to HEFCW about resources that are available, and we've been very clear to HEFCW that we want to be as flexible as possible in how they use those resources to support institutions. That potentially would mean reprofiling the way in which money gets out to institutions, but clearly we will need to have an ongoing discussion about how we respond to the immediacy of the issues facing HE, how we can get stability for the next academic year, and how we then can support the sector through what is a really challenging time for them. We will do that in a Welsh context and we will continue to do that also in a UK context, because you will have seen the scale of some of the figures that have been talked about in terms of the impact on the HE sector at this time. Well, we have come to the end of our time, and, as to anything that we didn't ask, we will have to write to the Minister. Can I just thank the Minister and her officials for your attendance today? We know how busy you are dealing with the pandemic and we very much welcome this opportunity to have this discussion with you. Can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Okay<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the 12th meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Members who have already participated in a virtual meeting of the special committee may actually not notice any change, except for the fact that some members are also participating from the floor of the House. An additional rubric, that of statements by members, was also added to the proceedings of the committee. In order to ensure that those joining the meeting via video conference can be seen and heard by those in the chamber, two screens have been set up in the chamber on either side of the Speakers chair. Sound amplification for virtual interventions will be available, and members in the chamber can listen to the floor sound or interpretation using the earpieces on their desks. For those of you joining via video conference, I would like to remind you to leave your mike on mute when you are not speaking. Also, please note that if you want to speak in English, you should be on the English channel. Should you wish to alternate between the two languages, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking each time you switch languages. Should members participating by videoconference need to request the floor outside their designated speaking times, they should activate their microphone and state that they have a point of order. Please note that today's proceedings will be televised in the same way as a typical sitting of the House. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. For members participating in person, we ask that they please come and drop the signed certificates off at the table once the petitions are presented. Chair, what an honour to be the first voice coming to you from the screens on either side of the Speaker of the House. I speak to you from SaanichGulf Islands on the traditional territory of the WSNEC people. I'm presenting a petition, number 431-00215, and it has been certified. The petitioners call on this House to take note of the fact that Canada is the only country with a universal health care system that does not include the provision of necessary prescription medications. They note that the system across Canada is a patchwork that leaves three million Canadians unprepared and uninsured to be able to purchase necessary medications. They call on the House assembled to put in place a system of universal national pharmacare, bringing down the cost of drugs through bulk purchasing. garnett genuis (sherwood parkfort saskatchewan, cpc): Thank you very much, Mr. This Senate public bill, been put forward by Senator Salma Ataullahjan in the Senate, would make it a criminal offence for someone to go abroad to receive an organ for which there has not been consent. It also has a mechanism by which somebody could be deemed inadmissible to Canada for being involved in the horrible practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking. This bill has been before various Parliaments for over 10 years, and petitioners are hopeful that this Parliament will be the one that finally takes action to address forced organ harvesting and trafficking. The second petition is put forward by folks who are concerned about Bill C-7, particularly the efforts by the government through Bill C-7 to remove vital safeguards that are currently associated with Canada's euthanasia regime. Petitioners are not happy about the fact that the government is trying to eliminate the 10-day reflection period and remove other safeguards that only four short years ago the government thought were essential for the euthanasia and assisted suicide system that they were putting in place. The petitioners call on the government to address that, and they are not supportive of these particular efforts to remove vital safeguards from that regime. the chair: Is anyone else presenting petitions? Seeing none, we'll move on to statements by members. darrell samson (sackvilleprestonchezzetcook, lib.): Good afternoon, everyone. This spring has been a difficult one for Nova Scotia and the communities of SackvillePrestonChezzetcook. While residents have banded together to tackle the challenges presented by COVID-19, we have also had to mourn the passing of three remarkable local women: RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson, well known by many in Cole Harbour and the surrounding areas; our own Sub-Lieutenant Abbigail Cowbrough, who was based out of 12 Wing Shearwater; and Captain Jenn Casey of the Canadian Forces Snowbirds. These three brave women, who served with honour on land, at sea and in the air, represent the absolute best of us. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Canada needs a prime minister who will create jobs and opportunity, but instead we have a prime minister who is piling up crippling national debt. After five years with this debt, Prime Minister, Canada's national debt is set to hit $1 trillion, with almost nothing to show for it. Canadian workers need and deserve a prime minister who supports our energy sector and gets our natural resources and agriculture products to market, who supports small business and will make our tax system encourage job creation and growth, and who will bring advanced manufacturing jobs to Canada and keep the automotive industry growing. Most importantly, we need a Conservative prime minister who will get the government finances under control after the massive debt left by this prime minister. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, we've seen a disproportionate number of deaths in long-term care homes. I'm thankful for the Canadian Armed Forces who were deployed to the Altamont care home in my riding and four other facilities across the GTA. They include residents being given expired or improper doses of medication; not being cleaned or changed for a prolonged period of time; being forcibly fed, causing choking; being bed-bound for weeks; receiving inadequate nutrition, and much more. Chair, I call upon Premier Ford to place these five homes under a mandatory management order and to appoint a third party manager to address and rectify these violations. I also call upon the Premier to undertake an independent public inquiry into the tragedy we face in long-term care facilities across Ontario. Chair, we need to work with the provinces and territories to set national standards of care for the most vulnerable in our society. I hesitate to interrupt colleagues, but I'm concerned about the petition practice, which, as I understand it, is to summarize a petition but not make a speech. the chair: I will remind honourable members that when a petition is presented, we're expected to give a prcis and make it as concise as possible. martin champoux (drummond, bq): Mr.Chair, I would like to recognize the resilience of Quebeckers concerned for their jobs or their businesses during the COVID-19 crisis. That is why the Bloc Qubcois is demanding that the government present an economic update, and that it do so before June17. In closing, I would like to remind the government that one group is not really contributing to the public purse at the moment. I am talking about the tech giants, the GAFAM group, that have never before been used to the extent that they are now, and that are still not paying a cent in tax in Canada. I want to take this opportunity to thank the Peel region police, paramedic and firefighting services for keeping Bramptonians safe. Organizations such as the Khalsa Aid Society, the Interfaith Council of Peel, the Brampton YMCA, the Prayer Stone Peoples Church, Unity in the Community, Ste. Louise Outreach Centre, Knights Table, the Yogi Divine Society, Vraj Community Service, Regeneration Brampton and many more have made our community stronger during this difficult time. Like many Canadians, I was shocked by this report from the long-term care centres, including one in my riding. Chair, Canada's oil and gas sector is in crisis, made worse by five years of bad policies, red tape and barriers to pipelines. Active rigs dropped by 92% and tens of thousands of oil and gas workers lost their jobs, adding to the 200,000 since 2015. Energy is Canada's biggest investor, and exporting could lead the recovery if there are actions, not just words. On March 25, the finance minister promised help in hours or days, not weeks, but he's letting Canadians down. Sixty-three days later, small oil and gas companies still can't apply for BDC loans, and last week's large employer loan terms are predatory, with interest rates escalating to 14% by year five. The Liberals' death-by-delay tactics are doing exactly what foreign activists in other countries want: to shut down Canada's oil. lyne bessette (bromemissisquoi, lib.): Mr.Chair, in times of crisis, we stick together. In the last weeks, I have been calling volunteer action centres in my constituency so that they can tell me their news. I would like to take the time that I have to highlight the work that community organizations are doing tirelessly in my constituency. The crisis has made us realize the extent to which food banks and meals-on-wheels can not only relieve hunger, but also relieve thousands of shut-in seniors of their loneliness. Let me also highlight the devotion of the volunteers giving generously of their time, particularly the initiative of Mabel Hastings in the volunteer aid centre in Mansonville. Like me, she sends out a daily newsletter to keep the public informed about the many resources available for their support. COVID-19 is bringing out the best in our community and I am certain that, together, we will get through it. Chair, during the COVID-19 pandemic I have been inspired by the courageous work of so many essential workers. I want to thank everyone on the front lines for keeping us safe, keeping us fed and keeping our communities functioning. I want to make special note of one particular essential health care worker, a woman who is a quarantine manager with the Public Health Agency of Canada. Suchi, I love you, I am very proud of you and I thank you for all of the sacrifices you are making. I want to highlight another woman from my riding of ParkdaleHigh Park, Rachelle LeBlanc. When the pandemic broke, she saw the need for protective barriers for small shops in Parkdale, so she set about collecting donations. Rachelle's team has now delivered 25 free COVID protective shields to small shopkeepers in Parkdale, and the team is on track to building 100 more. It's the compassion of Canadians like Rachelle that gives meaning to the phrase we are all in this together. jol godin (portneufjacques-cartier, cpc): Mr.Chair, the school year has been shattered and our graduating classes must be proud of what they have achieved amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The current government has the obligation to promote the values that will lead you to become involved in your communities. I implore this government, which is unaware of the damage it is causing, to immediately announce all the positions that have already been approved under the Canada summer jobs program. Let us have confidence in our organizations, our companies, and let us support our youth, a rich resource that we must equip and motivate. I congratulate all the young graduates in the beautiful constituency of PortneufJacques-Cartier. greg fergus (hullaylmer, lib.): Mr.Chair, this pandemic lets us see what Canadians are made of. This coming Saturday, May30, more than 2,000Christians of all denominations are coming together virtually for prayer and for action. This Saturday, in more than 2,000 churches and homes, thousands of faith-filled Canadians are gathering to pray and act on those prayers as part of Stand United Canada. Then they are going to deliver much-needed support to at-risk Canadians who live in disadvantaged areas. rachael harder (lethbridge, cpc): The best way to safeguard the truth is to allow people to speak freely, but from the very beginning of this pandemic, the Liberals have silenced dissent. Early on, they propagated the notion that human-to-human transmission wasn't possible. It is undeniable that the Liberal government has put Canadians in danger by silencing alternative points of view and has spread misinformation. They are determining what is true and what is not, what is right and what is wrong, what is in and what is out. I call upon the government to restore the personal liberties that are granted under our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They provide employment and economic stability and are always the first to support community functions and activities, but small businesses have been particularly hard hit due to COVID-19. They have shut their doors temporarily, and now many worry they'll never be able to open their doors again. With the season cancellations at the Stratford Festival, Drayton Entertainment and Stratford Summer Music, businesses in the tourism, hospitality, accommodation and retail sectors in PerthWellington are struggling. Every day, I talk to small business owners who can't access the Canada emergency business account, and others who find the convoluted commercial rent assistance program to be out of reach. Chair, the government needs to go back, fix these programs and ensure that support goes to the small businesses that need it. We can go backwards to so-called business as usual, with horrific conditions in long-term care homes, widespread inequality and no real action on climate change, or we can build for better. In Victoria, people in the community, organizations and municipal leaders have been calling for a new way forward. Organizations like Greater Victoria Acting Together; Common Vision, Common Action; and Kairos Victoria are exploring ideas for a sustainable and just recovery. claude debellefeuille (salaberrysurot, bq): Mr.Chair, in this time of pandemic, it is with heartfelt emotion that I want to highlight the excellent work of all the guardian angels at the CISSS de la Montrgie-Ouest. From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank the entire staff, as well as the retirees who have come back to provide their assistance. I admire the managers, at all levels and in all services, working tirelessly so that their teams can answer the call in this difficult situation. My fellow managers and the management teams of the Support Program for the Autonomy of Seniors, both in home support and in residential care, you have my heartfelt congratulations for the herculean work you have done. My thoughts go particularly to Lyne Ricard and Vronique Proulx, managers working diligently with their teams of professionals to support the seniors living in intermediate resources, as we call them. I also warmly recognize the director of nursing services, Chantal Careau, who is facing the current challenge with passion and humanity. Once again, my congratulations go to the entire organization of the CISSS de la Montrgie-Ouest for their remarkable work in this difficult and very demanding time. john barlow (foothills, cpc): During the worst of times, we see the best in people. I cannot say enough about my constituents in Foothillsfront-line health care workers, grocery store clerks, restaurateurs, farmersfor all they are doing to keep our community safe and healthy. I want to shine a light on some of our hidden heroes, such as Owen Plumb, a grade 9 student in Okotoks who is using his 3D printer to build PPE for front-line health care workers. He partnered with the Rotary Club and Evergreen Solutions in Okotoks to help with the manufacturing and assembly. There is also Sam Schofield, the volunteer president of the Pincher Creek Chamber of Commerce, overnight built a resiliency website for COVID-19 by building training tools for businesses throughout his area. He also helped develop the Foothills Business Recovery Taskforce, which is a resource for businesses throughout southern Alberta in my riding. Finally, to the employees of Cargill Foods in High River, I know this has been a very difficult time and that many of you have lost loved ones. I want to say thank you for tirelessly doing all you can to protect our food supply and keep food on our table. scott simms (coast of bayscentralnotre dame, lib.): Thank you, Chair. I would like to take this time to salute those who go above and beyond the call of duty to provide care and comfort to others. In my 16 years in the House of Commons I have never experienced anything like this, when we find our lives are at a standstill and there is so much sorrow felt by families who suffer from the effects of COVID-19. Shanna and Fred Patey of Bishop's Falls, along with a few of their friends, spend hours next to the Trans-Canada Highway with just a barbeque and a cooler. There is also Mitch Strickland of Grand Falls-Windsor, who owns Appy's Diner. To all our front-line workers in grocery stores and delivery trucks, and to doctors, nurses, LPNs, paramedics, first responders and, of course, our brave women and men in the military, we will be forever grateful and blessed because of you. members: Hear, hear! the chair: That's all the time we have today for Statements by Members. Before going on, I just want to remind all the members that it is a one-minute statement, so if you don't mind, please time it before coming in because we do have limited time. I'm not here to judge anybody's way of speaking, but try to consider the translators and interpreters to make sure that everyone understands what is said, because they are working diligently to try to get both languages out. In sum, there are two things: please slow down and please make sure the statement is confined to one minute. Please note that we will suspend the proceedings every 45minutes in order to allow the employees who are providing support for the sitting to substitute for each other safely. In the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown that followed, Canadians were told by this government that programs would be rolled out very quickly and that gaps and shortcomings would be changed as time went on. While many Canadians are being let down by this government's response and its unnecessarily rigid programs, Conservatives identified solutions weeks ago, yet here we are, two and a half months later, and many of these programs still have not been improved. On April 26 the Conservatives asked the Prime Minister to change the criteria for the Canada emergency business account so that small businesses that don't happen to have a business bank account could qualify for those types of programs. Chair, we knew from the beginning of this pandemic that we did need to move extremely quickly, and that's what we did. Eight million Canadians have had that as a replacement for paycheques lost because of COVID-19. We also moved forward on the wage subsidy and a range of other programs to support workers and small businesses. What we've done in terms of helping small businesses with the Canada emergency business account has had a massive impact on small businesses across the country, but we understand that certain companies and businesses have particularities that mean it's a little more difficult for them to qualify. We are working with them through their regional development agencies, and we encourage them to approach their local RDAs, which will be able to help them get the money they deserve. They're trying to get patted on the back for actions they took back in March, and yet they are letting so many Canadians down by not making these very simple changes. Will companies that have acquired another company still be allowed to use the wage subsidy to keep workers on the job, yes or no? right hon. We have moved forward on supporting as many of them as we possibly can, and we continue to work on filling gaps. I know the member opposite has talked to me a number of times about a tractor company in his riding. I can assure you that finance officials are engaged with that company to see if there's a way to make sure we're getting them the support they need. He can make this very clear, and save a lot of work, just by including the word acquisition. They're continuing to work with a range of businesses across the country that, for various reasons, are not able to apply for the help we have now. The government has set the parameters to qualify for the rent relief program for companies that have experienced a 70% revenue loss. There are untold thousands of businesses that have experienced a 50%, 55%, 60% or 65% loss that are ineligible but have no capacity to pay the rent. We called on the government weeks ago to have a more flexible sliding scale to allow more companies to access this program to keep more people on the job and more businesses open. Chair, from the beginning of this pandemic, our public servants and policy-makers have been moving creatively and quickly to try to get help to as many people as we possibly can, with our focus being on the people who need it the most. Obviously, this pandemic is affecting everyone and every business across the country in different ways, but our focus has been on ensuring that those who most need it are getting the help they can. We will, of course, continue to work with the parties opposite and all Canadians to ensure that we're getting help to everyone who needs it, but our focus has always been on the most vulnerable, first and foremost. yves-franois blanchet (beloeilchambly, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. If the Liberal Party of Canada had not taken advantage of the emergency programs, would it have laid off all its staff? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we recognized that a number of organizations and companies were facing difficulties because of COVID-19. People work for those organizations, as accountants, receptionists, assistants or labourers, and those people need to be supported. yves-franois blanchet: Is the Liberal Party one of those organizations in difficulty? right hon. justin trudeau: Any company or organization that can demonstrate a significant drop in its income, whether that be in donations, receipts, profits the chair: The floor goes to Mr.Blanchet. yves-franois blanchet: Is the Liberal Party of Canada in difficulty, as an organization? right hon. yves-franois blanchet: In the Magdalen Islands, fishing companies in difficulty and in need of assistance will not have the money that the Liberals are going to take. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we have invested in assistance for fishers all across the country. Compared to that company, is the Liberal Party of Canada in difficulty, as an organization? right hon. yves-franois blanchet: If the program criteria establish that the Liberal Party is an organization in difficulty, does that mean that the criteria to determine whether an organization is in difficulty are poorly designed? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, all through this pandemic, our priority has been to be here for workers in difficulty so that they do not lose their jobs. yves-franois blanchet: Given the answers from the Prime Minister, let me ask this question: is the Prime Minister in difficulty? right hon. yves-franois blanchet: Restaurant owners on rue Ontario in Montreal feel that they will not make it through the crisis and that they will never open their doors again. By comparison, is the Liberal Party of Canada an organization in difficulty that will not open its doors again after the crisis? We can but hope. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we established criteria for that program in order to help those working for various organizations. yves-franois blanchet: Is there a consensus in the Liberal Party caucus that the Liberal Party is in difficulty as an organization? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we are working every day to help Canadians and workers in difficulty. yves-franois blanchet: Does answering a question put the Prime Minister in difficulty? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, it is a pleasure to be here in the House and to answer questions from Canadians and from members of the opposition. yves-franois blanchet: You are going to answer a question from a Quebecker, I hope. Would those companies not deserve to be saved by the money that the supposedly struggling Liberal Party has taken? right hon. justin trudeau: I am always very happy to answer questions from all Canadians currently sitting in the House. yves-franois blanchet: If the Prime Minister is so happy to answer questions, I hope he will be delirious with joy to answer this one. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we established a program to help those working in organizations and who could lose their jobs because of COVID-19. The conditions of seniors as outlined by the military were appalling, but seniors need more than just compassionate words. Will the Prime Minister stop hiding behind excuses and actually show leadership to fix long-term care? right hon. It lays out the divisions of powers and responsibilities, and we respect the provinces' jurisdiction over long-term care facilities. However, from the very beginning, we have indicated our willingness to support the provinces on this very important issue. We need to make sure our seniors right across the country are properly cared for, which is why we sent in the military and why we are there to help the provinces. Philpott, said, We need to stop using jurisdiction as an excuse to not have federal leadership. Now, we know from the military report that staff were afraid to use vital equipment because of the cost. Chair, over the past couple of days I've had very good conversations with the premiers of both Quebec and Ontario on this important issue. I look forward to discussing issues around long-term care with all the premiers of the provinces and territories tomorrow evening as well. Ontarians and indeed people right across the country are deeply preoccupied by what they've seen going on. jagmeet singh: The military report found that cockroaches and flies were present and that food was rotten. Will the Prime Minister call for national standards so that long-term care is governed by the same principles as the Canada Health Act? right hon. Chair, our priority right now is ensuring that we are supporting the provinces in their need to make sure that all seniors are protected right across the country in all those institutions. Going forward, we absolutely will need to have more conversations about how we can ensure that every senior across the country is properly supported. Will the Prime Minister call for national standards and for long-term care to be governed by the same principles as the Canada Health Act? right hon. This is something we all take very seriously, and all orders of government will work together to make sure that right now, and going forward, we improve our systems. We need a commitment at the federal level that the Prime Minister will push for things that people need, which is to remove profit from long-term care and to establish national standards. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, I will always be here to stand up for Canadians in all different situations. We are going to work with the provinces, fully respecting jurisdictions, to make sure that, all across the country, Canadians in long-term care are supported as required and receive the services and the care they deserve. The COVID-19 crisis should not be used as an excuse to avoid presenting solutions to the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls committee, in particular by delaying action on the calls for justice. This is the same government that would not recognize it as a genocide, the same government that delayed the United Nations declaration legislation and the same government that is still taking indigenous kids to court. Will this government commit to core funding for indigenous services to help women and girls and ensure that the calls for justice are implemented without delay? right hon. Chair, we continue to work very closely with partners on the calls for justice even as we act in many areas, including better funding for shelters and for victims of domestic violence. We will continue to work with those partners, but people will understand that many of those partners are very focused right now on helping front-line workers, not on establishing the report. We will continue to work with them on the report, but the COVID-19 situation has made that more difficult. the chair: I want to thank the honourable members who are shouting time, but I do have a timer here, and I am taking care of it. He was just talking about the tragic conditions in long-term care facilities in Ontario, and there was a report out from Quebec today. I want to commend the Canadian Armed Forces for witnessing these appalling conditions, putting it in the context of a report, and providing care to our loved ones in these long-term care facilities. The government is saying they didn't receive the report from the department until May 22, but this report came out on May 14. I then forwarded it to the Minister of Public Safety on the 22nd, and that report was then given to the provincial authorities very quickly afterwards. james bezan: I trust that you got the report on the 21st, but the report was written on the 14th, so what happened with that report for seven days? Why wasn't it acted upon? Could you just explain that? Our loved ones were at risk during that entire time. Chair, as we stated, this report was done and given up through the chain of command, and the appropriate leadership did their due diligence. Again, I want to commend our Canadian Armed Forces members for not only the tremendous work they are doing but also for doing their duty. james bezan: That report from Ontario documented appalling conditions, horrific care that was being given to the clients, and also the way that the staff conducted themselves. Minister, do you believe that the infection could have been transmitted from staff to our soldiers serving in long-term care facilities because proper protocols were not being followed? hon. Chair, when it comes to any type of activities that we send our Canadian Armed Forces on, we do our due diligence to make sure that we have the right protocols in place and the appropriate training. This is why we have taken the time to make sure our folks not only did the appropriate training but had the appropriate equipment. We have the right protocols in place, and we will make sure that our members who are infected by COVID will get the appropriate treatment as well. james bezan: Does the Minister of National Defence believe that our soldiers serving in Operation Laser, who have put themselves in harm's way in battling the COVID virus as a war, deserve to have hazard pay benefits? hon. Chair, when it comes to looking after Canadian Armed Forces personnel, yes, we are actually in the process as we speak of making sure that our members have the appropriate hazard pay. I would finally like to come back to the issue of the timeline from May 14 to May 21, when that report was in the department for one week. Will the minister take responsibility for that report sitting on someone's desk for seven days and not being turned over to the proper authorities? hon. Chair, I want to make it very clear: When it comes to the observations that were made, those were immediately reported to the appropriate management of the care facilities and to the appropriate links within the province. At the same time, this report was being compiled and pushed up to the chain of command, and they did their due diligence. As I stated, it was given to us, and on the same day it was forwarded to the Minister of Public Safety, who immediately then sent it to the provincial authorities. Chair, as stated, this will not only be given to the proper authorities but the appropriate steps will be taken now. rosemarie falk (battlefordslloydminster, cpc): Thank you, Chair. Yesterday it was revealed that the Minister of Digital Government has been promoting a fundraising campaign to sue Global News for their story criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. Why is the minister using her authority to support the Communist Party of China and threatening our media and freedom of expression? hon. WeChat is a social media platform used to engage and share information with the chair: Now we'll go back to Ms. rosemarie falk: Is the minister aware of the efforts that the United Front carries out on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party to influence how Canadians view the People's Republic of China? hon. The participation in the WeChat group, much like Facebook, is guided by posted the chair: We'll now go back to Ms. rosemarie falk: Is the minister an active participant in the efforts by the Communists to muzzle a Canadian journalist and deprive Canadians of the facts about China? hon. I will say that the individual in question posted something outside of the guidelines of my WeChat group and is no longer the chair: We'll now go back to Ms. Falk, I just want to point out that we do have interpreters listening and trying to interpret. joyce murray: I think the member knows very well that the people who post on WeChat are free to post what they choose within certain guidelines. rosemarie falk: Chair, Sam Cooper is an investigative Canadian journalist who has uncovered many different criminal rackets that can be linked back to Beijing. joyce murray: As we all know, community outreach is a very important part of the work of a member of Parliament. WeChat is one of many social media sites regularly used by members the chair: We go back to Ms. rosemarie falk: Chair, when will the minister apologize to Sam Cooper and Global News? hon. Chair, I have been very clear that I do not share the views of the person who posted on my WeChat site, who operated outside of my the chair: We'll now go back to Ms. Chair, I want to assure the member that we are always vigilant in any foreign interference in our national security or issues of political interference in our society. It's monitored carefully by the national security establishment, according to the law as it exists in this country, and we will remain vigilant. Will the Liberals hold Joyce Murray's WeChat accountable if it has violated this part of the charter? hon. I think, as the minister has made very clear, she was not involved in this process and has no control over the individual who posted that matter. Will the government hold Joyce Murray's WeChat accountable if it has violated their part of the charter? hon. Chair, I want to assure the member that our government remains committed to the rule of law and we will always work tirelessly to uphold the laws of this country. rosemarie falk: Still, was that a yes or a no? I'm not hearing a yes or a no. Chair, to answer the question for the House and to assure the member opposite that our government will always remain committed to the rule of law. grard deltell (louis-saint-laurent, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. bill morneau (minister of finance): Mr.Chair, we continue to be transparent with our measures. Of course, we want to make sure that our investments, our economy the chair: The floor is yours, Mr.Deltell. grard deltell: Let me ask my question to the honourable Minister of Finance once more, since he is talking about transparency. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, the Minister of Finance may not know what the deficit is, but one great Canadian does know. Could the Minister of Finance be very clear, very fluid and, above all, very transparent with Canadians? What is Canada's deficit? hon. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, I want to be very clear with Canadians: our economic situation is very difficult. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, with all due respect to the Minister of Finance, let me point out that, though he is not very clear, Canada's Parliamentary Budget Officer was clear yesterday. Why does the government not have the courage to state it clearly, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer did yesterday? hon. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, I know that the Minister of Finance is very good with figures. Perhaps he could comment on the statement that the Parliamentary Budget Officer made yesterday, that the emergency assistance must have an end date, and if it does not, we are heading to levels of taxation that have not been seen in this country for generations. What is the government going to do to make sure that Canadians will not be overtaxed after this crisis? hon. When we have more information, we will the chair: Mr.Deltell, you have the floor. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, will the minister commit not to raise taxes after the crisis? hon. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, I have said several times that we do not have a plan to raise taxes. grard deltell: Finally a clear answer! However, I'm not convinced that he will apply it. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer himself has said that there isn't much ammunition left without shifting into a large structural deficit, which can lead directly to tax increases. If the Minister of Finance can't even say today what the deficit is today, how can he be credible when he says that he won't raise taxes? hon. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, I think what's most important is that during this pandemic, Canadians and companies across the country need the Government of Canada's help. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, all observers are expecting an economic update to know where we're going. Chair, the United States, Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam have created an economic prosperity group to diversify some of their key supply chains away from China. Indeed, we have been working diligently with all of these countries to make sure that we are keeping global supply chains open during this critical time. I think everyone agrees that keeping supply chains open for medical goods, critical agriculture and essential goods is absolutely essential and the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, this government is refusing to come to terms with what COVID-19 will mean for the future of international trade. Why is Canada not at the table with our largest trading partner protecting the viability of our international supply chains and capitalizing on the opportunities of others doing the same? the chair: Before we go to the minister, one of the members has his mike still on, and I would ask that he turn it off. Chair, Canada has unprecedented access to a number of markets around the world because of the extraordinary agreements that we have made to provide access to customers in those international markets. I have had two meetings with G20 trade ministers on the importance of keeping supply chains the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, is this payback for the Prime Minister snubbing these countries at the original TPP signing? hon. Chair, we have a CPTPP arrangement with these countries, and we are looking forward to making sure that we get Canadian businesses growing into those markets. will begin applying tariffs at the beginning of next year on Canadian exports such as seafood, beef and cars. I want to assure Canadian businesses that CETA continues to apply to our trade with the U.K. Chair, after CUSMA, this government guaranteed to the trade committee that they would publish the objectives of any new trade agreement. Chair, we look forward to working to ensure that those objectives are published as we get into future trade discussions. Chair, the resignation of the WTO director-general at this unprecedented time is concerning for the international trade community. Is the government committed to supporting a DG candidate who is dedicated to the massive reforms needed to get the WTO functioning again? hon. The Ottawa group, led by Canada, is working with like-minded countries on the reform of the WTO. I look forward to making sure that we are leading the way on those discussions with like-minded the chair: Mr. Has the government sought out and received assurances from the United States that no such action will apply to Canadian cattle? hon. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Mr. Chair, we have an excellent assurance of our trade with the United States, which is our new NAFTA trade agreement that we have negotiated, thanks to the unprecedented co-operation across this country. Chair, going forward post-COVID, there are a lot things that will be changing in supply chains. What is this government doing proactively to look at opportunities in these supply chains that Canadian businesses can take advantage of? hon. Chair, we continue to work with countries around the globe to ensure that Canada's supply chains and those global supply chains, particularly for essential goods, for agricultural products, for medical supplies, continue to remain open. Chair, on the agriculture side, canola farmers would like to know the status of canola going into China. marie-claude bibeau (minister of agriculture and agri-food): Mr.Chair, I want to assure my colleague that we are continuing to work with our industry representatives, our allies and our trading partners in China. cathy mcleod (kamloopsthompsoncariboo, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Senior Canadian bureaucrats received very credible reports in early January that China was procuring and hoarding PPE. Chair, from the very beginning of the outbreak in early January we were aware of the challenges our health sector would face, and we immediately began to work with the provinces and territories to understand what the need would be and how we could best prepare. cathy mcleod: In April, the minister stated there were not enough supplies in the national emergency stockpile. Can she explain why she approved a donation of 16 tonnes of PPE for China on January 31, claiming it would not compromise our supply? She can't have it both ways. Chair, we are operating in a highly competitive global environment, and the reality is that we need to make sure we have multiple complementary supply chains operating at the same time, which we have been doing in the past weeks and months, to ensure our front-line health care workers have the supplies they need to keep Canadians safe. cathy mcleod: Unfortunately, this question was directed to the health minister, referencing things she actually stated in terms of the availability of our supplies. Before the she signed off on the donationand it was the health minister who signed off on the donationdid she consult with the health ministers in the provinces and territories? hon. Chair, as the member opposite knows, provinces and territories have their own stockpiles, which of course they use to prepare for incidences of outbreak and other illnesses across their jurisdictions. We've worked very closely with the provinces and territories since the beginning of the outbreak to make sure we can provide any particular additional support. cathy mcleod: Health care workers are now having to look at modified full-face snorkels as an alternative to N95 masks. Did it not occur to the minister that our hospitals and care homes could have used that PPE she shipped out, providing a longer opportunity for them to also get procurement done? hon. Chair, as the member opposite knows, the equipment that was donated when China was in its outbreak was an important donation of nearly expired or expired goods that it was in desperate need of in its effort to try to contain the virus. As the member opposite knows, we've been able to work successfully with provinces and territories to ensure they have what they need. Chair, I would suggest that during February and March our hospitals would have consumed that almost-expired product very efficiently, but I want to move on to another topic. When defending the sale of 22 seniors' homes to the Chinese government, the Prime Minister stated that we have a strong regulatory regime that imposes rigorous standards. Was the Prime Minister completely oblivious to the risks, or was he just too anxious to please the Chinese government when he sold those 22 homes? hon. Chair, the homes the member opposite is referring to are in the province of B.C., and I have to commend the province for the early work it did to protect seniors in those long-term care homes. As she knows, the review we did was entirely separate from the standards to which the province holds the care homes. cathy mcleod: The Prime Minister does not have authority over seniors' homes, which he has clearly stated, but he does have authority over the act in which he approved the sale. Chair, the long-term care homes in each province fall within the jurisdiction of their own particular act, and those provinces and territories are responsible for fulfilling the inspections required under that act. cathy mcleod: Under the Investment Canada Act, the government is obligated to review the sale for compliance. Since the government approved the sale, it is complicit in the care of our seniors in this country hon. That is why we follow the appropriate steps, outlined under the Investment Canada Act, to make sure that any measures we take keep seniors and their well-being first and foremost. alain therrien (la prairie, bq): Mr.Chair, during the pandemic, the government has given money to companies that don't pay a cent in tax because they use tax havens. During the pandemic, the government gave money to Air Canada, but Air Canada never reimbursed customers who did not get the services they paid for. Is the moral of the story that the government thinks that dipping into the pockets of taxpayers to spend money carelessly is no big deal? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): Mr.Chair, the fight against tax evasion is a priority for our government. alain therrien: Mr.Chair, when I see that it's the Minister of National Revenue answering me, I don't feel like buying a lottery ticket. The Liberal Party used two airplanes in its last election campaign, which seems to indicate that it isn't short of money. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, we think it's very important to protect employees across the country and in every economic sector that's experiencing a significant drop in income. That's the approach we've taken to protect people and to ensure that there will be jobs in the future. alain therrien: It's especially important to protect the employees who work for the Liberals to ensure their re-election, yet the Liberal Party has raised more than $7million since the last election. We think that this principle is very important and that this approach must be maintained in order to have a better job market in the future. alain therrien: Mr.Chair, we still don't know exactly how much money the Liberals took from the cookie jar. How many SMEs could have been saved with the $1million that the Liberals took out of the jar and took away from SMEs? hon. We are protecting hundreds of thousands of SMEs through the emergency wage subsidy, the Canada emergency response benefit and all our programs. alain therrien: Mr.Chair, I will propose a choice of answers, or I won't get any. The first possible answer is that when the Liberals brought in the emergency wage subsidy, they set parameters allowing them to use it. The second is that when the Liberals saw the Conservative Partywhich is as rich as they are, but also sanctimonious and self-righteoustake advantage of the subsidy, they thought they could do it too. The third possible answer is that the Liberals hadn't planned to use the subsidy, but they pounced on the cookie jar when they saw it, because that's what they do. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, we continue to think it is very important to protect employees in every sector of the economy and across Canada. That's our approach, and I believe it's the right one to protect and preserve jobs across the country during a pandemic. the chair: We are now going to suspend the proceedings for a few seconds to allow the employees who provide support for the meeting to replace each other safely. Chair, when the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces stepped in to provide support to five long-term care homes in Ontario at the request of the premier, they released a report that outlined their findings in detail. Almost 1,000 seniors so far have lost their lives in long-term care homes in Ontario alone, over 25 of them in my riding of MississaugaErin Mills. Can the Minister of Health please update the House on how our federal government is working with the provinces and territories to prevent further tragic occurrences from happening at long-term care homes and to ensure that our most vulnerable seniors are properly looked after and cared for? hon. I believe all Canadians were deeply horrified to read the details from the Canadian Armed Forces on the conditions in long-term care homes in Ontario. I had a very good conversation with my provincial and territorial counterparts last night about the work we can do at a national level to support their important work. We'll continue to work with the provinces and territories to ensure that they get the care and dignity they deserve. I will sadly report that my community of Pickering has experienced the largest number of deaths at a single COVID-19 outbreak location anywhere in this country. Yesterday, we received the horrific report from the Canadian Armed Forces detailing what they witnessed at Orchard Villa in Pickering, Altamont Care Community in Scarborough, Eatonville Care Centre in Etobicoke, Hawthorne Place in North York, and Holland Christian Homes' Grace Manor in Brampton. The loved ones of those who have passed away, as well as the homes' workers, have asked for a full public inquiry from the Ontario government. I know that the responsibility for these facilities falls within provincial jurisdiction, but on behalf of our communities, can the Minister of Health update us on the work she is doing to ensure that the Ontario government takes action immediately and initiates a full, independent, non-partisan public inquiry and reverses its decision to create a government-led commission that won't even start until September? hon. Chair, I would say that all Canadians were shocked and horrified to hear about the conditions that existed in these particular care homes. We're so grateful to the members of the armed forces who not only improved conditions but also reported them quickly and appropriately to ensure amelioration of those conditions for those particular individuals. We also know that there are seniors all across the country who are struggling with care and with the appropriate level of care. I stand committed to working with my provincial and territorial counterparts to ensure that we do better as a society. We know that there's a role we can play at the federal level with advice, with guidance, with support and, yes, with investments. We look forward to having those conversations about how best we can improve the care for all seniors amongst us. Canadians were horrified to hear the report yesterday from our armed forces about the appalling conditions experienced by seniors in our long-term care homes. Page after page detailed the filth, neglect, abuse and danger our seniors in care are exposed to on a daily basis. Shockingly they face injury and death through missed medications, expired medications, unsterile devices and violations of basic contagion rules to stop the spread of COVID-19. Given that evidence of possible criminal conduct was contained in the military's report, will the minister refer this matter to the RCMP for investigation immediately? hon. We understand in long-term care facilities both seniors and persons living with a disability face unique challenges, and the findings of this report are in fact deeply concerning and completely unacceptable. Considering the severity of this report, we promptly shared it with the Province of Ontario, and the Province of Ontario has initiated an investigation based on the report's findings. Their investigation includes alerting the province's chief coroner who has the authority to alert the police of jurisdiction. We will continue to work with the province to protect those living in long-term care facilities, and we continue to support them through the deployment of our outstanding Canadian Armed Forces and in our partnership with the Red Cross. Chair, that's a shocking answer considering there's clear evidence of criminal conduct and negligence in this. That this federal government is not taking immediate steps to refer this to the nation's RCMP is unacceptable. COVID-19 has exposed critical vulnerabilities across Canada's entire network of long-term care facilities. Not a single province or territory currently meets the benchmark of 4.1 hours of hands-on care per day. As a result Canada has the worst record of COVID-19 deaths in long-term care among 14 comparable countries, with over 80% of Canadian fatalities occurring in these facilities. Chair, the member opposite is exactly correct when he says that those who are hardest hit in terms of losing their lives and the negative effects of COVID are those who are living in long-term care homes. He's also correct when he indicates that COVID-19 has shown us what many of us have known for a long time, that we need to do better in long-term care and supports for seniors. As the member knows, we started those steps some four years ago or so when we began to make incredible investments in aging at home. We know that is one part of the solution, but we have to do better for those seniors who need a higher level of care. I'm working with my colleagues at the provinces and territories to make sure that we come up with a solution that will truly result in better standards for all. Chair, what we need is binding national standards, just like we set through the Canada Health Act in the health care sector generally. Gross fecal contamination, filthy medical equipment, insect infestations, ignoring patient cries for hourswe would never tolerate these conditions in Canada's hospitals. Will the minister move to bring long-term care facilities under the Canada Health Act, or similar legislation, with formal funds tied to acceptable standards of care for our seniors, just like we do for hospitals? hon. Chair, the member shares the disgust and concern of so many Canadians across the country, not only those who have read the report but many of those who have struggled to provide care to elders in those long-term care homes, regardless of the province in which they live. We know that collectively, at all levels of government, we must do better for those people who cared for us and nurtured us all of those years. The member has my commitment that I will work with provinces and territories to find a solution forward to ensure that every person has the right to age with dignity and safety. Davies, you have 15 seconds for another question, a short one, and leave time for a response. These failures are the product of systemic neglect often motivated by prioritizing profit over the provision of adequate care. Does the minister agree that we should not be putting profits above the health care needs of Canada's seniors? hon. Chair, I believe that, when we commit to taking care of people, we must do so with the utmost care that is required. We must all work together to protect those people in our lives who are most vulnerable, whether they be seniors, children or others. jamie schmale (haliburtonkawartha lakesbrock, cpc): Thank you, Chair. According to Vaughn Palmer in an editorial in the Vancouver Sun regarding the secret Wet'suwet'en deal, Palmer writes: The hereditary chiefs calculated the two governments would sign despite the objections from the elected chiefs. Can the minister describe another situation in which the federal government negotiated a secret deal of this magnitude with unelected people? hon. carolyn bennett (minister of crown-indigenous relations): I thank the member for his ongoing concern and I want to remind him that actually it is in keeping with the Supreme Court decision of 1997 that we were to now begin those conversations with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs who took the case to the Supreme Court. As we've said many times, this is not an agreement; this is an MOU that establishes the path forward for the substantive discussions towards a final agreement, which would describe the future governance and the implementation of Wet'suwet'en rights and title. Chair, if it is a shared commitment, why on the eve of the signing ceremony did the four elected chiefs denounce the hereditary chiefs for keeping them in the dark? hon. carolyn bennett: Again, it's really important that the member understand that there was a process for the hereditary chiefs to go back to their communities and discuss with them. Any agreement after the good work that will happen now would have to go back and seek the approval of all of the communities. Chair, the Burns Lake Band members are openly wondering if they're still a band or if the few unelected hereditary chiefs will control everything now. Minister, can you assure them that going forward you will honour their concerns and take the time to listen? the acting chair (mr. carolyn bennett: Actually, the honourable member knows that the next steps include the further and ongoing engagement by the Wet'suwet'en in their house groups and that will include the six elected chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en nation, their community members and many others. Cynthia Joseph, a chief councillor with the Hagwilget First Nation says the MOU between Ottawa, the province and the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs was only shared with her community members on May 9, two days after it was published in the media. carolyn bennett: Walking the path of reconciliation means that we work with our partners and there is a way that they do the work within their communities. It is going to be an agreement to begin the work, but any final agreement is going to have to be approved by all members of the nation in terms of developing a consensus for the agreement the acting chair (mr. Does the minister have any concerns regarding claims by several former female hereditary chiefs that they were stripped of their hereditary status because they didn't agree with the men? hon. carolyn bennett: Again, it is going to be really important that the work take place within the Wet'suwet'en nation to determine their future governance, to determine their way of working with Canada and to make sure the acting chair (mr. For some reason it seems to be a problem to stand up for these hereditary female chiefs who had their titles taken away. Does the minister plan on recognizing band council resolutions denying the authority of hereditary chiefs to sign any future agreements without consent of the elected chiefs and the 3,000 members within the Wet'suwet'en they represent? hon. carolyn bennett: I think the member must understand that, as we begin the work, the nation will do its work and then we will come to the table to determine what the governance would be. Will it be a hybrid model like at Heiltsuk, like Ktunaxa, like some of the communities developing their constitutions, developing their laws and deciding how they will determine their own governance and that partnership with Canada? the acting chair (mr. pierre paul-hus (charlesbourghaute-saint-charles, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. The current restrictions on non-essential travel at the border do not prevent people from claiming refugee protection if they have family in Canada. We have heard from many constituents and members of Parliament from right across the country who are expressing concern about non-status spouses being denied entry into the country because their travel is deemed to be non-essential. I've recently been in touch with all of the provinces and territories because I think it's very important that we have their support for any changes the acting chair (mr. pierre paul-hus: If I understand correctly, Mr.Minister, you are talking to provincial representatives, but a case like that of ChantalTremblay, for instance, is unacceptable. For two months now, she has been trying to bring her spouse to Canada, but it isn't working. Is there a way to issue a directive to border services officers that married spousesit's often marriages with Americanscan cross the border to join their spouses in Canada? hon. bill blair: Just to be very clearagain, I thank the member opposite for the opportunity to clarify thisit is never our intention to separate families, but at the same time, we have imposed appropriate and necessary restrictions on non-essential travel. Our border services officers inquire of everyone coming to that border about the nature of their travel, and for non-citizens who come to that border seeking entry into Canada, if their entry is deemed non-essential, then they exercise their discretion not to allow the acting chair (mr. However, 100,000foreigners have entered Canada, even though the border is supposedly closed. How does the minister explain the fact that 100,000people arrived in Canada by plane? hon. We have imposed very significant restrictions on non-essential travel, but of course there are circumstances where individuals come to this country and their entry into Canada is deemed essential. For example, someone who is providing medical services and coming into Canada to provide those services would be deemed essential, because there is a great need among Canadians for those services. As you can see by the numbers, we have had a very significant reduction in the travel of all non-Canadians to Canada over the past two months. pierre paul-hus: So the minister confirms that the 100,000people who arrived by air were providing a service considered essential to Canada. I'm not talking about the people who crossed the land border, but the people who came to Canada by air. bill blair: What I can tell you is that at all points of entry, including our air borders, we apply the standard that the travel must be deemed essential, and that determination is utilized to see if a person is eligible to enter into the country. pierre paul-hus: We're now learning that the Correctional Service of Canada's investigation into the murder of MarylneLevesque is suspended due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Can the minister direct the Correctional Service of Canada to resume the investigation into the death of MarylneLevesque? hon. bill blair: Again, I thank the member for the question, because we know the concern of the people of Quebec, and the family of Ms. That's why we asked the Parole Board and the Correctional Service of Canada to convene a board of investigation. Clearly, during COVID transmission, the ability to conduct that investigation and to interview all of the witnesses became extremely difficult and has been temporarily suspended, but at the very earliest opportunity we remain resolute to resume that investigation and get to the bottom of it to provide the answers that the family deserves. pierre paul-hus: Mr.Chair, victims of crime are one of the segments of the population most affected by the crisis. For the first time in its history, and to add insult to injury, the government has cancelled all activities related to Victims and Survivors of Crime Week, which was to take place next week. bill blair: Again, at the earliest days of COVID, until arrangements could be put in place, there were restrictions on victims participating. We have put the systems in place to allow victims to present their evidence virtually, either by video or by phone, to ensure that their voices are heard in these important things. We very much respect and support the role of victims in these determinations, and we're making every effort to ensure that they can participate. Chair, yesterday I asked the Minister of Small Business how many business credit availability guarantees were issued by EDC, and I didn't get a number. Money from this program is flowing, and businesses across the country are receiving the important support that they need. Chair, these are large loans, and they require important due diligence and adjudication by the financial institutions. mary ng: I want to assure the member that we're going to do everything possible to support businesses and workers during this very important time. james cumming: How many businesses have received funding under the BCAP co-lending program since March? hon. mary ng: The lending programs, particularly the program to help small businesses, have really helped lots of businesses. Over 630,000 loans have been issued, and this is really helping those the acting chair (mr. james cumming: Unfortunately, lots is not an answer for the businesses that I'm trying to talk to. Can you tell me, for the CEBA changes that were recently announced, when will we be able to see people who have income through a dividend able to apply? hon. Those small businesses that will meet the expanded CEBA criteria are working very diligently with the financial institutions to make sure that they can get access to those loans as quickly as possible. mary ng: The financial institutions are working very hard to make sure that they can make this available to businesses. mary ng: We will work very hard and very diligently to make sure that these businesses and those sole proprietors are supported. mary ng: There is nothing more important than making sure these businesses weather the difficult time of COVID-19, and our measures are the acting chair (mr. mary ng: Today, over 630,000 businesses have received the support to do things like pay for salaries, the 25% top-up for the wage subsidy, pay for rent and pay for insurance and utilities. james cumming: How many dollars are left in the program so businesses can have some certainty that the program will be available for some time? hon. mary ng: I think you will see that the businesses across the country that I have talked to really appreciate that the government has stepped up to help them during this difficult time. These include women with businesses, indigenous-owned businesses and those small businesses all across our communities, all across the country, that are getting the necessary help. mary ng: There are 630,000 businesses that are getting help, and thousands more businesses will be getting help with the expanded criteria. We're going to keep doing the work that we need to help our businesses across this country through this difficult time. james cumming: I heard from a constituent in my riding that they waited for over four hours on the portal for CECRA. james cumming: Finally, the Prime Minister yesterday said that a list of all organizations that have been receiving CEWS will be made public. mary ng: We have committed to making sure that those companies taking the wage subsidy program will be listed publicly. The Canadian Coast Guard is doing a search at this moment following the loss of a vessel off the coast of Newfoundland. From my community, which is a seafaring, fishing community, I just want to put my thoughts out there to the folks of Newfoundland. bernadette jordan (minister of fisheries, oceans and the canadian coast guard): Thank you, Mr. I want to thank my colleague for his comments with regard to the tragic accident off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where we saw the loss of life in a fishing accident. We have made available over half a billion dollars to processors and harvesters to make sure they can weather this storm. We have made sure that the harvesters are able to access the harvester benefit as well as the grant, recognizing the unique nature of their business and how they are not able to access some of our other programs. Chair, to continue along this vein for a moment, we are still looking at unstable markets for a longer period of time. The plants are filling up, and harvesters are worried that they might stop buying product before the season is complete. What can the fishermen expect, or what kinds of programs can they expect, if the season goes bust? hon. We also know that because of the decline in markets, we've had to make accommodations for the processing sector in order to help them be better able to support the harvesters. We have put in $62.5 million, which is allowing the processors to increase capacity in their refrigeration and freezers so that they will continue to be able to purchase product. As I said earlier, we will continue to monitor the situation and make sure we do everything possible to support our harvesters. Chair, I don't know whether this next question will go to the Minister of DFO or the Minister of Transport. For those who are far-sighted or nearsighted, you just have to put on your glasses to correct it. I don't know about space shuttles, but who knows? You can now wear colour-corrected lenses, but Transport Canada still does not recognize these for use. We have medical standards with respect to a number of different kinds of transportation-related jobs for pilots, mariners and those kinds of occupations, which have to be respected. chris d'entremont: Mr.Chair, the eligibility criteria for financial support include the need to demonstrate a significant loss of income during the months of March and April, yet several SMEs in the tourism industry can't qualify because their operations start with the tourist season, in late May or early June. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, before accessing the emergency wage subsidy, applicants must meet important criteria. However, as we explained last week, we will be adjusting the wage subsidy until the end of August, and we will be reviewing the criteria. bruce stanton): We're going to go to the west coast and the member for SaanichGulf Islands. My colleague, Jenica Atwin from Fredericton, held a press conference this morning in which she used the term echo pandemic. My question to the minister is this: Will we see direct funding to community mental health services as urgently requested by the Canadian Mental Health Association? hon. Chair, I read the honourable member's colleague's letter just today, and I want to reassure all members that we have invested in mental health supports for Canadians, obviously before the pandemic hit but certainly since we've been living with the pandemic. I'd like to remind all members to direct their constituents to the wellnesstogether.ca website and portal. There Canadians can find online resources, as well as connections to real and alive counsellors and other professionals who can help them with their various concerns. That's not just unprecedented over thousands of years; that's unprecedented over the last one million years. The recognized parties in the House have established standing committees to work, but not the committee on the environment. When will the recognized parties remember the June 2019 emergency resolution that we are in a climate emergency, and start making sure that we hit 2020 commitments under the Paris Agreement to improve our targets? hon. We realize that along with the COVID pandemic, which is the major problem that exists in the world today, there is another problem as well that affects the entire planet, and that is the problem associated with climate change. elizabeth may: My next question will be for Minister Blair, but as an aside, I will say that last answer completely fails to meet the legal requirements of the Paris Agreement to file a new target this year. To save some time, Minister Blair, let's pretend to go back to the questions from my colleague MP Paul-Hus and to your last answer. Could the minister please put out a directive, advice to every CBSA agent on the ground, that when a non-status entry point sees a non-status direct relativehusband, wife, child of a Canadian citizenthat relative be deemed to be entering Canada for an essential purpose? hon. At the same time, we've been working with the provinces and territories, listening to the concerns of Canadians about ensuring that travel across our international border, particularly with the United States, is limited to essential travel. As I've indicated, I've had a number of important conversations and necessary conversations with our provincial and territorial partners. I believe there is a consensus on the right way forward on this, and we're working very diligently to put it in place. I believe our border services officers have been doing an extraordinary job for us in the exercise of their discretion. At the same time, they have been doing the important work of ensuring the health and safety of Canadians at our border. jenny kwan (vancouver east, ndp): Four out of the five homes listed in the armed forces report were for-profit. Will the minister admit that the for-profit model is failing our loved ones and commit to getting profits out of long-term care? hon. patty hajdu: As the member opposite notes, nobody can read that report or hear those stories without feeling absolute horror and disgust and without demanding better for the elders in our lives. As I have mentioned many times in the House, our government remains committed to working with provinces and territories to ensure that every elder person in our community can age with dignity and in safety. Will the minister make sure that the focus of long-term care homes is taking care of seniors and not taking care of owners' bank accounts? hon. patty hajdu: As the member will obviously know, long-term care remains in the jurisdiction of provinces and territories, and there is legislation that rules them as such. As the member also knows, we have stood by Ontario and all of the other provinces and territories throughout this outbreak. jenny kwan: Is the minister refusing to answer the question because she agrees that profit should come before care? hon. patty hajdu: I think it's unfortunate that the member is trying to place words in my mouth. What I do agree with, though, is that long-term care needs to be reformed, and I think all provinces and territories know, and all Canadians know, that we have to do a better job. Is she willing to defend for-profit care for our seniors? Is she in favour of for-profit private health care too? hon. patty hajdu: What I am willing to defend is the right for all Canadians to age with safety and dignity. jenny kwan: To the minister, what is the difference? Why sell out the care of our seniors? Will she commit that she will take profit out of long-term care? hon. Chair, I think the member opposite knows that the only way to actually reform long-term care is to work with provinces and territories, in fact, all levels of government, to ensure that the people who spent their lives caring for and nurturing us can end their lives with caring and nurturing the acting chair (mr. Since the government owns these homes, has the military been sent in there to see what's happening to seniors under their care? hon. Chair, we know that it is important to work with all of the provinces and territories under whose jurisdiction it falls to protect the seniors within those care homes. That's what we've been doing since the beginning of the outbreak of the coronavirus, and that's what we'll continue to do to protect the lives of seniors and strengthen their protection. Chair, work with the provinces and territories to have a longer-term plan so that all seniors can age with dignity and safety. What is the government doing to ensure the standards of care in these Revera homes that they own? hon. Chair, as I have repeatedly said, the jurisdiction for care of long-term care homes falls within the provincial and territorial realm. Chair, we have been there for provinces and territories since the outbreak of the coronavirus, and as the member opposite has clearly or likely heard the Prime Minister say, we will stand with provinces and territories as all elders have the right to age with dignity the acting chair (mr. Do you think that the families of the seniors in these homes want to hear those excuses about jurisdictional issues? Does the minister not think that the families want to hear that the federal government is doing all it can to care for their parents? the acting chair (mr. Quite frankly, I don't think that families care which level of government is responsible for caring for their elders. That's in fact what our government believes, and that's why we have willingly stepped up to say to provinces and territories that we will be there with you to make sure that all seniors in our lives have the right to age with dignity and care. bruce stanton): We will now give the floor to Mrs.Gill, from the riding of Manicouagan. marilne gill (manicouagan, bq): Mr.Chair, my question is for the Prime Minister who, earlier, clearly told us that the government's assistance is intended for those who are most in need and most vulnerable. I don't know if the PrimeMinister read the newspapers yesterday, but in Quebec, losses to the tune of $4billion are expected until March2021 in the tourism accommodation sector alone. How can I justify to my constituents the fact that a political party, which does not need it, has already seen money from the emergency wage subsidy, when people in my riding don't yet have access to it because of the seasonal nature of their work? These people haven't seen the money that is available through these programs. bill morneau: We think it is very important to protect the country's employees in all sectors of the economy. Through this approach, there will be more jobs after the pandemic, and the economic situation will be better. They are saying that they are protecting the jobs of the Liberal Party of Canada, which does not need the money. Another program was created for them, which isn't quite the same and doesn't really meet their needs. A government whose political wingnot the parliamentary wingdoesn't really need money takes money from the fund, but leaves fishers to make do with less generous programs that don't meet their needs. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, we know that many sectors of the economy across the country are facing challenges. We will continue our approach because we believe it's the best way to protect employees and our economy. The government is saying that the best way to proceed is to give money to the political wing of the Liberal Party of Canada, when there are people who are getting nothing. What am I supposed to tell seasonal workers, who have absolutely no assurances for their future? I can't go back to my riding and say I'm proud of the work the government is doing or our efforts in the House. I have a very hard time accepting that the government is helping employees of the Liberal Party in preparation for the next election campaign, when communities in my region are dying because their economies revolve around a single industry. I can't tell them I'm not ashamed of what's going on as we speak. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, we felt it was necessary to put emergency programs in place in response to the crisis during the pandemic. The emergency wage subsidy is a program that is clearly meant to ensure employees are protected and maintain their relationship with their employer. As for the Canada emergency response benefit, it means a lot to people who don't have a job. We are going to stick to our approach, which is to use consistent criteria to help all employees and all Canadians around the country struggling in any sector of the economy. marilne gill: Mr.Chair, I think the honourable Minister of Finance lives in an ivory tower. However, people who need that money, people who are actually losing money or who don't know if they'll even be working this summer are getting zilch. Are the Liberals going to return that money? Is the finance minister going to help all sectors of the economy, including tourism, fisheries and seasonal industries? hon. bill morneau: Mr.Chair, I'd like to thank the member for her question. The emergency wage subsidy is meant for any sector of the economy where revenues have dropped by 30% or more. We are also providing the Canada emergency response benefit to other employees, meaning, those who have lost their income because of COVID-19. Consequently, we will keep up our approach to ensure we continue to fare as well as possible and the economy works well after the pandemic. bruce stanton): Now we'll go to our last group of interventions, and that will be from Ms. I'd like to begin with a shout-out to the brave waiters and waitresses at our local Earls restaurant and Browns Socialhouse, who have been opened again for on-site dining this week. we're beginning to find our new normal, and it was great to see how small businesses have so quickly adapted their establishments to keep their workers and patrons safe while allowing people to get back to the business of living. Chair, here in my riding I recently had contact with the mayor of Langley City who was wondering if I had any way of accessing personal protective gear, because our local firefighters were running out of stock. Then again yesterday, I spoke with one of our local homeless shelters that is also looking for PPE. Tam is telling all Canadians to wear masks in public, but I'm wondering if the Minister of Public Service and Procurement could tell us where exactly we're going to get all those masks with the current shortage. anita anand: I want to be clear that our priority as a federal government has been to respond to provincial and territorial requests for PPE that goes to front-line health care workers. That is our priority, and we've been procuring goods aggressively in domestic and international markets. We are now actively also exploring ways in which we can assist broader organizations across the country with PPE needs, and that is something that I'll continue to update the House on as we go forward. tamara jansen: A Globe and Mail article revealed that government orders for N95 masks have steadily been dropping. Chair, the number of N95 masks ordered, as reported on the department's website, does continue to fall. Will the minister tell us why we seem to continue to struggle to supply PPE to Canadians? hon. anita anand: It is no secret that we are in a global competition for N95 masks and other supplies, so the Government of Canada's approach is to diversify supply chains internationally and build up and retool domestic industry so that we can have these supplies going forward. In terms of the numbers on our web page, we have short-term and long-term contracts in place the acting chair (mr. tamara jansen: Yes, I understand that a number of Chinese mask manufacturers have been nationalized, and products for Canadians have been confiscated by the CCP government. Is the drop in N95 orders due to, in actual fact, contracts being cancelled? hon. anita anand: On N95 masks, I would like to assure the member and the House that we have multiple contracts in place for the procurement of N95 masks, including with 3M in the United States, whose masks are crossing our border weekly over the next month. We have our embassy and other firms actively ensuring that our supplies from the manufacturing source make their way to the warehouse. tamara jansen: We know many millions of N95 masks have arrived in Canada from China and have been substandard. Chair, as previously explained to the House, about eight million masks did not meet spec by the Public Health Agency of Canada and have been repurposed to some extent in other areas of the system. tamara jansen: In a previous committee, the deputy minister advised us that Medicom was shoulder-tapped by the government to consider producing PPE. anita anand: We have operated in a very urgent way in order to procure supplies for front-line health care workers. It's a multi-pronged approach, and our priority is to get supplies out to front-line health care workers in this time of crisis as quickly as possible. bruce stanton): Just before we adjourn, I think this another mark of accomplishment on behalf of the great team here at the House of Commons. My compliments to all members joining us here in the House and to all members who have joined by virtual conference<doc-sep>We've received apologies for absence from Michelle Brown and Jack Sargeant; there are no substitutions. We'll move on, then, to item 2, which is our scrutiny of the 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' draft strategy, and I'm very pleased to welcome Dr Frank Atherton, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales, and Nathan Cook, who is the head of the healthy and active branch at Welsh Government. If I can just start by asking about the fact that 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' is an all-age strategy, really, and how confident you are that it will deliver for children and young people. We have high prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults—we know that, and we can't walk away from that because that's translating into demand on health services. But we have to take a focus, a future generation's focus, almost, on the next generation. I don't write off the current generation, we can't afford to do that, but we do need to think about what can we do that would be different for the next generation so that they don't get into the sorts of problems that we're currently seeing with overweight and obesity. We know that the consequences of that for our young people are going to be enormous if we don't do something and something quite soon. We know that overweight children go on to become overweight adults, unfortunately, and that brings all the consequences of multiple disease issues—diabetes is often cited—cancer risk et cetera. So, we have to focus on children, and, in fact, during the consultation, we've been very clear that we need to engage with children and young people as well. Perhaps we'll get into that at some point, Chair, but, yes, I can give you that assurance. What my follow-up question, really, is: can you just tell us what kind of engagement you've had with children and young people to inform the draft strategy? dr frank atherton: Well, Nathan may be able to influence some of the detail, but in broad terms, we have discussed with young people in a number of fora. In fact, I was delighted that we had a young person, Evie Morgan, a schoolgirl from mid Wales, who came to the joint launch on the consultation. She met the Minister there and gave a very good personal account of her views on obesity and overweight. I'm visiting a school, either this week or next week, at Treorchy, to talk with teachers and young people there. nathan cook: I was going to say, we've also had a session with youth ambassadors as well, and what we've actually produced for the consultation is not just the children and young people's version, but also a toolkit in terms of getting schools really engaged and involved in terms of the work that we want them to do to feed into this as well. So, we've already had some really good responses from a lot of youth group and schools already. lynne neagle am: And you've got a structured programme, have you, to roll that out? Okay. We've got some questions now on leadership, and the first questions are from Siân Gwenllian. The Minister for health said yesterday, in answering a question from me on the Chamber floor, that you gave him advice not to have a target in terms of reducing obesity among children. Could you confirm that that's what your advice was and tell us why you don't think that a target is needed? dr frank atherton: My advice was not that we don't need a target—we may well need a target, and that's one of the issues we need to consult on—but that the target that had been adopted in England and in Scotland to halve the prevalence of obesity in children was more aspirational than deliverable, and that if we are to choose a target in Wales, then we need to balance deliverability with challenge. So, there is something about performance management, because I would be looking to not just the health system but the health and care system and to public services boards to think about how they're delivering on this, and I think we can use targets to that. But they are one tool in the box that I would think we could use, and part of the consultation is to ask that question—'If we are to go down a route in Wales of choosing a target, what might that look like?' sian gwenllian am: Okay. dr frank atherton: It's certainly something that we could consider in terms of the final strategy. Well, that is contrary to what I was told yesterday on the floor of the Chamber by the Minister, but there we go. I'm glad to hear that you're not ruling out having a target, because without a target, without something to aim for, how do we know that we're getting there? dr frank atherton: I think your point about evaluation is really important. Whatever we produce at the end of this process—and we're looking to produce a final strategy towards the autumn—we do need to have a strong evaluation. So, some metrics in there, it would seem, would be appropriate, but what those are, what the nature of those are, do we frame them as targets or ambitions—that's the point we need to consult on. If the Government is going to be successful in terms of the aim of reducing childhood obesity, then it needs to fund and support the actions. Have you made an assessment of the level of investment needed to implement this plan? dr frank atherton: Resourcing will be important. We currently do make investments in a number of areas that relate to child health generally, and, of course, obesity and overweight in particular. Now, we can't quantify an absolute amount of resource that will be needed to deliver until we know exactly what's going to come out of the consultation and what actions we might want to deliver to a greater degree in Wales. A figure of £8 million to £10 million a year has been banded around as a broad kind of area of what we might need to invest, but that would need to be drawn from existing programmes. Can we make them more effective? Can we get better value from them? And there may well be a case for new investment, and that's a question, of course, that would need to be discussed with Ministers when we're producing the final strategy. nathan cook: But I think a key consideration as well is we already know there is investment across health boards in some kind of obesity-related services. So, I think what we really need to think about across Wales is how we can drive greater scale, how we can look at current programmes in terms of making sure that they're better evaluated, and how we can make sure that we're also drawing up on the existing resources and capacity out there as well. sian gwenllian am: And does the level of investment depend on what the target is—what the goal is? dr frank atherton: I don't think you can necessarily just link the two. The issue of resourcing is one that's there irrespective of whether we choose to put a target in place. sian gwenllian am: But how would we know that it's being used effectively if there isn't something to aim for? dr frank atherton: Which brings you back to the question about evaluation. sian gwenllian am: Yes, but without a target, how can you properly evaluate? If you don't know what you're trying to do, how can you properly evaluate? Anyway, you're open to suggestions about having a target, which is great. Would you agree that Government could use the revenue that's being produced through the levy on soft drinks towards some of these efforts to—? dr frank atherton: Well, of course, there are some consequentials that are coming to the Welsh Government as part of the levy on sugary soft drinks. That funding, of course, is less than we had anticipated, and that reflects, actually, a success story because industry is reformulating, and so the amount of sugar in soft drinks is already starting to decrease, which is a good thing. I'm not personally in favour of hypothecation, I think I'm more interested in the totality of resource that goes into public health programmes than into marginal resource. And when I think about obesity, I don't just think about the relatively small marginal amounts of money that come in through whatever source, but I think about the totality of the £7 billion we spend in health and social care and how we can divert and channel some of that towards broad prevention initiatives in general, and towards tackling being overweight and obesity in particular. Could you give us any kind of figure? dr frank atherton: I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? sian gwenllian am: You say that there is less money that's come in through these consequentials from the levy, can you mention some sort of figure? dr frank atherton: The figure that I have in mind is about £56 million that's coming in in terms of revenue over a two-year period. When the sugar levy was first brought in, there was some modelling at UK level about what level of revenue that would bring, but it was based on the amount of sugar that was currently then in drinks and the fact that the sugar has reduced in drinks, the total amount available to the UK is less and hence our consequentials are less. nathan cook: Yes, I was going to say, there was a mid-year report done where the levy has raised £150 million to date since coming into force in April, and the original forecast was £520 million a year. So, I think that shows the amount of work that's been done by industry around reformulation. sian gwenllian am: And the consequentials of that? That is the consequential—£150 million. sian gwenllian am: Yes, so what's the Welsh consequential? lynne neagle am: Fifty-six. Anyway, it's a good sum of money and you're talking about investing £8 million to £10 million. So, obviously, you know, we can be more ambitious because there is money in that pot if that money was ring-fenced for this particular scheme. dr frank atherton: Well, the resource is going to be a real issue that we need to address, and I think as Nathan has said, there is funding of various initiatives currently in the system, and we need to look at that and make that as effective as possible. Will there be a need for some additional resource? There may well be, and that's a question that we'll have to look at in terms of the strategy when we develop it and have a discussion with Ministers about the level of resourcing. lynne neagle am: Can I just ask on that before Siân moves on? What assessment have you made of how that money is being spent in other UK nations? Because my understanding is that the money is being used in other UK nations to directly impact on obesity. Have you given any consideration to—? As I understand it, that money now is being dispersed around a plethora of programmes, including the transformation programme, and what I found very odd, really, was vaccination, which is surely the core business of the NHS. Have you got any view on that? dr frank atherton: I'm not sure I understand your point, Chair, in terms of the link between the consequentials from—. Are you talking about the consequentials from the sugar levy or are you talking about—? lynne neagle am: Yes, because in other nations, it is being used to directly impact on initiatives to tackle obesity, whereas, we've kind of put it here in Wales into the general pot and it's being used to fund a plethora of different things. My preference—it's a personal view—is that hypothecation doesn't really help us too much. , what we need to look at is whether the programmes, the sorts of programmes that are being funded in England, or indeed in Scotland, are working effectively, and if they are, are they being delivered here in Wales? We have looked very carefully at the plans that England and Scotland have for tackling obesity and overweight, and we've made a comparison with what we're doing in Wales, and our ambition in Wales is to go further than those nations, in many ways. But I come back to the point that just linking the hypothecation of a relatively small amount of resource is likely to be less impactful than asking a question of public services boards and of the health system, indeed, about how much money, overall, are we putting into prevention. lynne neagle am: No, I recognise that, and I think we're talking about additional resource. suzy davies am: I was just wondering whether you thought that there was a useful psychological link on the part of the public between saying, 'Here's a sugar levy', and 'It's going to be used to help children and adults stay healthier.' Going into a pot, it actually makes it quite difficult to explain the purpose of the tax in the first place. So, I take your overall point, but in terms of the people who we're trying to help in all this, actually creating a direct link might be quite helpful. You're putting an emphasis on the whole-system approach in implementing the plan, how are you going to create a system that co-ordinates action and drives change across relevant partners, avoiding a situation where it's everyone's role, but nobody's responsibility? How are you going to avoid that? dr frank atherton: It's a very important question, and one of the four strands in the consultation is exactly related to that, around leadership and drive nationally. You may notice, by the way, that we've chosen not to talk about an obesity strategy but a healthy weight strategy, because I think having a positive construct is really quite important to us here in Wales. But leadership will be really important, and we will need some sort of structure to lead this, to provide oversight. I'm not a great believer in creating new structures, so we do need something that will give that drive, but the leadership comes from the top down. And then we need to make sure that the public sector generally is engaged in this, but it goes way beyond the public sector, of course, because we have to work with industry, and we have to work with communities, and we have to work with the public on this. Interestingly, we had quite a large discussion two days ago between health and social care, but also involving the third sector and some members of the public, around how can we drive prevention more generally. It wasn't specifically on obesity, but of course obesity came up because it's such a pressing issue. This question of governance was discussed quite extensively, and we do have governance systems, of course, in Wales. We have public services boards, we have regional partnership boards, and how we can get those aligned behind this common agenda is really important. But I'd like to see—and I know I'm a public health professional, so I know that only maybe 10 per cent, 15 per cent, possibly 20 per cent of what makes and keeps us healthy as individuals and as communities can be driven through the health system; but I would like the system to step up and take these kinds of issues more seriously as well. So I'd be looking for local leadership through directors of public health and indeed through chief executives to work with their public services boards on this. So, we'll need some sort of national oversight, absolutely, but we need local ownership and local leadership, too. Which Minister do you believe it should be accountable to, or, given the complexity of obesity, should the board be directly accountable to the First Minister? dr frank atherton: Ultimately, the First Minister will be responsible for this and will want to have a strong oversight of this. It is often framed as a health issue, and the Minister, Vaughan Gething, has a strong personal commitment to this, I know. We've talked extensively with him and with sports and recreation colleagues about that, so there's a link there. It does cut across all portfolios, and so this is an issue that I have discussed with Cabinet, and that collective ownership is really important, and will be, because it can't just sit in one domain. I think what you do need to have is you do need to have a lead organisation or a lead ministry, and I would see health as—I work within health, so I'm perhaps biased, but I would see health as leading this, but it needs broad ownership across Government. janet finch-saunders am: I know my colleague Siân Gwenllian mentioned earlier targets and things, but I know in Wales we're not too good at collecting data. What data is currently available on childhood obesity and what metrics will be used to measure progress against the plan's objectives? dr frank atherton: Well, of course, our main data source is the child measurement programme, which collects information on children entering school aged four or five. Well, I'm sure you're familiar with the statistics, but it'll be just under a third of children at that age who are overweight or obese— janet finch-saunders am: Could I just ask—sorry to interrupt—how up to date is that? dr frank atherton: The last survey was just last year. dr frank atherton: So, it's pretty up to date, and what it shows—. It's not getting radically worse—there's always statistical variation in these things—but it's not getting any better. And, for the first time last year, we did look at the question not just of children who were overweight or obese, but we actually singled out the proportion who are obese, severely obese. So we have a figure for that for the first time, which is about 12 per cent, which is quite shocking, in a way. Does that answer your question? janet finch-saunders am: Yes, but how will any gaps in your data be addressed? dr frank atherton: Well, one of the questions that are often asked is: could we measure more on a longitudinal basis? By that in England, for example, children are measured at school entry and then again at year 11—at age 11 or 12., that kind of age group. I think that would be helpful to us in Wales, and it's one of the questions in the consultation about whether we should expand that. Obviously, that would have significant resource implications, not just for the funding, but also for schools and for the system to deliver it. But it's something that maybe would help us in terms of better understanding and better evaluation—the point that was made earlier. nathan cook: And the other data we do have is the millennium cohort study, which has been released, for 14 and 15-year-olds. We're starting to think about how we can utilise some of that data, looking at that longitudinal picture around children as well, which will be really helpful. lynne neagle am: Can I just ask about the child measurement programme? The strategy commits to looking at whether we can have a second measurement taking place in Wales. Can you just tell us a bit more about your thinking on that and when you would see a second measurement taking place and how you would use that data? dr frank atherton: I touched on that just now, but personally I do think it would be helpful to have more information. It's always the case, There's always a trade-off between the cost of getting that information and the value of the information. We know an awful lot about obesity and being overweight and the causes of it, but we don't really have a very clear understanding, in Wales at least, of the point at which children start to become overweight. Although we know that overweight children tend to go on to become overweight adults, we don't know what proportion of them between school entry and later teenage years—what those changes are. So, it would help us to have some better understanding, which would help to direct some of our initiatives. We'll wait and see what comes out in the consultation, and it's something that we need to give thought to,  but we do have to trade off the additionality of what the information would give us with the cost of doing that, of course. In the draft plan, some of the measures in there suggest legislating for restricting price promotions and banning energy drinks, and that sort of thing. Do you think that, if we go down that road, there's going to be time within this Assembly to introduce such legislation? And, if not, what do you think might be the timescale for such legislation? dr frank atherton: It may well be that there are things in Wales that we might wish to legislate on, and you've mentioned two of them, and they're good examples. We would, obviously, need to undertake quite detailed consultation on those and, in a way, we need to mirror what's happening in England and in Scotland to some degree around the consultations they're having on energy drinks. We also need to influence the issues that are not devolved to us and we seek to do that. The timing of that will have to be subject to other pressures, and I come back to the point that legislation, of course, is one of the tools that we've got—we need to deploy them all. We've heard from the Government, on other calls for legislation, that the programme's very tight, certainly for this term, so I was just wondering whether we might get that in, but okay. If I turn now to the planning system—and this might not be something that you have great deal of knowledge of; I'd just welcome your view on this, because, when we discussed with stakeholders, we talked about whether the planning system, for instance, could be used to, as an example, restrict hot food takeaways around schools and so on. Would that be a measure that you would support, something like that? dr frank atherton: I think it's definitely something we want to look at and, of course, that question is asked in the consultation, so we would like to know people's views on that. I think there is a question—a really important question—about how we can use the planning system more effectively. I've discussed with Nathan on a number of occasions, with planning colleagues in Welsh Government and in local authorities, about the art of the possible, let's say. I was very interested to see, up in the north-east, some time ago, that one of the local authorities up there did put a moratorium on the opening of new fast-food venues near to schools, or indeed in areas where levels of obesity and overweight were particularly high. So, that gave me comfort, because maybe there are powers within local authorities that can be used more effectively. I think my view at the moment is that the jury's kind of out on whether those are effective and how effective they're going to be. But the fact that we have some initiatives around the UK does give us an opportunity to study that and to learn from experience perhaps and then, if it is shown to be beneficial, to think about that here in Wales, yes. Of itself, it wouldn't address the problem, but, added to other initiatives, I guess it would. Can I just ask you briefly, then, about community sport infrastructure and, in particular, of new schools? So, Welsh Government, as you know, has ploughed a huge amount of money into the twenty-first century schools programme. What we heard when we spoke to stakeholders recently, particularly headteachers, was that, in some of the new schools that have been built, we haven't had changing rooms and toilet facilities, for instance, built into the new buildings. So, if we're going to try and utilise these buildings for general community activity to get kids and the wider public, actually, more active, do you think that's something that we ought to be building in? Again, not your particular direct area of responsibility, but something that you might have an input into, is that, when we're developing schools, we should be making sure that they have those kinds of facilities so that they become accessible to the wider public. Is that something that you would be prepared to make a recommendation around? dr frank atherton: Well, it's certainly a fascinating area and one that I think has a lot of potential. You're right to raise it in the context of schools, and I can understand why this committee would, but I think it goes beyond that, actually, into all developments in the public sector and how they're developed and whether we're building health into our environment, which perhaps is your starting point. One of the things that I was really pleased to see in terms of the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017 that was passed a couple of years ago was the use of health impact assessment as a tool, and we're still working on how that will inform policy and how that will be applied in issues such as policy decisions through Government, but also in more downstream issues about how we create the public infrastructure that the public can and should be using. And so I would like to see the use of health impact assessments to a much greater degree to inform those kinds of decisions. If you apply that kind of lens and you take the point, which is inherent in your question, I think, that schools are not just for kids, they're for communities, then you would—it would lead you to a conclusion that you would perhaps design and build them in a different way. So, on a personal basis, I would certainly support your view that we should be looking to use the sports environment in schools in the same way as we use leisure centres. There are all kinds of barriers in there, and I understand all of that, and it's not really my field, exactly as you say, but, as a matter of principle, I think it's a good one to pursue. Yes, perhaps if we could just stay in this area of education just for a moment, I think we all agree that healthy habits acquired early on probably tend to last quite well, so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the healthy and sustainable preschool scheme and whether you think some timescales should be made public about what you expect the achievements from that scheme to be. But, in particular, I was struck with what you said about local leadership, and I just want you to bear that in mind in answering the next question, which is about the foundation phase. You're probably aware that this committee has heard from various school leaders that they're struggling in some cases to meet the ratio of staffing for the foundation phase, which potentially compromises the purpose of it in terms of physical activity. I'm just wondering how the strategy development board is considering that at the moment. Is it something that's come on the radar for the board? Is it something you're thinking about? And, if so, who do you think should be responsible for pinning that down a little bit? Because this is education, not health, and—. dr frank atherton: Well, look, I've got to confess to you, I'm not an educationist, and so the question on staffing numbers in schools is not one that I have been asked to give a deal of consideration to, and it hasn't really been discussed, I don't believe, in the context of development of the strategy. If there is a specific point around that that the committee would like to make in terms of a response into the consultation, which I presume you'll be making, then we'd be happy to consider that. We have standards and we perhaps need to think about how we tighten those standards and how we—enforce isn't the right word, but how we implement and make sure that those standards are properly implemented, because you're absolutely right to say that habits are developed early in life. That's in the preschool; it's also in the home of course, and then later in the school. So, we do need to look at all of those as settings and are there more things we can do within those settings to drive healthier behaviours—that's exactly why we need the consultation. nathan cook: But I would say, through that scheme as well, we've really got a really good bank of preschools that are actually doing some really great work in this area as well. So, I think the more we can understand the successes that some of those environments are having—you know, how we can roll those out and work across other settings to create that wider impact as well is going to be really important. What I'm thinking about is expectations at that level will be expectations at a slightly older level, which will be contained within the foundation phase. And while you're quite right—obviously, parents have a role in this, or families—there will be, particularly with the introduction of the new curriculum, certain expectations on schools to provide not just healthy environments but to actively work towards well-being and healthy weight in children and things. And that's why I asked you about local leadership, because, if it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the plan at foundation phase, it's going to fail further up the school years as well. I think it might be something that the board might want to consider here, because at some point there'll be an accountability question and we will want to know how 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' fits in with the new plans for the new curriculum, and whether it's merely persuasive and influential or whether it has the weight to place some obligations on school leaders about what they do in their schools. So, this connection, I think, is quite an important one, and, if the strategy development board could consider that, I think it would be very helpful, because this doesn't exist in a vacuum. dr frank atherton: Well, I'd certainly be delighted to take that back and we can look at it in terms of how we move from the consultation into the final strategy. suzy davies am: Because we will want to know who to ask: 'you're the accountable person—why has something worked, or not worked?' We will need to know that at some point. dr frank atherton: Just building on Nathan's point, some of the schools—I know it's schools rather than the preschools, and I take your point, but some of the schools we've been working with have absolutely brilliant models of good practice and good local leadership. I remember the Minister actually at the launch, and one of the schools was represented there, and they presented—the school came and some of the children came and presented—to the whole audience about the activities that they were undertaking in their school around physical activity and on healthy eating, and it was such a model of good behaviour the question was, 'Well, why not everywhere?', so that probably speaks to your question. lynne neagle am: And have you had any discussions, then, with education officials around things like teacher training and CPD, because you'll be aware the Health and Social Care Committee has made a number of recommendations in this area? It's crucial that we skill up the staff to develop these things in an appropriate way, isn't it? dr frank atherton: Well, we certainly discuss with education colleagues in Welsh Government. There's more we need to do in terms of that, because you're absolutely right: there's something about building the whole of the workforce—education is really important, but elsewhere as well; it's about how do we really make every contact count, you know, that construct. So, everybody who's working in the health and social care system should have a role in this; everybody who works in education, whether it's the old—. Do we still have dinner ladies? Or teachers, you know, they have a role to play in supporting children to be as healthy as they possibly can. And, actually, I see them, Chair, as a really essential part of the public health workforce. Suzy, are you going to do your curriculum one? suzy davies am: Well, I've bound it in together, but that final point you make about teachers being part of the answer to this, they're already under a range of pressures: is it fair to make them accountable for whether this works or not? Or should that local leadership lie somewhere else? I don't expect you to pin down a person today. dr frank atherton: I wouldn't like to blame a teacher or performance manage them on the proportion of their children in their class who are overweight. That would clearly be nonsense, wouldn't it? But they are part of the solution, and so the accountability lies further up the chain, doesn't it? The question I think we would have, and public services boards might well ask, and the local education authorities may well ask, is: how effective is any particular school at driving forwards these healthy behaviours? suzy davies am: Okay, thank you. hefin david am: Is that all right, Chair? lynne neagle am: You've got the floor, Hefin. What would that look like? dr frank atherton: Just in terms of the physical activity, I have to say it's a really important dimension and we need to move further on. We know not enough of our children are physically active and they're not meeting the various guidelines, so it's really important. It does have an impact on healthy weight, but it has a huge impact in terms of socialisation, in terms of mental health issues, et cetera, you know. nathan cook: I'd just say that one thing we have got in train is, obviously, Sport Wales, Public Health Wales and Natural Resources Wales—we have them working together as a collaborative at the moment to look at how their joint delivery on physical activity can be taken forward more efficiently. So, one of the things they are looking at is obviously the schools programmes they do through eco-schools, the Welsh network of healthy schools and the sports programme to really think about that physical activity and how we can have better join up in terms of the programmes that we're already delivering as well. hefin david am: With that in mind, I'm going to confess to you, chief medical officer, I did anything in school I could to avoid physical education lessons. Yet, two weeks ago, I played for the Assembly rugby team—I wanted to get that in. How can we get children more engaged with physical education in ways that—? I felt completely alienated in school. dr frank atherton: Well, you're right, and many people go through that same journey and come to physical activity later in life, and that's great if they do that. The sad reality is that many people don't, and we also know that there are issues around the dropping off, particularly for girls, of physical activity towards the teenage years. , at the heart of it, it's about making sports and physical activity enjoyable and attractive to people. Sometimes that's easier, I sense, for boys than for girls, but we need to tailor things to different audiences. hefin david am: Yes, that's the trick, isn't it? It's about finding out what children enjoy doing. It's not just about elite sports; it's about getting everybody engaged and active in sports, and that partnership with Public Health Wales that Nathan talked about is really important, because we need a population approach to driving physical activity. hefin david am: So, do you think, with that in mind, we need statutory guidance for schools on physical education? dr frank atherton: Again, I'd look to the consultation as to whether there was an appetite for any kind of guidance. And finally, with regard to free school meals to all pupils in primary and secondary schools, do you think that extending that to all pupils would be beneficial in providing a more varied diet for pupils? dr frank atherton: I don't have a personal view on that. I think it's the quality of the food that kids are getting, whether that comes from home or through school, and whether it's free or whether it's paid for. The question of children being hungry at school is a really important one and needs to be addressed at a national level. I think that's a— hefin david am: So, you think that's more about the provision of food for those who might not have access to it than providing a varied diet. dr frank atherton: I think it's important that children have access to food, absolutely, if that's your question, but we also need to look at the quality of the food and what's in that food offer. I've been around some amazing schools in my own constituency, where they've got proper canteen facilities for pupils and really, really good produce in the meals. And, to be honest, I've been very surprised and shocked at what I've seen of the quality of the food in the packed lunches. Nobody can really police, and I wouldn't want to see parents being policed over what goes in a packed lunch, so if there is data out there to suggest that there's a larger percentage of parents providing packed lunched that are really not good at all, then there is some merit to be said for what Hefin is—. Would you be willing to carry out any research? dr frank atherton: So, your point about food that's brought in in the packed lunches is a really important one, and I've talked to some headteachers as well about this. We could go down a route of guidance and prohibition, but that gets you into the role of nanny in chief and I don't really see that as my role or Government's role, and I don't think it's effective either. Do you remember—? You must have seen on tv—I think it was in Scotland; I don't know if it's happened in Wales—parents pushing the fish and chip packets through the school railings. What I have seen, though, is some really good innovative practice in schools where, for example, they reward children for bringing the healthy options. Schools can give guidance to parents about what would be a healthy lunch and what sort of things might be expected to be seen in the lunch box. So, I've seen some of those approaches that have transformed, actually, the offer of what comes in school boxes. So, my point to the question was: isn't there some merit, perhaps, about all children being equal and eating similar good-quality food in schools? dr frank atherton: Yes. The draft plan commits, doesn't it, to updating the healthy eating in schools regulations—the 2013 regulations? I appreciate this is a consultation, but what is it that needs changing in those regulations at the moment, just to give us a bit of steer? nathan cook: It's mainly on sugar content, so, obviously, they don't adhere to current Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition guidelines around sugar levels. So, what we'd want to consider is, you know, what we need to be careful of is unintended consequences of changing that, as well, if you see a shift to more kids bringing in school packed lunches as well. So, I think we want to consider the best way of doing that and consider through the consultation how we can go about it. janet finch-saunders am: The 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' plan commits to a review of the clinical obesity pathway. What are the time frames for this review, and what do you think are the basic essentials of a clinical obesity pathway for children and young people? dr frank atherton: We do have a pathway for managing overweight, and that's been in place since about 2010, I believe, and we do need to bring that up to date in terms of current knowledge and experiences. We've challenged Public Health Wales; we've asked Public Health Wales to undertake a review of that pathway, and they are going through that process now. nathan cook: We were asking them to review the pathway before we launch the final strategy in October because, obviously, what we want is for that to inform what that final strategy looks like. dr frank atherton: The second point of your question about what are the essential elements, they are already there; we need to tweak them and we need to make sure that they're properly delivered. But it's a tiered approach, so, having access to information through schools and through communities and into families is part of the first step of that. And then, if children are overweight, it's a question about how they're identified. There are questions about the ability of the public to recognise large children, so there may be an issue there. But when children are running into issues around weight, what kind of interventions can be put in, either through primary care or through communities through health visitors, et cetera? And then of course we do have—and we've started to shine a light on this, haven't we—the very overweight children. I don't think we have enough in the way of targeted support to be able to support those. So, I think there's something about looking at our whole pathway, mapping out what the current evidence now shows us is needed, and then thinking about what is our provision in Wales and what do we need to do to bring that up to the level of the places that are the best. The draft plan recognises the importance of the first 1,000 days, but it doesn't appear to include any new proposals to help parents to enable lifestyle changes. Are you satisfied that the draft plan does enough to address the influence that family and parents have on children's healthy weight behaviours, particularly in the first 1,000 days? dr frank atherton: Well, the first 1,000 days are really critically in shaping lives, as I'm sure you'd agree. We are absolutely open to any other suggestions that the public or this committee have as to what more we can and should do. There are a number of things, the sorts of programmes you've mentioned, that I think could be more effective. We know that children who are breastfed are less likely to suffer from obesity in childhood and, indeed, to go on to be obese adults. If there are other interventions in other areas that we need to take, then we'd be delighted to hear what they are, but those are the ones that have jumped out so far. nathan cook: Can I just say—? One of the proposals we're looking for is, obviously, we know that during pregnancy it's a really critical time when we can actually look to work with mothers. We know from looking at some of the behaviour change that it's actually a really critical point when new mothers really start thinking about their lives, wanting the best for their child and their families. So, what we are thinking about is how we could develop some kind of approaches to that going forward. But we know our Healthy Start scheme is also a good lever for us, just in terms of how we can look to improve that kind of dietary offer at the earliest stage as well. Finally, we know that for some families day-to-day challenges can make it difficult for them to make healthy choices, particularly for those on lower incomes and/or maybe using food banks. Could the Welsh Government take bolder action to better support low-income families to eat healthily? dr frank atherton: Well, you've touched on a really important point about inequalities because overweight and obesity is not evenly distributed across our population. It absolutely is more prevalent in more socioeconomically deprived communities, and that's something that should really concern us all. So, it gets you to questions of availability of fresh food and produce; it gets you to questions of formulation of products and whether value brands are less healthy than more premium brands. So, it cuts across all of those issues that we talked about in terms of settings and in terms of environment earlier. We do need to think in broad terms—broader terms than just obesity, but we do need to think in broad terms—about how we create a society where families have the wherewithal to lead healthy lives, and that gets you to really important questions about the minimum wage and income poverty. There's no doubt in my mind—I'm a public health professional—and there's no doubt in my mind that economic success and health success go hand in hand. In terms of what we can do through this particular consultation, there are some things in there about providing better access, but without tackling some of those deeper determinants of health, their impact will necessarily be limited. lynne neagle am: Just finally from me, then, you referred earlier to the importance of making every contact count, but some stakeholders have told the committee that they struggle to do that because of difficulties in availability of people to refer to. Is that a situation that you recognise and what, really, can we do to improve that situation? dr frank atherton: Well, it depends what you mean as to where to refer to. What we're seeing across the NHS is a gradual transformation in primary care so that primary care is no longer about going to see your GP, it's about going to see a practice where you have a range of health professionals. Would I like to see more dietetic support, for example, in that setting? Absolutely I would. I think we need to think in terms of that pathway that we were talking about earlier, about access to that kind of advice and support, which can head off people getting into problems and kids getting into problems with weight issues. So, that question of redesign of the pathway really speaks to, I think, your point about, 'Well, where do people go when they have problems with their weight?' That's true for adults and it's true for children as well. Well, can I thank you both very much for your attendance? It's been a really productive session. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee, because getting some input into the consultation from children's perspectives, this would be one of the routes we would absolutely welcome. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee on CAMHS tier 4 provision. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Health and Social Services also on CAMHS in-patient provision. Paper to note 4 is a letter from Qualifications Wales to the Minister for Education on qualifications for the new curriculum. Paper to note 5 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education on the development of the new curriculum. Paper to note 6 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education seeking clarification on the draft additional learning needs code. Paper to note 7 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education seeking clarification on the response to our Brexit report. Paper to note 8 is a letter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on a cumulative impact assessment briefing for committee, which has been offered. Paper to note 9 is a letter from the Chair of the Petitions Committee on a national taskforce for children’s mental health. Paper to note 10 is a letter to the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union from the children’s commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the implications of Brexit for children. There are a few that I'd like to return to in private, but are Members happy to note those? Thank you. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting

The opposition party accused China of stockpiling PPE in January, while the minister later claimed there was a shortage in the national emergency stockpile in April. The party was concerned about the minister's approval of a PPE donation to China in January, but the minister explained that the government had multiple supply chains for PPE production. Dawn Bowden AM raised the issue of including vulnerable children in education hubs, and Kirsty Williams AM acknowledged that this was a challenge faced by all four nations. The Welsh Government, along with local authorities and education systems, aimed to support families with special education needs and reduce risks by hiring social workers. It was agreed that appropriate referral mechanisms should be in place, and schools should maintain contact with and identify vulnerable children. Huw Irranca-Davies discussed the registration of grandparents and refuted the claim that Wales had the most fragile childcare sector, emphasizing that childcare offers could strengthen the sector. He also mentioned plans for capacity growth in the coming years. The impact on children and school readiness was addressed, focusing on the challenges faced by disadvantaged families, the feasibility of providing free education, and the associated costs. Jayne Bryant inquired about the clarity of support for the implementation of a Bill in educational settings, and Alastair Birch clarified that training requirements for professionals were clear, emphasizing the duty to report any significant harm to children. The concern of potential harm to relationships and mistrust due to increased referrals to social services was raised, but Alastair Birch disagreed, stating that professionals had a duty to report if they believed a child was at risk. The child measurement program was identified as the main data source, revealing that less than a third of children aged four or five were overweight or obese. Dr. Frank Atherton emphasized the importance of longitudinal data for evaluating strategies and supporting the education system.

Question: What were the recommendations made by the user interface designer and the industrial designer during the discussion on product requirements, technology innovation, appearance design, and product quotation, and why were these recommendations suggested? Article: So , we will have the three presentations from the In Industrial Designer , User Interface Designer and industrial designer: Industrial Design . project manager: And after that we will have the new product requirements , the decision on the remote control functions , and we will close the meetings after . project manager: No , industrial designer: Three three , it's three project manager: I'm participant one . The first I will present the technical function design for user interface for our remote T_V_ control . As we know our remote c rem remote T_V_ control it's very has very soph sophisticated functions , as we show from this picture . So how can we design a user interface with so sa with so many sophisticated functions ? , let's move to next slide . As we know Google it's a very successful because his powerful function , but with very easy to use user interface . project manager: user interface: So my job is to design a Google T_V_ controller which I want to have sophisticated functions while with very easy to use user interface . So industrial designer: user interface: That's the end of the talk the end of the presentation . user interface: With sophisticated functions , project manager: So powerful , user interface: but with very yeah powerful . marketing: So , I dunno , it's maybe difficult to have both , industrial designer: To merge the two system huh . marketing: industrial designer: But But this is user interface: But if we have very very good user interface marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah you maybe you have some international standards , where you know , if you can use one is the other are or almost the same , so the sign . project manager: Oh you mean for the yeah pic pictograms or things like that ? industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . For example , I dunno here , escape , you know , you have escape in computers you have , so if you see escape , you know that it should be the same . industrial designer: So you have to The sh the user there for example the power off button it is something very international , you know that So . project manager: Go on , go back and industrial designer: Yeah , but the question is how to merge you know the Google system to the system , alright . marketing: industrial designer: It you project manager: So , you will propose us something which is yeah so powerful and easy to use . marketing: industrial designer: The rationale must be design , or project manager: So , Baba is the the Industrial Designer . As you all know , you know m my job is to design you know to give an industrial design of the remote control . So the re basically the remote control will be , you know , infrared control , so the problem is how to relate the project manager: industrial designer: how to relate the remote control device , like for example this one I h I'm holding in my hand and the T_V_ . industrial designer: but I propose a nifra infrared base you know , so so for me I think that it is better it's bet it's better to control T_V_ project manager: marketing: industrial designer: so you know , so it's it will be cheaper and it is less technology than , you know For the cheap price we have , for the cheap price we want to marketing: True . project manager: So you mean that infrared control is a cheap technology ? industrial designer: I think it's cheaper than laser , so . Do y you know the requirements for the remote control ? Twelve , nearly thirteen , marketing: What the cost is ? project manager: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , I think for the cost we want for the cost we want it's better to have Let's see . So the di the differen the findings you know what you find inside the re i the the system here inside it is just , you know a bulb and an infrared bulb , so here for example the infrared bulb will be here project manager: You have the b the bulb , it is a blue the blue stuff here and the infrared and the infrared bulb it is the red stuff project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: you know and so and you have the other subcomponent that are not really here so important , so . project manager: What is this ? industrial designer: This is in fact some other component that are in between the electrical de the electronic device . industrial designer: So and the next slide , it is the last one it's So it's I think it should be wire wireless re remote con Because you know , it's easier to manage and you know because you f the b the the battery problem can hold you know will you use a battery or the a wire to connected you . Or maybe some kind of thing that we can have both , but you know , I at my side prefer a wireless . industrial designer: Okay , so if you have some question I didn't answer ? marketing: What's the average price of this technology then ? industrial designer: Well the avera the average prices I think that this technology will cost , I dunno , around eight Euros , so . Or at least you know , the user interface: So what , the wireless remote control ? There's a wire with remote control ? industrial designer: You'd yes , you can . It's so so bres you have to decide how how you will you know , put some energy inside , so you can think about wireless or you know it's it's a question that we can raise , so . project manager: So you think that a cable between the remote control and the T_V_ won't be a good idea . project manager: No it wou maybe it will be cheaper I dunno , I just may maybe you making a solu marketing: But this is what you would like to ask the user first and I don't think the user would be ready to have a industrial designer: project manager: Yeah , user interface: Wireless remote control . project manager: but marketing: I don't think well , yeah , I don't think he would , industrial designer: Yeah , but some pa I always want to have you know , project manager: marketing: but in a sense industrial designer: sometime I want to have wire because you know . project manager: Yeah but as Industrial Designer , do you think that it will be feasible to have linked or to have link between the remote control and the television ? industrial designer: project manager: I'm just asking you . Do you think it will be cheaper ? industrial designer: I don't think it will be too much . industrial designer: Have to think about the question , you know , 'cause it's I think that you know you can always you know project manager: Okay . industrial designer: I think wha wha with the wire it's cheaper but you know the wireless it's more practical , so . Mayb maybe you have just to to kind of research or try to ask people if they will like something wireless or not . marketing: Now the project manager: So industrial designer: Yeah but , it should be an agreement , you know , because even if you can think of the wireless , it is it's it is the job of the the the g Graphical User Designer , but you know . If it is a lot cheaper and if you want to reach for example some the the money you have , if you want to use , so it can be good to have a wireless , it it is a question . project manager: I think it's would be easier to have a link between the remote control and the television , marketing: Well that's actually one of the point , yeah ? True . So just trying to answer all the questions , if the user would be happy to have something or something else . We had one hundred subjects , we observe their remote control use in a lab and then after all the experiments they had to fill up a questionnaire , and see what was okay or not for them . actually seventy five percent of the users find m the most remote controls ugly , okay , so that's project manager: You mean the loo the look , the outside ? industrial designer: The look , how it look like . So this is where we could have yeah , good market , I guess , if people are ready to pay more . And then yeah , the remote controls like the one you've shown previously it's not so doesn't fit the user requirements sometime , because it's too many buttons and so on . And users are actually zapping a lot , so they're using the device intensively , that's something to take into account as well . project manager: marketing: So this is from the experiments we've done , project manager: marketing: so if we could solve this problem this would be interesting for the user , I think . it takes too much time to learn how to use the remote control for thirty five percent of the people . And remote control are really bad for R_S_I_ problems for twenty six percent of the users . project manager: What is R_S_I_ ? marketing: R_S_I_ is like , when you're using the same doing the same movement several times , then you get injured . marketing: Okay ? So , those numbers are less important then the previous one , but still it has to be taken to count . marketing: And definitely if it could have less buttons , still maybe the same number of functions , but less buttons , user interface: Functions . And just to have an idea , do you think you as the User Interface Designer to would it be possible to have less buttons and still have the same functionality and to have powerful remote control , you think it's possible ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , but do you think it will be easy to use ? user interface: But I'm not sure project manager: Because if you have many functions just for one button it would be quite difficult for the user to know . project manager: I think the marketing: It's user interface: No you you can have a switch menu , so you can project manager: Yeah , but it has to be intuitive . Then for you can have a switch menu , so you put the switch menu to it it tend to this kind of this category of functions . Okay , user interface: Then you you put the switch button , project manager: but user interface: then it switch to another category of functions . For example , if you have remote control you you can rem you can control your T_V_ and also you can control your recorder . industrial designer: With a user interface: So there's a different functions , but i if you you there's a button you can switch between control T_V_ and control your recorder . project manager: Yeah , but user interface: But what I'm not so sure is about how to make the remote control look funny look fancy , not funny . marketing: industrial designer: This is a question that should be asked to the If you ask the people , maybe the the marketing people . user interface: marketing: Yeah , this is something we sh user interface: Because maybe a colourful is fancy for some people , but maybe simple and uniform colourful is fancy for some for other peoples , so . industrial designer: I think the solution is to have many colours of you know instead of having one grey standard project manager: Yeah , but I think it will increase the price of the production of the remote control . user interface: Yeah , because maybe some people prefer a red remote control , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah , yeah . project manager: And also f user interface: Maybe we can have di di we can have several options , marketing: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , but as soon as you speak about options , it means that the price increases , marketing: Yeah , user interface: project manager: and we don't really want the price to be too too high , because we wanna be able to produce it . So , we want something fancy , as previously said , Florent , something very easy to use , powerful and also as it's written here , seventy five percent of users , they zap lot , so maybe just having many functions in one button is not that good if you want to zap a lot . project manager: And they don't really want to zap between functions of their remote control , they want to zap between channels on T_V_ . project manager: So I think you have quite lot of points to to think about industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: So , is it okay for your presentation ? Nothing else to to add ? marketing: Yeah , it's done , just yeah . If we would if we could remember like , not too many buttons and make it look fancy , I think it would make it . project manager: So , I had some new information about the product requirements , so you will have to take care of it of it in your thinking , in your designing of the remote control . So the first one is that for the designing of the remote control we don't really want to use the teletext anymore , as it's something that's user interface: project manager: It's is marketing: Lame , or project manager: No yeah , because now everybody has internet at home , so it's better to use internet then teletext . project manager: So , you will have to think about it in your in in the design of your remote control , industrial designer: Yep . project manager: and also the remote control will only be used for television , so for y for you your designing , you're not you won't be you won't had buttons to just to manipulate yeah to control the recorder or maybe the garage door or things like that . project manager: It's marketing: - project manager: because if we want to to do remote control user interface: . project manager: which will be used for for the television , for the recorder , for the camcorder and all the others , it will become too complex and it will increase the pli the price and we can't do that . project manager: So maybe it will be easier for you to to design it , to have very powerful and easy . project manager: And also we want the image of the real reaction be recognisable in the product , such as the colour and s the slogan . project manager: that's if you want to buy a remote control and if you go in a shop and if you see the remote control you will recognise directly that s it's our product . project manager: So you will have to use the colour of the product , of the user interface: Okay . As we say , we put the fashion in electronics , so it has to be a fashion remote control . Yeah , 'cause what I'm thinking is how will you will connect the T_V_ to internet , so . project manager: industrial designer: This is marketing: I don't think it's part of the remote control design anyway . project manager: but mayb industrial designer: Yeah , but this this mean that your T_V_ would be able to , you know , connect to internet , you know , surf the web . user interface: A pi There's that box in the T_V_ , so with the set box you you can connect internet with your T_V_ . industrial designer: It's pop I don't think it's popular , so that's the problem so . industrial designer: the global usage , user interface: Global , industrial designer: so if people don't have the technology . project manager: So everybody is okay with the new requirements ? user interface: So I I so As as for the colour , what what do you think ? project manager: I think it has to be yellow . user interface: Yellow ? T_V_ remote control ? marketing: Min project manager: Maybe you can change the colour , but the image of the society has to be recognised . industrial designer: I think if you have you know th like a yellow ribbon here is the double R_ . Doesn't need to be completely yellow , project manager: So you have to user interface: Okay . It's okay ? marketing: Regarding the first line , what So we're just expecting no more use of the teletext . Y you You will have as the I_D_ I don't remember what is industr Industrial Designer to put pon marketing: Industrial Designer . project manager: And by the way , Mister David Jordan , please record your presentations in your own folder <doc-sep>project manager: And then we going to do some finance to see if it is feasible user interface: And chocolate ? project manager: and at the end we will we will evaluate ourself as a team . So first , I present as we came to this perfect model , project manager: user interface: and then we'll give some technical specifications . We analysed all the fruits project manager: user interface: and contacted NASA , and made some real good project manager: MASA ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: And making some analysis of different fruits , we choose the ultimate form , ultimate colours , and ultimate smell of it . But we still didn't want to go far from our titanium idea , 'cause it's the most of the moder the m the modern material we can p select . Explanat user interface: Everyone is f really really glad to obtain an s such a r such a device . imitating flatulence] project manager: What do you say ? user interface: N marketing: It says project manager: user interface: You must say it . And so , we have buttons and using L_C_D_ , or like you can use this jog wheel and select which ever option on the L_C_D_ , and then do on and off . Like , m switching the L_C_D_ display if you want to use L_C_D_ , or you don't want you can just use normal button . industrial designer: And then you can see the look L_C_D_ and all the switches . industrial designer: Yeah , or s So , we want to have simple and perfect shapes , like I shown in these phones . That's for the L_C_D_ or for the titanium ? marketing: You mean we can change the colour of th industrial designer: For the L_C_D_ . Even you can configure your colours for its the depending on your mood , or s marketing: Okay . Or project manager: And w wait , wh what are the strawberries for ? Wh wh industrial designer: Huh ? marketing: On the L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: Ah , these are like sensors . industrial designer: So , marketing: industrial designer: after this meeting we'll propose a party for our success for project manager: Ah . project manager: industrial designer: So , any specific questions for project manager: we'll see in the financial part if all gets into user interface: marketing: It makes sense . project manager: W Who is the five fifty millions we first make a party in ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: yeah , let's see if th it's meet the evaluation criterium . You made a very nice prototype , and , I think , we now need altogether to try to evaluate it to see if it makes sense to do it , if it fulfils our what we want to do , and things like that . As you know , before going and creating and producing these strawberry remote control , it's very important to first verify if it makes sense , if we have a chance to sell it . marketing: so we need to evaluate it , try to do it in a constative way , and as much as we can . And then we are just going to have an average , which will give us the value of our remote control . Of course , this can be discussed , but let's let's see , so let's vote . marketing: So , industrial designer: Yeah , what's is really marketing: what do you think , is it fancy ? industrial designer: it's really project manager: I think that fancy , we can say it is fancy . project manager: what do you think ? marketing: What do you think ? user interface: Feel the weight . So marketing: Yeah , o one means it's , yes , a very fancy and seven mean no at all . marketing: So , what about technology ? We have we have speech recognition , we have location based , industrial designer: And we have L_C_D_ . project manager: Yeah , I think it's a marketing: Quite user interface: Yeah , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: still we need to cha marketing: So let's suppose my daughter take it and and through it away . project manager: marketing: Do you think it makes sense that it's going to live again ? , maybe not the prototype . Well , so the question is does it have the minimum requirement of re remote control ? industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: So I don't know . These are the main marketing: it depends on the project manager: And you can do di two sites ? marketing: Okay . Yeah , and you can do on L_C_D_ using these going to scrolling all the option . industrial designer: So if you don't want marketing: So but , for instance , because the L_C_D_ is not touch control , touch screen , you cannot go to channel twenty five directly . user interface: You go you project manager: You c push here the the user interface: So , the basic mode project manager: yeah . marketing: It's much longer than that that being two two five , no ? user interface: No . marketing: But So what do you think for it , usefulness ? industrial designer: So , d Yeah , we need to address we want marketing: Seems to be useful . industrial designer: we only address two main functions here and the other functions will be on L_C_D_ . So project manager: Let me understand well , industrial designer: so project manager: because I'm not sure that's for that this one are b d two dir directional button . And which what is that ? user interface: It's a jog dial for controlling the cursor on the L_C_D_ screen . , see in L_C_D_ , like you will have blocks and you select which one . marketing: Is it the the the effective size and weight that the Is it real size , real weight ? Or Because it industrial designer: Yeah , it's size al almost marketing: Size is going to be that , yeah ? industrial designer: Yeah , because it is marketing: and and industrial designer: The weight will be bit lighter . marketing: because I'm haven't seen the weight so I must not user interface: Okay . marketing: Well , so colour , it seems that we have the several colours for the L_C_D_ . marketing: But , it's not very clear what is the colour of the sh the sh the case . industrial designer: The case is silver titanium , no ? marketing: It's a it's going to be titanium . marketing: So project manager: I it that's industrial designer: So maybe , I think marketing: I think usefulness is m as as I rem just have to remind you that usefulness is much less important than fanciness . industrial designer: Yeah , well marketing: Whether it's fancy or not now , it we have to decide . marketing: But this project manager: I would have m i found more fancy that the fruits are useful . Not like this d We're just giving the fruit for more fanciness and more attraction , too . industrial designer: So , maybe think we can have rubber or some sponges , stuff for strawberries and different colours . industrial designer: So it's marketing: So , it seems we are not so clear on the shape industrial designer: Even project manager: No , I'm not sure why industrial designer: These buttons project manager: if it was like this industrial designer: But it looks really not really good . user interface: And industrial designer: Even we can provide many different colours or different fruits , and project manager: -huh . user interface: but still you got some rubber fruit here , and it's completely completely secure to leave it with children and that . project manager: Okay , so you you you feel like it's something a protection for the remote control . Yeah , we've yeah we have sensors here and so here and here , project manager: Also . marketing: but can we adapt it to each each personal use ? user interface: Sure , sure , just look at it . marketing: That industrial designer: You can marketing: What else can we need ? industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: You Do you think you are gonna be able to do that with ti titanium as well ? project manager: Yeah , it's fudge titanium . Well , I if if this is if you are ready to do that , then I think it deserves a one . So now , it has to fulfil the financial criterium ? marketing: industrial designer: Financi marketing: Ah-ha . user interface: What what's the limit ? project manager: H marketing: It's twelve bucks . user interface: it's it's okay that I don't know , 'cause it's not my field . So the case , which one is it in the end ? industrial designer: Yeah , I think we will go for a single curve , no ? marketing: Let's do a single curve . marketing: It's only curve ? project manager: Oh see , I I think that the the price is this one . marketing: Special colour ? user interface: Well , n Why three ? industrial designer: No , only one , no ? marketing: No because project manager: . marketing: So the L_C_D_ project manager: How many push-button ? industrial designer: Scro project manager: Three or two ? industrial designer: two . That's that's not marketing: That's all ? project manager: We choose this one , and not this one . marketing: is it a scroll wheel and pe push button , th this centre one ? project manager: Or only a scroll-wheel . So project manager: You try to s marketing: You are trying to make make up make us up . industrial designer: It's already project manager: Because how do you do to y select ? industrial designer: Ah . marketing: No , but you select with the two d the other two buttons , project manager: Yeah , you you go on the location with your scroll wheel industrial designer: Y ye marketing: no ? That's true . project manager: You you have all of these , no ? marketing: She's very hard on this . project manager: Not special colours an interest in ? marketing: No , the colour is in the L_C_D_ . project manager: And buttons are not colourised ? They are m industrial designer: marketing: I no . marketing: Well , if I look at what is the most expensive things , it's the L_C_D_ industrial designer: Sample speaker . user interface: Well , as you may know there's some research done in the field of producing energy from mechanical eng , producing electricity from mechanical energy . So , the point is that when you take device and push the button , you produce enough energy project manager: But you don't need a battery ? user interface: to make electricity . project manager: But marketing: So that would project manager: it's like the hand dynamo , no ? industrial designer: Maybe the jog wheel can be like kind of hand marketing: So , but if we select the hand dynamo it's okay , we only industrial designer: is marketing: We we win one . user interface: And ? marketing: And ? project manager: M maybe minus three , no ? industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: It's not changing , no ? user interface: Why ? industrial designer: It you don't marketing: Yeah , yeah , yeah , if Click somewhere , you'll see features . industrial designer: Yeah , that marketing: It Is it ? project manager: Yeah , yeah y industrial designer: marketing: I think we're exceeding now . It's maximum industrial designer: Is really strict ? marketing: We would prefer , project manager: and don't have to Yeah , yeah . marketing: I'm just curious to see this industrial designer: Ho marketing: my address chip on print . , I would say it's the Russian trick , but project manager: Yeah , but is English . When we see the results , there is no doubt there industrial designer: Yeah , it's really project manager: . user interface: M maybe not , huh ? marketing: Team-work , very strong , I would say . marketing: New ideas found ? project manager: So , you say , is there sheep ? marketing: Yeah . A good leader , you know , a good leader is somewhere in the shade and marketing: but then I I mus That's true . user interface: we could forecast it , right ? marketing: To whom ? To the whole our company ? project manager: I'm the one , proposing the celebration . industrial designer: So where we will go now ? project manager: Ah , industrial designer: ye project manager: I think it's finish . marketing: I think the meeting industrial designer: Will go to Italian restaurant , or marketing: The meeting is over at least <doc-sep>industrial designer: user interface: project manager: Yeah I kinda like this I'm kinda getting into it . So just to kick off the meeting basically so we're working now for a real reaction , this is so it right . Just got an agenda to set out what we're gonna try to accomplish in this particular first meeting . We're gonna just do a quick opening and we can hopefully all get acquainted with one another then we're gonna start talk a little bit about tool training . Essentially that means getting used to the only thing that we haven't tried out yet , the whiteboard . we've got a general plan for the project how we're gonna go about accomplishing this and then just a bit of discussion close up . I guess you know game or something in real life so yeah basically I want to I'm just gonna you got of course you can discuss that , I'm thinking about proposing that since we've got this weird blend of ourselves and our roles that we just don't ask , don't tell . so if you say something about marketing , right , sorted , y is marketing: You're just gonna believe me , industrial designer: marketing: we'll go from there . project manager: obvi if if you guys if if at the same time if you like logically if something doesn't like if I'm like we're gonna sell a remote control that's the size of this paper book you know you say like well that doesn't seem like such a good idea because of X_ obviously go with it . we'll discuss it but I'm not gonna ask do you know that or yeah it seems like marketing: Prove it project manager: yeah yeah exactly marketing: yeah , okay . project manager: so , 'cause we're what we're sort of role playing is y g yeah you're gonna tap into your own knowledge as well . And that's the same for your when we do introductions and you talk about your background you know have fun , you know maybe you went to you know maybe i you're like in Maine you went to U_C_S_B_ but you wanna say you went to Harvard or something like that , why not , you know industrial designer: marketing: project manager: you can this is you know I guess we can have a little bit of fun with it . So are you guys okay with that does that seem logical ? industrial designer: Oh yeah , that's fine . So I guess that that we're totally we're making a remote control which is thrilling industrial designer: Right . project manager: but the idea is that we can make something based on the whole corporate model I dunno if you guys had time to check the in real life I dunno if you guys checked the the corporate website . we've got to make something as fashionable as possible , that's kind of the corporate strategy is we're gonna try to take ordinary stuff that nobody really thinks about and try to make it nice you know like John Lewis nice or you know if you go to Debenham's or something . So basically we are reinventing the wheel but we wanna try to do it in a user friendly slick sleek kind of way . way we're gonna go about doing that is basically at first we're gonna start on the basics . And that's where I'm gonna need you guys the User Interface Designers and the the other designer that I can't remember , marketing: project manager: the the I_D_ and the U_I_D_ right the Industrial Designer industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: hey right on alright , user interface: . project manager: to guide me and guide us on this project 'cause you're gonna be you're g you guys are the bottom you know you're like no you can't do that you can't have you know X_ and Y_ at the same time . And then we'll work up from what is necessary to more like what would be good , you know like I I think you guys probably got the same emails I did but the idea of , yes a coffee pot needs to be able to hold coffee but it's also better if it's not like really cheap glass so that it if you touch it you hurt your hand , or something like that . and so we'll work up from there and then we'll meet on and talk about it and then finally we'll incorporate as kind of the last stage you know where you guys build or tell me tell us what's possible and then you tell us what we can hope for and what way to go take the the the take the basics and make it nicer and then ov obviously the U_I_D_ and the I_D_ you know you you can keep on the you know sort of at the cutting edge of how to get about maximising what is possible to try t of sync it all up . right so for now just for th the white board basically just to get used to it , I haven't tried it yet either I'm just gonna start and carry like five remotes around and just write down I'm just gonna write down one of the names of my desert discs you know if you if you were trapped on a desert island and you could only bring five C_D_s along with you name one of them that you could , not all five , if you wanna write all five go for it but name one of them that you could . marketing: project manager: I'm Marty , industrial designer: user interface: project manager: I went to uni at U_C_ Santa Barbara and I'm here working on a P_H_D_ in psychology . So marketing: I'm Sarah , I went to Michigan , and I'm here doing cultural studies and I'm the Marketing Manager or something . industrial designer: I'm Nathan , I'm from California , and I'm here doing a Masters degree in social anthropology . project manager: Where did you go to uni Nathan ? industrial designer: U_C_L_A_ . marketing: So do we have to wait for you to write it down or are you gonna tell us ? project manager: Well I'll t i marketing: I'm waiting to know . See I'm a big music fan I don't know if you guys are , I'm assuming everybody likes music to some lesser or greater extent marketing: project manager: but there's some other options , if you're a T_V_ slut marketing: Fair enough . project manager: like I am like Smallville terrible television show industrial designer: user interface: project manager: but I happen to love it , marketing: Oh , Smallville . and oh well I might as well throw a British person in there you can't go wrong with Radiohead . Alright so user interface: project manager: whoever wants to get up next , you can write down some telly that you watch or whatever you want . Right now I'm listening to a lot of somebody nobody's ever heard of , Chris Bathgate , project manager: . marketing: really lame user interface: marketing: and what else did I bring with me ? Probably classical , to totally geek it out , project manager: Okay yeah yeah . Isn't h has h industrial designer: project manager: do you watch the new season ? marketing: No . Are you getting it online , project manager: I think I'm gonna start downloading it marketing: or is it on sky ? project manager: yeah . user interface: marketing: It's the five by five , I can't read that much . user interface: I just came from Glasgow project manager: marketing: Seriously ? user interface: and I'm happy to say that there's the there's the same quantity approximately . project manager: I have to be here for three years so I might as well get the terminology right . And I'm gonna go home next week and everyone's gonna be like oh my God you're turning into one of those people , project manager: Oh , have you been home yet ? user interface: project manager: They'll be like , say something British , marketing: no . project manager: Bad religion ? marketing: 'Cause industrial designer: Yeah , that's the music I grew up listening to . user interface: industrial designer: And so there marketing: Oh , now I can think of so many other ones . project manager: Where are you from in California by the way ? user interface: industrial designer: I grew up in San Diego , project manager: Did you really ? What part ? industrial designer: but yeah La Jolla , P_B_ . industrial designer: But really I last lived in San Francisco , I haven't lived in Cali well I haven't lived in southern California since I was eighteen . project manager: Going to s like North Carol I'm sorry you you just can't get a better burrito than what's available in the s in San Diego . 'Cause in San Diego th the tortillas are cooked on the grill and in northern California they steam them . project manager: Well it's it's i there's other things too there's you just can't place it marketing: Ah . project manager: like I when I went to school in the U_ in Santa Barbara which is central California the Mexican food is okay , it's just not good like and yeah it's like two bucks , industrial designer: . industrial designer: Close t do you know where Clare de Lune coffee shop is , project manager: Yes . industrial designer: Cafe Forte project manager: Yeah it's actually like literally half a mile from my house . project manager: a little bit introductions we talked about some of our C_D_s industrial designer: Wow . user interface: project manager: and things we like about the city you know , I think we'll user interface: project manager: right so marketing: project manager: moving on to not fun stuff project finance . user interface: project manager: basically what we're trying to do is sell this remote for twenty five Euros . This is what the finance department has told me , the C_F_O_ but I don't know , I'm not sold on this , it's pretty dear , twenty f that's like you know forty bucks for a remote . project manager: what we can maybe work on that a later but we're gonna make a lot on it , the profit aims to make fifty million Euros on it . So one of the things I I was gonna mention to you you guys the designers is that it m we probably need a rever it needs to be a universal remote control probably . project manager: something that could do N_T_S_C_ as well as PAL as well as various other formats like if it's gonna control D_V_D_s marketing: Makes sense . project manager: I'll leave that to you guys but that's something that i i it is gonna be an international sold thing . s right so just to close up , I'm not sure how much time I've used next time right Project Manager , sorted . Is we'll meet in another half an hour or so and I'd like the Industrial Designer to get ge think about what needs to be done , like what the basic function of it . U_I_D_ well yeah you right g your assignments are up there and you'll also get s assignments from in your email as well more spec specifics on what do do . project manager: So actually in a way you guys c maybe in our next meeting chat a bit about what the user's gonna want and what the user can have , you know like so marketing: And negotiate that . project manager: yeah well it is and we'll discuss the trade-offs in between so yeah specific instructions will be sent in your email . But I think that that is more or less a good place to start for now and as more things come up we'll have meetings and you'll get emails and so forth . any questions , before we get started ? user interface: I assume that we're building a stand alone remote control , we can't kind of build it into other products . project manager: You mean to like user interface: For instance like a mobile phone or something like that . user interface: Or or you know can we produ can we sell a remote control phone for twenty five pounds or less ? project manager: Well , have a think about it . project manager: I'm I'm certainly op it seems like yeah it it seems like it's certainly do-able marketing: W yeah . or if we can't have a full mobile phone maybe a remote that has some other kind of useful function . We'll see what see what industrial designer: Maybe a remote with changeable faces , like the faces that you can buy for phones . That's true , I guess we we probably have some time , maybe we should brainstorm a bit like what we wanna do , go back to I don't really have any . user interface: Now are we also discussing kind of our initial ideas at all here ? project manager: Yeah yeah let's do it , let's do . user interface: S does anybody have any initial ideas ? project manager: I'm gonna go ahead and take notes on this too 'cause marketing: Good idea . marketing: right , we decided that already and it may be functioning for other things , as soon as you said that I was thinking like all the other things you could get a remote to do , like your microwave or your front door industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: or like to have everything on one thing , project manager: marketing: but then , I've never been a fan of those huge remotes that have like a million buttons , project manager: user interface: But I'm thinking I'm thinking kind of P_D_A_ design marketing: Yeah . We want it to be munt multifunctional but at the same time if you get it to do too much you're not gonna be able to tell them apart , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: of so you like maybe like an L_ like a touch screen type of remote ? user interface: I don't know if there's such a thing out there , I guess we could do some do some research on or one of us could do some research on it about whether or not there are multi-format like you know PAL , N_T_S_C_ , region one marketing: Right . user interface: I I have a friend who has a P_D_A_ project manager: Okay . user interface: that he just points at his telev any television he wants marketing: That user interface: and it'll figure out the the specifications of it marketing: Yeah . I li I'm liking that idea , this idea of a touch screen remote with multi-format features . industrial designer: I think , making it out of a nice material would be very important , because so many of those remotes that you see , these universal remotes look so cheap and low quality . And I don't know , like , there's such a problem with losing them , project manager: marketing: that adding this whole like P_D_A_ pen business is only one more thing to lose , industrial designer: . marketing: Just something like keep in mind when we start actually dealing with this stuff but that would be really cool . industrial designer: user interface: In in marketing: Fi b like what are they called , those face plate things ? project manager: Think they're just called face plates ? marketing: Isn't there a name for them ? project manager: I don't know . industrial designer: I think , it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have a like a locator device , maybe a simple button that you have on your television to help you find your remote . user interface: If you're not doing that then we can have something that just kind of rings from either marketing: True . project manager: Cou could we not do something where like just a little lit like literally just a very small kind of thing that comes with the remote that you could place something else that you press and it makes the remote page . Kinda like how on a lot of cordless regular phones , you have a page button and it goes , user interface: Th marketing: Right . project manager: yeah I think this material quality as well like I guess what we can think about what kind of you know Apple 's been really successful with this surgical white kind of business or this sleek kind of marketing: . marketing: And that titanium the new silver sleek ones that's last couple of years , very much so . project manager: We do have the minimum am amount we were talking finances I dunno , selling a a forty Pound remote would h or a forty Dollar remote , twenty five Euro remote would be pretty you know it's pretty expensive marketing: Right . Without without getting into that whole like you know go down to bargain store remote you know bargain store universal remote marketing: Right . project manager: But have a think about what we can do , have a think about what we want to do , how we're gonna sell it marketing: Yeah . project manager: and marketing: Or if you our users in mind , like these grandmas are not gonna be into this whole new let's design , no it's they're used to the buttons so we'll have to be careful of exactly who we're marketing this to , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: But user interface: We're talking twenty five Pounds or twenty five Euros ? project manager: Twenty five Euros . project manager: They serve right they sa tha s they will sell things overseas so you can buy stuff in America marketing: . Right so let's go ahead and wrap that up here for now , I'm gonna put these initial ideas that we've got in the project documents , so if you guys wa need a reminder about what we've talked about the different you know kind of trade-offs that we've got and the other ideas , you can consult them at your leisure . Let's just head back to work on what we were talking about bef goi h h getting into <doc-sep>user interface: Why won't it wake up ? Is it on ? marketing: The power light doesn't work . Okay , so I just show you the m the no the the the the the the minutes , minute . project manager: Okay , so we just talked about Oh you want me to show that there or user interface: No , industrial designer: no . And the functions are volume , channel to choose channels , an on-off , a mute button , and a text T_V_ button . project manager: So I just want to give you Mike again , the first presentation of your marketing: Shall I start ? project manager: Yeah . I searched the web , and I searched on this d document , recent investigation of the remote control market . but they found out the most important aspect for remote controls happens to be a fancy look-and-feel , instead of the current functional look and feel . And then that This is a point of discussion , because we just decided that we don't make use of L_C_D_ or speech recognition . marketing: But this is the second important aspect , and I think we must use some of the new technology , to be innovative . And it says fashion-watchers of Pari France and Italy , yeah , have detected the following trends . marketing: But the the next aspect also in contrast to last year , the feel of material is expe is expected to be spongy . marketing: But spongy , what what does spongy says ? industrial designer: Spongy . project manager: because you've you're you drop y your remote control very often on the ground . project manager: Is it a bit like like the the the the remote control ? user interface: How are you gonna make it ? project manager: R_ soft . industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: industrial designer: I've some material information , but I'll give you it later in my presentation . marketing: Okay ? project manager: marketing: What do I think ? because a fancy look is the most important thing for remote control control , I think about changeable fronts . Yeah , how do we do that ? Maybe speech ? We ma must have some kind of gadget . marketing: Intro project manager: Because it's only twelve and a half Euros you have to spend on every remote control . user interface: So industrial designer: Yeah , well actually we have don't have an idea how much it's gonna cost . But maybe it's cheap user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: and it's easy to implement . I d They don't say how much it will cost , so but marketing: user interface: if we implement speech recognition , I think it would be better to implement L_C_D_ as well . So you can say , you can user interface: Since you have to configure speech thing . project manager: But that's definitely more expensive than user interface: Yeah , that's that's something I dunno . But a telephone also have a L_C_D_ and and it's about t two hundred Euros . user interface: Yeah , so we gotta de project manager: So user interface: We have to decide on that . That was this ? user interface: industrial designer: Oh I got an email And it says the chip can be simple , regular or advanced . So user interface: L_D_C_ doesn't require industrial designer: it's m the most expensive . industrial designer: I I haven't got anything about speech recognition , but user interface: I'll I'll give you my design . 'Cause remote con control , you can see it here , you have to bo reach both out both sides . project manager: Yeah , maybe the teletext tel user interface: Yeah , text button , maybe there and there . user interface: but it's marketing: No , I don't I don't like it . And you can't use them now with your thumb , because the thing is not , it's not easy to control . industrial designer: Yeah okay , m maybe we cho should put that on top , and buttons we we don't use on , in the bottom . user interface: They're on top ? project manager: Yeah , just th th th other buttons like text T_V_ . industrial designer: But I I think w you'll use the switch channels buttons more often than the normal channel buttons , like one two three . I dunno , but yeah we'll industrial designer: Like zapping is just switching one channel at a time . user interface: And if you don't light 'em up , they don't you don't see 'em very good . industrial designer: That's that's good , but user interface: I think it's modern to light this area up , and to light this area up . It's s We have to look what's easy to use , and how it's easier to use . user interface: I dunno if it l will look good , if you put those on t on the bottom half . Yeah , maybe industrial designer: But we we can switch those two , user interface: Those two , yeah . user interface: And , yeah , you have to make sure it's easy to Yes , it has to be big enough so you can hold it , right . And well if we want to put in speech rec recognition or something , we I don't think we should put it on top then . I think that , if we're gonna put in more technology , that you need to be able to switch it open . project manager: We have to decide this this lecture , or this this this fifty minutes , yeah , how it is gonna look . If you aim at a young public , you should use materials that are soft with primary colours like green , blue , red . I don't know exactly what that means , but it should be , well yeah , popular kind of project manager: Yeah , we have to put our Real Reaction logo as well on the on the remote control . user interface: Yeah , it's project manager: So we have ha to ma make it in black , black , yellow . industrial designer: Yeah , n Not that weird , because we definitely want to make it kind of flashy , to attract a young public . user interface: Yeah , but I don't think the the colours black and yellow go well together . But project manager: We make i Maybe you can put yellow on the side and black on the on the front . That's a that's a sen That's just a matter of tastes , but user interface: Yeah , okay . user interface: can't we use different fron fronts , with all with the the logo on it ? Can we do that ? So project manager: Yeah , it's cool . industrial designer: S user interface: You can Just like a mobile phone , you can make different fronts on it . user interface: A more Yeah , just marketing: project manager: That's better prob industrial designer: With the hard hard buttons . The the the new new modern remote controls , the buttons are part of the the style , I think is part of the remote control itself . it's n doesn't Is a button How do you say it ? industrial designer: Yeah , it's it's all on one level . marketing: It it didn't it i it don't come out of the on the background . project manager: basic remote control from normal plastic , marketing: project manager: and industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: But I think we have to make the case transparent , otherwise the back light won't work . industrial designer: So if you put project manager: Y i if you The numbers could be can be user interface: you can just make them around the buttons project manager: Yeah , that's right . user interface: Or it runs the whole industrial designer: Yeah , but we can still make it transparent . user interface: Yeah , you can halfs transparent , industrial designer: Or no user interface: or just that it's comes out a bit . user interface: depends on the colour of the project manager: Yeah , but you can't choo You can't choose it when you buy it . Is marketing: but can you change it if you already bought the the remote control ? user interface: Yeah , it can . project manager: industrial designer: I don't know what it is , but it should be there I think . marketing: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: this is the normal circuit board , like a chip board in in a lot of things . project manager: Yeah , we have to hurry up a bit , so industrial designer: W So we d we just need this and this transistors and resonators . user interface: industrial designer: they they basically said that that's almost the same on any remote controls . project manager: We still want to have a recharger , don't we ? industrial designer: Yeah but project manager: Is that still the user interface: Yes . industrial designer: Yeah , but it i We don't wanna have a ar an How do you call it ? Accu . user interface: project manager: It's just batteries , industrial designer: so marketing: project manager: that's cheaper . So we need the expensive , most expensive chip , if we use an L_C_D_ . industrial designer: are are we using a a rubber case , or project manager: Oh just sk industrial designer: We haven't decided yet . It's user interface: I don't think a rubber case looks industrial designer: L marketing: but we have to do something about the trend . Or should we do it in the next meeting ? user interface: I_D_ and U_I_D_ work together on prototype drawing on smart board . industrial designer: So we should did it here ? project manager: That's for th user interface: So we're staying here ? project manager: that I think that's the next next meeting . user interface: Okay , so now we're ka thirty minutes alone again ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Just a bit cur Okay , I'll see if I can see any of those . You see what ? industrial designer: What ? project manager: If I draw here It draws about four centimetres lower than industrial designer: Oh . industrial designer: I think you'll get a a lot of volume changing when it's not wanted . project manager: And industrial designer: Yeah , but maybe we can make a a plastic , so that you i if you like drop it , it won't change the volume . user interface: Yeah , maybe you just have to make it That's not scrollable too easy . And what's the channel choose ? Where do we put that ? Still on the bottom industrial designer: I think in middle . project manager: or user interface: wh what is the middle part ? project manager: That's the numbers . industrial designer: I think th the numbers should be in the bottom , and and the switch channel in the middle . project manager: It doesn't make a difference , if you put the s the switch channels on side of each other or on top of each other . user interface: Use the dz project manager: Because you already have the volume here , so You can also put it here one butt and the other one there . project manager: So you can also can put it all on the top , and this , you keep this empty . industrial designer: Or you could do the switch channel up button above the the numbers and switch channel down button below . project manager: But that's not want to zap very quick , so user interface: Yeah , I think zapping is the highest priority . project manager: Yeah ? Is this a opportunity , user interface: And then you use those project manager: or you don't want a different user interface: Yeah , of course . industrial designer: but I think we we should bu put 'em on top of each other , so project manager: Why ? industrial designer: Because then it's it's easy to know m if I push the the the up project manager: But still the next It's still the next one . Doesn't make industrial designer: Yeah , but the top the top button is is like you switch channel up , and down button is If you put them project manager: Yeah , but fo from left to right is exactly the same . industrial designer: But but I I think left to right is more often associated with volume , and top down is more with channel changing . user interface: Yeah , I think industrial designer: So so if we use that , they will probably have a long learning time . I You already have the volume on the side , user interface: No , I think project manager: so you can't make it you can't ma make a mistake . project manager: So it's user interface: I think it's s so simple industrial designer: I dunno . user interface: you just project manager: So but that's for that's for you , industrial designer: Okay . project manager: 'cause it's user interface: Yeah , okay I'll d I'll take a look at it . user interface: Think we need to work thirty minutes again ? marketing: Yeah , we have to care that it r looks really new . marketing: 'Cause wha what I see the only difference i i i in fact is that we use a scroll-wheel on the outside . user interface: No , you have It is industrial designer: Yeah , but i i it should be round in in shape . marketing: Some some kind of bling bling can we have industrial designer: user interface: Where you can put a ve we have If we do it like that we have below have we a lot of room to put a nice logo . marketing: and how many fronts fronts do we put on the market then ? five or something ? project manager: Yeah , five . user interface: marketing: Or more or user interface: Maybe you can buy separate ones and marketing: And buy the product . industrial designer: No , tha that will be project manager: So y you can put the bottom of the remote control in recharger ? Is that is that a good good opportunity ? user interface: Yes . marketing: Yeah , we can b It c it could be just just a square , just a packet . industrial designer: But we have to make contacts on the on the remote control and the recharger as well . user interface: I think i marketing: user interface: Yeah okay , tho those are al already a bit cornered . industrial designer: Yeah , but we can we can do all kinds of As long as it isn is in two D_ we can use all kind of round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: It's a bit annoying , isn't it ? marketing: Yeah . I know we can do a lot more , but marketing: Yeah , it project manager: industrial designer: Like in this kind of shape or marketing: it's very annoying . project manager: So we have to make a decision , what kind of form it's gonna have t going to have . project manager: But why do we have to round it on the t bottom then ? Of Skip that one as well . user interface: and marketing: It's not not a lot of trends I I found project manager: Okay , so we have s still one minute left . So just marketing: project manager: I think it's okay if you just keep it a bit square . Yeah , marketing: It The th th industrial designer: I d I don't know n something about ergonomic kind of fits-in-the-hand stuff . It's only annoying if it if it's like that f formed like that , like f Whatever . Just you have a normal industrial designer: Yeah , but we're we're aiming at a young public . marketing: There is one There's just one overall important aspect is that we must make it fancy and it looks original , and I hope we can make it look not like the iPod itself . But you're If you look at the way remote controls are now project manager: But i it is it is it is already fancy . user interface: And if you make it look like the iPod marketing: Yeah , they're all the same . So that's already a very big change project manager: maybe maybe make the the the wha what's it called scroll wheel . Maybe we have to ask to the the to her if it has if it can work better than this . project manager: We just we just skip the the the voca or was it the the speech recognition . Yeah , do we s keep that ? Yeah , I think project manager: Or keep that ? It's okay . But you'd definitely need a industrial designer: S user interface: Well project manager: advanced chip . marketing: industrial designer: And we we have to build in a microphone and user interface: Well that's very easy . We already have the beeping of the home station , industrial designer: Yeah , and I do I don't know anything about that . user interface: so industrial designer: I d I didn't receive any information on speech recognition , marketing: No . Becau project manager: Can we just put it speech recognition in it as well , marketing: Yeah . But project manager: okay ? user interface: So marketing: Ma user interface: shall we it open then ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: Oh yeah , I marketing: But we don't have any f information about the cost . marketing: We started with information about the cost was now th user interface: I just I just received the industrial designer: Yeah , I have I have some some information about the cost . marketing: And how much is the chip ? The the the industrial designer: I don't know how much , but user interface: Yeah , our division has developed a new speech recognition feature , the integrated programmable sample sensor simple speaker u unit . industrial designer: Just in inexpensive or user interface: This is a very small electronic unit , will give a standard answer after it recognise a question . user interface: Yeah th that's just It's a marketing: Does it say does it say something back ? project manager: Okay , we have to stop it now . Yeah , it Well that's integrated in the chip , so if you use the speech recognition , that's in it . project manager: Okay , that's a r That's that's a advanced industrial designer: But i it's a separate chip . user interface: I dunno , but if we use speech recognition , that will be in it as well . industrial designer: Yeah , I don't know anything about this , marketing: project manager: Yeah , we just decide not to put it in , industrial designer: but Nah . project manager: Okay , just user interface: And there's a chip in it that will project manager: We have to stop it now

The recommendation from the user interface designer was to design a Google TV controller, inspired by Google's success in powerful functions and user-friendly interface. To ensure ease of use without relying on the manual, the industrial designer suggested incorporating international standards and pictograms. In response to a query about technological innovation, the user interface team proposed speech recognition based on research conducted by the technology department. The industrial designer expressed dissatisfaction with existing remote controls, deeming them cheap and of low quality, and aimed to create a sleek and stylish alternative, possibly with multiple plates. Additionally, the user interface designer suggested the inclusion of a hand dynamo to generate electricity from mechanical energy, ensuring sufficient power for the device when users interact with it. This proposal was approved by the group.

Question: When will the Canadian government announce a relief package for the aviation industry, small businesses, and the fishing industry? Article: anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): We'll call this meeting to order. Welcome to the fifth meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Pursuant to the order passed on Monday, April20, the committee is meeting today to consider ministerial announcements, to allow members of the committee to present petitions, and to question ministers, including the Prime Minister, about the COVID-19 pandemic. Tomorrow, May8, Dr.AndreaMcCrady, Dominion Carillonneur, will give a special recital to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. Victory in Europe Day, VE Day, commemorates the formal acceptance of Germany's surrender by allied forces at the end of the Second World War. While the pandemic prevents us from gathering to celebrate in person, tomorrow at noon the voice of our nation will ring out in remembrance of this milestone in our history. Just so you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entire committee. I would like to remind members that, as in the House of Commons or committee, they should not take photos of their colleagues or film the proceedings. In order to facilitate the work of the interpreters and to allow the meeting to proceed smoothly, I would ask you to follow some instructions. When you are ready to speak, click on the microphone icon to activate your microphone, or hold the space bar down while you are speaking. If you release the bar, your microphone will revert to mute, just like a walkie-talkie. Honourable members, I would like to remind you that if you want to speak English, you should be on the English channel. Should you wish to alternate between the two languages, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking each time you switch languages. Should you need to request the floor outside of your designated speaking time, you should activate your mike and state that you have a point of order. If a member of the committee wishes to intervene on a point of order raised by another person, you should use the raised hand function to indicate to the chair that you wish to speak. Should any technical challenges arise, for example, in relation to interpretation, please advise the chair immediately by raising a point of order, and the technical team will work on resolving them. If you get accidentally disconnected, please try to rejoin the meeting with the information you used to join initially. Before we get started, please note that in the top right-hand corner of your screen is a button that you can use to change views. Speaker view allows you to focus on the person currently speaking; gallery view allows you to see a larger number of participants. You can click through the multiple pages in the gallery view to see who is on and how many more participants there are. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during the meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. In addition, to ensure a petition is considered properly presented, the certificate of the petition and each page of the petition for a petition certified in a previous Parliament should be mailed to the committee no later than 6 p.m. Chair, five years ago when Parliament passed Bill C-14, then justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said that it represented a finely tuned balance between access and safeguards. Petitioners on the first petition I'm presenting are very concerned to see Bill C-7 before Parliament, which removes safeguards ahead of that five-year review. Petitioners specifically mention their concerns about the removal of the mandatory 10-day reflection period, which can already be waived in certain circumstances. They are concerned about reducing the number of witnesses required to oversee it and ensure that a request has been properly made. The second and final petition that I will be presenting today is with respect to Senate Bill S-204. This would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ from a person who did not consent. This responds specifically to concerns about organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China involving Falun Gong practitioners and increasing concerns that this is being or about to be applied to Uighurs as well. Petitioners are noting that in the previous Parliament there were bills on this, Bill C-350 and Bill S-240. Now, in this Parliament there is a bill, Bill S-204, and the petitioners hope that this 43rd Parliament will be the one that gets it passed. This is my first occasion to present a petition in our virtual format of the COVID-19 committee. The petition I am presenting today, which was previously approved, is from a number of constituents who are concerned that we pursue the Paris Agreement to hold the global average temperature increase to no more than 1.5C. The Paris Agreement itself embeds in it the concept of Just Transition with a capital J and a capital T, the concept of just transition ensuring fairness and support for all workers in the fossil fuel sector. The petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to move forward with an act to ensure just transition and to ensure adequate funding so that workers and communities dependent on the fossil fuel sector receive meaningful support to ensure security in their lives in the transition to more sustainable energy use. I want to thank the honourable members for their usual collaboration and now we'll go on to mr. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): On a point of order, Mr. Chair, on Tuesday, at our COVID-19 committee of the whole meeting, I was asking a question which started at 12:56:06 and was cut off at 1:00:32, so I still have 34 seconds of time remaining in my question time of five minutes. If you believe that my time was unjustly cut off and that it was unfair treatment of the official opposition when we were raising our points of order, I would ask that the 34 seconds be tacked on to the opening round for the opposition and credited to Rosemarie Falk, who will be leading off for the Conservatives. the chair: Normally what happens is the chair uses judgment, and with 35 seconds, there isn't enough time obviously for a full question or answer, most of the time. I want everyone to know that I do have a timer next to me and I am timing the questions, and I will be treating the answers the same way. We've taken a little bit of the chair's ability to give judgment on it, but it will be from now on. I would like to remind the honourable members that no member will be recognized for more than five minutes at a time and that members may split their time with one or more members by so indicating to the chair. Will the Prime Minister stand up for Canada's energy workers, or does he agree with the fringe left and those who want to destroy our country? ms. Chair, I believe that the language that the honourable member just used is unparliamentary mr. It is unacceptable to assert that anyone who wants to make a point about our economy is trying to destroy the country. As I pointed out this morning in my press conference, we cannot move forward on a transformation of our energy sector without supporting the workers in that energy sector. We need their innovation and we need their hard work if we are going to lower our emissions, if we are going to reach our the chair: We'll go to Ms. Chair, it has been 43 days since the finance minister promised Canada's energy sector liquidity through the Business Development Bank of Canada. If the government doesn't step up to support our energy sector, they are in effect doubling down on their support for foreign, unethically sourced oil. Chair, when will the credit options be available to Canada's small and medium energy firms? the chair: I want to remind honourable members that we do have interpreters who are listening and translating. Chair, from the very beginning, our priority through this pandemic and this crisis has been to support workers across the country. We have sent billions of dollars to workers right across the country, including Alberta, Saskatchewan, B.C., and Newfoundland and Labrador in the energy sector for them to be able to support their families through this difficult time. The announcements to date fall well short of what is needed to maintain a steady supply of affordable and healthy food. Instead of responding to specific COVID-19 challenges, our farmers are facing the Liberals' reannounced $125 million that was already budgeted in the AgriRecovery program. Will the Prime Minister finally step up and take our food supply chain seriously, or is agriculture just an afterthought for him? right hon. Chair, we take agriculture and our agricultural sector extremely seriously, which is why we announced hundreds of millions of dollars a couple of days ago to respond to pressing needs. We will continue to make investments to ensure both the safety of workers in our agricultural sector and the safety of our communities, as well as the continued flow of high-quality Canadian food onto our tables right across the country. Our farmers are faced with rising operational costs, a disrupted service industry, labour shortages and a reduced capacity at processing plants. When will the Prime Minister deliver adequate support to address the critical changes facing our ag industry? right hon. Chair, I would suggest respectfully that the honourable member take a look once again at the announcement we made, which actually highlights significant new investments to support our agricultural industry. Every step of the way in this unprecedented situation, we've been moving forward on doing more, on adjusting and on investing more. We need to support our agricultural sector and the people who work so hard to put food on Canadians' tables right across the country and we will continue to. Chair, Canadians expect to find healthy and affordable food at their grocery stores, but if the government does not take action now, that's not a given. It is an enormous hit to their bottom line, and the recent carbon tax hike is taking even more money out of the pockets of farmers at a time when they can afford it the least. Will the Prime Minister exempt all farm operations from the carbon tax and reimburse the money that they have already taken from them? right hon. Chair, it's a shame to hear the member opposite accidentallyunintentionally, I'm certainmislead the House and Canadians. This is the way of creating a better future for our kids and grandkids, which I know people in communities right across the country, including our farm communities, want to see happen. We are moving forward in a responsible way to put a price on pollution and put more money in average Canadians' pockets. marilne gill (manicouagan, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I am thinking about the lobster fishery in the Magdalen Islands, the crab fishery on the Cte-Nord or those fishing for herring in the south of the Gasp. Because imports have ceased, because the domestic market is weak and in decline because of the interruption of the tourism and restaurant industries, the fishing industry and its fishers must be supported. justin trudeau: Our fishers do exceptional work that is extremely important in feeding Canadians and in contributing to our economic success through their exports around the world. I know about the processing industry and the $62.5million to be used essentially for freezing products, but I am talking about the fishers themselves. In addition, they feel that they will be losing money, because of the drop in the price of their resource. They are just as essential as farmers, but they are going to have to work at a loss and they are not going to have workers to assist them. Are you going to do anything else, in addition to the assistance of $62.5million? Time is of the essence. We recognize the challenges that fishers must face in terms of social distancing and of work that is often seasonal. We are going to continue working with the industry, with the fishers, and with the coastal communities in order to ensure that people have confidence in their abilities and in their future. In times of crisis, it is important for the government to be there to support people, and that is exactly what we are going to continue to do. But, given the cyclical nature of the industry, some sectors have had to postpone for several weeks the preparations they need for fishing activities. The current program could be modified in a number of ways, to accommodate the cycle, the dates, and the size of the companies. They would really like to take advantage of the $40,000loan, but they cannot because of their payroll. I can already suggest a number of solutions to the government and to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, that would bring help to those businesses very quickly. The fishers carry on, because it is a duty for them, because they want to help us and to be part of the effort at this time of crisis. I would really like to hear a guarantee that they will be supported, that they will be able to put food on the table this year, and that they will be able to support the communities that often depend on the fishing industry, a major industry in those communities. justin trudeau: Minister Jordan has been working with the fishers, the fishing industry and the communities affected by the crisis since the crisis began. From the outset, our priority has been to support the millions of Canadians from coast to coast who have lost their jobs. We have been able to do so, but we are going to continue to work for those who must now face difficulties. the chair: Before we move to the next question, I would like to remind members of the committee to speak slowly, and to address their remarks to the chair and not directly to each other. They've seen revenues plummet, and at the same time the cost of delivering municipal services has risen. As the Prime Minister knows, municipalities are unable to run deficits and so they are facing the reality of cutbacks and serious cuts to the services that Canadians depend on. They're going to be even more important during the recovery, especially when it comes to delivering on the infrastructure programs before us. My question for the Prime Minister is, when can they expect federal financial support to arrive? right hon. Chair, no government in Canada's history has done more to work with our municipalities, with our cities, with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to respond to the challenges they're facing and to partner with them. Things from infrastructure to investments have made a huge difference right across the country in the quality of life of Canadians in towns, large and small, from coast to coast to coast. As I'm sure the member well knows, our Constitution requires that most of the funding for municipalities flow through the provinces. We are working with the provinces, as we continue to work with the cities, to ensure that we're able to support this order of government that delivers the vast majority of services to Canadians with very little financial means. Chair, it would seem that the federal government has the fiscal capacity and the responsibility to help municipalities weather this crisis. Transit systems have been hit particularly hard and have seen the bulk of the layoffs in the municipal sector. These transit services carry essential workers to work, whether they are health care workers, grocery store workers, janitors or others. We will see service cutbacks precisely at a time when we want to be expanding transit and improving transit in our communities. Does the Prime Minister acknowledge that the federal government needs to step in to safeguard and protect Canada's transit services? right hon. Chair, this federal government recognizes how important it is to support all Canadians, which is why we put forward unprecedented measures to help millions upon millions of Canadians with the CERB and with the wage subsidy. I'll be having a conversation with all other first ministers tonight to talk about a broad range of issues. We have continued to engage with them, but again, it is important to respect the Constitution and understand that funding for municipalities and cities does go through the provinces. The federal government is happy to be there to support, but it must be the chair: We will go to Mr. Chair, I am wondering how the Prime Minister could explain to a bus driver in Vancouver who has been laid off that as a public sector worker, she can't access the federal wage subsidy, while an equivalent worker in the airline industry gets to keep her job with the federal help of that program. Chair, I'm happy to explain to the member and to all Canadians that our Constitution creates federal areas of jurisdiction and provincial areas of jurisdiction. The airline industry, like banking, like telecommunications, is a federal area of jurisdiction that we have been able to move forward on. More than that, we brought the Canada emergency response benefit and the wage subsidy to all industries across this country, because we knew that as the federal government, it was something that we needed to step up on the chair: We will go back to Mr. Faced with minimal health care capacity, remote indigenous communities in my riding are taking matters into their own hands. The Nuxalk have put up a checkpoint on Highway 20 to protect community members and prevent non-essential travel. In particular, it is to protect the three remaining fluent speakers of the Nuxalk language, these cherished elders in their community. The Haida on Haida Gwaii have set up a similar checkpoint, as have communities throughout British Columbia, yet federal support for indigenous communities amounts to only $39 million for all of the indigenous communities in B.C. Does the Prime Minister not agree that more support is warranted to help indigenous communities in my riding and across the country? right hon. Chair, from the very beginning, we made funds available to Canadians right across the country, particularly people in indigenous remote or northern communities who we knew would be facing more difficult challenges because of the existing vulnerabilities in their health care system and socio-economic circumstances. We have made unprecedented investments and we will continue to make the necessary investments, because we need to make sure that indigenous Canadians, and indeed all Canadians, have the supports they need to make it through this crisis. luc berthold (mganticl'rable, cpc): Thank you very much, Mr.Chair. I am going to keep talking about the area of jurisdiction that the Prime Minister likes to talk about, except that I want to point out the incompetence of the Liberals in keeping their commitments on infrastructure projects. As the provinces gradually restart their economies, can the Prime Minister tell us how many projects that the provinces have submitted are waiting for approval from his government? mr. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, I hope that the length of the pause will not be taken out of my time. catherine mckenna (minister of infrastructure and communities): I'm sorry, Mr.Chair, I was on mute. It is very important to build projects that will create good jobs the chair: We are returning to Mr.Berthold. How many projects are currently awaiting government approval? I know that the minister has been meeting virtually with the provinces over the last few days. Rather than wait for the right political opportunity to approve these files, will the minister commit today to respecting the provinces and approving by next week all the projects that are sitting on her desk? hon. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, I'm pleased with how we are working with the provinces and territories. We will announce the approval of projects because it's very important for our economy, our communities and creating good jobs. luc berthold: Does the minister understand that she hasn't told us how many projects are still pending? The construction season is very short. Approval of a project in July means that work can't begin until next year, which won't help revive our economy. catherine mckenna: I want to make it clear that we have approved hundreds of projects in the last few weeks. These projects are important for the economy and the environment, as well as for jobs the chair: We return now to Mr.Berthold. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, while the minister is calling for a green recovery of the country's economy, public transit is at risk. The Union des municipalits du Qubec estimates that the monthly losses are between $75million and $100million. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, we recognize the importance of public transit for our economy, since some essential workers use public transit. As the Prime Minister said, it's the provinces that must help because the money the chair: We return now to Mr.Berthold. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, once again, what we're hearing is that the government is passing the buck to the provinces. Unfortunately, the minister was unable to answer a single question about the number of infrastructure projects still on the federal government's desk, which is very important. In terms of the number of projects that we've approved, I would be happy to inform the hon. member of the exact number of all the approved projects that my department has been working very hard on over the past few months to approve projects to go forward. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, do I have any time left? the chair: No, your time is up. On March 28, the minister personally tweeted out a thank you to the People's Republic of China for donating PPE to Canada. More recently, Taiwan donated half a million surgical masks to Canada, yet here we are, two weeks later, and the minister has yet to personally thank Taiwan for its generosity. I can say, after my COVID foreign ministers call, that the world community has come together to make sure that supply chains will remain intact and that we will have transit hubs and air bridges. Chair, I didn't hear a thank you there, so I'm going to try again. On May 4, the Government of Taiwan delivered 25,000 surgical masks to the Government of British Columbia. Minister of Citizens' Services Anne Kang and Minister of State for Child Care Katrina Chen, who, as ministers, officially thanked the Government of Taiwan for its donation. Again, will the minister now do the right thing and, on behalf of Canadians, recognize the generosity of Taiwan and thank its government for that timely donation? hon. Chair, as I said to you before, Canada is grateful to all who have given supplies to Canada. As I said, when it comes to global health, when it comes to helping each other, I think it is a duty for all to come together. We are grateful and thankful for all those who have agreed to help Canada and Canadians from coast to coast to coast in times of need. I've repeated that and have said many times in many forums that we are grateful and thankful to all of those who are helping Canada. The Government of Taiwan has been the world leader in successfully fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Sadly, the People's Republic of China continues to oppose Taiwan's membership in the World Health Organization. Will the minister now do the right thing and assure Canadians that he will fully support efforts to grant Taiwan membership in the World Health Organization? hon. That said, we support Taiwan to continue meaningful participation in international multilateral forums, particularly when it comes to health. We also believe that Taiwan's role as an observer in the World Health Assembly meeting is of interest to the international health community and we have been supportive of that. Can he tell us exactly how many Canadians remain abroad who have expressed a desire to be repatriated? hon. As of today, we have repatriated more than 20,000 Canadians on 232 flights from 87 countries. As the Prime Minister and I have said from the beginning, we will make our best effort to repatriate everyone who wants to come back home during the crisis. My office has received correspondence from Canadians concerned that trial delays due to COVID-19 may result in criminals walking free. As this government has been working overtime to criminalize law-abiding citizens with new and useless gun laws, will the Minister of Justice ensure that real criminals will not walk free as a result of delays in the justice system? hon. We have been working with my provincial counterparts across Canada, as well as with the various federal courts and also, through my provincial counterparts, with the superior courts and courts of appeal across Canada. Each particular jurisdiction has taken measures to ensure that basic essential services within the court system are maintained, through a variety of means, and we believe that we will be able to solve these various challenges. Chair, the regional relief and recovery fund was announced weeks ago as a way to help small and medium-sized businesses in rural communities, like those in my riding. Can the minister clarify whether we are days away or weeks away from this support flowing to the businesses that need it so desperately? hon. Chair, I had the chance to talk with many of the chambers of commerce and business owners throughout Atlantic Canada, and we hear their anxiety. That's why ACOA's doing great work on the ground to make sure we can help them through this very difficult period. We have increased the budget of ACOAgood newsand I'll be coming up with the details very soon. It will be a pleasure to collaborate with him to make sure that we can help many businesses and business owners across the Atlantic region. In particular, they are unable to access the emergency business account, because they do not have a payroll. There are hundreds and thousands of small businesses in this very situation, vital small businesses in our communities, but they do not meet this requirement. What does the Minister of Finance have to say to these small businesses that are suffering right now? hon. I want all the businesses that he is talking about and all of them throughout the country to know that we continue to work very hard to make sure they're supported through this difficult period. We know that businesses are being supported through getting access to the wage subsidy to keep their employees together, and they're getting help, whether it's with rent or to defray costs by deferring GST and HST or customs duty payments. Some have a personal account that they've dealt with over the years rather than a business account, and that makes them ineligible. Chair, small businesses are concerned about their ability to survive, and no amount of deferrals, loans or subsidies can substitute for their need to be open and servicing their customers. Can the government confirm that a sectoral risk analysis has taken place to assist the provinces in reopening the economy? hon. Chair, I can assure the member that we've been very clear in terms of our strategy around reopening the economy. We need to make sure that we follow the advice of the experts and the health authorities to do so in a manner that does not compromise the health and well-being of Canadians. We of course will have a sectoral lens, and as you can see by some of the initiatives and the support packages we've put forward the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Can the government confirm that the programs currently in place will be expanded to these hard-working Canadians? hon. Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we continue to work with all of our small businesses and I want to thank him for raising this very important issue. I want to assure our Canadian small businesses that we are going to continue to do this work to make sure they are supported. james cumming: Can the minister give me a date when she will be able to announce to these businesses that they will be eligible? hon. mary ng: I want to assure our Canadian small businesses of their importance and of the importance of their contributions to all of our communities. I want them to know that we continue to listen and that we will ensure that they are supported and continue to be supported during this difficult time. Can you give me a date when I can tell these thousands of businesses they will be supported if they pay dividends or if they use contractors within their businesses? hon. The landlord says that he doesn't have the 25% needed to be eligible for the program because he's already paying for common area costs and deferrals on utilities, which he will have to pay on his mortgage. Will the government reform the rent relief program to focus on tenants and not just the landlords? hon. Chair, I want to let the member know that we are working to make sure that the details of the emergency program for rent are out there so that both tenants and landlords can understand the situation. We're seeing a significant number of both landlords and tenants coming forward to register for this program, and we are convinced that it will be in the best interests of landlords to move forward and give tenants this relief. Chair, we've been hearing, however, from small business owners that their landlords don't find the government's rent relief program appealing enough. Can the government confirm, given the program's low eligibility rate, that the program will be expanded and be more efficient in helping tenants? hon. Chair, we recognize that it's critically important that all of the details of this program be out there for landlords and tenants to understand. This is a program that we've put out within the last week, and we are confident that it's in the best interests of tenants and landlords. One easy way to do that would be to expand the Canada summer jobs program to businesses with over 50 employees. Will the government consider doing so to allow students to gain that very valuable work experience over the coming months? hon. The second uptake provided employers across the country with the ability to add their needs for students to the mix. During this pandemic, the government has consistently called for a team Canada, non-partisan approach, and I was glad to hear that said a little earlier today. However, at the same time, the current government has used a parliamentary back door to launch a poorly thought out gun ban. We have a government that didn't win the popular vote, and I'm just wondering how I explain to my residents, because I'm getting so many calls, that this is not a bloated response because, quite frankly, it is. Chair, I think the honourable member can explain to his constituents that the forming of regulations through order in council is actually the process prescribed in law in Canada under section 117.15 of the Criminal Code. I would also invite the member to advise his constituents that way back in 1991, when there were some Conservatives who called themselves Progressive, the Mulroney government brought forward, in Bill C-17, the authority under that section for an order in council to prescribe specific makes, models and variants of military firearms as prohibited or restricted. terry dowdall: I'm not sure, but I'm hoping, that I'll get an honest answer on this question from the minister, who has everything from rocket launchers to basically toy guns on the ban list. When will we get the cost of this buyback program? the chair: I want to remind the honourable members to please be careful in their language when they are referring to others. I won't comment on this one particularly, but I want all of you to be very, very careful when referring to other members. Chair, to respond to some of the obfuscations and deceptions that have been put out there. I think it's very clear, and I invite the member to look at the list of weapons that are the chair: We'll go back to Mr. bill blair: Actually, I'm very much looking forward to bringing forward legislation as soon as the House resumes. We will have a vigorous debate in Parliament about the form a buyback will take and we will bring forward a budget at that time. bill blair: If people are illegally in possession of the weapons and they're committing a crime, they will be dealt with for the crimes they commit. Canadians in my riding who suffer from cystic fibrosis are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 infection. While these Canadians with existing lung conditions are incredibly worried about a virus that attacks the ability to breathe, the good news is that there are life-saving medicines for those with CF. I am wondering if and when the government will correct these guidelines and give access to life-saving medicines for our most vulnerable. Chair, as you know, the government has been very committed to improving access and affordability for prescription medications for all Canadians. The PMPRB regulatory amendments will help Canadians be able to afford their prescriptions, and Canada will continue to be an important market for new medicines. In fact, many countries with much lower medicine prices gained access to new medicines in the same time frame as Canada frame, or even faster, so we are excited to do this work. Chair, our seniors are being particularly hard hit right now during this pandemic, yet seniors have not been given any direct support. Funding to charities like the United Way is being labelled as support for seniors, but most won't see any of this support. Seniors in my riding have asked for an increase in their CPP and OAS, and to be able to make untaxed bulk withdrawals from their RRSPs while they still have some value. deb schulte (minister of seniors): I want to assure the honourable member and Canadians that our government has been working extremely hard on how best to support and serve seniors during this pandemic. the chair: You might want to try your space bar and keep it down while you're speaking. I want to assure the honourable member and Canadians that our government has been working extremely hard on how best to support and serve seniors during this pandemic. We've reduced the minimum RRIF withdrawal by 25%, and we've made the CERB available to working seniors who have lost their jobs due to the COVID pandemic. We know there's more work to do, and we'll have more to say in the future. the chair: I want to remind honourable members that if there are issues, we are taking note of them, and we'll hopefully resolve them by the next meeting. marie-hlne gaudreau (laurentideslabelle, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. In fact, we have been looking at a number of ways to support increased contact tracing across the country, including working with provinces and territories to boost their capacity through human resources and volunteer organizations. Anything we put forward as a digital tool to assist with contact tracing would be thoroughly considerate of Canadians' privacy rights. But you know as well as I do that the Privacy Commissioner has been calling us to task for a very long time now, because there is also a crisis of confidence. You know as well as I do that for 90%of Canadians, the misuse of their personal data is a cause for concern, whether it be for profiling or business development purposes. I'd like to know whether this commitment will be implemented quickly so that legislation can be passed on this issue, in this case the Privacy Act. We're talking about what is going on in Quebec, among other places, and I would like to make sure that the federal government commits to respecting the proposals regarding geolocation and contact tracing possibilities, with full respect for the right to privacy. We have worked very closely with provinces and territories for a long time before the outbreak, but certainly ever since the outbreak. We respect the rights of jurisdictional authorities to use tools that have been properly vetted through their own provincial and territorial legislation. marie-hlne gaudreau: Concerning privacy, there are 30million Quebeckers and Canadians who have had their personal data leaked. Why is it that our laws don't allow us to apply financial penalties so that we can then go further? The very basis is to be concerned about our fundamental rights. As the critic for access to information and privacy, I'd like a commitment that the federal government will deal not with what the provinces are doing, but with the Privacy Act. the chair: Your time is up, but I'll give the floor to the minister for 30seconds. Our government will ensure the privacy of Canadians is respected, support responsible innovation and take reasonable steps to strengthen enforcement powers. yvan baker (etobicoke centre, lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Minister, in my riding of Etobicoke Centre, we are mourning the loss of 40 residents to COVID-19 at the Eatonville long-term care centre. Of all Canadians who have died from COVID-19, 79% were living in long-term care homes. I understand that long-term care homes fall within the jurisdiction of provincial governments in Canada, but this is a crisis. What is the federal government doing right now to help protect our seniors who are living in long-term care homes from COVID-19? What will we do to reform our long-term care homes in the future to ensure that our seniors in Etobicoke Centre and across Canada get the care they deserve? hon. We are deeply concerned by the outbreaks of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities, and our thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one. As my colleague mentioned, while these facilities are regulated by provinces and territories, we have been focused on protecting the health and safety of long-term care residents and staff while working with our partners in a team Canada approach. We're working with the provinces and territories to cost-share a temporary salary top-up for long-term care workers. We are working through investing $2 billion to secure personal protective equipment for the health of workers, including those in the long-term care homes, and we've deployed the Canadian Armed Forces to assist 25 long-term care homes in Quebec and Ontario. We all have a role to play to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to protect our seniors and caregivers. At the finance committee, we've heard a lot of concerns from all sectors of the economy as a result of COVID-19 and we've been presented with quite a number of possible solutions as well, several of which the government has acted upon. It is very welcome support, but I sincerely believe the farm sector will be taking the Prime Minister up on the suggestion that $250 million should be seen as an initial investment. However, as a result of reduced processor contracts for next year, plus cancelled seed contracts, millions of dollars of seed and process potatoes have no home. How does the minister see Tuesday's announcement addressing potato farmers' concerns? Second, in 2013, long-term financial safety nets were gutted by the Harper government. We know the importance of our potato farmers, and that's why we are launching a first-ever surplus food purchase program, a $50-million fund designed to help redistribute existing inventories, such as potatoes, to local food organizations. On the financial safety net that we have in place for our farmers, called the business risk management program, we announced up to $125 million in funding through AgriRecovery and made changes to AgriStability that will help producers quickly. In the meantime, I want to reiterate that BRM programs, including AgriInvest, are there to help farmers in difficult times. Robyn, who has owned Arbutus Health in Tofino for over 13 years, can't apply for the Canada emergency business account loan, simply because she doesn't have a payroll of over $20,000. With no business income and without emergency financing, it is virtually impossible for her to pay her bills or come up with the 25% needed for the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance program. The government promised to be flexible and willing to adjust its COVID response rollout so that nobody falls through the cracks, but Robyn, like tens of thousands of proprietors who are the economic job creators of our communities, urgently needs the government's help now. Will the government amend its programs to help more business owners so that people like Robyn don't lose their businesses? hon. I know he and I have talked about this, and I appreciate the input and the feedback that he is providing from business directly. I want to assure Robyn and her businesses, and many businesses across the country, that we are absolutely listening, and we will continue to make sure we are supporting those businesses during this period. We also know that more has to be done, and we will continue to work with you and businesses across the country so that we can indeed give them that necessary support to weather this difficult period of COVID-19. I was talking to Heather last night, who also owns a business in Tofino, Basic Goodness Pizzeria, with her partner Marco. Like many proprietors of family businesses who aren't on payroll, they don't qualify for the business loans. Now with the new rollout of the rent support, they're not sure if their landlord is willing to play ball and even apply. Heather was in tears last night as she told me that they have done nothing wrong to deserve being excluded from these emergency programs. Will the government fix the rent support program so that tenants can apply, instead of leaving it up to landlords, and so businesses can get the help they desperately need? hon. We've been working on offering a response for small businesses and charities and non-profit organizations, and we are continuing to listen on the ground to how we can better assist the businesses that fall through the cracks. Chair, when the government rolled out its commercial rent support program, why didn't it negotiate an eviction moratorium with the provinces, as Australia and other countries did, to protect business owners? hon. We've recognized it and we've been working with the provinces and territories to implement the Canada emergency commercial rent the chair: We'll go back to Mr. gord johns: To qualify for the Canada emergency wage subsidy, a 30% drop in revenue has to be shown. Anyone who's owned a business knows that even with this program, it's going to be hard to survive. Why is the government using a 70% measurement drop to qualify for the rent support program, but a 30% drop for the wage subsidy? hon. We've been working with provinces and territories to provide forgivable loans to commercial property owners, who in turn lower the rents for their tenants by 75%. We're hoping that tenants and landlords will be working together so we can support businesses during this very difficult crisis. the chair: Before we move on to the next question, Mr.Berthold, did you have a question or a point of order? mr. I checked the clock from the first round of five minutes, and as you may recall, it took a very long time for me to get an answer from the government. During my first turn, it took 50seconds before a government minister deigned to answer my questions. After checking my time, I realized that the discussion between Ms.McKenna and I went on for four minutes and 14seconds, so I wasn't able to ask the minister one final question, a very important one. I would ask you to take that into account and allow me to ask MinisterMcKenna one last question, please. the chair: The person chairing the meeting uses their judgment and does their best to keep an eye on what's going on. I think it's more or less equal for all the members, but I apologize if the honourable member feels that he was denied a few seconds. bill blair: The decision to close the border was made in Canada by Canadians in the best interest of Canadians. todd doherty: When will the government be in a position to inform Canadians of any changes to the agreement? hon. bill blair: I'm pleased to advise the member that we're continuing to monitor the situation, but I'm strongly of the opinion that the circumstances on both sides of our border do not indicate that this is the right time to make a change in the restrictions. todd doherty: Can the government confirm whether there are any discussions about reopening the border to certain modes of transportation and restricting others? the chair: Before I go to the minister, I want to remind the honourable members that we do have translators, and they are trying to translate. With respect to them, I know we're trying to get as many questions in as possible, but they do have to translate them, so please be considerate of our interpreters. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Let me please inform the honourable member that we are, of course, aware that the current agreement expires. navdeep bains: We are engaged with the industry, and we are working with them on a solution, Mr. Chair, will this relief package include funding for airline ticket refunds similar to what other countries around the world have done? Yes or no? hon. Chair, I can confirm that Air Canada has now adopted a policy of checking temperatures for passengers boarding Air Canada flights. Last week I asked the Minister of Labour if they were aware of a letter written on April 6 by CUPE to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Labour. Minister, were you aware of that letter? the chair: I want to remind the honourable members to place their questions through the Chair and not directly. todd doherty: On April 6, CUPE wrote a letter to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Labour. Before that I had conversations with CUPE with respect to flight attendants and the use of personal protective equipment. todd doherty: Can the minister confirm whether or not they have provided PPE to the flight attendants and/or training for front-line staff for airlines and airports? hon. This has become a policy to ensure the safety not only of passengers on board but also of the flight attendants and flight crew. He stated that he couldn't give his small business tenants a break on rent because the government is penalizing him for paying off his mortgage. Chair, as you know, we laid out the CECRA program just last week, and we are encouraging landlords to take that opportunity to support the renters. Is the minister aware of this, and are they trying to revise the CECRA program? hon. mona fortier: As you know, we've been working with provinces and territories to present that program. We are asking, actually encouraging, landlords to do their part and help tenants, like the one you mentioned, go through this. It's been heartbreaking, frankly, to hear that everything they've built and sacrificed for is in serious jeopardy, and through no fault of their own. Your government has created programs that are supposed to help them, but many legitimate businesses aren't able to apply. I'm hoping to hear specifics, not just nice words, on what you're going to do to help them. First, businesses that recently incorporatedfor example, in late 2019are unable to apply their entire 2019 payroll. As a result, many are falling short of the $20,000 payroll threshold required to qualify for this loan. What is your government going to do about these three scenarios? the chair: I just want to remind honourable members to place their questions through the Chair and not directly to the minister. As well, please take into consideration the interpreters, who have to listen and translate, so that we can have this conversation. Right from the very beginning, we've always said that we will listen and that we will work to make sure that measures go out to help our Canadian small businesses. She's absolutely right: 98% of all our businesses in this country are small businesses, so they absolutely contribute enormously to our communities and are job creators. For the Canada emergency business account, over 550,000 small businesses have been approved and are getting that support. I can assure the honourable member that we will continue to do this work so that businesses, all businesses, are supported, whether it is helping keep your employees together, helping with rent support, helping to keep your business's expenses low, or of course helping with the capital that is needed so that you can pay your operating expenses and your bills through this difficult time. Moving on, there are two issues regarding the 50% commercial rent assistance subsidy, where landlords pay 25%, the government pays 50%, and the tenant is responsible for 25%. First, many of the small landlords aren't able to take a 25% hit to their income, and are unable to provide the subsidy to their tenants. Second, with the 70% decline in revenue threshold for small businesses to even be eligible for the rent assist, many restaurants are at 65% or 67% decline. What is the government planning to do to streamline this program for small businesses that can't access but desperately need the rent subsidy? hon. Chair, as the Minister of Official Languages, I just want to raise the fact that interpretation is very complicated right now. In order to make sure that we can continue to uphold bilingualism within the House, I would love it if my colleagues could take down the pace a bit. I just want to remind everyone again that when you're asking a question, make sure you are doing it at a pace at which you're considering the people who are interpreting ms. mona fortier: As you know, we've been working with the provinces and territories to provide this forgivable loan to commercial property owners, who in turn lower the rent of their tenants by 75%. It will be very important that we understand what happens across the country, and we will monitor and adapt the program as we ms. Chair, it has been in the media quite a bit that this rent subsidy is not helping many, many, many small business owners. It's falling short of everything that was announced, so I think it needs to be taken a bit more seriously than that. We know that some still fall through the cracks and we will look at how we can continue to support businesses across the country. alexandra mends (brossardsaint-lambert, lib.)): We are now going to Mr. Three weeks ago, on April 17, the Minister of Canadian Heritage announced funding of $500 million to assist Canada's arts, sports and cultural sectors. steven guilbeault (minister of canadian heritage): Madam Chair, we will be releasing the details of that announcement, and how the money is going to be spent, in the coming days. kevin waugh: We all know that many media organizations, large and small, in Canada are struggling right now. Allegations have arisen that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, is currently engaging in predatory behaviour and taking advantage of the current situation to harm its competitors using rate cuts. kevin waugh: Local community and ethnic media outlets and papers have strong ties to their communities that often go much deeper than the major media outlets. Is the government currently using any local or ethnic media outlets to provide crucial coronavirus information through advertising? hon. We need to get the information to Canadians on COVID-19, which is why we have started an ad-buy campaign of $30 million, which is being distributed in more than 900 local, regional and national newspapers across the country and 500 radio and TV stations in 12 different languages, including Farsi, Mandarin, Spanish, Italian and many more. It has received two ads from an ad agency in connection with the $30 million the government is doling out to help media outlets. Is this the kind of money you're attempting to dole out to help media: two ads in eight weeks? hon. steven guilbeault: Madam Chair, we have been doing a number of things for our media in Canada over the last few months and will continue to do so. On top of that $30 million ad-buy campaign, we have been investing $50 million in local journalism. Just this year, it means that 200 journalists will be hired in areas across the country where journalism is more poorly defined. kevin waugh: Madam Chair, last week, as the minister would know, 15 community newspapers, including eight in Manitoba and seven in the province of Ontario, closed their doors for good. Is the government currently planning any further measures aimed at assisting community or ethnic media organizations? We understand that many more will close their doors within the next 30 to 60 days. steven guilbeault: We are planning a number of other measures, some of which will be included in the $500 million. Of the $595 million that the media will receive, we have a tax credit that has now entered into force, and the cheques should be in the mail by the end of the summer. So there are a number of things we've done and a number of things we will be doing in the coming months as well. kevin waugh: Well, finally, you have the five members associated with that committee to dole out the $595 million. colleague that in order for us to provide tax breaks for the 2019 period, media outlets had to file their tax returns so we could go ahead. jol godin (portneufjacques-cartier, cpc): Thank you, MadamChair. This being the first time I've had the floor during a virtual sitting of Parliament, I'd like to take this opportunity to greet my fellow members, all 259participants. I'd like to talk about the Prime Minister's appearance on the show Tout le monde en parle. This is what he had to say about his economic recovery plan: We are going to remain focused on the economy as a wholeinnovationresearch and science, the green economy and a fairer economyThere are things we are all reflecting on right now that reflection is going to continue. Can the government assure Canadians that it is being proactive and working on a plan to get the economy moving again? It must act now. Our government is wholly committed to restarting the economy, and we are working closely with the provinces to do just that. Last week, our government, together with the provincial and territorial premiers, released the principles that will guide efforts to restore economic activity across the country. jol godin: MadamChair, before we go any further, since it took a while for the minister, or the government, to answer the question, can I have that time back to ask questions? the acting chair (mrs. The Prime Minister's answer during his appearance on Tout le monde en parle didn't inspire much confidence and doesn't line up with the Deputy Prime Minister's comments. How can the government be proud of announcing $252million in assistance for the agri-food sector, when that is less than 1% of all the program funding the government has committed to help Canadians get through the COVID-19 crisis? Clearly, the government doesn't see the food supply chain as a priority and has no regard for farmers and pork and beef producers. Does the government realize that eating is vital to Canadians? When is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food going to adjust the program and show respect for Canadian farmers? hon. This week, we focused on beef and pork producers and processors, as well as sectors with product surpluses that can be redirected to food banks. I can assure my fellow member that this is an additional step and that more supports are on the way in the weeks ahead. PortneufJacques-Cartier is home to a company that is already licensed by Health Canada and that, for 20years, has been manufacturing medical equipment including masks, face shields and thermometers. In mid-March, Health Canada reached out to the company to find out how much equipment it could manufacture to help fight COVID-19. The company confirmed that it could immediately start producing 200,000masks a week, ramping up to a million masks over the next few weeks. Can the health minister tell us why, 45days later, this company licensed by Health Canada hasn't received an order? hon. Industry and suppliers have enthusiastically answered our call to equip Canada with products and goods during the crisis. Seniors living alone are most at risk of economic insecurity, particularly single senior women, as gender inequality in the job market has translated all too often into inadequate retirement income. Madam Chair, can the minister commit to implementing a poverty reduction plan that addresses the unique challenges faced by older women? hon. deb schulte: Madam Chair, I want to assure the member that we are quite aware that this pandemic has typically affected single seniors, and many of those, given that they live longer, are single senior women. I want to assure her that we are working on this issue, and we have provided some supports already through measures such as the GST supplementary payment. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, older women represent a high proportion of residents in long-term care facilities. Having spent their lives caring for parents, children and often their partners, they find themselves needing care in nursing homes. Multiple outbreaks of COVID-19 in long-term care homes in Canada have highlighted systemic gaps that senior and elderly women may face in such facilities, as well as the working conditions of the female-dominated ranks of nurses and personal support workers. Madam Chair, can the minister commit to implementing a federal strategy for long-term care homes that recognizes quality of life for residents and working conditions for the employees, ideally one that goes hand in hand with a poverty reduction plan and enhanced home and community care investments across the country? hon. We are obviously deeply saddened by the outbreaks that have been going on in long-term care facilities and those who have lost their lives. We do recognize that the administration of long-term care and palliative care is the responsibility of provinces and territories; however, we have been taking a team Canada approach, and as you already know, we've been doing tremendous work with them to try to ensure that those who live in those facilities can be well cared for and safe. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, from May 4 to May 10, we are observing Mental Health Week. We know that our essential workers right now are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety, on top of putting their own physical safety and health on the line. Most of these workers work in precarious jobs with no access to paid sick leave or vacation, and without any benefits to access mental health services. Apart from the very welcome investments in online resources, can the minister explain how the government will support these workers now and once the crisis is behind us? hon. I'm so glad that she's raising the issue of mental health and in particular how poor mental health is oftentimes connected to our socio-economic status. We do have new resources that are available to all Canadians free of charge through the Wellness Together portal, but there is more to do. I think the announcement of top-up wages, for example, which the Prime Minister spoke about today, is another example of how we're taking the health and wellness of all low-income Canadians very seriously. We know that mental health is not divorced from socio-economic status, and I look forward to working with her more on other measures that we can take together. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, we're all very aware of the importance of temporary foreign workers and their role in ensuring our food sovereignty across this country. How are we protecting them? Madam Chair, will the government take action to strengthen legislation and ensure Canadians have access to the food they need while the workers who help bring it to our tables have safe working conditions, regardless of where they are working in this country? hon. We are very concerned, as are countries around the world, that we support and create the environment for the health and safety of our temporary foreign workers and we value their contribution to our food supply chain here in Canada. We have issued guidelines to employers and are working very closely with local public health authorities in the provinces and territories to make sure workers are protected, that physical distancing and other recommendations are adhered to and that there are severe consequences if employers don't take care of their workers. alistair macgregor (cowichanmalahatlangford, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. My first question is this: Will the Liberal government prevent federal bailout funds from going to companies that use tax havens and avoid paying their fair share here in Canada, yes or no? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): We are working to make sure that anyone who tries to circumvent the rules faces serious consequences. Anyone who abuses the program could face fines of up to 225% of the subsidy amount as well as five years in prison. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, I didn't really hear a yes to that question, so I'll repeat it. Does the government really think it's appropriate for tax-avoiding corporations to receive funding provided for by taxpayers? hon. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, the agriculture funding announced by the government earlier this week amounts to less than 10% of what the Canadian Federation of Agriculture estimates will be required to help farmers weather this crisis. I have to remind my colleague that we have put in $5 billion through FCC, $50 million for the temporary foreign workers, two times $50 million for pork and beef producers this week, and $77 million for food processing. This is only the beginning, and we should not forget that the business risk management programs are still there to offer support. alistair macgregor: Yes, Madam Chair, but we're nearly two months into this pandemic and this announcement only came this week. marie-claude bibeau: Madam Chair, we are working closely with the farmers and their representatives to identify where the gaps are, but once again, we have made improvements to the AgriStability program. They can get, depending on the province, either 50% or 75% in advance payments, and they can also, right now, access their AgriInvest program. There is more than $2 billion ready to access today, if they have the acting chair (mrs. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, federal disability recipients and seniors on fixed incomes have been hardest hit by cost of living increases from COVID-19. If we acknowledge that $2,000 per month is the minimum needed to get through this time, why are they being asked to survive on far less? When can they expect assistance, and how much will they receive? hon. deb schulte: Madam Chair, I want to make sure people realize that we have provided some assistance through the GST supplementary benefit. We are also providing support to those who are still working, and we have done that by allowing them to access the CERB. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, as I think we've heard through today's question period, there are countless example of this government designing programs to exclude many small businesses that desperately need help. Whether it's the payroll requirements or other eligibility, we still, to this day, almost two months into the pandemic, have too many small businesses falling through the cracks. Madam Chair, why has the government taken this approach and when can we finally expect fixes to the whole system? hon. mary ng: Madam Chair, right from the get-go, we have been committed to making sure that Canadians are helped through this crisis, and that small businesses get the support that they need, so that we are saving businesses and jobs in this country. yves perron (berthiermaskinong, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I hear the questions my fellow members are asking, and to be frank, I don't find the answers satisfactory. It is well and good to talk about existing programs, but they aren't working, so enough with that refrain. This morning, both farmers and processors came together for a press conference at the Union des producteurs agricoles's head office in Longueuil. Can the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food therefore tell us when she will announce significant supports for the industry? hon. marie-claude bibeau: We have already announced significant amounts of support, and more is on the way. It's not that the programs aren't working; it's that they aren't generous enough in farmers' eyes. That's why I'm working with my provincial counterparts to make improvements to programming, including AgriStability. After using the online AgriStability benefit estimator, a pork producer found out that he would get $11 per head, as they say in the industry. Pork producers are calling for $20 per head, so it's a good start, even though it's not enough and it isn't what they are asking for. We want to keep working together, but farmers have to access the money available to them through AgriStability. Even before the crisis, we were hearing from people in the industry that the programs were neither suitable nor sufficient. A few days ago, the government announced $50million in funding for pork producers, even though they are asking for $20per hog for 27million hogs. When is the government going to announce a whole lot more in funding support? What's been announced so far is only 10% of what farmers are asking for. However, I would point out to the member that, when it comes to AgriRecovery, we made an exception to the rule. That's two funding envelopes of $50million each to help cover the additional costs from the decrease in plant processing capacity. As the Prime Minister said, we are going to do more, and we are moving forward step by step. yves perron: What we concluded in committee this week is that the $125million is not new money. The government can't say that programs already exist and, at the same time, claim that they are new programs. Everyone knows that the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement came into force a month earlier than planned, despite the promises that had been made. An easy way to make money available without committing new spending is to provide compensation and announce programs for supply-managed sectors that got nothing. It seems to me that a time of crisis is a time for the government to practise some judo and announce measures. I am reaching out to the government, as I always do, but it has to come forward with announcements. marie-claude bibeau: Our commitment to farmers in supply-managed sectorsmeaning, egg, poultry and dairy farmersis as strong as it always was. Support for poultry and egg farmers is in the form of investment programs, which aligns well with the recovery. At this time, we are focusing on emergency programs to help farmers hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. As you know, legislative changes are needed to grant the Canadian Dairy Commission's request and increase its borrowing limit by $200million so it can buy more butter and cheese. Chair, we're all inundated, as we've heard during this entire question period, with Canadians' concerns about the economic restrictions and the social restrictions that they're under. Over the last couple of months, the WHO has given one very consistent message in terms of coming out of those economic and social restrictions. Tedros said in his briefing, We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test. On March 25, 44 days ago, he said, Aggressive measures to find, isolate, test, treat and trace are not only the best and fastest way out of extreme social and economic restrictionstheyre also the best way to prevent them. Does the minister agree with the WHO that relentless testing and tracing are critical to a successful economic and social relaunch strategy in Canada? hon. Absolutely, we agree that testing and contact tracing will form an important part of our response to living with COVID. We've been investing heavily in ensuring that we have the lab capacity, the collaboration across provinces and territories, and the variety of testing options to help us increase our capacity to test. We are aiming right now for a high volume of tests, but I will also say that in Canada we have one of the highest testing rates in the world. Although we're doing well, I can assure him that I am with him and I believe we need to do more. Chair, as I mentioned to his colleagues yesterday, we have currently the capacity to do approximately 60,000 tests per day across the country. Chair, it's hard for me to get that exact number, but I will get back to him with the exact number. She said, As a first tranche, roughly close to 60,000 is where the provinces can potentially expand to as a target already. Does the minister happen to know, ballpark, what the average number of daily tests in Canada has been since that statement? hon. patty hajdu: Your estimate was slightly higher than what my estimate was going to be, so that's a great piece of news. Listen, I will just say that I think if the premise here is that we could be doing more testing. I would agree, but I will also say that the provinces and territories are working incredibly hard on testing strategies that meet their own specific needs. Tam works with all the chief public health officers across the country to ensure that their testing strategy is going to be applicable and appropriate for their particular jurisdictions. mike lake: Following up on that, is there a jurisdiction in Canada where relentless testing is not the appropriate strategy as provinces consider relaunching? hon. For example, in British Columbia, where there are relatively fewer cases in general and less disease activity, they may have a different testing strategy than a province like Ontario, which is currently struggling with more outbreaks. mike lake: Given your comment that our current testing capability is 60,000, and acknowledging that only at one point in the entire history of our COVID response, over several months, has our weekly average been over 30,000it was about 31,000 for one day on a rolling basisMinister, are you satisfied with our current testing amounts right now, given that we're testing 50% of what the public health officer advises would be best? hon. patty hajdu: I'm so amazed by the work the provinces and territories have done in a very short time to increase their capacity. We are supporting them with the tools that they need to get more testing done, but also to have other components in place that will allow them to do the rapid tracing of positive cases. I think it's very important to remember that testing strategies will be different across the provinces, based on the outbreak disease epidemiology. Having said that, I know that we can all do better, and I'm certain that my counterparts feel the same<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the sixth meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic. members that if you want to speak English, you should be on the English channel; if you want to speak French, you should be on the French channel; and should you wish to alternate between the two languages, as I just did, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking, each time you switch languages. In addition, please direct your remarks through the chair and speak slowly and clearly at all times to help our interpreters. I recommend the headset for your fellow members, but also for the interpreters as it gets loud, up and down, and it squeaks. I understand that there are no ministerial announcements today, so we will proceed to presenting petitions, for a period not exceeding 15 minutes. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. World Maternal Mental Health Day took place last week, and today I'd like to take a moment to present a very important petition on behalf of the Canadian Perinatal Mental Health Collaborative. Whereas perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are the most common obstetrical complication, whereas in Canada and worldwide 20% of women and 10% of men suffer from a perinatal mental illness, resulting in an annual economic cost to Canada of approximately $11 billion, and whereas the U.K., Australia and parts of the U.S. have perinatal mental health strategies and screening guidelines in place and Canada does not, the Canadian Perinatal Mental Health Collaborative is calling upon the House of Commons in Parliament assembled to create a national perinatal mental health strategy that will provide direction, policy and funding to develop specialized, comprehensive perinatal mental health care services, which include universal screening and timely access to treatment for all women and men during pregnancy and the postpartum period. If we were in the House now, as May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, one of the days this month we would all be wearing yellow roses in sympathy and solidarity with those who suffer from what is the number one disease killer in Canada of young people. The petitioners have asked us to look at the situation with the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which is scheduled to go through some important and potentially detrimental regulatory changes very soon. They ask that the amendments to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board be rescinded, as these will restrict Canadians from receiving life-saving medications for cystic fibrosis and other illnesses, but in particular, a medicine called Trikafta, which can have the effect of treating cystic fibrosis in the case of 90% of cystic fibrosis sufferers. They ask the government to work with the provinces to find a strategy to jointly allow for the delivery of this life-saving medicine to Canadians across the country and to take a leadership role in negotiating a price for gene modulators throughout all the provinces of Canada. Petitioners in my community point out in this petition, which, of course, predates the pandemic, that the family doctor shortage is severe in this country. This problem is particularly profound in more rural areas, including, as the petitioners reference, the community in which I live, Sydney, British Columbia. The petitioners call on the government to work with provinces and territories to find a collaborative, holistic solution so that every Canadian has a family doctor and we address the family doctor shortage. I'm presenting a timely petition today that emphasizes the concerns constituents in my riding of MissionMatsquiFraser Canyon have with the Liberal government's inherently flawed and undemocratic approach to firearms legislation and regulation. The petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to stop targeting law-abiding firearms owners; to cancel all plans to confiscate firearms legally owned by federally licensed RCMP-vetted Canadians; to focus taxpayer dollars where they will actually increase public safety, which is on keeping at-risk youth from being involved in gangs and on anti-gang enforcement; and to provide our men and women in uniform at the Canada Border Services Agency with the resources they need to stop the flow of illegal guns into this country. Through this petition, my constituents take issue with how the Liberal government continues to target law-abiding firearms owners instead of the gangs, drug traffickers and illegal weapons smugglers responsible for the violence in our communities. They note that the use of the phrase military-style assault rifle is purely political posturing, as the term is undefined in Canadian law. They also draw attention to the numerous inaccuracies about current firearms legislation and regulation the chair: I'd like to remind the honourable members that this is a concise prcis of what a petition says, not a speech. It's a huge honour to table e-petition 2512, which was signed by 1,198 petitioners, primarily from the province of Nova Scotia. The Province of Nova Scotia invited multinational companies to scope out and develop expansive open-net salmon farming operations. The petitioners cite that the expansion would increase environmental degradation, as seen in similar aquaculture operations in British Columbia, Newfoundland, Norway, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. It also, they cite, would pose risks to native fish stocks, pollute coastal ecosystems, impair at-risk wild Atlantic salmon, and threaten established fisheries and tourism operations. They also raise concerns that open-net fish farming would not create significant employment and would undermine existing lobster and other fisheries. They are calling on the government to uphold Bill C-68 and species-at-risk legislation, protect our oceans, ban expansion of open-net finfish aquaculture in our oceans, work to phase out any existing open-net fish farming operations currently in place and, lastly, invest in land-based, closed-containment finfish aquaculture. I want to thank these petitioners for fighting for clean oceans, for their local economy and for the well-being of Nova Scotia. It calls upon the House of Commons to commit to upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada by immediately halting all existing and planned construction of the Coastal GasLink project on Wet'suwet'en territory, ordering the RCMP to dismantle its exclusion zone and stand down, scheduling nation-to-nation talks between the Wet'suwet'en nation and the federal and provincial governmentssomething that has already happened, thankfullyand prioritizing the real implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. yasmin ratansi (don valley east, lib.): Thank you, Mr. The petitioners are asking that the Government of Canada not provide any financial assistance to Canadian airlines until they promptly provide full refunds for flights that were cancelled due to COVID-19. dan albas (central okanagansimilkameennicola, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Today we've learned that federal workers have been told to ignore obvious signs of fraud when it comes to applying for government benefits. Can the Prime Minister confirm that 200,000 applications have been flagged as potentially fraudulent? right hon. We moved very quickly to get the Canada emergency response benefit out, to get the wage subsidy out and to help Canadians in this unprecedented situation. Chair, can the Prime Minister confirm that the instruction has been given to federal employees to ignore these 200,000 applications being flagged as potentially fraudulent? This is important. Our decision from the very beginning was to get the help out to people and figure out, with retroactive action if necessary, where and when there may have been fraudulent use. justin trudeau: Again, in this unprecedented situation, our focus has been on helping as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Other parties might have made a different choice had they been in government, but our focus was getting help to people when they needed it as quickly as possible and cleaning it up afterwards. Did the Prime Minister or his minister sign off on this memo that was issued by the deputy minister, yes or no? right hon. Chair, we have been focused entirely on getting help to Canadians when they need it, and that has meant that yes, there will be things we will need to clean up after the fact and work to fix, but getting that help into Canadians' pockets during this pandemic was our priority. Will he at least then commit to investigating every individual case of fraud, or will he write them off, as the story said? right hon. Chair, in this unprecedented situation Canadians have lost their jobs; they've lost their paycheques; they don't know how they're going to be able to support their loved ones and pay for their groceries. We made a decision as a country that we would be there for them and that has been and will continue to be our priority. Will he commit as a government to enforce the rule of law and to enforce the attestation that says that if someone commits fraud, the fraud will be pursued? right hon. All along we've been told fraud would be detected through audits after the fact, and we expect that to happen. justin trudeau: When we made the determination that we needed to move quickly to help Canadians, we knew there would be a need to clean up after the fact, to go after fraudulent cases. Our priority now and in the coming months is to ensure Canadians get the support they need, and our economy comes roaring back. gabriel ste-marie (joliette, bq): Mr.Chair, yesterday, the Prime Minister announced the large employer emergency financing facility. One of those conditions forces companies not to resort to tax evasion or tax avoidance through tax havens. Excellent! Unfortunately, I quickly became disillusioned because it is more about abusive tax evasion and avoidance. Companies that legally take advantage of tax havens to avoid paying their taxes will have access to the large employer emergency financing facility. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we will always be there to counter tax evasion and tax avoidance. In the current situation, our priority is to help workers across the country who could lose their jobs or who have lost their jobs. gabriel ste-marie: Mr.Chair, I'm delighted to hear the Prime Minister say that there's no tolerance for tax avoidance. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, when we announced the large employer emergency funding facility, we recognized that those who wanted to receive tax dollars had to have paid their fair share of taxes. That's why we're putting in place measures to carefully assess the tax structures of these businesses before we loan money to them. gabriel ste-marie: Mr.Chair, sometimes a bank will relocate its most profitable activities carried out in Canada and register them in a subsidiary in the Bahamas, Barbados or another tax haven. Does the Prime Minister consider this bank to be paying its fair share of taxes in Canada? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we will assess applications for the large employer emergency funding facility on a case-by-case basis. Before we provide any money, we're going to make sure that whoever wants to access these funds is transparent about how the money is being managed, including internationally. Consumers are paying more and more with their credit cards, which allows contactless payments in shops, not to mention online shopping. This benefits Visa and Mastercard, which charge appallingly high user fees, known as interchange fees. These are almost 10times higher than in Europe and Australia, and it costs our merchants a fortune. Can the Prime Minister follow the example of Europe and Australia by capping interchange fees at0.3%? right hon. We have worked with the big banks and the financial industry to ensure that people who need it have access to the help they need. Right now, we're sending money to consumers across the country who need it to get through this crisis. A credit card company, such as Visa and Mastercard, that charges a fee of 2.5%to3% per transaction undermines the merchant's profit margin and gets richer at the expense of consumers. I invite the Prime Minister to follow the example of Europe and Australia by capping these fees at0.3%. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we continue to work with financial institutions and the big banks to help consumers during this exceptional and difficult situation. Instead of providing a universal direct payment for all, the government has decided to implement a complicated program that leaves many people behind. A single parent with four school-age children lost her spousal and child support due to COVID-19. Will the Prime Minister step in and fix this gap so that the single parents and their children can get the support they need during this pandemic? right hon. Chair, to correct the honourable member by pointing out that we actually moved in the most rapid and simplest possible way in providing income replacement to millions upon millions of Canadians who needed it through the Canada emergency response benefit. However, as the member points out, when one moves quickly and efficiently, there will be gaps, and that's why we've been working diligently to try to fill those gaps. jenny kwan: While the Minister of Employment has been aware of this for three weeks and says she is looking into it, there's still been no action. The truth of the matter is that single parents and their children who depend on spousal support and child maintenance are not getting support. justin trudeau: We recognize the particular challenge faced by families, single parents and families with young children, which is why we increased the amount of the Canada child benefit to be able to support people in this particular moment. On top of that, we have looked to fill further gaps that have existed with the Canada emergency response benefit. Well over seven million Canadians have access to CERB, and we will continue to work with them ms. Across the country there is no national standard to address the homelessness crisis amidst this pandemic, leaving communities at heightened risk from COVID-19. Canadians who are homeless or living in substandard housing have no access to bathroom facilities for basic hygiene. government has implemented an initiative to house some of the homeless population in empty hotels in the short term, support from the federal government is needed to secure permanent solutions post-COVID-19. Will the Prime Minister commit to providing matching funds and take the right to adequate housing seriously? right hon. justin trudeau: I know that the honourable member wouldn't want to inadvertently mislead the House. The fact is, the federal government almost immediately sent significant resources, hundreds of millions of dollars, to shelters across the country to enable them to create facilities, including renting new spaces, to be able to house homeless people without increasing the danger of the spread of COVID-19. I recognize there's always more to do, but as we demonstrated with our national housing strategy, we are serious about fighting homelessness and supporting vulnerable Canadians, and we will continue to do that. Cutting chronic homelessness by 50% over the next decade is not good enough, and that is this Prime Minister's national housing strategy. Will the government stop just making empty promises and ensure that every Canadian has the right to housing? Will he top up the support for provinces to at least match their funds? right hon. Chair, cutting chronic homelessness by 50% is an ambitious goal that no one else has ever been able to do as a government, and we are well on track for it. I would suggest that the member opposite not dismiss that as an empty promise, because we have demonstrated actions on it. jenny kwan: I would remind the Prime Minister that it was the federal Liberals who eliminated the national affordable housing program in 1993, so we have this homeless crisis today as a result of the Liberals. We in Vancouver East have the third-largest urban indigenous population in the country, yet we got less than 2% of the pandemic urban indigenous housing funding. We have moved forward, both through the Minister of Indigenous Services and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, to address the challenges facing urban aboriginal populations. We will continue to work with them, recognizing that they are among the most vulnerable people in Canada who deserve the right support from all orders of government, and we will be there to support them increasingly in the coming years. Chair, I'm hearing in my riding of PortageLisgar that individuals who are dealing with Service Canada through the mail are experiencing delays. In fact, one of my constituents sent documents, including a doctor's note, two months ago on March 12 and is now being told that she must resend them because they've never been opened. Can the government tell us whether this is a widespread problem, and how are they dealing with unopened mail at Service Canada? the chair: The honourable minister. Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we are doing everything that we can in Service Canada to meet the expectations of Canadians. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had unprecedented volumes, but we have redeployed thousands of staff to front-line services by phone and by other means. We had to close a number of the centres because of COVID-19 concerns and the safety and well-being of Canadians. candice bergen: Is the minister aware whether this is a widespread problem? Is this happening rarely, or frequently? I'm hearing about it. I know, from many MPs, we are at the front lines of dealing with and helping constituents who are not only wanting to get support but also are trying to get programs unrelated to COVID-19. Chair, the Iver Johnson single-shot rifle is a standard farm gun used by many farmers in my riding, in fact, passed down from generation to generation in some cases. Why are the Liberals making this gun illegal? What's the purpose of banning this particular farm rifle? the chair: The honourable minister. I just wish to advise the member that we worked very closely with the Canadian firearms program, with law enforcement and with their firearms verification to identify the makes, models and variants of nine rifles, all of which had in their earliest provenance a design for military use, for soldiers to use in combat. We're hearing from front-line officers that they are concerned about gangs, drug dealers and illegal weapons being smuggled across the border. They are not concerned with these types of farm rifles that are being used by our farmers and, in some cases, hunters. Chair, we'd like to see the evidence on why the Liberals are once again targeting law-abiding Canadians, ignoring gangsters and drug dealers. bill blair: It's a great opportunity, I think, when the member opposite says what the police are saying. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police declared that military assault rifles were produced for the sole purpose of killing people in large numbers and urged the government to enact legislation to ban all military assault rifles, except for law enforcement and military purposes. They said, In our view, these weapons have no place in our communities and should be reserved for use by Canada's military and law enforcement. Chair, we've seen this before, where the Liberals introduced a long-gun registry that cost billions of dollars and did absolutely nothing to stop violent crimes. bill blair: Actually, what I'm saying, and what our regulations say very clearly, is that weapons that were designed not for hunting and not for sport purposes but for soldiers to use in combat to kill other soldiers have no place in Canadian society. Is it true that Canada Revenue Agency employees who process applications for the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB, have been asked to send the payment even if fraud had been detected, as was pointed out in a national media report today? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): Mr.Chair, our government considers these to be very difficult times for Canadians. We're going to do everything we can to support them by helping them pay for their housing and their groceries. alain rayes: I repeat my question, which is extremely simple: Is it true that the Canada Revenue Agency sent a memo to its employees asking them to ignore the fraudsters and still send the CERB payments?? hon. diane lebouthillier: I'll finish my response, which was interrupted: Nearly 7.8million Canadians have applied for the Canada emergency response benefit. alain rayes: Yes or no: Did the Canada Revenue Agency send a memo to its employeeswho are doing an exceptional job, I'd like to point outso that they would ignore the 200,000potential cases of fraud that they detected? hon. The federal government website clearly states that if an employee returns to work, the employee must pay back the CERB. Can the Prime Minister tell us whether employees who decide to return to work have to pay back the full $2,000per month, or only $500for week of the month? hon. diane lebouthillier: As I mentioned, we believe that Canadians are going through a very difficult time, and we need to support them. That's what our government is committed to, and that's what we'll continue to do. alain rayes: Mr.Chair, the extremely simple question I am asking the Minister comes from companies and workers. None of the officials dares to answer it when we call on technical matters, even though they are supposed to give us information that we can pass on to the public with complete transparency. If an employee is called back to workwhich is perfectly fineagrees to do so and wants to reimburse the CERB, must he reimburse $500for each week he works during the month, or the entire $2,000? hon. Chair, I can clarify that Service Canada will work closely with anybody who transitions either from the CERB to the wage subsidy or from the CERB back to employment to ensure that there's no overpayment, but of course that there's no undue hardship on the individual. It seems to me that my question is not complicated: do people have to reimburse $500for each week they work in a month, or the full monthly amount of $2,000? hon. That's why Service Canada is reaching out to individuals to make it as seamless as possible for them. If an employer complies with the hygiene conditions, can employees still refuse to return to work, and therefore continue to receive the CERB? hon. Chair, I can assure all Canadians that at the same time as employees have a right to refuse work and employers have an obligation to ensure healthy and safe workplaces, we want all people to be able to go back to work and feel safe. There are established processes and federal and provincial labour processes for refusal to work, and at the end of the day the CERB is there for workers who aren't working due to COVID-19. jamie schmale (haliburtonkawartha lakesbrock, cpc): Thank you, Chair. The Wet'suwet'en elected chiefs and community members have been excluded from negotiations on a memorandum of understanding affecting land rights and titles. The elected chiefs have issued a press release asking for the government to halt the joint announcement scheduled for May 14 on the MOU until the community has had a chance to look at and understand how the MOU will affect them. Will the minister agree with the democratically elected chiefs and the Wet'suwet'en people they represent and delay any announcement until proper consultation can be completed? the chair: The honourable minister. carolyn bennett (minister of crown-indigenous relations): I want to reassure the member that communication is ongoing with and between our partners on how to go forward on implementing the Wet'suwet'en rights and title with a Wet'suwet'en-led solution. We encourage the leaders to continue their ongoing, necessary and important conversations with their community on how they want to proceed on a path toward implementing their rights and title. As we work to rebuild Canada's relationship with the Wet'suwet'en, we need to give them space for these important discussions. jamie schmale: Minister, is that a yes that the signing will be delayed until the elected chiefs have a chance to look at the agreement? hon. jamie schmale: The current health crisis should not be used as an opportunity to sideline the Wet'suwet'en people and their elected chiefs. The federal government should be bringing the community together rather than actively excluding Wet'suwet'en members. The chiefs are so concerned that they are now calling for the resignation of the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations for failure to engage in proper consultations, which has stoked divisions within the community. Will the minister reconsider and put in place a consultation process that honours both their traditional house system and the governance responsibilities of elected chiefs and councils? hon. carolyn bennett: Yet again, it's very important the member understand the engagement must take place and be led by the Wet'suwet'en nation. That means the elected chiefs and the hereditary chiefs need to work with all clan members as they determine how they wish to work with Canada and the Province of British Columbia to implement the rights and title of the Wet'suwet'en people. jamie schmale: I agree that the Wet'suwet'en should have the opportunity to look at the proposed agreement, but we are still seeing news coming out of the elected chiefs and the people they represent that they have not had a thorough chance to look at this proposed agreement. carolyn bennett: I think the member will agree that there's a lot more work to do with all the parties. I believe, in terms of the kind of engagement that has taken place in the feast houses and the notification that took place even before COVID-19, that the work is under way and it will have to be Wet'suwet'en-led in terms of what eventually will be their choice as to how they implement their rights and title. Chair, for two weeks now the Liberals on the indigenous affairs committee have shut down Conservatives and witnesses every time we mention the word Wet'suwet'en. They don't want to talk about the issue, an issue that is very much aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis. I don't believe that there's, at any time, an interest in shutting down discussion or debate. I think, though, that at the COVID committee the issues facing indigenous communities, first nations, Inuit and Mtis around COVID-19 are very important to them. jamie schmale: I would argue with the minister and challenge her to talk to her committee members. Each time Conservatives have brought up the topic of the Wet'suwet'en and the situation happening with the elected chiefs and the people they represent, we have been shut down every single time. carolyn bennett: Again, in a committee, it is the work of the committee and the decision of the committee. I believe the chair and all members want first nations, Inuit and Mtis to be able to keep their communities safe during COVID-19. It has been three months since this pandemic started and the Liberals just got around to announcing help for seniors. I've just had the opportunity to introduce additional measures today wherein we are introducing a one-time special payment for those who receive OAS. stephanie kusie: Nearly two months into living in some form of isolation, watching their retirement savings take a hit and having to take additional health precautions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, eligible seniors are set to receive a one-time payment of up to $500. deb schulte: I just want to make sure that my honourable colleague remembers that we have already given a GST top-up of almost $375 for single seniors and over $500 for couples. This is in addition to what we've just done today where, as you said, it's $500. stephanie kusie: According to Abacus Data, 69% of Canadians feel that there will be a second wave in the pandemic, and 52% of Canadians believe that there is a shortage of medical equipment, including personal protective equipment. Given these surprising figures, what is the government's plan to bring in enough personal protective equipment, should there be a second wave of the pandemic? hon. anita anand (minister of public services and procurement): Our government is aggressively buying life-saving equipment and supplies that Canada needs, from a diverse range of suppliers around the world and here at home. We're working directly with businesses across the country to rapidly scale up domestic production capacity to meet current and future needs. At this point, our primary focus is on front-line health care professionals, but we are also exploring federal government assistance in areas of essential services so that PPE exists where workers need it. stephanie kusie: According to Public Services and Procurement Canada, despite 1.8 billion units of PPE being procured, less than 6% of N95 respirator orders have been filled, less than 8% of surgical mask orders have been filled, and just 1.4% of face shield orders have been filled. anita anand: Let me start by saying that we are working in an incredibly difficult and competitive global environment and are procuring millions of items: face shields, gowns, hand sanitizer, and N95 surgical masks, and ventilators every single day. There is a delay in the production of these goods, but we have had many deliveries coming into Canada, including over two million face shields the chair: We'll have to go back to Mrs. stephanie kusie: A national security expert from the University of Ottawa has said that the national emergency strategic stockpile has failed in the current crisis, resulting in some provinces such as Saskatchewan using expired PPE, and provinces such as Alberta using faulty PPE that cause rashes and headaches. What is the government doing to expedite procurement and to counter the risk of faulty PPE, given that 34 of the suppliers are from China, which has already supplied significant faulty PPE? hon. anita anand: I will start by saying that we have multiple supply chains operating at the same time, from China, and domestically, and from the United States and other countries around the world. Our first priority is to make sure that we get safe, effective equipment and supplies into the hands of our front-line health care workers. Given the global supply chains and their competitive nature, this is an ongoing project and we are having success for our front-line health care workers. Ten weeks ago the Minister of Fisheries, in responding to my question in question period, acknowledged that the lobster fishery was being negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and was facing losses of up to 95% of its Asian markets. Chair, on April 28 I asked the minister what she was doing to support harvesters who were left out of the $62.5 million aid package. Can the minister tell us what the government's plan is to directly support seafood harvesters? the chair: The honourable minister. bernadette jordan (minister of fisheries, oceans and the canadian coast guard): Thank you, Mr. We know that the fish and seafood sector has been extremely adversely affected because of COVID-19. We've started to put measures in place to address the issue with the $62.5 million for processors, as well as to make sure that the CERB is available for seasonal workers as well as people who have run out of their fishery EI, but we know that more needs to be done. The fishery enterprises are uniquely structured, which is why we're looking at measures to address the concerns they have. Chair, most fishermen are not eligible for the wage subsidy program due to the stipulation that it cannot be used for employees who are related to their employer. Many fishermen have their wives, their sons, their uncles or their fathers working for them, and sometimes it's the whole family on the boat. Can the minister explain what the government's plan is to support fishermen who do not fit into any actual program and who desperately need direct financial help from the federal government to survive? hon. Chair, we know that, because of the unique structure of fishing enterprises, they are not eligible for many of the supports we have put in place. We have made changes to the CERB to make sure that people who run out of the fishers EI are eligible as well as seasonable workers. We have put in place measures to address processors' concerns so that harvesters continue to have a place to sell their product. I am working with my cabinet colleagues to find solutions, and I hope I will have more to say about that very soon. chris d'entremont: In recent weeks, lobster fishermen in the gulf region of the Maritimes were shocked to read an additional subsection of regulations that was added to their fishing conditions for the 2021 fishing season. This addition was for a catch limitation or quota to which none of the harvesters or advisory members were privy. Can the minister tell us how these detailed regulations managed to get added without her authorization, and can licence-holders expect to see these same regulations in their conditions when their season gets going in the future? hon. Chair, I want to thank the people who brought to my attention the conditions that were put on licences in the gulf. Chair, on Wednesday, February 26, after the death of 23-year-old Chantelle Lindsay from Nova Scotia due to complications from cystic fibrosis, I asked the Prime Minister whether the government was going to make Trikafta, which might have saved Chantelle's life, available to Canadians. Now that almost 12 weeks have passed, we understand that Vertex Pharmaceuticals has not yet applied to Health Canada for study. Many of my Conservative colleagues and I have recently sent a letter to the minister asking for an update on how we support those negotiations with Vertex. Can the Minister of Health tell us when this drug will be available to CF patients in Canada? the chair: Honourable minister, the floor is yours. In fact, the majority of people who have applied through the special access program to get access to the drug have received access. chris d'entremont: Mr.Chair, the tourism season is already deeply affected by COVID-19. In my constituency, tens of thousands of tourists use the ferry between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. What is the government planning to do to help the ferry to survive and to resume service next season, if the borders remain closed this summer? hon. mlanie joly (minister of economic development and official languages): I have had the opportunity to speak to my colleague Mr.d'Entremont about solutions to assist people in the tourism sector all over the country, and particularly in the Atlantic region. In light of the new funding for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, ACOA, I will be happy to work with him and with the leaders of the tourism sector. simon-pierre savard-tremblay (saint-hyacinthebagot, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Despite all the upheaval it causes, the crisis we are experiencing, considerable in scope though it is, can also be an opportunity to begin a transition. Many of us in Quebec feel that, when a company knocks on the state's door to ask for assistance, it is totally legitimate for the state to impose conditions before providing its support. We in the Bloc Qubcois feel that there should be a limit, a ceiling, on the assistance provided to large companies, in order to avoid abuses in executive compensation. A few years ago, after the Bombardier affair in QuebecI will not dwell on that because Quebecers are all too familiar with itthree of the four political parties that sat in the National Assembly and that still sit these took a position of that kind. The United States, which, you will agree, is no bastion of socialism, has already implemented similar policies for periods of crisis. According to a report published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on January2, the 100highest-paid CEOs in Canada earned 227times more in 2018 than the average worker. Given that inflation was then at 2.3%, it can be said that there was practically no increase. By contrast, the salary increase for CEOs in the same period was 18%, even in cases where the companies suffered losses. Does the government intend to put a ceiling on executive compensation to ensure that they are not the only ones to profits from the support at this time of crisis? The question is clear and I am asking you to give me a clear answer. If I don't get one, I am going to have to demand a new version of the Clarity Act. We know that our approach has to help small and medium-size companies, but also large companies in order to provide a bridge to the end of the crisis. Yes, we do want to make sure that the facility is available for companies that are going to continue to support our economy, to protect their employees, and to make a significant contribution to our communities. We are going to consider the rules and conditions that are needed in order for the facility to be available to the companies, the operations and the employees. Of course, conditions are required to ensure that the facility is available for operations, not for dividends or share buybacks, for example. sgro (humber riverblack creek, lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. In my own riding of Humber RiverBlack Creek, 30% of the population are 65 or older. Can the minister please tell us what our government is doing to ensure that vulnerable seniors get the support they need during this very difficult time? the chair: The honourable minister. Seniors have faced increased costs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and our government today has responded to that with additional action. We announced a one-time, tax-free payment of $300 for seniors eligible for OAS and an additional $200 for seniors eligible for GIS. This means there will be up to $500 for the most vulnerable seniors to help them with their financial security to get through this challenging time. Beyond this, we announced $20 million to expand the new horizons for seniors program to kick-start initiatives and services that will help seniorsfor example, to get grocery deliveries right to their door and to stay connected. We've worked tirelessly on this as well as on other recent measures like the GST credit to help the most vulnerable seniors. I know she's been working extremely hard to make sure that we get some additional announcements over and above all of the ones we have already made, so congratulations. Seniors across the country have been communicating with us and letting us know their needs, and we have been responding. It's always a privilege to have a chance to speak on issues that matter to Canadians, whether it's from the floor of the House of Commons or, indeed, from my house here in Nova Scotia. Like my colleagues, I'd like to thank the staff of the House of Commons for their continued work to make sure that we have this forum to be able to continue the democratic process. I would also quickly like to thank my staff both here locally in KingsHants and in Ottawa for their continued work for my constituents. We have the Kentville Research and Development Centre and the Hants County agricultural exhibition, the longest-standing exhibition in North America. Can the minister specifically provide an update to the House on the measures our government has taken on those two particular commodity groups that are so important in my riding? the acting chair (mr. Last Tuesday I was proud to announce our emergency processing fund for a total of $77.5 million, $50 million for the surplus food program and $125 million through AgriRecovery to support our beef and pork producers. Concerning the dairy sector in particular, I'm hopeful that tomorrow we will get the support of all of the parties to be able to respond to their request for an increase in their loan capacity from $300 million to $500 million. I would like to encourage all farmers to apply to the business risk management programs, including AgriStability, for which we have improved some of the mechanisms. bruce stanton): We'll go on with questions, but I'll also just ask Mr. brian masse (windsor west, ndp): During the COVID-19 pandemic, the State of Michigan has become an epicentre of the outbreak. The border communities of Sarnia and Windsor have higher per capita infection rates than the rest of the province. With the premiers of B.C., Quebec and Ontario opposing the opening of the border at this time, will the restrictions be extended, or is the Prime Minister discussing changing the restrictions? the acting chair (mr. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Let me assure the honourable member that, first and foremost, all decisions about Canada's border are taken by Canadians and with the health and safety of Canadians first and foremost in mind. When it comes to the current agreement's coming up next week, we are in very close conversations with Americans about next steps. chrystia freeland: Let me just be clear that I didn't speak about any changes; I spoke about a very collaborative conversation with our American neighbours about next steps. chrystia freeland: I found during the NAFTA negotiations that negotiations are best not conducted in public, but let me just assure Canadians that the health and safety of Canadians is first and foremost. chrystia freeland: Let me just say that I think the honourable member was actually seeking to know what exactly is being discussed with our American partners. brian masse: Will more information be shared between your government and the American government on Canadians and Americans crossing the border on both sides? hon. chrystia freeland: I'm not sure what the member is alluding to, but let me just say that the current arrangements are working extremely well. brian masse: With border communities having more rates of infection, will they receive additional PPE and financial assistance to deal with the loosening of current border restrictions that is being discussed? hon. chrystia freeland: Let me just emphasize to the honourable member that on a couple of occasions he has implied that a loosening of the current restrictions is being discussed. I'll move to the large commercial banks who are profiteering off or squeezing Canadians during this public crisis. Will the government use its statutory powers and force the banks to offer the credit card relief that Vancity has already done? the acting chair (mr. I would like to say that we recognize the challenges that Canadians face, especially with issues like credit card rates. Most recently, during the COVID-19 crisis, we've negotiated with the banks and encouraged them, and they have come out with reductions in their credit card fees that are significant, and deferrals for customers mr. brian masse: Will you use your statutory powers, yes or no, to do what Vancity has done to help Canadian consumers? hon. We're continuing to work together with banks to make sure that they are giving the kind of support necessary to their customers, and we've seen actions in this regard, supporting customers. brian masse: Why do banks have to profit at higher interest rates on Canadian consumer and retailer exchange rates during COVID-19? hon. Chair, I think it's important to clarify that banks have come forward and given deferrals to customers in trouble and cut their interest by half Mr. brian masse: Will the minister use his powers if the banks continue to charge Canadian consumers interest rates that are higher than Vancity's? hon. Chair, again, we will continue to work with banks to ensure that they're supporting their customers. What banks have done on credit cards by cutting their fees in half is an important nod in that direction. jacques gourde (lvislotbinire, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Quebec is Canada's biggest producer of hydroelectricity, a renewable energy that is the pride of the Quebec nation. The only problem is that it seems to be a tough sell west of Quebec, in Ontario, for instance. Will the government show leadership and allow Canada's provinces to share renewable energy through an energy corridor, as we proposed? hon. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, Canada's dairy processors have been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis and the new CanadaU.S.Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA. Will the government commit to granting import permits under CUSMA to Canada's dairy processors, not retailers directly? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I can assure you that dairy producers will receive fair compensation. That is important to Canada and Quebec, and I'm very pleased that we were able to do that. Canada's dairy processors invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year to bring high-quality products to consumers, while contributing $19billion to GDP. Will the minister commit to giving Canada's dairy processors import permits, instead of encouraging American multinationals? hon. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I'd like to thank the member for his question. I fully understand, as we all do, the important role processors play in our system and our country. I can assure the members of the House that we will continue to work with Canadian processors as the agreement comes into force. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, when it comes to the COVID-19 crisis, what Canadians will remember is that those with access to reliable high-speed Internet will have fared better, feeling less financial strain, than those who are cut off from the rest of the world. Is the government ready to invest in making high-speed Internet available to all Canadians, no matter where they live in the country? hon. jacques gourde: Mr.Chair, the current economic situation could lead to the disappearance of Canada's tourism industry. The pain will be felt by thousands of Canadians, who will have to find new jobs in order to survive. Is the government going to protect the tourism-based economy by investing in tourism infrastructure and upgrades to ensure Canada's tourist regions are ready when the economy reopens? hon. That is why we're here, providing a helping hand at this difficult time so they can come out the other side. bruce stanton): Continuing with questions, we'll go to the honourable member for SaskatoonUniversity, Mr. With respect to entering Canada, does the government consider spousal reunification as essential travel, yes or no? the acting chair (mr. bill blair: The CBSA has exercised the appropriate discretion in determining when a non-Canadian citizen, who has no status in Canada, attempts to enter the country for any consideration considered non-essential. Changing gears a little, all Canadians would agree, or can agree, that the Prime Minister requires suitable accommodation. Why did the government simply not tell Canadians that the Harrington cottage needed to be rebuilt and massively expanded? the acting chair (mr. The work at Harrington Lake is part of a broader program to preserve and maintain and restore all official residences under NCC management, and we will support the NCC in its important work. corey tochor: Was there something in particular that this government did not want Canadians to know about the cottage, or is secrecy all this government knows how to do? hon. corey tochor: Respectfully, Canadians feel misled on this, and we're not clear on what the expenses were, how large an expansion it was the acting chair (mr. Chair, I believe this has absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic, so the questions are out of order, in my opinion. Certainly the scope of the special committee on the COVID-19 pandemic does expect and anticipate that the subject matter will be related to the matter at hand, so I would ask honourable members to continue to keep within those bounds. Of course, members will also know that we're unable to gauge that until members have spoken, so I would ask members to keep on subject. The point I was making was about transparency or lack of transparency that is hurting our efforts with COVID-19. Changing gears onto CERB, who came up with the number for CERB? Why is it $2,000? A senior gets $1,200, people with disabilities get $1,600, and now we've added another ad hoc program on top of those. carla qualtrough: Working collaboratively between ESDC and the Department of Finance, we determined that that would be an appropriate amount, based on what workers were earning and what we anticipated they would need to live on, and what we anticipated they would be losing by way of employment income. corey tochor: I have a really quick question, which I've heard in my office, on charities and non-profits that do not have their own payroll number and are ineligible for the wage subsidy. Does the Prime Minister have a program fix coming so that charities and non-profits can receive the wage subsidy? the acting chair (mr. Chair, we understand the important role that charities and non-profits are playing to help vulnerable Canadians at this difficult time. We have announced supports in the amount of $350 million to ensure that not only do they continue that great work, but also expand it to serve the most vulnerable to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. Chair, last week markets were shocked when leaks regarding the state of our economy came to light before the market even opened. This caused worry to investors at home and abroad about the integrity of our markets and the nature of the leak, which is, in itself, unprecedented. Section 34 of the Statistics Act indicates the following: Every person who, after taking the oath set out in subsection 6, is guity of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars or to impreisonment for a term not exceeing five years or both: wilfully discloses or divulges directly or indirectly to any person not entitled under this Act to receive the same any information obtained by him in the course of his employment that might exert an influence on or affect the market value of any stocks, bonds or other security or any product or article, or uses any information described in paragraph for the purpose of speculating in any stocks, bonds or other security or any product or article My question for the minister is this: Does the government consider this case to be subject to paragraph 34 or 34 and a criminal offence, yes or no? the acting chair (mr. colleague is absolutely right that the current situation with regard to the COVID crisis is deeply problematic, and we want to make sure that any information we share with the Canadian public with regard to economic measures or labour market numbers follows the appropriate process. I can assure him that we are looking into this matter and that Statistics Canada is looking into this issue as well. Going forward, we will ensure that such a breach does not occur again, because it's important that we continue to have the confidence of Canadians during this current health care crisis. navdeep bains: As I have indicated very clearly, what has happened is completely unacceptable. This matter is being looked into, and we want to assure Canadians going forward that the acting chair (mr. ziad aboultaif: In that case, the minister said the matter will be looked into. Basically, my understanding of this case is that Statistics Canada is going to investigate itself, or does the minister think that the government should refer this to the RCMP? hon. navdeep bains: Sorry, could you repeat that question? I had a bit of an issue and could not hear the question. ziad aboultaif: Will Statistics Canada investigate itself or will the government refer this to the RCMP? hon. Those protocols will be followed, and the appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such breaches do not occur going forward. ziad aboultaif: The minister indicated that this will be investigated, but during the investigation into the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the Liberal staff refused to co-operate. navdeep bains: Again, we've been clear that it's important that any such breach be taken seriously. What has happened is unacceptable, and we will ensure that the appropriate steps are taken to make sure that such breaches do not occur going forward. ziad aboultaif: There's no doubt about the general terms, but I need to make sure that the government will commit that its staff will co-operate. The law is very clear, and we will make sure that the process is followed and the law is upheld. david yurdiga (fort mcmurraycold lake, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Before I start my questions, I would like to thank the various ministers, parliamentary secretaries and the Speaker of the House for reaching out to me during the severe flooding in Fort McMurray. Over the past number of years, we have seen tremendous pressure on the federal government from anti-oil and gas lobby groups demanding that the oil sands be shut down. The federal Liberal government's response to the anti-oil lobby was the introduction of the no more pipelines bill, Bill C-69, which will prevent any major oil and gas projects from being developed in Canada; and the oil shipping ban, Bill C-48, for the northern coast of British Columbia, which also had a negative effect on the oil industry. These two bills alone pushed over $200 billion of investment out of Canada, causing the Alberta economy to retract to recession levels. To compound Alberta's economic problems, we have an international oil price war and the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a huge drop in demand for oil. Chair, 48 days after the finance minister promised liquidity loans to oil producers and service companies, there are still no applications open for these loans. Chair, I'm happy that we were able to announce today some liquidity measures for large cap corporations in the oil and gas sector. These measures will provide them with the liquidity that they needed, and this is also the liquidity that they asked for. It was on April 17 that we started liquidity measures for small and medium-sized businesses in the oil and gas industry, and those are the ones in which 85% of workers are affected. I'm very happy that we've had such people as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers come out and say that this is what they asked for and this is what they need, and we have produced what they need in order to ensure the future competitiveness of Canada's oil and gas sector. Many of these contractors are indigenous companies, and they are having a difficult time qualifying for programs to save their businesses. Can the honourable Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations inform us of the measures the government is taking to ensure there are no gaps in the current programs, and commit to review the eligibility criteria for owners of aboriginal businesses struggling to qualify for financial help? hon. Chair, Canada's oil sector provides jobs for more than 576,000 people, including 11,000 indigenous people, in every part of Canada. It is essential that we support the many indigenous people who work in our oil and gas sector, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan. We have provided supports for those businesses, and we will continue to do so, also keeping in mind that in many of these communities the importance of public health and safety is foremost in our minds. If the global oil markets remain oversupplied into the summer and industry must shut down production, what is the government's plan to ensure Canada's energy security and the economic future of the oil sands with the potential shutdown of oil production? hon. Chair, we have worked with industry and with provinces on every front to ensure the stability of the oil and gas sector of our country. We need the workers in our oil and gas sector in order to lower emissions and achieve a greener economy. Therefore, we are looking after workers and we are looking out for companies that hold onto those jobs for those workers. Chair, the government's assistance package for the Canadian oil and gas industry provides some hope to the industry. Can the minister clarify? On a medium-sized energy company's eligibility, if the company is in default to financial institutions, does it still qualify for the business credit availability program? hon. We have the impacts of COVID and the effects of a global price war, and we have been tackling both of these on each front. As well, through the BCAP, we are making sure that more companies are eligible so that they can remain whole and so they can hold onto the jobs that we need. As we all know, we're being told we need a vaccine, and the quest for a vaccine is all-consuming globally. However, people who think about this issue and the question of the power structure and profit motive, particularly Dr. Can we ensure that public dollars for finding a vaccine will result in a product that is shared globally, openly, and is not for profit? hon. We have an open science model, and we're working with different partners and different jurisdictions to help develop vaccines and look at countermeasures and other therapeutics. Our goal is to make sure that we do so in a collaborative fashion, because this is a global pandemic, but make no mistake: If it's Canadian ingenuity and Canadian IP that's driving it, we want to support them as well. elizabeth may: As a follow-up to the minister's comment, I note it was interesting to see the claim made by this public health institute at Dalhousie about the wonderful research that was being done in Winnipeg on an Ebola vaccine. Because of the for-profit motive and the interests that big pharma had in seeing their market before they developed the product, it is alleged that the Ebola vaccine was actually delayed by the for-profit model. I wonder if we might consider examining this profit motive around the development of life-saving vaccines and other drugs. I'm working very closely with Minister Hajdu and the chief science advisor to look at all options. We are engaging with them and empowering them, and we will continue to share details of this with the public. elizabeth may: Changing gears, we know that the new regulations limiting what are described as military-style assault rifles and guns have been very controversial. It's very clear to me as an opposition member why we haven't seen legislation on any fast track. Wouldn't it be wise to table for first reading the entire legislative framework so that we know what we're talking about in the long term with regard to the buyback program and other aspects of this issue? hon. I want to assure her that at the first opportunity, we will bring forward legislation dealing with a number of aspects of our commitment to strengthen gun control in Canada, including legislation to deal with a buyback program, which we've indicated we will put in place. There are a number of other significant measures as well that we intend to bring forward to strengthen gun control legislation. The pandemic does not diminish our responsibility to do what is necessary to keep Canadians safe, and we will bring that legislation forward at the first opportunity. Some that are being run by not-for-profit societies are actually running very well, certainly in my community, but they are facing increased costs that could bankrupt them. As yet, there's no program to help a well-run seniors home that is not experiencing a loss of revenue and has lots of staff working hard. patty hajdu: I offer my gratitude to the many people who are working in these long-term care facilities day and night to keep seniors safe. The member certainly highlighted that there are not only additional expenses for some of the not-for-profit seniors homes, but also additional new measures that will increase all kinds of things, including costs. We continue to work with the provinces and territories and support them through, for example, generous transfers of money to boost their health care systems in ways that they think are most appropriate. To the Minister of Health, is her government prepared to take strong action to address this crisis in seniors health care? hon. Chair, the member has illustrated some of the horror stories that have appalled us all as Canadians and certainly as parliamentarians. We know that seniors deserve to live in dignity and safety with the utmost care, and that just hasn't been happening in this time of COVID and certainly, in some cases, in previous times as well. As the member knows, I've said publicly that I believe we need to hold long-term care homes to stronger standards. I am working with many ministers across our government to think about how we do that, how we the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, if we treated children the way we do seniors in this country, social services would seize them. Over 80% of the deaths in Canada from COVID-19 have occurred in long-term care homes. Canada has the highest proportion of deaths in long-term care home settings among 14 comparable countries, including France, Germany, Denmark and Ireland. Chair, the member opposite knows that long-term care homes have rested largely in the jurisdiction of provincial governments and, in fact, municipal governments, which often run them and fund them partially as well. That's why it's important that we have those conversations with our provincial and territorial partners, but the member can rest assured that it is on the top of my priority list to engage with my colleagues all across the country, including many experts who have studied this issue multiple times, to come up with stronger standards so all seniors have quality of life, safety and dignity in their elder years. Chair, Canadians don't want politicians pointing fingers at each other; they want our seniors taken care of. Not a single province or territory in Canada is meeting the minimum standards of hands-on care for seniors, and death rates from COVID-19 in private, for-profit facilities are two to three times that of public or non-profit homes. Will the minister agree with New Democrats that we need strong national standards, federal funding tied to enforcement and public delivery of care to effectively improve care for seniors? hon. As a matter of fact, what I hear from my colleagues at the provincial and territorial level is the willingness to collaborate on how, first of all, we get through this crisis together and strengthen safety for seniors in homes right now and then how we look to the future to build a stronger network of long-term care or care alternatives that will ensure that seniors have the right and the ability to live with dignity and safety in their homes. Chair, what I'm not hearing is a single concrete proposal or measure that this minister is suggesting her government can take, but let me move to another subject. Like long-term care, COVID-19 has exposed other major gaps in our health care system. Millions of Canadians lost their prescription benefits when they lost their jobs, revealing the fundamental weakness of medical coverage tied to employment status. Will this government finally move to ensure all Canadians get the medicine they need by bringing in universal pharmacare at the earliest opportunity? hon. Chair, as you know, in the mandate that the Prime Minister gave to me, working on a national pharmacare plan is still there. I know it feels like a lifetime ago, but the member has very aptly illustrated why affordable medication is so important as part of a robust health care system. A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister made a big announcement expressing his desire to launch an economic recovery plan that fast-tracks the transition to a green economy. MinisterGuilbeault, MinisterMcKenna and MinisterWilkinson were appointed to a group tasked with doing just that. Today, I worry that the group is nothing but an empty shell, a convenient post-crisis political pitch. Perhaps there is an environmental component, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around yesterday's announcement by Export and Development Canada. That's $500million for a pipeline project that will eventually produce 8.6million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually. How does the government reconcile that with its desire to transition to a green economy? the chair: The honourable minister has the floor. Certainly at this time, Canadians are most particularly focused on ensuring that support is provided so that they can put food on the table and pay their rent. Certainly as we move forward, we need to be thinking about the kind of society and economy that we want to create for the future. In that context, we need to learn lessons coming out of this experience, and certainly we need to ensure that we are addressing challenges that are on the horizon, including the challenge of climate change. Those are conversations that will need to be had as we move beyond this phase of the crisis, but at the current time, the focus is clearly on combatting the virus. monique pauz (repentigny, bq): There was absolutely no interpretation while the minister was speaking. the chair: Since so many are having issues with the interpretation, let's take a quick break while I try to fix the problem on my end. I'm going to ask the minister to repeat his answer, and we'll see whether the interpretation comes through this time. If not, please let me know, Ms.Pauz and anyone else who doesn't hear it. That means not just climate change, but also other challenges that we saw during the coronavirus crisis, challenges we need to take into account. Of course, we need to think about the future, but I want Canadians the chair: Mr.Simard has the floor. I want to tell you that, of all industries, the one best positioned to make the energy transition is probably the forestry industry. Unfortunately, in Canadaa petro statethere always seem to be two sets of rules when it comes to helping key industries, including providing liquidity support. Yesterday's announcement suggests that the $500million being provided by EDC is for a single project: Coastal GasLink. In 2017, under the softwood lumber action plan, EDC's entire budget for the forestry industry was exactly $500million. Now, EDC is shelling out $500million for just one project, Coastal GasLink, even though the whole of the forestry industry also received $500million when it needed EDC's support under a 2017 action plan to deal with tariffs. The industry accounts for 58,000jobs in Quebec and $6billion of Quebec's GDP. Does he think this situation is fair? Will he commit to providing the forestry industry with the same amount of liquidity being made available to the fossil fuel sector? hon. Building on our work today, we have included traditional investments to make sure this sector innovates, diversifies and grows. Over these past two and a half months, I have spent an inordinate amount of time with CEOs, with heads of the forestry sectors from coast to coast to coast. A few days ago, I convened a meeting of CEOs from all parts of this country, from Quebec to British Columbia, to talk to them about solutions, about answers. We will continue to work closely with industry to make sure we are there for them and that we stand by them through the COVID crisis, so we make sure that the chair: The next question will go to Mr. I'm hearing from small business owners like Joel, who runs a fitness club here in Pitt MeadowsMaple Ridge, and is very concerned that their landlords refuse to participate in the rent assistance program. These businesses have seen revenue drops between 50% and 100% and are asking for just 25% off their rent. When will the government help small businesses whose landlords refuse to be team players during this pandemic? hon. That's why we've moved forward with a number of measures that are designed to be of assistance. It allows for small businesses to significantly reduce their rent and for landlords to be protected with up to 75% of the rent. A number of my constituents, including Kathy, who owns a beauty salon, are concerned about meeting the PPE requirements. What is the federal government doing to ensure businesses in my riding can get access to the PPE they need to keep their employees and customers safe when they reopen? hon. However, we are actively involved in trying to ascertain how the federal government can work with the provinces and territories to provide essential services and other businesses with PPE. Chair, Craig and Matt are co-owners of Wanstalls, a firearms retail outlet in downtown Maple Ridge that employs eight people and serves thousands of law-abiding firearm owners in my riding, people who are now made to feel like criminals by the Liberal government. Further, they are now stuck with tens of thousands of dollars of inventory that they can no longer sell. What are they supposed to do to keep open in this already tumultuous COVID environment? hon. bill blair: It's important to understand that none of the restrictions that we have put in place, the new prohibitions, in any way impact weapons that are used for the lawful purposes in Canada of hunting and sport shooting, so those weapons remain available to Canadians engaged in those lawful activities. We have prohibited weapons that were not intended for the legal purposes of hunting and sport shooting and for which firearms are available to Canadians. Chair, according to the CERB website, if a recipient earns over $1,000 in a reporting period, their entire $2,000 benefit must be repaid. They're worried that if they take an extra shift, they will lose their CERB, but if they refuse a shift, they will also lose their CERB. Does the government intend to make them repay all their CERB if they barely go over the threshold? hon. Chair, that is why we're working with individual eligible CERB recipients to make sure they are not put in positions of undue hardship. At the beginning, the registration restricted it to basically not working, and then we relaxed the condition to earning up to $1,000. alexis brunelle-duceppe (lac-saint-jean, bq): I have a point of order, Mr.Chair. alexis brunelle-duceppe: There were some technical issues earlier during my fellow member Mario Simard's turn. The good thing is that this is all being filmed, so we can watch the video back to see what happened. alexis brunelle-duceppe: Mr.Chair, because the ministers chose to answer in French owing to a technical issue, their answers were unduly drawn out, which cost my fellow member speaking time. the chair: As I said, I'll check what happened and we'll have a solution for next time. steven guilbeault: I hope the member isn't suggesting that, because some members of the House are making an effort to speak French, they are unduly dragging out the time, as he seems to have said. Good for them, I say, for trying to speak a language they aren't necessarily comfortable in for the benefit of other members. the chair: I think a debate is brewing, but I'm sure that's not what people want, so I don't want an argument to break out over the fact that different languages are being spoken. Mr.Chair, many farmers in my riding and elsewhere are afraid they won't have enough workers this summer and fall. What is the government going to do to make sure those receiving the CERB and CESB have the right information and know about the job opportunities in the agri-food sector in our communities? the chair: The honourable minister has 15seconds to answer. Chair, I can assure the member that while we are supporting Canadians through both the CERB and the CESB, we are creating tens of thousands of jobs, including in the agriculture sector, to make sure there is labour available in this important and essential sector. When I first got elected as Speaker, one of the things I mentioned was that you would want everyone who was watching, including your families and your friends, to be proud of you. I didn't see anybody answer without one, and it is very much appreciated, not only by our fellow members but also by the people who are translating into the other language that you are not speaking

The relief package announced by Air Canada will include funding for airline ticket refunds, following the example of other countries. This support will be available for all destinations served by Air Canada. The government has recognized the significant contribution of small businesses, which make up 98% of all businesses in the country. Measures such as the Canada emergency business account have been implemented to provide support to over 550,000 small businesses. The government is also taking steps to support small businesses with rent assistance, encouraging landlords to participate and working with provincial finance ministers to enforce the program. The fish and seafood sector has been severely impacted by COVID-19, and measures have been put in place to address their specific needs, including $62.5 million for processors and access to the CERB for seasonal workers and those who have exhausted their fishery EI. However, more action is needed to support fishing enterprises, as their unique structure makes them ineligible for certain supports. Changes have been made to the CERB to ensure eligibility for those who have exhausted fishers EI and seasonal workers.

Question: What were the suggestions and proposed solutions for the transcribers and how did Grade E perceive sonorance? Article: phd a: Why is it so cold in here ? professor b: so , we haven't sent around the agenda . So , i , any agenda items anybody has , wants to talk about , what 's going on ? postdoc g: I c I could talk about the meeting . phd a: Well , I had a just a quick question but I know there was discussion of it at a previous meeting that I missed , but just about the the wish list item of getting good quality close - talking mikes on every speaker . professor b: OK , so let 's let 's So let 's just do agenda building right now . You were gonna starting to say something ? postdoc g: Well , you you , already know about the meeting that 's coming up and I don't know if if this is appropriate for this . phd e: What meeting ? professor b: We can so we can ta so n NIST is NIST folks are coming by next week postdoc g: OK . professor b: I think phd e: Who 's coming ? professor b: John Fiscus postdoc g: An - anything else , strike anybody ? phd a: we started running recognition on one conversation but it 's the r isn't working yet . phd e: Wha phd a: the main thing would be if anyone has , knowledge about ways to , post - process the wave forms that would give us better recognition , that would be helpful to know about . professor b: Yeah , so , phd e: What about , is there anything new with the speech , nonspeech stuff ? phd c: Yeah , we 're working more on it but , it 's not finished . postdoc g: I had thought under my topic that I would mention the , four items that I I , put out for being on the agenda f on that meeting , which includes like the pre - segmentation and the and the developments in multitrans . professor b: Alright , why don't we start off with this , u u I guess the order we brought them up seems fine . So the one issue was that the the , lapel mike , isn't as good as you would like . Right ? phd a: Ri - , professor b: Is that is that basically the point ? phd a: yeah , the And actually in addition to that , that the the close talking mikes are worn in such a way as to best capture the signal . And the reason here is just that for the people doing work not on microphones but on sort of like dialogue and so forth , or and even on prosody , which Don is gonna be working on soon , it adds this extra , you know , vari variable for each speaker to to deal with when the microphones aren't similar . phd a: So And I also talked to Mari this morning and she also had a strong preference for doing that . And in fact she said that that 's useful for them to know in starting to collect their data too . Right , so one th grad h: Well , so professor b: well one thing I was gonna say was that , i we could get more , of the head mounted microphones even beyond the number of radio channels we have because I think whether it 's radio or wire is probably second - order . grad h: So it 's towards the corner of your mouth so that breath sounds don't get on it . grad h: And then just sort of about , a thumb or a thumb and a half away from your from your mouth . phd a: But we have more than one type of professor b: How am I d phd a: for instance , you 're phd c: Yeah . phd a: But if we could actually standardize , you know , the the microphones , as much as possible that would be really helpful . professor b: Well , it doesn't hurt to have a few extra microphones around , phd d: Yeah . professor b: so why don't we just go out and and get an order of of if this microphone seems OK to people , I 'd just get a half dozen of these things . grad h: Well the onl the only problem with that is right now , some of the Jimlets aren't working . grad h: And so , w , I 've only been able to find three jacks that are working . phd e: Can we get these , wireless ? grad h: So professor b: No , but my point is phd a: But y we could just record these signals separately and time align them with the start of the meeting . professor b: R r right grad h: I I 'm not sure I 'm follow . Say that again ? professor b: Right now , we 've got , two microphones in the room , that are not quote - unquote standard . professor b: Also what we 've talked before about getting another , radio , grad h: Right . professor b: So , so we should go out to our full complement of whatever we can do , but have them all be the same mike . I think the original reason that it was done the other way was because , it w it was sort of an experimental thing and I don't think anybody knew whether people would rather have more variety or or , more uniformity , phd a: Right . phd a: Well , for short term research it 's just there 's just so much effort that would have to be done up front n , professor b: Yeah . phd e: Is it because You you 're saying the for dialogue purposes , so that means that the transcribers are having trouble with those mikes ? Is that what you mean ? phd a: Well Jane would know more about the transcribers . postdoc g: a couple times , so , yeah , the transcribers notice And in fact there 're some where , ugh well , there 's it 's the double thing . postdoc g: And he 's always they always they just rave about how wonderful Adam 's Adam 's channel is . , " Baaah ! " phd a: Even if if you 're talking on someone else 's mike it 's still you w postdoc g: Yeah , but it 's not just that , it 's also you know you professor b: Yeah . postdoc g: It 's also like n no breathing , no You know , it 's like it 's it 's , professor b: Yeah . postdoc g: it 's really it makes a big difference from the transcribers ' point of view grad h: Yeah , it 's an advantage when you don't breath . professor b: When we 're doing grad h: Yeah , I think that the point of doing the close talking mike is to get a good quality signal . professor b: Yeah , probably yeah , to the store we talked about and that grad h: Yep . postdoc g: And there was some talk about , maybe the h headphones that are uncomfortable for people , to grad h: Yep . So , as as I said , we 'll do a field trip and see if we can get all of the same mike that 's more comfortable than than these things , which I think are horrible . grad h: And , you know , we 're researchers , so we all have big heads . OK , so , Jonathan Fiscus is coming on the second of February and I 've spoken with , u u a lot of people here , not everyone . , and , he expressed an interest in seeing the room and in , seeing a demonstration of the modified multitrans , which I 'll mention in a second , and also , he was interested in the pre - segmentation and then he 's also interested in the transcription conventions . postdoc g: And , So , it seems to me in terms of like , i i it wou You know , OK . So the room , it 's things like the audio and c and audi audio and acoustic acoustic properties of the room and how it how the recordings are done , and that kind of thing . OK , in terms of the multi - trans , well that that 's being modified by Dave Gelbart to , handle multi - channel recording . grad h: Oh , I should 've I was just thinking I should have invited him to this meeting . I I , @ @ didn't didn't see it , yesterday but I 'm going to see it today . And , that 's that will enable us to do nice , tight time marking of the beginning and ending of overlapping segments . In terms of , like , pre - segmentation , that that continues to be , a terrific asset to the to the transcribers . What what I 'm doing right now is I 'm trying to include some information about which channel , there 's some speech in . I 'm just trying to do this by comparing energies , normalizing energies and comparing energies of the different channels . phd c: And so to to give the transcribers some information in which channel there 's there 's speech in addition to to the thing we we did now which is just , speech - nonspeech detection on the mixed file . So I 'm I 'm relying on on the segmentation of the mixed file postdoc g: This is good . phd c: but I 'm I 'm trying to subdivide the speech portions into different portions if there is some activity in in different channels . postdoc g: Excellent , so this 'd be like w e providing also speaker ID potentially . professor b: something I guess I didn't put in the list but , on that , same day later on in or maybe it 's No , actually it 's this week , Dave Gelbart and I will be , visiting with John Canny who i you know , is a CS professor , postdoc g: Oh . You know , maybe they 'd wanna stick an array mike here when we 're doing things phd e: That would be cool . professor b: or or maybe it 's it 's not a specific array microphone they want phd d: Yeah . professor b: but they might wanna just , you know , you could imagine them taking the four signals from these these table mikes and trying to do something with them , I also had a discussion So , w , we 'll be over over there talking with him , after class on Friday . I had a , discussion today with , Birger Kollmeier who 's a , a German , scientist who 's got a fair sized group doing a range of things . But but , he does stuff with auditory models and he 's very interested in directionality , and location , and and , head models and microphone things . And so , he 's he and possibly a student , there w there 's , a student of his who gave a talk here last year , may come here , in the fall for , sort of a five month , sabbatical . phd e: That that reminds me , I had a a thought of an interesting project that somebody could try to do with the data from here , either using , you know , the the mikes on the table or using signal energies from the head worn mikes , phd d: phd e: and that is to try to construct a map of where people were sitting , professor b: Right . phd e: And so you could plot out who was sitting next to who professor b: A little bit , phd e: and professor b: he didn't do a very extreme thing but just it was just sort of phd d: Yeah , yeah . professor b: e e given that , the the the block of wood with the the the two mikes on either side , grad h: professor b: if I 'm speaking , or if you 're speaking , or someone over there is speaking , it if you look at cross - correlation functions , you end up with a phd d: Yeah . professor b: if if someone who was on the axis between the two is talking , then you you get a big peak there . And if if someone 's talking on on on , one side or the other , it goes the other way . professor b: And then , it it it even looks different if th t if the two two people on either side are talking than if one in the middle . Well I was just thinking , you know , as I was sitting here next to Thilo that , when he 's talking , my mike probably picks it up better than your guys 's mikes . phd e: So if you just looked at grad h: Oh , that 's another cl cue , phd d: Yeah . phd e: yeah , looked at the energy on my mike and you could get an idea about who 's closest to who . professor b: Yeah , well you have to the appropriate normalizations are tricky , and and and are probably the key . phd a: You just search for Adam 's voice on each individual microphone , you pretty much know where everybody 's sitting . postdoc g: Can I ask one thing ? , so , Jonathan Fiscus expressed an interest in , microphone arrays . postdoc g: is there b And I also want to say , his he can't stay all day . He needs to , leave for , from here to make a two forty - five flight grad h: Oh , so just morning . postdoc g: So it makes the scheduling a little bit tight but do you think that , that , i John Canny should be involved in this somehow or not . professor b: Probably not but I I 'll I 'll I 'll know better after I see him this Friday what what kind of level he wants to get involved . professor b: he might be excited to and it might be very appropriate for him to , or he might have no interest whatsoever . grad h: Is he involved in Ach ! I 'm blanking on the name of the project . NIST has has done a big meeting room instrumented meeting room with video and microphone arrays , and very elaborate software . Is is he the one working on that ? professor b: Well that 's what they 're starting up . professor b: well I think they 've instrumented a room but I don't think they they haven't started recordings yet . They don't have the phd e: Are they going to do video as well ? grad h: . grad h: Oh , cuz what what I had read was , they had a very large amount of software infrastructure for coordinating all this , both in terms of recording and also live room where you 're interacting the participants are interacting with the computer , and with the video , and lots of other stuff . professor b: All all I know is that they 've been talking to me about a project that they 're going to start up recording people meet in meetings . professor b: And one one notable difference u u actually I can't remember whether they were going to routinely collect video or not , but one one , difference from the audio side was that they are interested in using array mikes . The reason I didn't go for that here was because , the focus , both of my interest and of Adam 's interest was , in impromptu situations . And we 're not recording a bunch of impromptu situations but that 's because it 's different to get data for research than to actually apply it . professor b: And so , for scientific reasons we thought it was good to instrument this room as we wanted it . But the thing we ultimately wanted to aim at was a situation where you were talking with , one or more other people i , in in an p impromptu way , where you didn't didn't actually know what the situation was going to be . And therefore it would not it 'd be highly unlikely that room would be outfitted with with some very carefully designed array of microphones . It was just , you know , yet another piece of research and it seemed like we had enough troubles just phd e: So there 's no like portable array of mikes ? professor b: No . So there 's there 's , there 's a whole range of things there 's a whole array of things , that people do on this . professor b: So , the , the big arrays , places , like , Rutgers , and Brown , and other other places , they have , big arrays with , I don't know , a hundred hundred mikes or something . professor b: And it 's and , in fact at one point we had a a proposal in with Rutgers where we were gonna do some of the sort of per channel signal - processing and they were gonna do the multi - channel stuff , but it d it d we ended up not doing it . grad h: And then they have little ones too professor b: And then they had the little ones , yeah . grad h: but but they don't have our block of wood , right ? professor b: Yeah , our block of wood is unique . professor b: But the But the No , there are these commercial things now you can buy that have four mikes or something phd a: professor b: and and , So , yeah , there 's there 's there 's a range of things that people do . professor b: so if we connected up with somebody who was interested in doing that sort of thing that 's that 's a good thing to do . , whenever I 've described this to other people who are interested on the with the acoustic side that 's invariably the question they ask . Just like someone who is interested in the general dialogue thing will always ask " , are you recording video ? " phd a: Right , professor b: right ? phd a: right . professor b: And and the acoustic people will always say , " well are you doing , array microphones ? " So it 's it 's a good thing to do , but it doesn't solve the problem of how do you solve things when there 's one mike or at best two mikes in in this imagined PDA that we have . , I know that having an array of , I would imagine it would be more expensive to have a an array of microphones . But couldn't you kind of approximate the natural sis situation by just shutting off , channels when you 're later on ? , it seems like if the microphones don't effect each other then couldn't you just , you know , record them with an array and then just not use all the data ? grad h: It 's it 's just a lot of infrastructure that for our particular purpose we felt we didn't need to set up . professor b: Yeah , if ninety - nine percent of what you 're doing is c is shutting off most of the mikes , then going through the postdoc g: OK . professor b: But if you get somebody who 's who who has that as a primary interest then that put then that drives it in that direction . grad h: That 's right , if someone if someone came in and said we really want to do it , phd a: Right . That would be fine , phd e: So to save that data you You have to have one channel recording per mike in the array ? grad h: Buy more disk space . professor b: But then , you know , there 's it there 's phd e: What you save , if you 're going to do research with it . yeah professor b: There 's I I don't know what they 're going to do and I don't know how big their array is . Obviously if you were gonna save all of those channels for later research you 'd use up a lot of space . grad h: Well their software infrastructure had a very elaborate design for plugging in filters , and mixers , and all sorts of processing . But I think in practical situations you would have some engine of some sort doing some processing to reduce this to some to the equivalent of a single microphone that was very directional . professor b: Right ? phd a: it seems professor b: So phd e: Sort of saving the result of the beam - forming . phd a: it seems to me that there 's you know , there are good political reasons for for doing this , just getting the data , because there 's a number of sites like right now SRI is probably gonna invest a lot of internal funding into recording meetings also , which is good , but they 'll be recording with video and they 'll be You know , it 'd be nice if we can have at least , make use of the data that we 're recording as we go since it 's sort of this is the first site that has really collected these really impromptu meetings , and just have this other information available . So , if we can get the investment in just for the infra infrastructure and then , I don't know , save it out or have whoever 's interested save that data out , transfer it there , it 'd be g it 'd be good to have have the recording . grad h: You mean to to actually get a microphone array and do that ? phd a: Well , if Even if we 're not grad h: And video and phd a: I 'm not sure about video . That 's sort of an video has a little different nature since right n right now we 're all being recorded but we 're not being taped . , but it definitely in the case of microphone arrays , since if there was a community interested in this , then grad h: Well , but I think we need a researcher here who 's interested in it . professor b: See the problem is it it took , it took at least six months for Dan to get together the hardware and the software , and debug stuff in in the microphones , and in the boxes . And so I think we could get a microphone array in here pretty easily and , have it mixed to to one channel of some sort . professor b: But , e I think for , how we 're gonna decide For for maximum flexibility later you really don't want to end up with just one channel that 's pointed in the direction of the the the p the person with the maximum energy or something like that . , you you want actually to you want actually to have multiple channels being recorded so that you can And to do that , it we 're going to end up greatly increasing the disk space that we use up , we also only have boards that will take up to sixteen channels and in this meeting , we 've got eight people and and six mikes . phd a: Well if there 's a way to say time to sort of solve each of these f those professor b: Yeah . phd a: So suppose you can get an array in because there 's some person at Berkeley who 's interested and has some equipment , and suppose we can as we save it we can , you know , transfer it off to some other place that that holds this this data , who 's interested , and even if ICSI it itself isn't . , and it it seems like as long as we can time align the beginning , do we need to mix it with the rest ? I don't know . phd a: it 's just it 's worth considering as sort of grad h: And y it 'd certainly gets skew . phd a: once you make the up front investment and can sort of save it out each time , and and not have to worry about the disk space factor , then it mi it might be worth having the data . I mentioned that , b as a practical matter , grad h: Just professor b: but the real issue is that , there is no way to do a recording extended to what we have now with low skew . professor b: which would mean that the sampling times and so forth would be all over the place compared to this . So it would depend on the level of pr processing you were doing later , but if you 're d i the kind of person who 's doing array processing you actually care about funny little times . And and so you actually wou would want to have a completely different set up than we have , phd a: I see . But what we could do is if there was someone else who 's interested they could have a separate set up which they wouldn't be trying to synch with ours which might be useful for for them . phd a: Right , at least they 'd have the data and the transcripts , professor b: And then we can offer up the room , phd a: and Right . professor b: Yeah , we can o offer the meetings , and the physical space , and and yeah , the transcripts , and so on . phd a: But it 's if it 's impossible or if it 's a lot of effort then you have to just balance the two , professor b: Well I thi phd a: so professor b: yeah , the thing will be , u u in in again , in talking to these other people to see what you know , what what we can do . phd e: Is there an interest in getting video recordings for these meetings ? professor b: Right , so we have we phd e: grad h: Yes , absolutely . But it 's exactly the same problem , that you have an infrastructure problem , you have a problem with people not wanting to be video taped , and you have the problem that no one who 's currently involved in the project is really hot to do it . Internally , but I know there is interest from other places that are interested in looking at meeting data and having the video . So it 's just postdoc g: Yeah , w although I m I I have to u u mention the human subjects problems , that i increase with video . There 's the fact that then , if i I I 've heard comments about this before , " why don't you just put on a video camera ? " But you know , it 's sort of like saying , " , well we 're primarily interested in in some dialogue things , but , why don't we just throw a microphone out there . " , the thing is , once you actually have serious interest in any of these things then you actually have to put a lot of effort in . professor b: So I think NIST or LDC , or somebody like that I think is much better shape to do all that . postdoc g: I it it occurred to me , has Don signed a human subject 's form ? grad h: Oh ! Probably not . postdoc g: A permission form ? grad h: Has Don have you s did you si I thought you did actually . grad h: Didn't you read a digit string ? phd e: You were here at a meeting before . postdoc g: Did you sign a form ? grad f: Did I ? I don't know . professor b: Yeah , we we postdoc g: But I just grad f: Can I verbally consent ? postdoc g: you know . You 're on recor you 're being recorded postdoc g: o grad f: Yeah . phd a: and professor b: we don't we don't perform electro - shock during these meetings , grad f: I don't care . phd e: How big is the data set ? postdoc g: Oh , it 's what is one meeting . I didn't want to have any conflicts of , you know , of of when to stop transcribing this one or So I wanted to keep it clear whose data were whose , and and and so phd e: - huh . postdoc g: And , meetings , you know , I think that they 're they go as long as a almost two hours in some in some cases . So , you know , that means you know , if we 've got two already finished and they 're working on , right now all eight of them have differe , additional data sets . postdoc g: And , also Dan Ellis 's innovation of the , the multi - channel to here really helped a r a lot in terms of clearing clearing up h hearings that involve overlaps . But , just out of curiosity I asked one of them how long it was taking her , one of these two who has already finished her data set . , these still , when they 're finished , that means that they 're finished with their pass through . They still need to be edited and all but But it 's word level , speaker change , the things that were mentioned . OK , now I wanted to mention the , teleconference I had with , Jonathan Fiscus . postdoc g: He , he in indicated to me that they 've that he 's been , looking , spending a lot of time with I 'm not quite sure the connection , but spending a lot of time with the ATLAS system . But it looks to me like that 's the name that has developed for the system that Bird and Liberman developed for the annotated graphs approach . postdoc g: So what he wants me to do and what we what we will do and , is to provide them with the u already transcribed meeting for him to be able to experiment with in this ATLAS System . And they do have some sort of software , at least that 's my impression , related to ATLAS and that he wants to experiment with taking our data and putting them in that format , and see how that works out . I I I explained to him in in detail the , conventions that we 're using here in this in this word level transcript . And , you know , I I explained , you know , the reasons that that we were not coding more elaborately and and the focus on reliability . He 's he 's very , independently he asked , " well what about reliability ? " So , he 's interested in the consistency of the encoding and that sort of thing . OK , phd a: Sorry , can you explain what the ATLAS I 'm not familiar with this ATLAS system . postdoc g: Well , you know , at this point I think , well Adam 's read more in more detail than I have on this . But , there there is a way of viewing , whenever you have coding categories , and you 're dealing with , a taxonomy , then you can have branches that that have alternative , choices that you could use for each each of them . grad h: Is is Is ATLAS the his annotated transcription graph stuff ? I don't remember the acronym . The the one the what I think you 're referring to , they they have this concept of an an annotated transcription graph representation . grad h: And that 's basically what I based the format that I did I based it on their work almost directly , in combination with the TEI stuff . And so it 's it 's a data representation and a set of tools for manipulating transcription graphs of various types . phd e: Is this the project that 's sort of , between , NIST and and , a couple of other places ? postdoc g: And I looked through them and they mainly had to do with this , this , tree structure , annotated tree diagram thing . postdoc g: So , and , you know , in terms of like the conventions that I 'm a that I 've adopted , it there there 's no conflict at all . And , " oh , and how 'd you handle this ? " And I said , " well , you know , this way " and And and we had a really nice conversation . , OK , now I also wanted to say in a different a different direction is , Brian Kingsbury . I told him he could SSH on and use multi - trans , and have a look at the already done , transcription . And what he said was that , what they 'll be providing is will not be as fine grained in terms of the time information . And , that 's , You know , I need to get back to him and and , you know , explore that a little bit more and see what they 'll be giving us in specific , phd a: . phd e: The p the people postdoc g: but I just haven't had time yet . phd e: The the folks that they 're , subcontracting out the transcription to , are they like court reporters postdoc g: Sorry , what ? Yes . phd e: or postdoc g: Apparently Well , I get the sense they 're kind of like that . Like it 's like a pool of of somewhat , secretarial I don't think that they 're court reporters . Like medical transcriptionist type people grad h: Nu - it 's mostly it 's for their speech recognition products , phd e: But aren't they 're postdoc g: Yep . grad h: Well they they do send it out but my understanding is that that 's all this company does is transcriptions for IBM for their speech product . grad h: So most of it 's ViaVoice , people reading their training material for that . postdoc g: Up to now it 's been monologues , as far my understood . postdoc g: Brian himself downloaded So So , Adam sent them a CD and Brian himself downloaded , cuz , you know , we wanted to have it so that they were in familiar f terms with what they wanted to do . postdoc g: And then what he 's going to do is check it , a before they go be beyond the first one . professor b: So if they hear something off in the distance they don't they just go phd e: OK . grad h: Well , but that 's OK , because , you know , you 'll do all them and then combine them . phd e: Well if you 're tran if you got that channel right there postdoc g: d , in my case phd c: Yeah . postdoc g: Yeah , I I would think that it would be kind of hard to come out with Yeah . phd a: I I think it 's sort of hard just playing the you know , just having played the individual files . phd a: there are a lot of words that are so reduced phonetically that make sense when you know what the person was saying before . phd e: Yeah , that 's phd a: it sort of depends where you are in postdoc g: And especially since a lot of these phd d: Yeah . grad h: And the answer is we don't actually know the answer because we haven't tried both ways . postdoc g: Well , except I can say that my transcribers use the mixed signal mostly grad h: So . postdoc g: unless there 's a huge disparity in terms of the volume on on the mix . In which case , you know , they they wouldn't be able to catch anything except the prominent channel , grad h: Right . postdoc g: Yeah , well phd a: Actually , are th so are they giving any time markings ? grad h: Right . phd a: In other words , if postdoc g: Well , I have to ask him . postdoc g: But but the , I did want to say that it 's hard to follow one channel of a conversation even if you know the people , and if you 're dealing furthermore with highly abstract network concepts you 've never heard of So , you know , one of these people was was transcribing the , networks group talk and she said , " I don't really know what a lot of these abbreviations are , " " but I just put them in parentheses cuz that 's the that 's the convention and I just " Cuz you know , if you don't know grad h: Oh , I 'd be curious to to look at that . grad h: The networks group meetings are all phd e: Given all of the effort that is going on here in transcribing why do we have I B M doing it ? Why not just do it all ourselves ? professor b: it 's historical . , some point ago we thought that , it " boy , we 'd really have to ramp up to do that " , phd c: - huh . phd d: No , just professor b: you know , like we just did , and , here 's , a a , collaborating institution that 's volunteered to do it . professor b: And it still might be a good thing phd e: I 'm just wondering now phd a: Actu yeah , Mar - Mari asked me the same question as sort of professor b: but phd e: Well , I 'm I 'm wondering now if it 's grad h: Well we can talk about more details later . Let 's see what comes out of it , and and , you know , have some more discussions with them . It 's very a real benefit having Brian involved because of his knowledge of what the how the data need to be used and so what 's useful to have in the format . grad h: So , Liz , with with the SRI recognizer , can it make use of some time marks ? phd a: OK , so this is a , grad h: I I guess I don't know what that means . phd a: and actually I should say this is what Don has b , he 's already been really helpful in , chopping up these So so first of all you , for the SRI front - end , we really need to chop things up into pieces that are f not too huge . , but second of all , in general because some of these channels , I 'd say , like , I don't know , at least half of them probably on average are g are ha are have a lot of cross - ta sorry , some of the segments have a lot of cross - talk . , it 's good to get sort of short segments if you 're gonna do recognition , especially forced alignment . So , Don has been taking a first stab actually using Jane 's first the fir the meeting that Jane transcribed which we did have some problems with , and Thilo , I think told me why this was , but that people were switching microphones around in the very beginning , so the SRI re phd c: No , th Yeah . They they were not switching them but what they were they were adjusting them , phd a: and they They were not phd c: so . phd a: So we have to sort of normalize the front - end and so forth , and have these small segments . phd a: So we 've taken that and chopped it into pieces based always on your your , cuts that you made on the mixed signal . Right ? phd a: the problem is if we have no time marks , then for forced alignment we actually don't know where you know , in the signal the transcriber heard that word . And so grad h: Oh , I see , phd a: if if it 's a whole conversation and we get a long , you know , par paragraph of of talk , grad h: it 's for the length . phd a: And , I think with phd e: Well you would need to like a forced alignment before you did the chopping , right ? phd a: No , we used the fact that So when Jane transcribes them the way she has transcribers doing this , whether it 's with the pre - segmentation or not , grad h: It 's already chunked . And maybe they choose the chunk or now they use a pre - segmentation and then correct it if necessary . That 's great , cuz the recognizer can grad h: it 's all pretty good sized for the recognizer also . phd a: Right , and it it helps that it 's made based on sort of heuristics and human ear I think . phd a: Th - but there 's going to be a real problem , even if we chop up based on speech silence these , the transcripts from I B M , we don't actually know where the words were , which segment they belonged to . phd e: Why not do a a a forced alignment ? grad h: That 's what she 's saying , is that you can't . phd a: If you do a forced alignment on something really grad h: Got six sixty minutes of phd a: well even if you do it on something really long you need to know you can always chop it up but you need to have a reference of which words went with which , chop . postdoc g: Now wasn't I thought that one of the proposals was that IBM was going to do an initial forced alignment , phd a: So postdoc g: after they grad h: Yeah , but professor b: I I think that they are , grad h: We 'll have to talk to Brian . professor b: yeah , I 'm sure they will and so we we have to have a dialogue with them about it . professor b: it sounds like Liz has some concerns phd a: Maybe they have some you know , maybe actually there is some , even if they 're not fine grained , maybe the transcribers professor b: and phd a: I don't know , maybe it 's saved out in pieces or or something . postdoc g: I just you know , it 's like I got over - taxed with the timing . But the it is true that the segments I haven't tried the segments that Thilo gave you but the segments that in your first meeting are great . phd a: Right , cuz postdoc g: Well , I I was thinking it would be fun to to , if if you wouldn't mind , to give us a pre - segmentation . postdoc g: maybe you have one already of that first m of the meeting that , the first transcribed meeting , the one that I transcribed . phd c: I 'm sure I have some postdoc g: Do you have a could you generate a pre - segmentation ? grad h: February sixteenth I think . phd c: but but that 's the one where we 're , trai training on , so that 's a little bit grad h: Oh . phd c: It 's a little bit at odd to postdoc g: Oh , darn . phd a: And actually as you get transcripts just , for new meetings , we can try postdoc g: - huh . So it 'd be good for just to know as transcriptions are coming through the pipeline from the transcribers , just to sort of we 're playing around with sort of , parameters f on the recognizer , postdoc g: phd a: The first meeting had I think just four people , phd c: Four speakers , yeah . postdoc g: Yeah , Liz and I spoke d w at some length on Tuesday and and I and I was planning to do just a a preliminary look over of the two that are finished and then give them to you . I guess the other thing , I I can't remember if we discussed this in the meeting but , I know you and I talked about this a little bit , there was an issue of , suppose we get in the , I guess it 's enviable position although maybe it 's just saying where the weak link is in the chain , where we we , we have all the data transcribed and we have these transcribers and we were we 're the we 're still a bit slow on feeding at that point we 've caught up and the the the , the weak link is is recording meetings . OK , two questions come , is you know what how how do we , it 's not really a problem at the moment cuz we haven't reached that point but how do we step out the recorded meetings ? And the other one is , is there some good use that we can make of the transcribers to do other things ? So , I I can't remember how much we talked about this in this meeting but there was grad h: We had spoken with them about it . postdoc g: And there is one use that that also we discussed which was when , Dave finishes the and maybe it 's already finished the the modification to multi - trans which will allow fine grained encoding of overlaps . , then it would be very these people would be very good to shift over to finer grain encoding of overlaps . It 's just a matter of , you know , providing So if right now you have two overlapping segments in the same time bin , well with with the improvement in the database in in the , sorry , in the interface , it 'd be possible to , you know , just do a click and drag thing , and get the , the specific place of each of those , the time tag associated with the beginning and end of of each segment . professor b: One one was , we had s had some discussion in the past about some very high level labelings , postdoc g: Yeah . The types of overlaps professor b: types of overlaps , and so forth that that someone could do . And the third one is is , just a completely wild hair brained idea that I have which is that , if , if we have time and people are able to do it , to take some subset of the data and do some very fine grained analysis of the speech . For instance , marking in some overlapping potentially overlapping fashion , the value of , ar articulatory features . professor b: You know , just sort of say , OK , it 's voiced from here to here , there 's it 's nasal from here to here , and so forth . , as opposed to doing phonetic , you know , phonemic and the phonetic analysis , grad h: professor b: and , assuming , articulatory feature values for those those things . postdoc g: Also if you 're dealing with consonants that would be easier than vowels , wouldn't it ? , I would think that that , being able to code that there 's a a fricative extending from here to here would be a lot easier than classifying precisely which vowel that was . professor b: but I think also it 's just the issue that that when you look at the u w u u when you look at Switchboard for instance very close up there are places where whether it 's a consonant or a vowel you still have trouble calling it a particular phone postdoc g: grad h: Yeah , but but just saying what the professor b: because it 's you know , there 's this movement from here to here postdoc g: Yeah , I 'm sure . professor b: and and and it 's so I phd e: You 're saying r sort of remove the high level constraints and go bottom - up . Maybe there 's there 's even a better way to do it but it but but that 's , you know , sort of a traditional way of describing these things , phd e: professor b: and , actually this might be a g neat thing to talk to postdoc g: That 's nice . professor b: some sort of categories but but something that allows for overlapping change of these things and then this would give some more ground work for people who were building statistical models that allowed for overlapping changes , different timing changes as opposed to just " click , you 're now in this state , which corresponds to this speech sound " and so on . phd a: So this is like gestural , these g professor b: Yeah , something like that . professor b: actually if we get into that it might be good to , haul John Ohala into this phd a: Right . phd a: But is is the goal there to have this on meeting data , postdoc g: Excellent . phd a: like so that you can do far field studies of those gestures or , or is it because you think there 's a different kind of actual production in meetings that people use ? Or ? professor b: No , I think I think it 's for for for that purpose I 'm just viewing meetings as being a a neat way to get people talking naturally . And then you have i and then and then it 's natural in all senses , phd e: Just a source of data ? phd a: I see . professor b: in the sense that you have microphones that are at a distance that you know , one might have , and you have the close mikes , and you have people talking naturally . And the overlap is just indicative of the fact that people are talking naturally , phd a: - huh . professor b: right ? So so I think that given that it 's that kind of corpus , phd d: Yeah . professor b: if it 's gonna be a very useful corpus , if you say w OK , we 've limited the use by some of our , censored choices , we don't have the video , we don't and so forth , but there 's a lot of use that we could make of it by expanding the annotation choices . professor b: And , most of the things we 've talked about have been fairly high level , and being kind of a bottom - up person I thought maybe we 'd , do some of the others . professor b: people have made a lot of use of of TIMIT and , w due to its markings , and then the Switchboard transcription thing , well I think has been very useful for a lot of people . professor b: So phd a: I guess I wanted to , sort of make a pitch for trying to collect more meetings . phd a: I actually I talked to Chuck Fillmore and I think they 've what , vehemently said no before but this time he wasn't vehement and he said you know , " well , Liz , come to the meeting tomorrow professor b: Yeah . Go to their meeting tomorrow and see if we can try , to convince them postdoc g: professor b: Cuz they have something like three or four different meetings , phd a: because they have And they have very interesting meetings from the point of view of a very different type of of talk than we have here professor b: right ? postdoc g: phd e: You mean in terms of the topic topics ? phd a: Well , yes and in terms of the the fact that they 're describing abstract things and , just dialogue - wise , professor b: And then the other thing is , I don't know if this is at all useful , but I asked Lila if I can maybe go around and talk to the different departments in this building to see if there 's any groups that , for a free lunch , professor b: Yes . grad h: You mean non - ICSI ? phd a: non - ICSI , non - academic , grad h: Yeah , I guess you you can try phd a: you know , like government people , grad h: but phd a: I don't know . , it seems like we we had this idea before of having like linguistics students brought down for free lunches grad h: Well , tha I think that 's her point . phd a: Right , and then we could also we might try advertising again because I think it 'd be good if if we can get a few different sort of non - internal types of meetings postdoc g: Yeah . phd e: Does does John Ohala have weekly phonetics lab meetings ? postdoc g: grad h: And I think , if we could get phd a: So I actually wrote to him and he answered , " great , that sounds really interesting " . grad h: But , it would be nice if we got someone other than me who knew how to set it up and could do the recording phd a: So grad h: so u I didn't have to do it each time . phd a: and I was thinking professor b: He - he 's supposed he 's supposed to be trained to do it . , the other thing is that there was a number of things at the transcription side that , transcribers can do , like dialogue act tagging , grad h: It 's not that hard . phd a: disfluency tagging , things that are in the speech that are actually something we 're y working on for language modeling . So if you wanna process a utterance and the first thing they say is , " well " , and that " well " is coded as some kind of interrupt u tag . , and things like that , th postdoc g: Of course some of that can be li done lexically . phd a: A lot of it can be done postdoc g: And I also they are doing disfluency tagging to some degree already . phd a: I think there 's a second pass and I don't really know what would exist in it . But there 's definitely a second pass worth doing to maybe encode some kinds of , you know , is it a question or not , postdoc g: postdoc g: I wanted to whi while we 're , so , to return just briefly to this question of more meeting data , I have two questions . One of them is , Jerry Feldman 's group , they they , are they I know that they recorded one meeting . professor b: I think there 's we should go beyond , ICSI but , there 's a lot of stuff happening at ICSI that we 're not getting now that we could . So th there was the thing in Fillmore 's group but even there he hadn't What he 'd said " no " to was for the main meeting . phd e: Well , and and the other thing too is when they originally said " no " they didn't know about this post - editing capability thing . professor b: there 's there 's , the networks group , I don't Do they still meeting regularly or ? grad h: Well , I don't know if they meet regularly or not but they are no longer recording . professor b: But , ha ha have they said they don't want to anymore or ? grad h: ugh , what was his name ? professor b: i i postdoc g: Joe Sokol ? grad h: Yeah . professor b: OK , so they 're down to three or four people grad h: They and they stopped Yeah . postdoc g: We might be able to get the administration grad h: Well he was sort of my contact , so I just need to find out who 's running it now . phd a: Yeah , it One thing that would be nice postdoc g: I don't know phd a: and this it sounds bizarre but , I 'd really like to look at to get some meetings where there 's a little bit of heated discussion , like ar arguments and or emotion , and things like that . Some group , " yes , we must " grad h: Who 's willing to get recorded and distributed ? phd a: Well , you know , something phd c: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , I don't think the more political argumentative ones would be willing to phd a: professor b: Yeah , with with with potential use from the defense department . phd a: No , but maybe stu student , groups or , film - makers , or som Something a little bit colorful . Yeah , th there 's a problem there in terms of , the commercial value of of st , postdoc g: Yeah , of course there is this problem though , that if we give them the chance to excise later we e might end up with like five minutes out of a f of m one hour phd d: Film - maker . phd a: And I don't mean that they 're angry phd d: Is postdoc g: of Yes . phd a: but just something with some more variation in prosodic contours and so forth would be neat . So if anyone has ideas , I 'm willing to do the leg work to go try to talk to people but I don't really know which groups are worth pursuing . postdoc g: Well there was this K P F A grad h: No that 's postdoc g: but OK . phd a: Or postdoc g: And I had one other one other aspect of this which is , Jonathan Fiscus expressed primar y a major interest in having meetings which were all English speakers . phd e: Did he mean , did he mean and non - British ? grad h: Well phd c: The all native . phd e: He said British was OK ? postdoc g: But but Sure , sure , sure . professor b: Why ? grad h: British is English ? phd c: postdoc g: Yeah . professor b: Well , I don't I don't I don't think if he didn't say that postdoc g: Native speaking . grad h: So , why would he care ? phd e: Knowing the application phd a: That 's professor b: I remember wh I I remember a study phd a: I was thinking , knowing the , n National Institute of Standards , it is all professor b: I remember a study that BBN did where they trained on this was in Wall Street Journal days or something , they trained on American English and then they tested on , different native speakers from different areas . professor b: it was Swiss w Yeah , so it 's so I think , you know , if he 's if he 's thinking in terms of recognition kind of technology I I I think he would probably want , American English , postdoc g: All America , OK . It it yeah , unless we 're gonna train with a whole bunch of postdoc g: I think that the Feldman 's meetings tend to be more that way , aren't they ? , I sort of feel like they have professor b: I think so , grad h: Maybe . grad h: And maybe there are a few of with us where it was professor b: Yeah . grad h: you know , Dan wasn't there and before Jose started coming , professor b: Yeah . professor b: So , what about what about people who involved in some artistic endeavor ? phd d: Yeah . phd a: Exactly , that 's what I was professor b: You 'd think like they would be phd d: A film - maker . phd a: something where there there is actually discussion where there 's no right or wrong answer but but it 's a matter of opinion kind of thing . phd a: Yeah , we could phd e: A any department that calls itself science phd d: Department . phd d: Computer sci grad h: That postdoc g: We could get Julia Child . phd a: I 'm I 'm actually serious grad h: That 's phd a: because , you know , we have the set up here grad h: Got a ticket . grad f: I know grad h: I could phd a: Not not professor b: Put a little ad up saying , " come here and argue " . grad h: and they they they expressed willingness back when they thought they would be doing more stuff with speech . grad h: But when they lost interest in speech they also stopped answering my email about other stuff , so . phd a: Or people who are really h professor b: They could have a discussion about te grad f: I grad h: We should probably bleep that out . grad f: I heard that at Cal Tech they have a special room someone said that they had a special room to get all your frustrations out that you can go to and like throw things and break things . professor b: Yeah , now that is not actually what we grad f: So we can like post a grad h: Th - that 's not what we want . grad f: No , not to that extent phd a: Well , far field mikes can pick up where they threw stuff on the wall . professor b: Yeah , but we don't want them to throw the far field mikes is the thing . postdoc g: It 'd be fun to get like a a p visit from the grad h: There was a dorm room at Tech that , someone had coated the walls and the ceiling , and , the floor with mattresses . professor b: What did we mean by that ? Remember @ @ ? grad h: Liz wanted to talk about methods of improving accuracy by doing pre - processing . phd a: Well I think that that was just sort of I I already asked Thilo professor b: Oh , you already did that . phd a: but that , it would be helpful if I can stay in the loop somehow with , people who are doing any kind of post - processing , whether it 's to separate speakers or to improve the signal - to - noise ratio , or both , that we can sort of try out as we 're running recognition . , so , i is that Who else is work I guess Dan Ellis and you phd c: Dan , yeah . professor b: he 's he 's interested in in fact we 're look starting to look at some echo cancellation kind of things . professor b: Which grad h: I am not sure how much that 's an issue with the close talking mikes , professor b: ? grad h: but who knows ? professor b: Well , let 's w i isn't that what what you want phd a: I don't know . I 'm bad professor b: t No , so No , i w wha what you what you want when you 're saying improving the wave form you want the close talking microphone to be better . professor b: And the question is to w to what extent is it getting hurt by , by any room acoustics or is it just , given that it 's close it 's not a problem ? phd a: It doesn't seem like big room acoustics problems to my ear professor b: phd a: but I 'm not an expert . grad h: e I bet with the lapel mike there 's plenty , room acoustic phd a: That that may be true . phd a: But I don't know how good it can get either by those the those methods grad h: Yeah . grad h: So I I think it 's just , phd a: Oh , I don't know . phd a: All I meant is just that as sort of as this pipeline of research is going on we 're also experimenting with different ASR , techniques . phd e: So the problem is like , on the microphone of somebody who 's not talking they 're picking up signals from other people and that 's causing problems ? phd a: R right , although if they 're not talking , using the the inhouse transcriptions , were sort of O K because the t no one transcribed any words there and we throw it out . phd a: But if they 're talking at all and they 're not talking the whole time , so you get some speech and then a " - " , and some more speech , so that whole thing is one chunk . And the person in the middle who said only a little bit is picking up the speech around it , that 's where it 's a big problem . postdoc g: You know , this does like seem like it would relate to some of what Jose 's been working on as well , the encoding of the phd d: Yeah . postdoc g: And and he also , he was phd a: The energy , phd d: Yeah , phd a: right . postdoc g: I was t I was trying to remember , you have this interface where you i you ha you showed us one time on your laptop that you you had different visual displays as speech and nonspeech events . Because , eh , it 's possible , eh , eh , in a simp sample view , to , nnn , to compare with c with the segment , the the kind of assessment what happened with the the different parameters . And only with a different bands of color for the , few situation , eh , I consider for acoustic event is enough to @ @ . phd d: I I I see that , eh , you are considering now , eh , a very sophisticated , eh , ehm , eh , @ @ set of , eh , graphic s eh , eh , ehm , si symbols to to transcribe . No ? Because , before , you you are talking about the the possibility to include in the Transcriber program eh , a set of symbols , of graphic symbol to t to mark the different situations during the transcription postdoc g: Oh , I w - huh . No ? postdoc g: Well , you 're saying So , symbols for differences between laugh , and sigh , and and and slam the door and stuff ? phd d: Yeah . postdoc g: Or some other kind of thing ? phd d: No ? To to mark postdoc g: Well , I wouldn't say symbols so much . The the main change that I that I see in the interface is is just that we 'll be able to more finely c , time things . postdoc g: But I I also st there was another aspect of your work that I was thinking about when I was talking to you phd a: . postdoc g: which is that it sounded to me , Liz , as though you and , maybe I didn't q understand this , but it sounded to me as though part of the analysis that you 're doing involves taking segments which are of a particular type and putting them together . postdoc g: And th so if you have like a p a s you know , speech from one speaker , then you cut out the part that 's not that speaker , phd a: postdoc g: and you combine segments from that same speaker to and run them through the recognizer . Is that right ? phd a: Well we try to find as close of start and end time of as we can to the speech from an individual speaker , postdoc g: phd a: because then we we 're more guaranteed that the recognizer will for the forced alignment which is just to give us the time boundaries , because from those time boundaries then the plan is to compute prosodic features . phd a: And the sort of more space you have that isn't the thing you 're trying to align the more errors we have . , so , you know , that that it would help to have either pre - processing of a signal that creates very good signal - to - noise ratio , postdoc g: phd a: which I don't know how possible this is for the lapel , or to have very to have closer , time you know , synch times , basically , around the speech that gets transcribed in it , or both . So I just wanted to see , you know , on the transcribing end from here things look good . And then the issue of like global processing of some signal and then , you know , before we chop it up is is yet another way we can improve things in that . You can , The problem is just that the acoustic when the signal - to - noise ratio is too low , you you 'll get , a an alignment with the wrong duration pattern or it phd e: Oh , so that 's the problem , is the the signal - to - noise ratio . It 's not the fact that you have like , what he did is allow you to have , words that were in another segment move over to the at the edges of of segmentations . phd a: Right , things things near the boundaries where if you got your alignment wrong phd e: It 's that there are problems even in inside the alignments , because of the fact that there 's enough acoustic signal there t for the recognizer to to eat , as part of a word . So , yeah , bottom bottom line is just I wanted to make sure I can be aware of whoever 's working on these signal - processing techniques for , detecting energies , phd d: Yeah . professor b: O K , tea has started out there I suggest we c run through our digits and , postdoc g: OK <doc-sep>professor f: We can say the word " zero " all we want , phd g: I 'm doing some professor f: but just phd g: square brackets , coffee sipping , square brackets . phd d: There 's gonna be some zeros from this morning 's meeting because I noticed that professor f: u phd d: Barry , I think maybe you turned your mike off before the digits were Oh , was it during digits ? Oh , so it doesn't matter . phd b: So it 's not it 's not that bad if it 's at the end , but it 's in the beginning , it 's bad . grad a: Yeah , you wanna you wanna keep them on so you get good noise noise floors , through the whole meeting . Yeah I did have to run , but grad e: Is there any way to change that in the software ? grad a: Change what in the software ? grad e: Where like you just don't like if you if it starts catching zeros , like in the driver or something in the card , or somewhere in the hardware Where if you start seeing zeros on w across one channel , you just add some random , @ @ noise floor like a small noise floor . grad a: certainly we could do that , but I don't think that 's a good idea . professor f: Well , I u I actually don't know what the default is anymore as to how we 're using the the front - end stuff but for for when we use the ICSI front - end , grad a: As an argument . professor f: but , there is an there is an o an option in in RASTA , which , in when I first put it in , back in the days when I actually wrote things , I did actually put in a random bit or so that was in it , grad e: OK . professor f: but then I realized that putting in a random bit was equivalent to adding adding flat spectrum , grad e: Right . Gee ! Here we all are ! grad a: so the only agenda items were Jane was Jane wanted to talk about some of the IBM transcription process . professor f: There 's an agenda ? grad a: I sort of condensed the three things you said into that . And then just I only have like , this afternoon and maybe tomorrow morning to get anything done before I go to Japan for ten days . So if there 's anything that n absolutely , desperately needs to be done , you should let me know now . professor f: Yeah , I guess you first you have to do the first one , grad a: Yeah . professor f: Oh they they had some extension that they announced or something ? phd g: Well yeah . Liz had sent them a note saying " could we please have another " I don't know , " three days " or something , and they said yes . phd d: And then she said " Did I say three ? grad a: Oh , phd d: I meant four . " grad a: that was the other thing , phd g: But u grad a: Dave Gelbart sent me email , I think he sent it to you too , that , there 's a special topic , section in si in Eurospeech on new , corp corpors corpora . grad e: Huh ! grad a: And , professor f: Oh ! phd b: I got this mail from grad a: I s forwarded it to Jane as I thought being the most relevant person . So , I thought it was highly relevant postdoc c: Yeah I 'm professor f: That 's grad a: have you did you look at the URL ? postdoc c: Yeah . phd b: Was this SmartKom message ? I think Christoph Draxler sent this , postdoc c: Yeah . grad a: but obviously I can't , really do , most of it , postdoc c: Yeah . For instance that Morgan , accounted for fifty - six percent of the Robustness meetings in terms of number of words . postdoc c: because is it partly , eh , c correctly identified words ? Or is it or just overall volume ? phd g: No . I think it 's he 's he 's in all of them , postdoc c: Oh . phd g: we didn't mention Morgan by name grad a: and he talks a lot . professor f: Well we have now , but phd g: We we we something about grad a: Did you identify him as a senior member ? phd g: No , we as identify him as the person dominating the conversation . professor f: I get these AARP things , but I 'm not se really senior yet , but phd g: Right professor f: phd g: . professor f: but , other than that delightful result , what was the rest of the paper about ? phd g: well it was about it had three sections professor f: You sent it to me but I haven't seen it yet . , the one was that the just the the amount of overlap grad a: The good , the bad , and the ugly . phd g: s in terms of in terms of number of words and also we computed something called a " spurt " , which is essentially a stretch of speech with , no pauses exceeding five hundred milliseconds . , and we computed how many overlapped i spurts there were and how many overlapped words there were . , for four different corpora , the Meeting Recorder meetings , the Robustness meetings Switchboard and CallHome , and , found and sort of compared the numbers . , and found that the , you know , as you might expect the Meeting Recorder meetings had the most overlap , but next were Switchboard and CallHome , which both had roughly the same , almost identical in fact , and the Robustness meetings were had the least , so One sort of unexpected result there is that two - party telephone conversations have about the same amount of overlap , grad a: I 'm surprised . phd g: sort of in gen you know order of magnitude - wise as , as face - to - face meetings with multiple grad a: I have I had better start changing all my slides ! phd g: Yeah . Also , I in the Levinson , the pragmatics book , in you know , textbook , there 's I found this great quote where he says you know you know , how people it talks about how how how people are so good at turn taking , postdoc c: phd g: and so they 're so good that generally , u the overlapped speech does not is less than five percent . grad e: Did he mean face like face - to - face ? Or ? phd g: Well , in real conversations , grad e: . phd b: But postdoc c: Well , of course , no , it doesn't necessarily go against what he said , cuz he said " generally speaking " . phd b: And in f phd g: Well , he he made a claim grad a: Well phd g: Well grad a: phd b: But professor f: Yeah , we we have pretty limited sample here . phd b: Five percent of time or five percent of what ? grad a: Yeah , I was gonna ask that too . phd b: Yeah , so postdoc c: It 's i it 's not against his conclusion , phd g: So but still but still u postdoc c: it just says that it 's a bi bell curve , and that , you have something that has a nice range , in your sampling . So there are slight There are differences in how you measure it , but still it 's You know , the difference between between that number and what we have in meetings , which is more like , you know , close to in meetings like these , you know , close to twenty percent . professor f: But what was it like , say , in the Robustness meeting , for instance ? phd g: That grad a: But phd g: Robustness meeting ? It was about half of the r So , in terms of number of words , it 's like seventeen or eigh eighteen percent for the Meeting Recorder meetings and about half that for , the Robustness . professor f: Maybe ten percent ? grad a: But I don't know if that 's really a fair way of comparing between , multi - party , conversations and two - party conversations . phd b: Then then then you have to grad a: that 's just something phd d: Yeah , I just wonder if you have to normalize by the numbers of speakers or something . phd b: Then Yeah , then normalize by by something like that , postdoc c: Yeah , that 's a good point . phd g: but this obvious thing to see if if there 's a dependence on the number of participants . grad a: You have a lot of a lot of two - party , subsets within the meeting . phd g: And and and then and we also d computed this both with and without backchannels , postdoc c: phd g: so you might think that backchannels have a special status because they 're essentially just grad a: - huh . So , did we all said " - huh " and nodded at the same time , phd g: R right . phd g: But , even if you take out all the backchannels so basically you treat backchannels l as nonspeech , as pauses , grad a: You know , it goes down from maybe For Switchboard it goes down from I don't know f I don't know f fourteen percent of the words to maybe I don't know , eleven percent or something it 's it 's not a dramatic change , grad a: phd g: so it 's Anyway , so it 's That was that was one set of results , and then the second one was just basically the the stuff we had in the in the HLT paper on how overlaps effect the recognition performance . , but mostly we added one one number , which was what if you , basically score ignoring all So so the the conjecture from the HLT results was that most of the added recognition error is from insertions due to background speech . So , we scored all the recognition results , in such a way that the grad a: Oh by the way , who 's on channel four ? You 're getting a lot of breath . phd g: OK , so so if you have the foreground speaker speaking here , and then there 's some background speech , may be overlapping it somehow , and this is the time bin that we used , then of course you 're gonna get insertion errors here and here . phd g: Right ? So we scored everything , and I must say the NIST scoring tools are pretty nice for this , where you just basically ignore everything outside of the , region that was deemed to be foreground speech . And where that was we had to use the t forced alignment , results from s for so That 's somewhat that 's somewhat subject to error , but still we we , Don did some ha hand - checking and and we think that based on that , we think that the results are you know , valid , although of course , some error is gonna be in there . But basically what we found is after we take out these regions so we only score the regions that were certified as foreground speech , the recognition error went down to almost , the level of the non - overlapped speech . So that means that even if you do have background speech , if you can somehow separate out or find where it is , the recognizer does a good job , grad a: That 's great . phd g: even though there is this back grad a: Yeah , I guess that doesn't surprise me , because , with the close - talking mikes , the the signal will be so much stronger . , grad a: What what sort of normalization do you do ? phd g: so , well , we just @ @ we do u you know , vit grad a: in you recognizer , in the SRI recognizer . phd g: Well , we do , VTL vocal tract length normalization , w and we you know , we we , make all the features have zero mean and unit variance . grad a: Over an entire utterance ? professor f: And grad a: Or windowed ? phd g: Over over the entire c over the entire channel . We just took the old So this is actually a sub - optimal way of doing it , grad a: Right . So the recognizer didn't have the benefit of knowing where the foreground speech a start professor f: Were you including the the lapel in this ? phd g: Yes . professor f: And did the did did the la did the the problems with the lapel go away also ? Or phd g: it Yeah . professor f: fray for for insertions ? phd g: It u not per , not completely , but yes , professor f: Less so . So we have to professor f: you still phd g: Well I should bring the should bring the table with results . professor f: I would presume that you still would have somewhat higher error with the lapel for insertions than phd g: Yes . professor f: Cuz again , looking forward to the non - close miked case , I think that we s still phd g: And then , the third thing was , we looked at , what we call " interrupts " , although that 's that may be a misnomer , but basically we looked at cases where , so we we used the punctuation from the original transcripts and we inferred the beginnings and ends of sentences . So , you know postdoc c: Di - did you use upper - lower case also , or not ? phd g: postdoc c: U upper lower case or no ? phd g: ? postdoc c: OK . phd g: No , we only used , you know , periods , question marks and exclamation . And we know that there 's th that 's not a very g , we miss a lot of them , postdoc c: Yeah . That 's OK but phd g: but but it 's f i i postdoc c: Comma also or not ? phd g: No commas . And then we looked at locations where , if you have overlapping speech and someone else starts a sentence , you know , where do these where do other people start their turns not turns really , but you know , sentences , phd b: Ah . phd g: So we only looked at cases where there was a foreground speaker and then at the to at the so the the foreground speaker started into their sentence and then someone else started later . phd b: Somewhere in between the start and the end ? phd g: OK ? And so what phd b: OK . phd g: Sorry ? phd b: Somewhere in between the start and the end of the foreground ? phd g: Yes . phd g: So , the the question was how can we what can we say about the places where the second or or actually , several second speakers , start their " interrupts " , as we call them . phd g: w And we looked at this in terms of grad a: On T - closures , only . phd g: So so we had we had u to for for the purposes of this analysis , we tagged the word sequences , and and we time - aligned them . , and we considered it interrupt if it occurred in the middle of a word , we basically you know , considered that to be a interrupt as if it were at at the beginning of the word . phd g: And then we looked at the the locatio the , you know , the features that the tags because we had tagged these word strings , that that occurred right before these these , interrupt locations . phd b: Tag by phd g: And the tags we looked at are the spurt tag , which basically says or actually Sorry . So whether there was a pause essentially here , because spurts are a defined as being you know , five hundred milliseconds or longer pauses , and then we had things like discourse markers , backchannels , disfluencies . , filled pauses So disfluen the D 's are for , the interruption points of a disfluency , so , where you hesitate , or where you start the repair there . , repeated you know , repeated words is another of that kind of disfluencies and so forth . So we had both the beginnings and ends of these so , the end of a filled pause and the end of a discourse marker . We just looked at the distribution of words , and so every " so yeah " , and " OK " , and " - huh " were were the were deemed to be backchannels and " wow " and " so " and " right " , were Not " right " . But so , we sort of just based on the lexical , identity of the words , we we tagged them as one of these things . So , and then we looked at the disti so we looked at the distribution of these different kinds of tags , overall , and and and particularly at the interruption points . And , we found that there is a marked difference so that for instance after so at the end after a discourse marker or after backchannel or after filled pause , you 're much more likely to be interrupted than before . So pauses are always an opportunity for So we have this little histogram which shows these distributions and , phd d: I wonder phd g: you know , it 's it 's it 's not No big surprises , but it is sort of interesting from grad a: It 's nice to actually measure it though . In other words if you weren't going to pause you you will because you 're g being interrupted . professor f: But he yeah , he 's he 's right , y maybe you weren't intending to pause at all , but You were intending to stop for fifty - seven milliseconds , phd g: Right . And and we so we wrote this and then , we found we were at six pages , and then we started cutting furiously phd b: Oops . phd g: and threw out half of the material again , and played with the LaTeX stuff and grad a: Made the font smaller and the narrows longer . phd g: but we s we put Oh , I I grad a: Took out white space . phd g: you know the the gap between the two columns is like ten millimeters , phd b: Yeah . phd d: Wasn't there wasn't there some result , Andreas professor f: Yeah phd d: I I thought maybe Liz presented this at some conference a while ago about , backchannels phd g: Well phd d: - i i do you rem phd g: y We didn't talk about , prosodic , properties at all , phd d: Right . But phd g: although that 's I I take it that 's something that Don will will look at grad e: Yeah , we 're gonna be looking at that . postdoc c: Well , I didn't know about Liz 's finding on that , phd d: About postdoc c: but I know of another paper that talks about something phd d: - huh . phd d: It made me think about a cool little device that could be built to to handle those people that call you on the phone and just like to talk and talk and talk . And you just have this little detector that listens for these drops in pitch and gives them the backchannel . phd g: There 's actually there 's this a former student of here from Berkeley , Nigel Nigel Ward . phd g: He did a system , in he he lives in Japan now , and he did this backchanneling , automatic backchanneling system . phd g: It 's a very phd d: Oh ! phd g: So , exactly what you describe , phd d: Huh . And it 's apparently for Japa - in Japanese it 's really important that you backchannel . Actually for a lot of these people I think you could just sort of backchannel continuously and it would pretty much be fine . Where the barber who was afraid of scissors was playing a a tape of clipping sounds , and saying " - huh " , " yeah " , " how about them sports teams ? " phd g: Anyway . So the paper 's on - line and y I I think I I CC ' ed a message to Meeting Recorder with the URL so you can get it . So I I 'm actually about to send Brian Kingbury an email saying where he can find the the s the m the material he wanted for the s for the speech recognition experiment , so but I haven't sent it out yet because actually my desktop locked up , like I can't type anything . b so if there 's any suggestions you have for that I was just gonna send him the phd d: Is it the same directory that you had suggested ? phd g: I made a directory . phd g: He does ? postdoc c: And he and he 's phd g: Yeah but but but he has to postdoc c: I 'd hafta add him to Meeting Recorder , I guess , phd g: he prefe he said he would prefer FTP postdoc c: but OK . phd g: and also , the other person that wants it There is one person at SRI who wants to look at the , you know , the the data we have so far , postdoc c: OK . So what I did is I @ @ I made a n new directory after Chuck said that would c that was gonna be a good thing . Right ? The same the same as the mailing list , professor f: Yeah , phd g: and professor f: the No vowels . , professor f: Yeah phd g: and then under there actually Oh and this directory , is not readable . So , in other words , to access anything under there , you have to be told what the name is . phd g: So , and the directory for this I call it I " ASR zero point one " because it 's sort of meant for recognition . professor f: So anyone who hears this meeting now knows the grad a: Beta ? phd g: And then then in there I have a file that lists all the other files , so that someone can get that file and then know the file names and therefore download them . If you don't know the file names you can't professor f: Is that a dash or a dot in there ? phd g: you can grad a: Don't don't don't say . So all I all I was gonna do there was stick the the transcripts after we the way that we munged them for scoring , because that 's what he cares about , and , and also and then the the waveforms that Don segmented . , just basically tar them all up f w for each meeting I tar them all into one tar file and G - zip them and stick them there . grad a: I , put digits in my own home directory home FTP directory , phd g: And so . phd d: So we could point Mari to this also for her March O - one request ? phd g: OK . phd d: Or phd g: Oh ! phd d: You n Remember she was phd g: Oh she wanted that also ? phd d: Well she was saying that it would be nice if we had they had a Or was she talking Yeah . She was saying it would be nice if they had eh the same set , so that when they did experiments they could compare . grad e: I phd g: But yeah , we can send I can CC Mari on this so that she knows phd d: Yeah . phd d: so I was gonna probably put it grad a: We can put it in the same place . , so either we should regenerate the original versions , or , we should just make a note of it . And so I but OK so but for the other meetings it 's the downsampled version that you have . Oh that 's th important to know , OK so we should probably give them the non - downsampled versions . Alright , then I 'll hold off on that and I 'll wait for you grad e: Probably by tomorrow phd g: gen grad e: I can I 'll send you an email . Yeah , definitely they should have the full bandwidth version , grad e: Yeah , because I I think Liz decided to go ahead with the downsampled versions cuz we can There was no s like , r significant difference . grad e: It does take up less disk space , and apparently it did even better than the original than the original versions , phd g: Yeah . Good that Well , it 's a good thing that grad a: OK , I think we 're losing , Don and Andreas at three - thirty , right ? OK . professor f: So , that 's why it was good to have Andreas , say these things but So , we should probably talk about the IBM transcription process stuff that postdoc c: OK . So , you know that Adam created , a b a script to generate the beep file ? professor f: . But but you were gonna to use the originally transcribed file because I tightened the time bins and that 's also the one that they had already in trying to debug the first stage of this . And , my understanding was that , I haven't I haven't listened to it yet , grad a: postdoc c: but it sounded very good and and I understand that you guys were going to have a meeting today , before this meeting . , just so that while I 'm gone , you can regenerate it if you decide to do it a different way . So , Chuck and Thilo should , now more or less know how to generate the file postdoc c: Excellent . grad a: and , the other thing Chuck pointed out is that , since this one is hand - marked , there are discourse boundaries . So what what we 're probably gonna do is just write a script , that if two , chunks are very close to each other on the same channel we 'll just merge them . grad a: So , and that will get around the problem of , the , you know " one word beep , one word beep , one word beep , one word beep " . phd d: Yeah , in fact after our meeting , this morning Thilo came in and said that , there could be other differences between the already transcribed meeting with the beeps in it and one that has just r been run through his process . phd d: So tomorrow , when we go to make the , chunked file for IBM , we 're going to actually compare the two . So he 's gonna run his process on that same meeting , postdoc c: Great idea ! phd d: and then we 're gonna do the beep - ify on both , and listen to them and see if we notice any real differences . phd g: Beep - ify ! postdoc c: OK , now one thing that prevented us from apply you you from applying Exactly . Wel - we just wanna if if there 're any major differences between doing it on the hand postdoc c: - huh . phd g: So this training meeting , w un is that some data where we have very , you know , accurate time marks ? for postdoc c: I went back and hand - marked the ba the bins , I ment I mentioned that last week . phd d: But the but there 's yeah , but there is this one issue with them in that there 're there are time boundaries in there that occur in the middle of speech . phd g: Because phd d: So Like when we went t to When I was listening to the original file that Adam had , it 's like you you hear a word then you hear a beep and then you hear the continuation of what is the same sentence . grad a: It 's i phd d: So there are these chunks that look like that have grad a: that 's not gonna be true of the foreground speaker . So you 'll you 'll have a chunk of , you know , channel A which starts at zero and ends at ten , and then the same channel starting at eleven , ending at fifteen , and then again , starting at sixteen , ending at twenty . Right , so that 's three chunks where actually we w can just make one chunk out of that which is A , zero , twenty . postdoc c: Yeah , I thought that was phd d: So if you were to use these , you have to be careful not to pull out these individual postdoc c: Yeah . phd g: Oh ! it Right , w what I would I was interested in is having a se having time marks for the beginnings and ends of speech by each speaker . phd g: So , it I don't care that you know , there 's actually abutting segments that we have to join together . phd g: But what we do care about is that the beginnings and ends are actually close to the speech inside of that phd d: Yeah , I think Jane tightened these up by hand . phd g: OK , so what is the sort of how tight are they ? professor f: it looks much better . I just wanted to get it so tha So that if you have like " yeah " in a swimming in a big bin , then it 's phd g: No , no ! I don grad a: Let me make a note on yours . phd g: I it 's f That 's fine because we don't want to th that 's perfectly fine . You always want to have a little bit of pause or nonspeech around the speech , say for recognition purposes . , but just just u w you know get an id I just wanted to have an idea of the of how much extra you allowed so that I can interpret the numbers if I compared that with a forced alignment segmentation . postdoc c: but but my main goal was , in these areas where you have a three - way overlap and one of the overlaps involves " yeah " , and it 's swimming in this huge bin , I wanted to get it so that it was clo more closely localized . But are we talking about , I don't know , a tenth of a second ? a ? You know ? How how much how much extra would you allow at most postdoc c: I I wanted to I wanted it to be able to l he be heard normally , phd g: postdoc c: so that if you if you play back that bin and have it in the mode where it stops at the boundary , it sounds like a normal word . postdoc c: Now sometimes you know , it 's these are involved in places where there was no time . postdoc c: some cases , there 're some people , who who have very long segments of discourse where , you know , they 'll they 'll breath and then I put a break . postdoc c: But other than that , it 's really pretty continuous and this includes things like going from one sentence into the u one utterance into the next , one sentence into the next , w without really stopping . i they , i you know in writing you have this two spaces and a big gap phd g: postdoc c: But but i some people are planning and , you know , a lot we always are planning what we 're going to say next . postdoc c: But , in which case , the gap between these two complete syntactic units , which of course n spoken things are not always complete syntactically , but but it would be a shorter p shorter break than maybe you might like . postdoc c: But the goal there was to not have the text be so so crudely parsed in a time bin . , because from a discourse m purpose it 's it 's more it 's more useful to be able to see and also you know , from a speech recognition purpose my impression is that if you have too long a unit , it 's it doesn't help you very much either , cuz of the memory . postdoc c: So , that means that the amount of time after something is variable depending partly on context , but my general goal when there was sufficient space , room , pause after it to have it be kind of a natural feeling gap . postdoc c: Which I c I don't know what it would be quantified as . You know , Wally Chafe says that , in producing narratives , the spurts that people use tend to be , that the the what would be a pause might be something like two two seconds . postdoc c: I was interested that you chose , you know , the you know that you use cuz I think that 's a unit that would be more consistent with sociolinguistics . phd g: Well we chose , you know , half a second because if if you go much larger , you have a y you know , your your statement about how much overlap there is becomes less , precise , postdoc c: Yeah , I also used I think something around zero point five seconds for the speech - nonspeech detector phd g: and it 's also based Liz suggested that value based on the distribution of pause times that you see in Switchboard and and other corpora . postdoc c: In any case , this this , meeting that I hand I I hand - adjusted two of them I mentioned before , phd g: postdoc c: and I sent I sent email , phd g: OK , postdoc c: so phd g: So so at some point we will try to fine - tune our forced alignment postdoc c: And I sent the path . phd g: maybe using those as references because you know , what you would do is you would play with different parameters . And to get an object You need an objective measure of how closely you can align the models to the actual speech . So , I will phd b: Yeah and hopefully the new meetings which will start from the channelized version will will have better time boundaries and alignments . postdoc c: But I like this idea of , for our purposes for the for the IBM preparation , n having these joined together , phd b: Yeah . phd b: And and in in the in the previous version where in the n which is used now , there , the backchannel would would be in - between there somewhere , so . Well , phd b: but postdoc c: that 's that 's right , but you know , thi this brings me to the other f stage of this which I discussed with you earlier today , phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: which is the second stage is , w what to do in terms of the transcribers adjustment of these data . , the tr so the idea initially was , we would get , for the new meetings , so the e EDU meetings , that Thilo ha has now presegmented all of them for us , on a channel by channel basis . And , so , I 've assigned I 've I 've assigned them to our transcribers and , so far I 've discussed it with one , with And I had a about an hour discussion with her about this yesterday , we went through EDU - one , at some extent . And it occurred to me that that basically what we have in this kind of a format is you could consider it as a staggered mixed file , we had some discussion over the weekend a about at at this other meeting that we were all a at , about whether the tran the IBM transcribers should hear a single channel audio , or a mixed channel audio . And , in in a way , by by having this this chunk and then the backchannel after it , it 's like a stagal staggered mixed channel . And , it occurred to me in my discussion with her yesterday that , the the the maximal gain , it 's from the IBM people , may be in long stretches of connected speech . So it 's basically a whole bunch of words which they can really do , because of the continuity within that person 's turn . So , what I 'm thinking , and it may be that not all meetings will be good for this , but but what I 'm thinking is that in the EDU meetings , they tend to be driven by a couple of dominant speakers . And , if the chunked files focused on the dominant speakers , then , when when it got s patched together when it comes back from IBM , we can add the backchannels . It seems to me that , you know , the backchannels per - se wouldn't be so hard , but then there 's this question of the time @ @ , marking , and whether the beeps would be y y y And I 'm not exactly sure how that how that would work with the with the backchannels . And , so And certainly things that are intrusions of multiple words , taken out of context and displaced in time from where they occurred , that would be hard . So , m my thought is i I 'm having this transcriber go through the EDU - one meeting , and indicate a start time f for each dominant speaker , endpoi end time for each dominant speaker , and the idea that these units would be generated for the dominant speakers , and maybe not for the other channels . grad a: Yeah the only , disadvantage of that is , then it 's hard to use an automatic method to do that . The advantage is that it 's probably faster to do that than it is to use the automated method and correct it . I think I I think , you know , the original plan was that the transcriber would adjust the t the boundaries , and all that for all the channels but , you know , that is so time - consuming , and since we have a bottleneck here , we want to get IBM things that are usable s as soon as possible , then this seemed to me it 'd be a way of gett to get them a flood of data , which would be useful when it comes back to us . postdoc c: Oh also , at the same time she when she goes through this , she 'll be If there 's anything that was encoded as a pause , but really has something transcribable in it , then she 's going to , make a mark w , so you know , so that that bin would be marked as it as double dots and she 'll just add an S . And in the other in the other case , if it 's marked as speech , and really there 's nothing transcribable in it , then she 's going to put a s dash , and I 'll go through and it and , you know , with a with a substitution command , get it so that it 's clear that those are the other category . But , the transcribable events that , I 'm considering in this , continue to be laugh , as well as speech , and cough and things like that , so I 'm not stripping out anything , just just you know , being very lenient in what 's considered speech . Yeah ? phd d: Jane ? In terms of the this new procedure you 're suggesting , u what is the grad a: It 's not that different . phd d: So I 'm a little confused , because how do we know where to put beeps ? Is it i d y is it postdoc c: Oh , OK . postdoc c: So what it what it what it involves is is really a s , the original pr procedure , but only applied to , a certain strategically chosen s aspect of the data . grad a: We pick the easy parts of the data basically , postdoc c: So grad a: and transcriber marks it by hand . grad a: And because phd d: But after we 've done Thilo 's thing . Oh , OK , postdoc c: Yes ! grad a: I didn't I didn't understand that . phd g: So , grad a: OK , leave the mikes on , and just put them on the table . postdoc c: We start with the presegmented version grad a: Let me mark you as no digits . phd b: You start with the presegmentation , r yeah ? postdoc c: Yeah . And then , the transcriber , instead of going painstakingly through all the channels and moving the boundaries around , and deciding if it 's speech or not , but not transcribing anything . OK ? Instead of doing that , which was our original plan , the tra They focus on the dominant speaker phd d: So what they do is they identify who 's the di dominant speaker , and when the speaker starts . postdoc c: So , you 're still gonna phd b: And you just postdoc c: So we 're It 's based on your se presegmentation , that 's the basic thing . phd b: and you just use the s the segments of the dominant speaker then ? For for sending to to IBM or ? postdoc c: Yeah . phd d: So , now Jane , my question is when they 're all done adjusting the w time boundaries for the dominant speaker , have they then also erased the time boundaries for the other ones ? postdoc c: postdoc c: That 's that 's why she 's notating the start and end points of the dominant speakers . So , on a you know , so i in EDU - one , i as far as I listened to it , you start off with a a s section by Jerry . So Jerry starts at minute so - and - so , and goes until minute so - and - so . And he starts at minute such - and - such , and goes on till minute so - and - so . And then meanwhile , she 's listening to both of these guys ' channels , determining if there 're any cases of misclassification of speech as nothing , and nothing as speech , phd d: phd d: So she does the adjustments on those guys ? postdoc c: But you know , I wanted to say , his segmentation is so good , that , the part that I listened to with her yesterday didn't need any adjustments of the bins . So this is not gonna be a major part of the process , at least least not in not on ones that that really phd d: So if you don't have to adjust the bins , why not just do what it for all the channels ? postdoc c: - ? phd d: Why not just throw all the channels to IBM ? postdoc c: Well there 's the question o of whether Well , OK . She i It 's a question of how much time we want our transcriber to invest here when she 's gonna have to invest that when it comes back from IBM anyway . postdoc c: So if it 's only inserting " - "s here and there , then , wouldn't that be something that would be just as efficient to do at this end , instead of having it go through I B M , then be patched together , then be double checked here . But But then we could just use the the output of the detector , and do the beeping on it , and send it to I B phd d: Without having her check anything . postdoc c: Well , I guess grad a: I think we just we just have to listen to it and see how good they are . phd b: For some meetings , I 'm I 'm sure it i n postdoc c: I 'm I 'm open to that , it was professor f: Yeah , if it 's working well , phd b: That 's And some on some meetings it 's good . professor f: that sounds like a good idea since as you say you have to do stuff with the other end anyway . the detector , this phd d: Yeah , we have to fix it when it comes back anyhow . postdoc c: Now , you were saying that they they differ in how well they work depending on channel s sys systems and stuff . So we should perhaps just select meetings on which the speech - nonspeech detection works well , postdoc c: But EDU is great . phd b: and just use , those meetings to to to send to IBM and , do the other ones . , my my my impression is that it 's better for meetings with fewer speakers , and it 's better for for meetings where nobody is breathing . phd d: So in fact this might suggest an alternative sort of a a c a hybrid between these two things . Yeah ? phd d: So the the one suggestion is you know we we run Thilo 's thing and then we have somebody go and adjust all the time boundaries phd b: Yeah . phd d: There 's a a another possibility if we find that there are some problems , phd b: Yeah . phd d: and that is if we go ahead and we just run his , and we generate the beeps file , then we have somebody listen beeps file . And erase phd d: And they listen to each section and say " yes , no " whether that section is phd b: Yeah . And it just You know , there 's a little interface which will for all the " yes " - es it then that will be the final beep file . postdoc c: That 's interesting ! Cuz that 's that 's directly related to the e end task . it wouldn't be that much fun for a transcriber to sit there , hear it , beep , yes or no . I don't know , I I think I 'm I 'm really tending towards grad a: One and a half times real time . professor f: what 's the worst that happens ? Do the transcribers as long as th on the other end they can say there 's there 's something conventions so that they say " huh ? " phd d: Yeah . professor f: i i It i phd d: We can just catch it at the catch everything at this side . phd d: Well maybe that 's the best way to go , postdoc c: How interesting ! phd d: just grad a: it just depends on how postdoc c: Well EDU phd b: Yeah , grad a: Sorry , go ahead . phd b: u u u postdoc c: So I was gonna say , EDU - one is good enough , phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: maybe we could include it in this in this set of , this stuff we send . phd b: Yeah there 's I I think there are some meetings where it would would It 's possible like this . grad a: Yeah I I think , we won't know until we generate a bunch of beep files automatically , listen to them and see how bad they are . phd d: We won't be able to s include it with this first thing , grad a: If postdoc c: . phd d: because there 's a part of the process of the beep file which requires knowing the normalization coefficients . phd d: Right , except I don't think that the c the instructions for doing that was in that directory , right ? I I didn't see where you had gener grad a: No , but it 's easy enough to do . phd b: What professor f: But I but I have a phd b: Doing the gain ? It 's no problem . professor f: But but but I I I have another suggestion on that , which is , since , really what this is , is is is trying to in the large , send the right thing to them and there is gonna be this this post - processing step , why don't we check through a bunch of things by sampling it ? phd d: professor f: Right ? In other words , rather than , saying we 're gonna listen to everything grad a: I didn't mean listen to everything , I meant , just see if they 're any good . So y you do a bunch of meetings , you listen to to a little bit here and there , phd d: Yeah . professor f: if it sounds like it 's almost always right and there 's not any big problem you send it to them . professor f: And , you know , then they 'll send us back what we w what what they send back to us , postdoc c: Oh , that 'd be great . professor f: and we 'll we 'll fix things up and some meetings will cost more time to fix up than others . grad a: And we should just double - check with Brian on a few simple conventions on how they should mark things . grad a: Yeah , cuz @ @ what I had originally said to Brian was well they 'll have to mark , when they can't distinguish between the foreground and background , professor f: Yeah . But if we send them without editing , then we 're also gonna hafta have m , notations for words that are cut off , phd d: phd d: And they may just guess at what those cut - off words are , postdoc c: Yeah . phd d: but w we 're gonna adjust everything when we come back grad a: But what what we would like them to do is be conservative so that they should only write down the transcript if they 're sure . postdoc c: which professor f: i Can I maybe have have an order of it 's probably in your paper that I haven't looked at lately , but postdoc c: Certainty . professor f: an order of magnitude notion of of how on a good meeting , how often , do you get segments that come in the middle of words and so forth , and in a bad meeting how often ? phd b: . postdoc c: Was is it in a in a what what is the t professor f: Well he 's saying , you know , that the the EDU meeting was a good good meeting , postdoc c: In a good meeting , what ? phd b: Yeah . professor f: right ? postdoc c: Oh I see , professor f: and so so so it was almost it was almost always doing the right thing . And then , in a bad meeting , or p some meetings where he said oh he 's had some problems , what does that mean ? postdoc c: - huh . professor f: So does one of the does it mean one percent and ten percent ? Or does it mean five percent and fifty percent ? postdoc c: OK . professor f: phd b: So professor f: Or Maybe percentage isn't the right word , postdoc c: Just phd b: Yeah th professor f: but you know how many how many per minute , or You know . phd b: Yeah , the the problem is that , nnn , the numbers Ian gave in the paper is just , some frame error rate . So that 's that 's not really What will be effective for for the transcribers , is They have to yeah , in in they have to insure that that 's a real s spurt or something . So the speech the amount of speech that is missed by the detector , for a good meeting , I th is around or under one percent , I would say . For yeah , but there can be more There 's There 's more amount speech , more amount of Yeah well , the detector says there is speech , but there is none . Now what about in a meeting that you said we 've you 've had some more trouble with ? phd b: I can't really hhh , Tsk . That 's really I I did this on on four meetings and only five minutes of of every meet of of these meetings so , it 's not not that representative , but , it 's perhaps , Fff . Yeah , it 's perhaps then it 's perhaps five percent of something , which s the the frames speech frames which are which are missed , but , I can't can't really tell . So I So i Sometime , we might wanna go back and look at it more in terms of how many times is there a spurt that 's that 's , interrupted ? phd b: Yeah . professor f: Something like that ? postdoc c: The other problem is , that when it when it d i on the breathy ones , where you get breathing , inti indicated as speech . professor f: And phd b: So postdoc c: And I guess we could just indicate to the transcribers not to encode that if they We could still do the beep file . professor f: Yeah again I I think that that is probably less of a problem because if you 're if there 's If if a if a word is is split , then they might have to listen to it a few times to really understand that they can't quite get it . professor f: Whereas if they listen to it and there 's don't hear any speech I think they 'd probably just listen to it once . professor f: So there 'd you 'd think there 'd be a a factor of three or four in in , cost function , postdoc c: OK . phd b: Yeah , so but I think that 's n that really doesn't happen very often that that that a word is cut in the middle or something . professor f: So so what you 're saying is that nearly always what happens when there 's a problem is that is that , there 's some , nonspeech that that is b interpreted as speech . phd b: Yeah , it 's professor f: You know , if they they hear you know , a dog bark and they say what was the word , they you know , they phd b: Yeah , I als I professor f: Ruff ruff ! phd b: Yeah I also thought of there there are really some channels where it is almost , only bre breathing in it . I 've got a a P - a method with loops into the cross - correlation with the PZM mike , and then to reject everything which which seems to be breath . phd b: So , I could run this on those breathy channels , and perhaps throw out grad a: That 's a good idea . But I think I th Again , I think that sort of that that would be good , phd b: Yeah . professor f: But I think none of this is stuff that really needs somebody doing these these , explicit markings . Oh , I 'd be delighted with that , I I was very impressed with the with the result . professor f: Yeah , cuz the other thing that was concerning me about it was that it seemed kind of specialized to the EDU meeting , and and that then when you get a meeting like this or something , phd b: Yeah . professor f: and and you have a b a bunch of different dominant speakers postdoc c: Oh yeah , interesting . professor f: Whereas this sounds like a more general solution postdoc c: Oh yeah , I pr I much prefer this , professor f: is postdoc c: I was just trying to find a way Cuz I I don't think the staggered mixed channel is awfully good as a way of handling overlaps . phd d: And we can just , you know , get the meeting , process it , put the beeps file , send it off to IBM . I would phd d: Do what ? phd b: listen to it , and then grad a: Or at least sample it . professor f: make sure you don't send them three hours of " bzzz " or something . phd b: And there 's there 's one point which I yeah , which which I r we covered when I when I r listened to one of the EDU meetings , professor f: Great . grad a: - huh phd b: And i the speech - nonspeech detector just assigns randomly the speech to to one of the channels , so . - I haven't - I didn't think of of s of this before , grad a: What can you do ? phd b: but what what shall we do about s things like this ? postdoc c: Well you were suggesting You suggested maybe just not sending that part of the meeting . postdoc c: But phd b: But , sometimes the the the laptop is in the background and some somebody is is talking , and , that 's really a little bit confusing , but grad a: It 's a little bit confusing . phd b: that 's that 's a second question , " what what will different transcribers do with with the laptop sound ? " postdoc c: Would you would professor f: What was the l what was the laptop sound ? postdoc c: Yeah , go ahead . postdoc c: Well , so So my standard approach has been if it 's not someone close - miked , then , they don't end up on one of the close - miked channels . phd b: when thi when this is sent to to the I M - eh , I B M transcribers , I don't know if if they can tell that 's really postdoc c: Yeah , that 's right . grad a: postdoc c: Well , they have a convention , in their own procedures , which is for a background sound . grad a: Right , but , in general I don't think we want them transcribing the background , cuz that would be too much work . grad a: Right ? For it because in the overlap sections , then they 'll phd d: Well I don't think Jane 's saying they 're gonna transcribe it , but they 'll just mark it as being there 's some background stuff there , grad a: But that 's gonna be all over the place . phd d: right ? grad a: How w how will they tell the difference between that sort of background and the dormal normal background of two people talking at once ? phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: Oh , I think I think it 'd be easy to to say " background laptop " . grad a: How would they know that ? phd d: But wait a minute , why would they treat them differently ? phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: Well because one of them grad a: Because otherwise it 's gonna be too much work for them to mark it . postdoc c: Oh , I s background laptop or , background LT wouldn't take any time . grad a: Sure , but how are they gonna tell bet the difference between that and two people just talking at the same time ? postdoc c: And phd b: Yeah . Acoustically , can't you tell ? phd b: It 's really good sound , so postdoc c: Oh is it ? Oh ! professor f: Well , isn't there a category something like , " sounds for someone for whom there is no i close mike " ? phd b: Yeah that would be very important , grad a: But how do we d how do we do that for the I B M folks ? postdoc c: Yeah . grad a: How can they tell that ? phd d: Well we may just have to do it when it gets back here . grad a: And they 'll just mark it however they mark it , postdoc c: That sounds good . postdoc c: Well , as it comes back , we have a when we can use the channelized interface for encoding it , then it 'll be easy for us to handle . postdoc c: But but if if out of context , they can't tell if it 's a channeled speak , you know , a close - miked speaker or not , then that would be confusing to them . postdoc c: I don't know , I it doesn't I don't Either way would be fine with me , I don't really care . Do you think we should send the that whole meeting to them and not worry about pre - processing it ? professor f: Yes ma ' postdoc c: Or , what is we we should leave the part with the audio in the , beep file that we send to IBM for that one , or should we start after the that part of the meeting is over in what we send . professor f: Which part ? phd b: With postdoc c: So , the part where they 're using sounds from their from their laptops . phd b: with the laptop sound , or ? just postdoc c: w If we have speech from the laptop should we just , excise that from what we send to IBM , or should we i give it to them and let them do with it what they can ? phd d: I think we should just it it 's gonna be too much work if we hafta worry about that I think . postdoc c: And give them freedom to to indicate if it 's just not workable . professor f: Cuz , I wouldn't don't think we would mind having that transcribed , if they did it . grad a: I think phd d: Yeah , e grad a: As I say , we 'll just have to listen to it and see how horrible it is . grad a: - , and and they 're very it 's very audible ? on the close - talking channels ? phd b: What what I would Yeah . postdoc c: OK , so we read the transcript number first , right ? grad a: Are we gonna do it altogether or separately ? phd b: So What time is it ? professor f: why don't we do it together , postdoc c: quarter to four . professor f: One , two , three , go ! postdoc c: It 's kind of interesting if there 're any more errors in these , than we had the first set . phd d: Do you guys plug your ears when you do it ? grad a: I do . professor f: I haven't been , phd d: How can you do that ? professor f: no . phd b: Perhaps there are lots of errors in it phd d: Gah ! grad a: Total concentration . Are you guys ready ? phd d: You hate to have your ears plugged ? professor f: Yeah <doc-sep>professor c: OK , what are we talking about today ? phd b: I don't know . phd a: Oh , this was the , talk where they were supposed to try to decide phd b: To to decide what to do , phd a: Ah , right . , so , let 's let 's assume for right now that we 're just kind of plugging on ahead , phd b: Yeah . professor c: because even if they tell us that , the rules are different , we 're still interested in doing what we 're doing . , well , we 've a little bit worked on trying to see , what were the bugs and the problem with the latencies . phd d: To improve phd b: So , We took first we took the LDA filters and , we designed new filters , using recursive filters actually . professor c: So when you say " we " , is that something Sunil is doing or is that ? phd b: I 'm sorry ? professor c: Who is doing that ? phd b: us . phd b: So we took the filters the FIR filters and we designed , IIR filters that have the same frequency response . phd b: So they had two filters , one for the low frequency bands and another for the high frequency bands . And the low frequency band has sixty - four milliseconds of delay , and the high frequency band filter has something like eleven milliseconds compared to the two hundred milliseconds of the IIR filters . So we have the filters but we still have to implement a routine that does recursive filtering professor c: OK . phd b: and professor c: You you had a discussion with Sunil about this though ? phd b: No . professor c: right ? So so you need to discuss with him what we 're doing , phd b: Yeah . , I yeah , I don't know if th that 's what they were trying to They were trying to do something different like taking , well , using filter that takes only a past professor c: Right . I think that the the fact that we we did that with had that thing with the latencies was indicative of the fact that there wasn't enough communication . Well , there is w one , remark about these filters , that they don't have a linear phase . phd b: Well , I don't know , perhaps it perhaps it doesn't hurt because the phase is almost linear but . , and so , yeah , for the delay I gave you here , it 's it 's , computed on the five hertz modulation frequency , which is the mmm , well , the most important for speech so . professor c: So that would be , a reduction of a hundred and thirty - six milliseconds , phd d: The low f f phd b: Yeah . professor c: which , What was the total we ended up with through the whole system ? phd b: Three hundred and thirty . professor c: So that would be within ? phd b: Yeah , but there are other points actually , which will perhaps add some more delay . Is that some other other stuff in the process were perhaps not very perf well , not very correct , like the downsampling which w was simply dropping frames . phd b: so we will try also to add a nice downsampling having a filter that that professor c: - huh . , because wh when when we look at the LDA filters , well , they are basically low - pass but they leave a lot of what 's above twenty - five hertz . phd b: and so , yeah , this will be another filter which would add ten milliseconds again . phd b: yeah , and then there 's a third thing , is that , basically the way on - line normalization was done , is just using this recursion on on the , on the feature stream , professor c: Yeah . , and when we look at this filter actually it has a delay of eighty - five milliseconds . If we want to be very correct , so if we want to the estimation of the mean t t to to be well , the right estimation of the mean , we have to t to take eighty - five milliseconds in the future . We would be at six so , sixty - five , plus ten , plus for the downsampling , plus eighty - five for the on - line normalization . So it 's professor c: phd b: plus plus eighty for the neural net and PCA . phd b: So it would be around two hundred and forty so , well , professor c: Just just barely in there . phd a: What 's the allowable ? professor c: Two - fifty , unless they changed the rules . phd a: What were they thinking of changing it to ? professor c: But phd b: Yeah . professor c: well the people who had very low latency want it to be low , very very very narrow , latency bound . professor c: Unfortunately we 're the main ones with long latency , but phd a: Ah ! professor c: But , phd b: Yeah , and basically the best proposal had something like thirty or forty milliseconds of latency . professor c: Yeah , so they were basically , they were more or less trading computation for performance and we were , trading latency for performance . And they were dealing with noise explicitly and we weren't , and so I think of it as complementary , that if we can put the phd a: Think of it as what ? professor c: Complementary . professor c: I think the best systems so , everything that we did in in a way it was it was just adamantly insisting on going in with a brain damaged system , which is something actually , we 've done a lot over the last thirteen years . So , w th w this was a test that largely had additive noise and we did we adde did absolutely nothing explicitly to handle ad additive noise . And , we did this , RASTA - like filtering which was done in the log domain and was tending to handle convolutional noise . So , the , spectral sub subtraction schemes a couple places did seem to seem to do a nice job . And so , we 're talking about putting putting some of that in while still keeping some of our stuff . I think you should be able to end up with a system that 's better than both but clearly the way that we 're operating for this other stuff does involved some latency to to get rid of most of that latency . To get down to forty or fifty milliseconds we 'd have to throw out most of what we 're doing . And and , I don't think there 's any good reason for it in the application actually . , you 're you 're you 're speaking to a recognizer on a remote server and , having a a a quarter second for some processing to clean it up . professor c: These aren't large vocabulary things so the decoder shouldn't take a really long time , and . phd a: And I don't think anybody 's gonna notice the difference between a quarter of a second of latency and thirty milliseconds of latency . What what does wa was your experience when you were doing this stuff with , the the the surgical , microscopes and so forth . , how long was it from when somebody , finished an utterance to when , something started happening ? phd a: we had a silence detector , so we would look for the end of an utterance based on the silence detector . phd a: And I I can't remember now off the top of my head how many frames of silence we had to detect before we would declare it to be the end of an utterance . phd a: but it was , I would say it was probably around the order of two hundred and fifty milliseconds . phd a: So professor c: Yeah , so you you so you had a phd a: this w professor c: so you had a a quarter second delay before , plus some little processing time , phd a: Right . professor c: And there 's physical inertia there , so probably the the motion itself was all phd a: And it felt to , the users that it was instantaneous . professor c: Yeah , so you would think as long as it 's under half a second or something . A person I don't think a person can tell the difference between , you know , a quarter of a second and a hundred milliseconds , and I 'm not even sure if we can tell the difference between a quarter of a second and half a second . , basically if you yeah , if you said , " what 's the , what 's the shortest route to the opera ? " and it took half a second to get back to you , phd a: Yeah . phd a: because when we talk to each other we tend to step on each other 's utterances . So like if I 'm asking you a question , you may start answering before I 'm even done . Well , anyway , I think we could cut we know what else , we could cut down on the neural net time by by , playing around a little bit , going more into the past , or something like that . phd a: So is the latency from the neural net caused by how far ahead you 're looking ? professor c: professor c: And there 's also well , there 's the neural net and there 's also this , multi - frame , KLT . phd a: Wasn't there Was it in the , recurrent neural nets where they weren't looking ahead at all ? professor c: They weren't looking ahead much . And and then But you also could just , we haven't experimented with this but I imagine you could , predict a , a label , from more in the past than in than than in the future . phd a: but I don't think professor c: Yeah , but we 've but we played a little bit with with asymmetric , guys . So , that 's what that 's what you 're busy with , s messing around with this , phd b: yeah . And , phd d: Also we were thinking to to , apply the eh , spectral subtraction from Ericsson phd b: Yeah . professor c: phd a: What is the advantage of that ? phd d: phd b: Well , it 's that by the for the moment we have , something that 's discriminant and nonlinear . Well , it 's it 's a linear transformation , that professor c: So at least just to understand maybe what the difference was between how much you were getting from just putting the frames together and how much you 're getting from the discriminative , what the nonlinearity does for you or doesn't do for you . Actually what we want to do , perhaps it 's to replace to to have something that 's discriminant but linear , also . And to see if it if it improves ov over over the non - discriminant linear transformation . professor c: Yeah , well , that 's what I meant , is to see whether whether it having the neural net really buys you anything . professor c: But maybe it 's just the discrimination and and maybe yeah , maybe the nonlinear discrimination isn't necessary . But the other part you were saying was the spectral subtraction , so you just kind of , phd b: Yeah . professor c: At what stage do you do that ? Do you you 're doing that , ? phd b: So it would be on the on on the mel frequency bands , phd d: We was think phd b: so . professor c: OK , phd d: Yeah , professor c: so just do that on the mel f phd d: we no nnn We we was thinking to do before after VAD or phd b: Yeah , phd d: Oh , we don't know exactly when it 's better . phd b: phd d: Before after VAD or professor c: So so you know that that that the way that they 're phd d: and then phd b: . professor c: one thing that would be no good to find out about from this conference call is that what they were talking about , what they 're proposing doing , was having a third party , run a good VAD , and and determine boundaries . professor c: The reason for that was that , if some one p one group put in the VAD and another didn't , or one had a better VAD than the other since that they 're not viewing that as being part of the the task , and that any any manufacturer would put a bunch of effort into having some s kind of good speech - silence detection . It still wouldn't be perfect but , e the argument was " let 's not have that be part of this test . " And so , I guess they argued about that yesterday and , yeah , I 'm sorry , I don't don't know the answer but we should find out . So , Yeah , so there 's the question of the VAD but otherwise it 's it 's on the the , the mel fil filter bank , energies I guess ? phd d: professor c: And you 're you 're subtracting in the in the in the I guess it 's power power domain , or or magnitude domain . phd b: and professor c: if you look at the theory , it 's it should be in the power domain but but , I 've seen implementations where people do it in the magnitude domain phd b: Yeah . professor c: I have asked people why and they shrug their shoulders and say , " oh , it works . professor c: and there 's this I guess there 's this mysterious people who do this a lot I guess have developed little tricks of the trade . , there 's there 's this , you don't just subtract the the estimate of the noise spectrum . phd b: so you have the estimation of the power spectra of the noise , and you multiply this by a factor which is depend dependent on the SNR . phd a: ! phd b: When the speech lev when the signal level is more important , compared to this noise level , the coefficient is small , and around one . But when the power le the s signal level is small compared to the noise level , the coefficient is more important . And this reduce actually the music musical noise , phd a: Oh ! phd b: which is more important during silence portions , phd a: - huh . professor c: Well , that 's , that 's what differs from different different tasks and different s , spectral subtraction methods . phd a: ! professor c: if if you have , fair assurance that , the noise is is quite stationary , then the smartest thing to do is use as much data as possible to estimate the noise , get a much better estimate , and subtract it off . professor c: But if it 's varying at all , which is gonna be the case for almost any real situation , you have to do it on - line , with some forgetting factor or something . phd a: So do you is there some long window that extends into the past over which you calculate the average ? professor c: Well , there 's a lot of different ways of computing the noise spectrum . So one of the things that , Hans - Guenter Hirsch did , and pas and other people actually , he 's he wasn't the only one I guess , was to , take some period of of of speech and in each band , develop a histogram . And , in fact I think the NIST standard method of determining signal - to - noise ratio is based on this . phd a: A couple seconds ? professor c: So No , no , it 's based on this kind of method , phd a: . Now , if you have signal and you have noise , you basically have these two bumps in the histogram , which you could approximate as two Gaussians . professor c: So so basically now you have this mixture of two Gaussians , you you n know what they are , and , sorry , you estimate what they are , and , so this gives you what the signal is and what the noise e energy is in that band in the spectrum . And the other thing to do is which is sort of more trivial and obvious is to , determine through magical means that that , there 's no speech in some period , and then see what the spectrum is . , a variant on that for just determining signal - to - noise ratio is to just , you can do a w a an iterative thing , EM - like thing , to determine means only . professor c: And then you just use those mean values as being the the , signal - to - noise ratio in that band . phd a: But what is the it seems like this kind of thing could add to the latency . Cuz if you don't look into the future , right ? phd a: OK , well that I guess that was my question , professor c: if you just yeah phd a: yeah . professor c: if you just if you you , a at the beginning you have some phd a: Guess . professor c: esti some guess and and , phd b: Yeah , but it professor c: It 's an interesting question . I wonder how they did do it ? phd b: Actually , it 's a mmm If - if you want to have a good estimation on non - stationary noise you have to look in the in the future . , if you take your window and build your histogram in this window , what you can expect is to have an estimation of th of the noise in in the middle of the window , not at the end . So professor c: Well , yeah , phd b: the but but people professor c: but what does what what what does Alcatel do ? phd d: grad e: Pretty stationary , phd b: but , professor c: Well , the thing , e e e e grad e: yeah . professor c: Yeah , y , you 're talking about non - stationary noise but I think that spectral subtraction is rarely is is not gonna work really well for for non - stationary noise , phd b: Well , if y if you have a good estimation of the noise , professor c: you know ? phd b: yeah , because well it it has to work . professor c: But it 's hard to phd b: i professor c: but that 's hard to do . So so I think that that what what is wh what 's more common is that you 're going to be helped with r slowly varying or stationary noise . professor c: If it varies a lot , to get a If if to get a good estimate you need a few seconds of speech , even if it 's centered , right ? phd b: professor c: if you need a few seconds to get a decent estimate but it 's changed a lot in a few seconds , then it , you know , i it 's kind of a problem . professor c: imagine e five hertz is the middle of the of the speech modulation spectrum , phd b: Mmm . So , phd b: So in this case , yeah , sure , you cannot professor c: Yeah . phd b: But I think y , Hirsch does experiment with windows of like between five hundred milliseconds and one second . and he worked on non - stationary noises , like noise modulated with well , wi with amplitude modulations and things like that , phd a: Were his , windows centered around the phd b: and But , yeah . professor c: No , I understand it 's better to do but I just think that that , for real noises wh what what 's most likely to happen is that there 'll be some things that are relatively stationary phd b: Mmm . professor c: and other things where it 's not so stationary and , you can always pick something that that falls between your methods , phd b: . professor c: but I don't know if , you know , if sinusoidally , modul amplitude modulated noise is is sort of a big problem in in in practice . professor c: I think that it 's phd a: We could probably get a really good estimate of the noise if we just went to the noise files , and built the averages from them . phd b: What What do you mean ? professor c: Just cheat You 're saying , cheat . phd b: But if the if the noise is stationary perhaps you don't even need some kind of noise estimation algorithm . phd b: We just take th th th the beginning of the utterance and professor c: Oh , yeah , sure . phd b: Well , everybody seems to use some kind of adaptive , well , scheme professor c: But but phd d: Yeah . phd b: is it very useful professor c: you know , stationary phd a: Very slow adaptation . phd b: and is the c phd a: th professor c: Right , the word " stationary " is has a very precise statistical meaning . But , you know , in in signal - processing really what we 're talking about I think is things that change slowly , compared with our our processing techniques . professor c: So if you 're driving along in a car I I would think that most of the time the nature of the noise is going to change relatively slowly . If you if you check it out , five minutes later you may be in a different part of the road phd b: But it 's it 's i i i using the local characteristics in time , is probably going to work pretty well . professor c: But you could get hurt a lot if you just took some something from the beginning of all the speech , of , you know , an hour of speech and then later phd b: Yeah . professor c: so they may be you know , may be overly , complicated for for this test but but but , I don't know . , if possible you shouldn't you should you should make it , the center of the center of the window . , phd a: If they 're going to provide a , voice activity detector that will tell you the boundaries of the speech , then , couldn't you just go outside those boundaries and do your estimate there ? professor c: Oh , yeah . So I I imagine that 's what they 're doing , right ? Is they 're they 're probably looking in nonspeech sections and getting some , phd b: Yeah , they have some kind of threshold on on the previous estimate , and So . Yeah , so , they h they have an estimate of the noise level and they put a threshold like six or ten DB above , and what 's under this threshold is used to update the estimate . It 's like saying what 's under the threshold is silence , professor c: Does France Telecom do this phd b: and grad e: . professor c: Does France Telecom do th do the same thing ? More or less ? phd b: I d I Y you know , perhaps ? phd d: No . , maybe we can talk about a couple other things briefly , just , things that that we 've been chatting about but haven't made it into these meetings yet . So you 're coming up with your quals proposal , and , Wanna just give a two three minute summary of what you 're planning on doing ? grad e: Oh , two , three , it can be shorter than that . , but I 'm , looking into extending the work done by Larry Saul and John Allen and Mazin Rahim . , they they have a system that 's , a multi - band , system but their multi - band is is a little different than the way that we 've been doing multi - band in the past , where Where we 've been @ @ taking sub - band features and i training up these neural nets and on on phonetic targets , and then combining them some somehow down the line , they 're they 're taking sub - band features and , training up a detector that detects for , these phonetic features for example , he presents , a detector to detect sonorance . And so what what it basically is is , it 's there 's at the lowest level , there it 's it 's an OR ga , it 's an AND gate . So , on each sub - band you have several independent tests , to test whether , there 's the existence of sonorance in a sub - band . And at the at the higher level , for every if , The higher level there 's a soft OR gate . , so if if this detector detects , the presence of of sonorance in any of the sub - bands , then the detect , the OR gate at the top says , " OK , well this frame has evidence of sonorance . " phd a: What are what are some of the low level detectors that they use ? grad e: And these are all Oh , OK . , and the , professor c: So that , by the way , basically is a is one of the units in our in our our neural network . Yeah , so he uses , an EM algorithm to to train up these parameters for the logistic regression . professor c: Well , actually , yeah , grad e: The professor c: so I was using EM to get the targets . So so you have this this this AND gate what we were calling an AND gate , but it 's a product product rule thing at the output . And then he uses , i u and then feeding into that are I 'm sorry , there 's it 's an OR at the output , isn't it ? Yeah , grad e: phd a: And so are each of these , low level detectors are they , are these something that you decide ahead of time , like " I 'm going to look for this particular feature or I 'm going to look at this frequency , " or What what what are they looking at ? grad e: phd a: What are their inputs ? grad e: Right , so the OK , so at each for each sub - band there are basically , several measures of SNR and and correlation . , and for for every s every sub - band , e you you just pick ahead of time , " I 'm going to have like five i independent logistic tests . grad e: And you initialize these parameters , in some some way and use EM to come up with your training targets for a for the the low - level detectors . grad e: And then , once you get that done , you you you train the whole whole thing on maximum likelihood . , and h he shows that using this this method to detect sonorance is it 's very robust compared to , to typical , full - band Gaussian mixtures estimations of of sonorance . You get enough of these detectors together , then you have enough information to do , higher level discrimination , for example , discriminating between phones phd a: grad e: and then you keep working your way up until you you build a full recognizer . grad e: So , that 's that 's the direction which I 'm I 'm thinking about going in my quals . , one is the going towards , using narrow band information for , ph phonetic features of some sort rather than just , immediately going for the the typical sound units . professor c: Another thing I like about it is that you t this thing is going to be trained explicitly trained for a product of errors rule , which is what , Allen keeps pointing out that Fletcher observed in the twenties , phd a: And then , the third thing I like about it is , and we 've played around with this in a different kind of way a little bit but it hasn't been our dominant way of of operating anything , this issue of where the targets come from . So in our case when we 've been training it multi - band things , the way we get the targets for the individual bands is , that we get the phonetic label for the sound there phd a: professor c: and we say , " OK , we train every " What this is saying is , OK , that 's maybe what our ultimate goal is or not ultimate but penultimate goal is getting these these small sound units . But but , along the way how much should we , what should we be training these intermediate things for ? , because , we don't know , that this is a particularly good feature . , there 's no way , someone in the audience yesterday was asking , " well couldn't you have people go through and mark the individual bands and say where the where it was sonorant or not ? " phd a: professor c: But , you know , I think having a bunch of people listening to critical band wide , chunks of speech trying to determine whether I think it 'd be impossible . professor c: It 's all gonna sound like like sine waves to you , more or less . professor c: Well not , it 's g all g narrow band , i I m I think it 's very hard for someone to to a person to make that determination . It could sh be that you should , not be paying that much attention to , certain bands for certain sounds , in order to get the best result . professor c: So , what we have been doing there , just sort of mixing it all together , is certainly much much cruder than that . Now we have I guess done experiments you 've probably done stuff where you have , done separate , Viterbis on the different grad e: Yeah . Did did that help at all ? grad e: it helps for one or t one iteration but , anything after that it doesn't help . professor c: So so that may or may t it that aspect of what he 's doing may or may not be helpful because in a sense that 's the same sort of thing . You 're taking global information and determining what you how you should But this is this is , I th I think a little more direct . phd a: How did they measure the performance of their detector ? professor c: And Well , he 's look he 's just actually looking at , the confusions between sonorant and non - sonorant . professor c: So he hasn't applied it to recognition or if he did he didn't talk about it . It 's it 's just And one of the concerns in the audience , actually , was that that , the , he he did a comparison to , you know , our old foil , the the nasty old standard recognizer with mel mel filter bank at the front , and H M Ms , and and so forth . But the one of the good questions in the audience was , well , yeah , but that wasn't trained for that . , this use of a very smooth , spectral envelope is something that , you know , has evolved as being generally a good thing for speech recognition but if you knew that what you were gonna do is detect sonorants or not So sonorants and non - sonorants is is is almost like voiced - unvoiced , except I guess that the voiced stops are are also called " obstruents " . , so it 's it 's , but with the exception of the stops I guess it 's pretty much the same as voiced - unvoiced , phd a: So , if you knew you were doing that , if you were doing something say for a a , a a Vocoder , you wouldn't use the same kind of features . Nonetheless , it was one that was interesting because , this is what we are actually using for speech recognition , these smooth envelopes . And this says that perhaps even , you know , trying to use them in the best way that we can , that that that we ordinarily do , with , you know , Gaussian mixtures and H M Ms and so forth , you you don't , actually do that well on determining whether something is sonorant or not . phd a: Didn't they professor c: Which means you 're gonna make errors between similar sounds that are son sonorant or obstruent . phd a: Didn't they also do some kind of an oracle experiment where they said " if we could detect the sonorants perfectly and then show how it would improve speech recognition ? I thought I remember hearing about an experiment like that . professor c: That would that 's you 're right , that 's exactly the question to follow up this discussion , is suppose you did that , got that right . phd b: What could be the other low level detectors , for Other kind of features , or ? in addition to detecting sonorants or ? Th - that 's what you want to to to go for also grad e: phd b: or ? grad e: What t Oh , build other other detectors on different phonetic features ? phd b: Other low level detectors ? Yeah . e , w easiest thing would be to go go do some voicing stuff but that 's very similar to sonorance . grad e: phd a: When we when we talked with John Ohala the other day we made a list of some of the things that w grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , so there 's a half dozen like that that are grad e: Yeah , nasality . professor c: Now this was coming at it from a different angle but maybe it 's a good way to start . , these are things which , John felt that a a , a human annotator would be able to reliably mark . So the sort of things he felt would be difficult for a human annotator to reliably mark would be tongue position kinds of things . professor c: But stress doesn't , fit in this thing of coming up with features that will distinguish words from one another , grad e: professor c: right ? It 's a it 's a good thing to mark and will probably help us ultimate with recognition phd a: Yeah , there 's a few cases where it can like permit and permit . professor c: Well , yeah , but i either case you 'd write PERMIT , right ? So you 'd get the word right . phd a: No , I 'm saying , i i e I thought you were saying that stress doesn't help you distinguish between words . As long as you get The sequence , professor c: We 're g if we 're doing if we 're talking about transcription as opposed to something else phd a: right ? Yeah . Yeah , so that 's yeah , that 's , you know , a neat neat thing and and , So . grad e: S so , Ohala 's going to help do these , transcriptions of the meeting data ? phd a: well I don't know . , we just talked about some possible features that could be marked by humans and , grad e: . phd a: because of having maybe some extra transcriber time we thought we could go through and mark some portion of the data for that . professor c: that 's not an immediate problem , that we don't immediately have a lot of extra transcriber time . professor c: But but , in the long term I guess Chuck is gonna continue the dialogue with John and and , and , we 'll we 'll end up doing some I think . , so , y you want to talk maybe a c two or three minutes about what we 've been talking about today and other days ? grad f: Ri Yeah , OK , so , we 're interested in , methods for far mike speech recognition , mainly , methods that deal with the reverberation in the far mike signal . So , one approach would be , say MSG and PLP , like was used in Aurora one and , there are other approaches which actually attempt to remove the reverberation , instead of being robust to it like MSG . And so we 're interested in , comparing the performance of , a robust approach like MSG with these , speech enhancement or de - reverber de - reverberation approaches . grad f: And , it looks like we 're gonna use the Meeting Recorder digits data for that . phd b: And the de - reverberation algorithm , do you have can you give some more details on this or ? Does it use one microphone ? grad f: o o phd b: Several microphones ? Does it ? grad f: OK , well , there was something that was done by , a guy named Carlos , I forget his last name , who worked with Hynek , who , professor c: Avendano . grad f: it was like RASTA in the sense that of it was , de - convolution by filtering , except he used a longer time window , phd b: And the reason for that is RASTA 's time window is too short to , include the whole , reverberation , I don't know what you call it the reverberation response . The reverberation filter from my mouth to that mike is like it 's t got it 's too long in the in the time domain for the for the RASTA filtering to take care of it . And , then there are a couple of other speech enhancement approaches which haven't been tried for speech recognition yet but have just been tried for enhancement , which , have the assumption that , you can do LPC analysis of th of the signal you get at the far microphone and the , all pole filter that you get out of that should be good . It 's just the , excitation signal that is going to be distorted by the reverberation and so you can try and reconstruct a better excitation signal and , feed that through the i , all pole filter and get enhanced speech with reverberation reduced . professor c: There 's also this , echo cancellation stuff that we 've sort of been chasing , so , we have , and when we 're saying these digits now we do have a close microphone signal and then there 's the distant microphone signal . And you could as a kind of baseline say , " OK , given that we have both of these , we should be able to do , a cancellation . " So that , we we , essentially identify the system in between the linear time invariant system between the microphones and and and and re and invert it , or or cancel it out to to some some reasonable approximation phd b: that 's not a practical thing , if you have a distant mike , you don't have a close mike ordinarily , but we thought that might make also might make a good baseline . , but And then there are s , there are single microphone methods that I think people have done for , for this kind of de - reverberation . Do y do you know any references to any ? Cuz I I w I was w w I I lead him down a a bad path on that . phd b: I g I guess I guess when people are working with single microphones , they are more trying to do professor c: But . phd b: well , not not very Well , there is the Avendano work , professor c: Right . phd b: but also trying to mmm , trying to f t find the de - convolution filter but in the not in the time domain but in the the stream of features I guess . Well , @ @ there there 's someone working on this on i in Mons professor c: Yeah , OK . phd b: So perhaps , yeah , we should try t to He 's working on this , on trying to professor c: Yeah . phd b: on re reverberation , professor c: The first paper on this is gonna have great references , I can tell already . professor c: It 's always good to have references , especially when reviewers read it or or one of the authors and , feel they 'll " You 're OK , you 've r You cited me . Well , he did echo cancellation and he did some fancier things like , training different network on different reverberation conditions and then trying to find the best one , but . professor c: The oth the other thing , that Dave was talking about earlier was , multiple mike things , where they 're all distant . So , there 's there 's all this work on arrays , but the other thing is , what can we do that 's cleverer that can take some advantage of only two mikes , particularly if there 's an obstruction between them , as we as we have over there . It 's part of why you have such good directionality with , with two ears phd b: professor c: So that Yeah , the the head , in the way , is really that 's what it 's for . It 's basically , phd a: That 's what the head 's for ? To separate the ears ? professor c: Yeah , it 's to separate the ears . professor c: Yeah ? phd a: I think th that may be due to the fact that Adam ran out of digits , and didn't have time to regenerate any . professor c: Oh ! Oh ! I guess it 's Well there 's no real reason to write our names on here then , phd a: Yeah , if you want to put your credit card numbers and , professor c: is there ? grad e: Oh , no ? professor c: Or do did any do we need the names for the other stuff , phd a: yeah , I do need your names and and the time , and all that , professor c: or ? Oh , OK <doc-sep>grad d: and pick out the ones that have problems , and either correct them or have them re - read . So we probably have like four or five more forms to be read , to be once through the set . I extracted out about an hour 's worth which are the f digits with for which whose speaker have speaker forms , have filled out speaker forms . So I extracted one for speakers who have speaker forms and for meetings in which the " key " file and the transcript files are parsable . Some of the early key files , it looks like , were done by hand , and so they 're not automatically parsable and I have to go back and fix those . , Liz professor f: So you think two you think two hours is the is the total that we have ? grad d: Yep , yeah . professor f: And you think we th , I I didn't quite catch all these different things that are not quite right , but you think we 'll be able to retrieve the other hour , reasonably ? grad d: Yes , absolutely . grad d: So it 's just a question of a little hand - editing of some files and then waiting for more people to turn in their speaker forms . I have this web - based speaker form , and I sent mail to everyone who hadn't filled out a speaker form , and they 're slowly s trickling in . professor f: So the relevance of the speaker form here , s grad d: It 's for labeling the extracted audio files . grad d: No , I spoke with Jane about that and we sort of decided that it 's probably not an issue that We edit out any of the errors anyway . So the other topic with digits is , Liz would like to elicit different prosodics , and so we tried last week with them written out in English . So in conversations with Liz and Jane we decided that if you wrote them out as numbers instead of words it would elicit more phone number , social security number - like readings . When I look at this , that first line is " sixty one , sixty two , eighteen , eighty six , ten . " , and so the question is does anyone care ? , I 've already spoken with Liz and she feels that , correct me if I 'm wrong , that for her , connected numbers is fine , postdoc e: I think two hours is probably fine for a test set , but it may be a little short if we actually wanna do training and adaptation and all that other stuff . professor f: Yeah , do you want different prosodics , so if you always had the same groupings you wouldn't like that ? Is that correct ? phd g: Well , we actually figured out a way to grad d: Yeah , the the phd g: the the groupings are randomly generated . professor f: No but , I was asking if that was something you really cared about because if it wasn't , it seems to me if you made it really specifically telephone groupings that maybe people wouldn't , go and do numbers so much . You know if it if it 's phd a: phd g: I think they may still do it , professor f: Maybe some , but I probably not so much . phd b: What about putting a hyphen between the numbers in the group ? phd g: And professor f: Right ? So if you if if you have grad d: Six dash one , you mean ? professor f: if you go six six six dash two nine three one . phd g: I well OK I it might help , I would like to g get away from having only one specific grouping . phd g: but it seems to me that , at least for us , we can learn to read them as digits postdoc e: Yeah . phd g: and it seems like that might be better for you guys since then you 'll have just more digit data , grad d: Right . phd g: It 's a little bit better for me too because the digits are easier to recognize . Right , read them as single digits , so sixty - one w is read as six one , postdoc e: phd g: and if people make a mistake we grad d: How about " O " versus " zero " ? professor f: the other thing is we could just bag it because it 's it 's it 's - I 'm not worrying about it , because we do have digits training data that we have from from OGI . I 'm sorry , digits numbers training that we have from OGI , we 've done lots and lots of studies with that . phd g: But it 's nice to get it in this room with the acous professor f: Yeah . phd g: for it 's professor f: No , no , I guess what I 'm saying is that grad d: Just let them read it how they read it . professor f: to some extent maybe we could just read them have them read how how they read it and it just means that we have to expand our our vocabulary out to stuff that we already have . Well that 's fine with me as long as It 's just that I didn't want to cause the people who would have been collecting digits the other way to not have the digits . phd g: So professor f: we s we we 've We can do this for awhile phd g: OK . Do yo , do you want do you want this Do you need training data or adaptation data out of this ? phd g: OK . professor f: How much of this do you need ? with the phd g: It 's actually unclear right now . I just thought well we 're if we 're collec collecting digits , and Adam had said we were running out of the TI forms , I thought it 'd be nice to have them in groups , and probably , all else being equal , it 'd be better for me to just have single digits professor f: OK . phd g: since it 's , you know , a recognizer 's gonna do better on those anyway , and it 's more predictable . So we can know from the transcript what the person said and the transcriber , in general . professor f: OK , well if you pre phd g: But if they make mistakes , it 's no big deal if the people say a hundred instead of " one OO " . and also w maybe we can just let them choose " zero " versus " O " as they as they like because even the same person c sometimes says " O " and sometimes says " zero " in different context , professor f: Yeah . So I don't have a Specific need cuz if I did I 'd probably try to collect it , you know , without bothering this group , but If we can try it grad d: OK so so I can just add to the instructions to read it as digits not as connected numbers . phd g: Right , and you can give an example like , you know , " six sixty - one would be read as six one " . And is the spacing alright or do you think there should be more space between digits and groups ? professor f: OK . phd g: and grad d: Or is that alright ? phd g: what do other people think cuz you guys are reading them . postdoc e: I it it to me it looks like you 've got the func the idea of grouping and you have the grou the idea of separation phd g: OK . postdoc e: and , you know , it 's just a matter of u i the instructions , that 's all . grad d: And I think there are about ten different gouping patterns professor f: Let 's try it . phd g: Righ - right , and you just they 're randomly generated and randomly assigned to digits . professor f: Sorry , I I was just gonna say , so we have in the vicinity of forty hours of of recordings now . And you 're saying two hours , is digits , so that 's roughly the ratio then , grad d: Yep . professor f: yeah like you say , I think a couple hours for a for a for a test test set 's OK . It 'd be nice to get , you know , more later because we 'll we might use use this up , in some sense , postdoc e: professor f: but but postdoc e: Yeah , I also would like to argue for that cuz it it seems to me that , there 's a real strength in having the same test replicated in a whole bunch of times and adding to that basic test bank . postdoc e: ? Cuz then you have , you know , more and more , u chances to get away from random errors . And I think , the other thing too is that right now we have sort of a stratified sample with reference to dialect groups , and it might be there might be an argument to be made for having f for replicating all of the digits that we 've done , which were done by non - native speakers so that we have a core that totally replicates the original data set , which is totally American speakers , and then we have these stratified additional language groups overlapping certain aspects of the database . I think that trying to duplicate , spending too much effort trying to duplicate the existing TI - digits probably isn't too worthwhile because the recording situation is so different . postdoc e: Except that if you have the stimuli comparable , then it says something about the the contribution of setting professor f: No it 's it 's not the same . postdoc e: and professor f: A little bit , but the other differences are so major . professor f: They 're such major sources of variance that it 's it 's it 's postdoc e: What 's an example of a of m some of the other differences ? Any other a difference ? professor f: Well i i individual human glottis is going to be different for each one , postdoc e: OK . , we 're collecting it in a read digit in a particular list , and I 'm sure that they 're doing more specific stuff . grad d: Was it read ? professor f: Yeah , I think the reading zipcode stuff you 're thinking of would be OGI . professor f: Yeah , no TI - digits was read in th in read in the studio I believe . grad d: But but regardless it 's gonna it 's hard to compare cross - corpus . professor f: And they 're different circumstances with different recording environment and so forth , so it 's it 's it 's really pretty different . But I think the idea of using a set thing was just to give you some sort of framework , so that even though you couldn't do exact comparisons , it wouldn't be s valid scientifically at least it 'd give you some kind of frame of reference . , you know it 's not phd b: Hey Liz , What what do the groupings represent ? postdoc e: OK . phd b: You said there 's like ten different groupings ? phd g: Right , just groupings in terms of number of groups in a line , and number of digits in a group , and the pattern of groupings . Are the patterns like are they based on anything or phd g: I I just roughly looked at what kinds of digit strings are out there , and they 're usually grouped into either two , three , or four , four digits at a time . In the old days you probably only had three sequences , and telephone numbers were less , and so forth . So , there 's between , Well if you look at it , there are between like three and five groups , and each one has between two and four groupings and I purposely didn't want them to look like they were in any kind of pattern . phd g: So grad d: And which group appears is picked randomly , and what the numbers are are picked randomly . grad d: So unlike the previous one , which I d simply replicated TI - digits , this is generated randomly . phd g: But I think it 'd be great i to be able to compare digits , whether it 's these digits or TI - digits , to speakers , and compare that to their spontaneous speech , and then we do need you know a fair amount of of digit data because you might be wearing a different microphone grad d: phd g: and , so it 's it 's nice to have the digits you know , replicated many times . phd g: so we have a problem with acoustic adaptation , and we 're not using the digit data now , but you know grad d: Oh , you 're not . v W we 're not we were running adaptation only on the data that we ran recognition on and I 'd As soon as someone started to read transcript number , that 's read speech and I thought " well , we 're gonna do better on that , grad d: Oh I see . So those speakers who are very quiet , shy grad d: That would be interesting to see whether that helps . phd g: r Right phd b: Like Adam ? grad d: Do you think that would help adapting on Yeah . phd g: Well , it sh it 's the same micropho see the nice thing is we have that in the in the same meeting , grad d: Right . phd g: and so you don't get grad d: same microphone , phd a: Yeah . professor f: Yeah , for the for the acoustic research , for the signal - processing , farfield stuff , I see it as as as the place that we start . But , th , it 'd be nice to have twenty hours of digits data , but but the truth is I 'm hoping that we we through the the stuff that that you guys have been doing as you continue that , we get , the best we can do on the spontaneous stuff , nearfield , and then , we do a lot of the testing of the algorithms on the digits for the farfield , and at some point when we feel it 's mature and we understand what 's going on with it then we we have to move on to the spontaneous data with the farfield . phd g: The only thing that we don't have , I know this sounds weird , and maybe it 's completely stupid , but we don't have any overlapping digits . phd g: An - yea I know it 's weird , but phd a: Overlapping digits ! grad d: The the problem I see with trying to do overlapping digits is the cognitive load . grad d: No it 's it 's not stupid , it 's just , try to do it . phd g: I 'm just talkin for the stuff that like Dan Ellis is gonna try , grad d: here , let 's try it . phd g: OK So but grad d: So so you read the last line , I 'll read the first line . professor f: No , I 'll p phd g: So you plu you plug your ears . grad d: Oh I guess if you plug you 're ears you could do it , but then you don't get the the same effects . phd g: Well , what is actually no not the overlaps that are well - governed linguistically , but the actual fact that there is speech coming from two people grad d: Yeah . phd g: and the beam - forming stuf all the acoustic stuff that like Dan Ellis and and company want to do . phd g: It would take one around amount of ti phd b: It 's the P - make of digit reading . I I mea I 'm I was sort of serious , but I really , I 'm I don't feel strongly enough that it 's a good idea , professor f: See , y grad d: You do the last line , I 'll do the first line . I 'm mean I think it 's doable , grad d: The poor transcribers phd g: I 'm just grad d: they 're gonna hate us . phd g: So , we we could have a round like where you do two at a time , and then the next person picks up when the first guy 's done , or something . professor f: Oh like a round , yeah , like in a a phd g: Like a , phd a: Yeah , just pairwise , professor f: yeah . phd g: I 'm actually sort of serious if it would help people do that kind o but the people who wanna work on it we should talk to them . professor f: I don't think we 're gonna collect vast amounts of data that way , phd g: So . professor f: but I think having a little bit might at least be fun for somebody like Dan to play around with , phd g: OK . grad d: I think maybe if we wanted to do that we would do it as a separate session , professor f: yeah . grad d: something like that rather than doing it during a real meeting and you know , do two people at a time then three people at a time and things like that . postdoc e: c c Can I can I have an another another question w about this ? grad d: Oh well . postdoc e: So , there are these digits , which are detached digits , but there are other words that contain the same general phon phoneme sequences . Like " wonderful " has " one " in it and and Victor Borge had a had a piece on this where he inflated the digits . Well , I wonder if there 's , an if there would be a value in having digits that are in essence embedded in real words to compare in terms of like the articulation of " one " in " wonderful " versus " one " as a digit being read . grad d: Oh ! grad c: It only sounds w good when you scream it , though . postdoc e: Well , I just wanted to offer that as a possible task professor f: Yes . postdoc e: because , you know , if we were to each read his embedded numbers words in sent in sentences cuz it 's like an entire sketch he does and I wouldn't take the inflated version . So he talks about the woman being " two - derful " , and and a But , you know , if it were to be deflated , just the normal word , it would be like a little story that we could read . postdoc e: I don't know if it would be useful for comparison , but it 's embedded numbers . grad d: I think for something like that we 'd be better off doing like TIMIT . Well I think the question is what the research is , so , I presume that the reason that you wanted to have these digits this way is because you wanted to actually do some research looking at the prosodic form here . professor f: So if somebody wanted to do that , if they wanted to look at the the the difference of the phones in the digits in the context of a word versus the digits a a non - digit word versus in digit word , that would be a good thing to do , but I think someone would have to express interest in that . professor f: I think , to if you were interested in it then we could do it , for instance . grad d: We have ASR results from Liz , transcript status from Jane , and disk space and storage formats from Don . Does do we have any prefer preference on which way we wanna we wanna go ? phd g: Well I was actually gonna skip the ASR results part , in favor of getting the transcription stuff talked about grad d: phd g: since I think that 's more important to moving forward , but Morgan has this paper copy and if people have questions , it 's pretty preliminary in terms of ASR results because we didn't do anything fancy , but I think e just having the results there , and pointing out some main conclusions like it 's not the speaking style that differs , it 's the fact that there 's overlap that causes recognition errors . And then , the fact that it 's almost all insertion errors , which you would expect but you might also think that in the overlapped regions you would get substitutions and so forth , leads us to believe that doing a better segmentation , like your channel - based segmentation , or some kind of , echo cancellation to get basically back down to the individual speaker utterances would be probably all that we would need to be able to do good recognition on the on the close - talking mikes . phd a: So these grad d: why don't you , if you have a hard copy , why don't you email it to the list . professor f: Yeah , so it 's the same thing ? phd g: he he professor f: It 's the same thing I mailed to every everybody that w where it was , phd g: it it 's that paper . phd g: and it 's Let 's see , th I guess the other neat thing is it shows for sure w that the lapel , you know within speaker is bad . grad d: Horrible ? phd g: And it 's bad because it picks up the overlapping speech . phd a: So , your your ASR results were run on the channels synchronized , phd g: Yes , cuz that 's all that w had been transcribed at the time , phd a: OK . phd g: the closer t that would be very interesting for us phd b: So if phd g: because we professor f: Yeah , that 's that 's why I only used the part from use phd a: Yeah . phd b: So if there was a segment of speech this long phd g: cuz phd a: Yeah . phd b: and oh and someone said " oh , " the whole thing was passed to the recognizer ? grad d: And someone said " oh " in the front in the middle . In fact I I pulled out a couple classic examples in case you wanna u use them in your talk of phd b: That 's why there 's so many insertion errors ? grad c: phd g: Chuck on the lapel , so Chuck wore the lapel three out of four times . phd g: yeah , and I wore the lapel once , and for me the lapel was OK . phd g: Right , but when Chuck wore the lapel and Morgan was talking there 're a couple really long utterances where Chuck is saying a few things inside , and it 's picking up all of Morgan 's words pretty well and so the rec you know , there 're error rates because of insertion Insertions aren't bounded , so with a one - word utterance and ten insertions you know you got huge error rate . So I this is sort of what we expected , but it 's nice to be able to to show it . phd g: And also I just wanted to mention briefly that , Andreas and I called up Dan Ellis who 's still stuck in Switzerland , and we were gonna ask him if if there 're you know , what 's out there in terms of echo cancellation and things like that . " phd g: And he We 've given him the data we have so far , so these sychronous cases where there are overlap . phd g: And he 's gonna look into trying to run some things that are out there and see how well it can do phd b: So phd g: because right now we 're not able to actually report on recognition in a real paper , like a Eurospeech paper , because it would look sort of premature . phd b: So So the idea is that you would take this big hunk where somebody 's only speaking a small amount in it , and then try to figure out where they 're speaking based on the other peopl phd g: Right . Or who 's At any point in time who 's the foreground speaker , who 's the background speaker . phd g: So there 's like grad d: But how would you do that automatically ? phd g: Well ther there 's phd a: I 've actually done some experiments with cross - correlation phd b: Right . phd a: and it seems to work pretty well to to get rid of those those overlaps , grad d: that that 's the sort of thing that you would do . Exactly , so it 's it 's a phd b: So why do you want to do echo cancellation ? phd g: it would be techniques used from adaptive adaptive echo cancellation which I don't know enough about to talk about . phd g: But , right , and that would be similar to what you 're also trying to do , but using , you know , more than energy phd a: Yeah . phd b: So it would be phd g: So the idea is to basically run this on the whole meeting . and get the locations , which gives you also the time boundaries of the individual speak phd b: OK . professor f: Yeah , Dave Dave is , also gonna be doin usin playing around with echo cancellation for the nearfield farfield stuff , phd g: So . professor f: so we 'll be phd g: And I guess Espen ? This is is he here too ? professor f: Yeah . phd g: May also be working So it would just be ver that 's really the next step because we can't do too much , you know , on term in terms of recognition results knowing that this is a big problem phd b: phd b: I think this also ties into one of the things that Jane is gonna talk about too . grad d: I also wanted to say I have done all this chopping up of digits , postdoc e: Definitely grad d: And and I have scripts that will extract it out from " key " files phd g: and Don should grad d: and and do all the naming automatically , phd g: OK . grad c: You 've compiled the list of , speaker names ? phd g: So that that 's it for the grad d: grad d: and it does all sorts of matches because the way people filled out names is different on every single file so it does a very fuzzy sort of match . phd g: So at this point we can sort of finalize the naming , and so forth , grad c: phd g: and we 're gonna basically re rewrite out these waveforms that we did because as you notice in the paper your " M O in one meeting and " M O - two " in another meeting and it 's we just need to standardize the grad c: Yeah . phd g: no it 's it 's professor f: No , I didn't notice that actually . So th I now have a script that you can just say basically look up Morgan , phd g: So professor f: Yeah . Is that something we need to talk about at the meeting , or should you just talk with Chuck at some other time ? grad c: I had some general questions just about the compression algorithms of shortening waveforms and I don't know exactly who to ask . , yeah , which is grad d: And I assume half of it is scratch and half of it is ? grad c: I 'm not exactly sure how they partitioned it . grad c: yeah , I don't know what 's typical here , but , it 's local though , so grad d: That doesn't matter . How do you do that ? professor f: In fact , this is an eighteen gig drive , or is it a thirty six gig drive with eighteen grad d: N grad c: Eighteen . It was a spare that Dave had around grad d: Slash N slash machine name , slash X A in all likelihood . grad d: so the the only question is how much of it The distinction between scratch and non - scratch is whether it 's backed up or not . grad d: So what you wanna do is use the scratch for stuff that you can regenerate . grad d: So , the stuff that isn't backed up is not a big deal because disks don't crash very frequently , grad c: Right . all of this stuff can be regenerated , phd g: Yeah it 's grad c: it 's just a question grad d: Then put it all on scratch phd g: Well the grad d: because we 're ICSI is is bottlenecked by backup . grad d: So we wanna put phd g: Well I 'd leave all the All the transcript stuff shouldn't should be backed up , postdoc e: phd g: but all the waveform Sound files should not be backed up , grad c: Yeah , I guess Right . So , I guess th the other question was then , should we shorten them , downsample them , or keep them in their original form ? grad d: It just depends on your tools . , because it 's not backed up and it 's just on scratch , if your sc tools can't take shortened format , I would leave them expanded , grad c: Right . grad d: so you don't have to unshorten them every single time you wanna do anything . phd g: We can downsample them , grad c: Do you think that 'd be OK ? phd g: so . phd g: the r the front - end on the SRI recognizer just downsamples them on the fly , grad c: Yeah , I guess the only argument against downsampling is to preserve just the original files in case we want to experiment with different filtering techniques . phd g: so So that 's professor f: I I I 'm sorry phd g: Yeah , if professor f: Yeah , l over all our data , we we want to not downsample . phd g: So we 're what we 're doing is we 're writing out , this is just a question . We 're writing out these individual segments , that wherever there 's a time boundary from Thilo , or or Jane 's transcribers , you know , we we chop it there . phd g: And the reason is so that we can feed it to the recognizer , professor f: grad d: Yeah , as I said , since that 's it 's regeneratable , what I would do is take downsample it , phd g: So Yeah . grad d: and compress it however you 're e the SRI recognizer wants to take it in . professor f: ye phd g: So we can't shorten them , grad c: Right . professor f: As yeah , as long as there is a a form that we can come from again , that is not downsampled , then , grad c: r Yeah . That that 's why we need more disk space professor f: uuu phd g: cuz we 're basically duplicating the originals , professor f: Yeah . But for for fu future research we 'll be doing it with different microphone positions and so on phd g: Oh yeah . professor f: we would like to phd b: So the SRI front - end won't take a an an a large audio file name and then a a list of segments to chop out from that large audio file ? professor f: Yeah . phd b: They actually have to be chopped out already ? phd g: it 's better if they 're chopped out , phd b: - huh . phd g: and and it it will be yeah , y we could probably write something to do that , but it 's actually convenient to have them chopped out cuz you can run them , you know , in different orders . grad d: And that 's the whole point about the naming conventions phd g: you can get rid of grad d: is that you could run all the English speaking , phd g: Yeah , it it 's a lot faster . grad d: all the native speakers , and all the non - native speakers , phd g: Right . You can grab everything with the word " the " in it , grad d: and all the men , and all the women . phd g: and it 's That 's a lot quicker than actually trying to access the wavefile each time , find the time boundaries and So in principle , yeah , you could do that , phd b: I don't I don't think that 's really right . phd g: but it 's but it 's grad d: " That 's just not right , man . " The the point phd g: These are long These are long grad d: So so s For example , what if you wanted to run run all the native speakers . grad d: Right , so if if you did it that way you would have to generate a program that looks in the database somewhere , extracts out the language , finds the time - marks for that particular one , do it that way . The way they 're doing it , you have that already extracted and it 's embedded in the file name . And so , you know , you just say phd g: We - yeah that 's so that 's part of it grad d: y so you just say you know " asterisk E asterisk dot wave " , and you get what you want . And the other part is just that once they 're written out it it is a lot faster to to process them . Otherwise , you 're just accessing grad d: This is all just temporary access , so I don't I think it 's all just It 's fine . Two gig ? phd g: So we 're also looking at these in Waves like for the alignments and so forth . phd g: You need to s have these small files , and in fact , even for the Transcriber program grad d: Yes you can . phd g: Yeah , if you try to load s really long waveform into X Waves , you 'll be waiting there for phd b: No , I I 'm not suggesting you load a long wave file , phd g: Oh phd b: I 'm just saying you give it a start and an end time . grad d: I th w The transcribers didn't have any problem with that did they Jane ? postdoc e: What 's th u w in what respect ? phd g: Loading the long phd a: No , with the Transcriber tool , it 's no problem . phd g: It takes a very long ti phd a: Yeah just to load a transcription postdoc e: In the in grad d: Are you talking about Transcriber or X Waves ? phd g: Huh . phd g: Actually , you 're talking about Transcriber , right ? phd a: Yeah . grad d: And they were loading the full mixed files then , postdoc e: Yeah . Well we we have a problem with that , you know , time - wise on a It - it 's a lot slower to load in a long file , grad d: . phd g: and also to check the file , so if you have a transcript , grad d: Well regardless , it 's professor f: Yeah . phd g: it 's I I think overall you could get everything to work by accessing the same waveform and trying to find two you know , the begin and end times . , but I think it 's more efficient , if we have the storage space , to have the small ones . grad d: and , it 's no problem , right ? phd g: Yeah , it 's grad d: Because it 's not backed up . grad d: So we just phd g: It 's it 's just grad d: If we don't have a spare disk sitting around we go out and we buy ourselves an eighty gigabyte drive and make it all scratch space . phd g: Yeah , so these wouldn't be backed up , the postdoc e: Yeah . grad d: So remind me afterward phd g: And grad d: and I 'll and we 'll look at your disk and see where to put stuff . , I could just u do a DU on it right ? And just see which how much is on each So . Alright so , first of all , there was a an interest in the transcribe transcription , checking procedures and and I can tell you first , to go through the steps although you 've probably seen them . , as you might imagine , when you 're dealing with , r really c a fair number of words , and , @ @ natural speech which means s self - repairs and all these other factors , that there 're lots of things to be , s standardized and streamlined and checked on . And , so , I did a bunch of checks , and the first thing I did was obviously a spell - check . And at that point I discovered certain things like , " accommodate " with one " M " , that kind of thing . And then , in addition to that , I did an exhaustive listing of the forms in the data file , which included n detecting things like f faulty punctuation and things phd b: I 'm I 'm sorry to interrupt postdoc e: Yeah ? phd b: you could could I just back up a little bit postdoc e: Sure , please , phd b: and postdoc e: yeah , please , please . phd b: So you 're doing these So the whole process is that the transcribers get the conversation postdoc e: Yeah , yeah , yeah . phd b: And then when they 're finished with it , it comes to you , postdoc e: That 's right . And so , I do a an exhaustive listing of the forms Actually , I will go through this in in order , so if if we could maybe wait and stick keep that for a second cuz we 're not ready for that . grad d: So on the fifth page , seven down postdoc e: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . Exactly ! Exactly ! Alright so , a spelling check first then an exhaustive listing of the , all the forms in the data with the punctuation attached and at that point I pick up things like , oh , you know , word followed by two commas . But there 's w And that that 's done with the assumption that pronunciation variants can be handled . So for things like " and " , the fact that someone doesn't say the " D " , that 's not important enough to capture in the transcription because a a good pronunciation , you know , model would be able to handle that . However , things like " cuz " where you 're lacking an entire very prominent first syllable , and furthermore , it 's a form that 's specific to spoken language , those are r reasons f for those reasons I I kept that separate , and used the convention of using " CUZ " for that form , however , glossing it so that it 's possible with the script to plug in the full orthographic form for that one , and a couple of others , not many . So " wanna " is another one , " going " , " gonna " is another one , with just the assumption , again , that this th these are things which it 's not really fair to a c consider expect that a pronunciation model , to handle . And Chuck , you in you indicated that " cuz " is is one of those that 's handled in a different way also , didn't you ? Did I phd b: I don't remember . postdoc e: but someone told me that in fact " cuz " is treated differently in , i u in this context because of that r reason that , it 's a little bit farther than a pronunciation variant . OK , so after that , let 's see , phd b: So that was part of the spell - check , or was that that was after the spell - check ? postdoc e: . Well so when I get the exhau So the spell - check picks up those words because they 're not in the dictionary . postdoc e: So it gets " cuz " and " wanna " and that grad d: And then you gloss them ? postdoc e: Yeah , Run it through I have a sed You know , so I do sed script saying whenever you see " gonna " you know , " convert it to gonna " , you know , " gloss equals quote going - to quote " , you know . OK , I also wrote a script which will , retrieve anything in curly brackets , or anything which I 've classified as an acronym , and a pronounced acronym . So if it 's " ACL " then it 's " A " underscore " C " underscore " L " . grad d: And so so your list here , are these ones that actually occurred in the meetings ? postdoc e: And the th Yes . phd g: can I ask a question about the glossing , before we go on ? postdoc e: Yeah . phd g: So , for a word like " because " is it that it 's always predictably " because " ? , is " CUZ " always meaning " because " ? postdoc e: Yes , but not the reverse . So sometimes people will say " because " in the meeting , and if if they actually said " because " , then it 's written as " because " with no w " cuz " doesn't even figure into the equation . professor f: But but in our meetings people don't say " hey cuz how you doing ? " phd g: Beca - because Right . phd g: so , I guess So , from the point of view of postdoc e: That 's a good point . phd g: The the only problem is that with for the recognition we we map it to " because " , grad d: Well , phd g: and so if we know that " CUZ " postdoc e: That 's fine . phd g: but , we don't grad d: You have the gloss form so you always replace it . postdoc e: and he 's bee he has a glo he has a script that grad c: I replace the " cuz " with " because " if it 's glossed . grad c: And phd g: But then there are other glosses that we don't replace , right ? Because postdoc e: Yes . postdoc e: on the different on the different types of comments , which we 'll which we 'll see in just a second . postdoc e: So the pronounceable acronyms get underscores , the things in curly brackets are viewed as comments . w And maybe we 'll expand that grad d: postdoc e: but the but the comments are , of four types mainly right now . grad d: Can ca postdoc e: Another type is , grad d: So a are we done with acronyms ? Cuz I had a question on what what this meant . postdoc e: OK so , gloss is things like replacing the full form u with the , more abbreviated one to the left . , then you have if it 's , there 're a couple different types of elements that can happen that aren't really properly words , and wo some of them are laughs and breathes , so we have that 's prepended with a v a tag of " VOC " . phd a: Whew ! postdoc e: And the non - vocal ones are like door - slams and tappings , and that 's prepended with a no non - vocalization . phd b: So then it just an ending curly brace there , or is there something else in there . postdoc e: Oh yeah , so i e this would grad d: A comment , basically . postdoc e: And then the no non - vocalization would be something like a door - slam . And then the third type right now , is m things that fall in the category of comments about what 's happening . So it could be something like , you know , " referring to so - and - so " , " talking about such - and - such " , you know , " looking at so - and - so " . phd b: on the middle t So , in the first case that gloss applies to the word to the left . But in the middle two Th - it 's not applying to anything , right ? postdoc e: Yeah , and this gets substituted here . grad d: Well the " QUAL " can be The " QUAL " is applying to the left . postdoc e: Well , and actually , it is true that , with respect to " laugh " , there 's another one which is " while laughing " , grad d: " While laughing " . postdoc e: and that is , i i An argument could be made for this tur turning that into a qualitative statement because it 's talking about the thing that preceded it , but at present we haven't been , coding the exact scope of laughing , you know , and so to have " while laughing " , you know that it happened somewhere in there which could well mean that it occurred separately and following , or , you know , including some of the utterances to the left . Haven't been awfully precise about that , but I have here , now we 're about to get to the to this now , I have frequencies . But , the very front page deals with this , final c pa , aspect of the standardization which has to do with the spoken forms like " - " and " - " and " ha " and " - " and all these different types . And , someone pointed out to me , this might have been Chuck , about , about how a recognizer , if it 's looking for " - hmmm " with three M 's , and it 's transcribed with two M 's , that it might , that it might increase the error rate which is which would really be a shame because , I p I personally w would not be able to make a claim that those are dr dramatically different items . postdoc e: I I should say grad d: So it 's a small list . So , I 'm gonna I 'm gonna I 'm gonna check grad d: That that 's known as " found data " . I got It was stored in a place I didn't expect , grad c: It 's like the z Zapruder Film . So I 'll I 'll be able to get through that tonight , and then everyth i well , actually later today probably . postdoc e: And I made it so that these are , with a couple exceptions but , things that you wouldn't find in the spell - checker so that they 'll show up really easily . And , grad c: Jane , can I ask you a question ? What 's that very last one correspond to ? postdoc e: Sure . grad c: is that like someone 's like burning or some such thing ? postdoc e: So - c I haven't listened to it so I don't know . grad c: Like their hair 's on fire ? postdoc e: I haven't heard it actually . grad d: Ah ! phd a: It 's the Castle of Ah ! phd g: Actually we we gave this to our pronunciation person , grad c: it looks like that . postdoc e: Did she hear the th did she actually hear it ? Cuz I haven't heard it . phd g: No , we just gave her a list of words that , you know , weren't in our dictionary and so of course it picked up stuff like this , and she just didn't listen so she didn't know . Yeah I 'm curious to se hear what it is , but I didn't know wanna change it to something else until I knew . phd g: Maybe it 's " argh " ? postdoc e: Well , sss , you know phd g: grad c: But that 's not really like postdoc e: Hhh . grad c: No one really says " argh , " you know , postdoc e: phd g: Yeah . Right , no one say grad c: it 's not professor f: Well , you just did . phd b: Except for now ! grad c: Well , there 's another there 's another word error . grad d: Ah ! postdoc e: phd g: So , Jane , what 's the d grad d: Maybe he died while dictating . phd g: I have one question about the the " EH " versus like the " AH " and the " " . postdoc e: That 's partly a nonnative - native thing , phd g: OK . phd g: postdoc e: But it 's mostly non - native phd a: H phd b: That 's " eh " versus " ah " ? phd g: S OK . grad d: Eh ? phd g: " Eh , " yeah right , cuz there were were some speakers that did definite " eh 's " postdoc e: phd g: but right now we phd b: They were the Canadians , right ? professor f: Canadians , yeah , yeah , yeah . phd g: So , it it 's actually probably good for us to know the difference between the real " eh " and the one that 's just like " " or transcribed " aaa " postdoc e: Exactly . phd g: cuz in like in Switchboard , you would see e all of these forms , but they all were like " " . grad d: You mean just the single letter " a " as in the particle ? phd a: The transcription or grad d: Article . phd g: No , no , like the the " " , postdoc e: " " . grad d: I 'm just these poor transcribers , they 're gonna hate this meeting . phd g: But you 're a native German speaker so it 's not a not a issue for phd a: Yeah . phd g: So it 's like Japanese and Spanish postdoc e: Yeah I I think you 've - huh , yeah . phd g: and grad d: I didn't get that , postdoc e: That makes sense . postdoc e: Yeah , and so , you know , th th I have there are some , Americans who who are using this " eh " too , and I haven't listened to it systematically , maybe with some of them , they 'd end up being " 's " but , I my spot - checking has made me think that we do have " eh " in also , American e e data represented here . But any case , that 's the this is reduced down from really quite a long a much longer list , phd g: Yeah this is great . grad d: Yeah , it 's good , postdoc e: and this is grad d: yeah . postdoc e: functionally pretty , you know , also It was fascinating , I was listening to some of these , I guess two nights ago , and it 's just hilarious to liste to to do a search for the " - 's " . postdoc e: Just I wanted to say I w think it would be fun to make a montage of it because there 's a " postdoc e: All these different vocal tracts , you know , but it 's it 's the same item . , then the acronyms y and the ones in parentheses are ones which the transcriber wasn't sure of , grad d: Oh I see . postdoc e: and I haven't been able to listen to to to clarify , but you can see that the parenthesis convention makes it very easy to find them grad d: o How about question mark ? postdoc e: cuz it 's the only place where where they 're used . grad d: So they so it 's " PLP ? " postdoc e: Exactly . Sometimes the contrastive stress is showing up , and , professor f: I 'm sorry , I I got lost here . What - w what 's the difference between the parenthesized acronym and the non - parenthesized ? postdoc e: The parenthesized is something that the transcriber thought was ANN , but wasn't entirely sure . So I 'd need to go back or someone needs to go back , and say , you know , yes or no , professor f: Ah . postdoc e: But the parentheses are used only in that context in the transcripts , of of noti noticing that there 's something uncertain . grad d: Yeah , P - make is phd g: Yeah cuz they they have no idea , grad d: That 's a good one . phd g: but it 's professor f: I I don't recognize a lot of these . grad d: I know ! I I was saying that I think a lot of them are the Networks meeting . phd g: and the PTA was in these , topics about children , postdoc e: Yeah . phd g: Is the P - PTA working ? postdoc e: Right and sometimes , you see a couple of these that are actually " OK 's " so it 's it 's may be that they got to the point where it was low enough understandable understandability that they weren't entirely sure the person said " OK . " You know , so it isn't really necessarily a an undecipherable acronym , grad c: There 's a lot of " OK 's " . This professor f: The number to the left is the number of incidences ? grad d: Count . professor f: So CTS is really big here , grad d: Yeah , I wonder what it is . phd a: So what is the difference between " papers rustling " and " rustling papers " ? professor f: IP , I know what IP is . postdoc e: But , I I 'm a little hesitant to to collapse across categories unless I actually listen to them . OK well professor f: Wh - the self - referential aspect of these these p phd g: I 'm wai grad c: Yeah . phd g: Well this is exactly how people will prove that these meetings do differ because we 're recording , right ? grad d: Yes . phd g: Y no normally you don't go around saying , " Now you 've said it six times . phd g: Now you 've said " postdoc e: But did you notice that there were seven hundred and eighty five instances of " OK " ? phd a: Seven hundred eighty - five instances . grad d: And that 's an underestimate postdoc e: Extra forty one if it 's questioned . grad c: Is this after like did you do some replacements for all the different form of " OK " to this ? professor f: Yeah . phd b: Wait a minute , w s professor f: So now we 're up to seven hundred and eighty eight . postdoc e: Yeah that 's grad c: Although , what 's there 's one with a slash after it . phd b: Was that somewhere where they were gonna say " new speaker " or something ? postdoc e: No , I looked for that , but that doesn't actually exist . postdoc e: I i it 's the only grad c: There 's postdoc e: it 's the only pattern that has a slash after it , and I think it 's it 's an epiphenomenon . grad d: So I 'll just I was just looking at the bottom of page three there , is that " to be " or " not to be " . phd b: There 's no tilde in front of it , postdoc e: Oh that 's cute . " postdoc e: There is th one Y well , no , that 's r that 's legitimate . So now , comments , you can see they 're listed again , same deal , with exhaustive listing of everything found in everything except for these final th thirty minutes . grad d: OK so , on some of these QUALs , postdoc e: Yeah . grad d: are they really QUALs , or are they glosses ? So like there 's a " QUAL TCL " . professor f: What 's a QUAL ? grad d: Oh I see , I see . grad c: Sh - shouldn't it be " QUAL TICKLE " or something ? grad d: It wasn't said " TCL " . grad c: Like it 's not postdoc e: On the in the actual script in the actual transcript , I s I So this this happens in the very first one . postdoc e: Because we they didn't say " TCL " , they said " tickle " . professor f: I f I forget , what 's QUAL ? postdoc e: Qual - qualifier . grad c: It 's not something you wanna replace with postdoc e: Comment or contextual comment . phd b: So they didn't mean " tickle " as in Elmo , grad c: but phd a: Tickle ? professor f: Yeah . phd g: But at some point , we probably shoul grad d: We 'll probably add it to the language model . phd b: Add what , Liz ? grad d: We can go on lan lan add it to both dictionary and language model . phd g: it 's in the language model , w yeah , but it so it 's the pronunciation model that has to have a pronunciation of " tickle " . Right ? phd a: " tickle " is pronounced " tickle " ? phd b: What are you saying ? grad d: It 's pronounced the same it 's pronounced the same as the verb . phd g: I 'm sorry ! grad d: So I think it 's the language model that makes it different . What I meant is that there should be a pronunciation " tickle " for TCL as a word . phd g: And that word in the in , you know , it stays in the language model wherever it was . phd g: Yeah you never would put " tickle " in the language model in that form , postdoc e: grad d: Right . There 's actually a bunch of cases like this with people 's names and phd b: So how w there 'd be a problem for doing the language modeling then with our transcripts the way they are . Yeah so th th there there 's a few cases like that where the , the word needs to be spelled out in in a consistent way as it would appear in the language , but there 's not very many of these . grad d: And and you 'll ha you 'll have to do it sychronously . grad d: Right , so y so , whoever 's creating the new models , will have to also go through the transcripts and change them synchronously . We have this there is this thing I was gonna talk to you about at some point about , you know , what do we do with the dictionary as we 're up updating the dictionary , these changes have to be consistent with what 's in the Like spelling people 's names and so forth . If we make a spelling correction to their name , like someone had Deborah Tannen 's name mispelled , and since we know who that is , you know , we could correct it , grad d: You can correct it . phd g: but but we need to make sure we have the mispel If it doesn't get corrected we have to have a pronunciation as a mispelled word in the dictionary . postdoc e: Well , of course now the the Tannen corre the spelling c change . So if there 's things that get corrected before we get them , it 's it 's not an issue , postdoc e: phd g: but if there 's things that , we change later , then we always have to keep our the dictionary up to date . And then , yeah , in the case of " tickle " I guess we would just have a , you know , word " TCL " which phd b: phd g: which normally would be an acronym , you know , " TCL " grad d: Right . postdoc e: " ICSI " is is one of those that sometimes people pronounce and sometimes they say " ICSI . postdoc e: So , those that are l are listed in the acronyms , I actually know phd g: Oh yeah . The others , e those really do need to be listened to cuz I haven't been able to go to all the IC ICSI things , phd g: Right , exactly . postdoc e: and and until they 've been listened to they stay as " ICSI " . professor f: Don and I were just noticing , love this one over on page three , " vocal vocal gesture mimicking sound of screwing something into head to hold mike in place . postdoc e: It was ! In fact , it was ! Yeah ! grad d: A lot of these are me the the " beep is said with a high pit high pitch and lengthening . grad d: That was the I was imitating , beeping out postdoc e: Yeah , that 's it . phd g: Oh there is something spelled out " BEEEEEEP " grad c: postdoc e: That 's it . Because he was saying , " How many E 's do I have to allow for ? " grad c: You need a lot of grad d: What I meant was " beep " . postdoc e: And those of course get get picked up in the frequency check grad d: glosses . postdoc e: and you know it gets kicked out in the spelling , and it also gets kicked out in the , freq frequency listing . postdoc e: I have the there 're various things like " breathe " versus " breath " versus " inhale " and , hhh , you know , I don't know . I I think they don't have any implications for anything else so it 's like I 'm tempted to leave them for now an and It 's easy enough to find them when they 're in curly brackets . professor f: " Sings finale - type song " grad c: Yeah , that was in the first meeting . grad d: postdoc e: Yeah , but I don't actually remember what it was . " postdoc e: Chuck Chuck led to a refinement here which is to add " NUMS " if these are parts of the read numbers . Now you already know i that I had , in places where they hadn't transcribed numbers , I put " numbers " in place of any kind of numbers , but there are places where they , it th this convention came later an and at the very first digits task in some transcripts they actually transcribed numbers . And , d Chuck pointed out that this is read speech , and it 's nice to have the option of ignoring it for certain other prob p , things . And that 's why there 's this other tag here which occurs a hundred and five or three hundred and five times right now which is just well n n " NUMS " by itself grad d: " NUMS " , yeah . , i with the sed command you can really just change it however you want because it 's systematically encoded , you know ? grad d: Yep . postdoc e: Have to think about what 's the best for for the overall purposes , but in any case , " numbers " and " NUMS " are a part of this digits task thing . And actually , th , the reason I b did it this way was because I initially started out with the other version , you have the numbers and you have the full form and the parentheses , however sometimes people stumble over these numbers they 're saying . And there 's no way of capturing that if you 're putting the numbers off to the side . You can't have the seven and grad d: So what 's to the left of these ? postdoc e: The left is i so example the very first one , grad d: postdoc e: And then , in here , " NUMS " , so it 's not going to be mistaken as a gloss . grad d: OK now , the other example is , in the glosses right there , postdoc e: Thank you . grad d: What what 's to the left of that ? postdoc e: Well now In that case it 's people saying things like " one one one dash so - and - so " or they 're saying " two zero " whatever . postdoc e: And in that case , it 's part of the numbers task , and it 's not gonna be included in the read digits anyway , phd b: So there will be a " NUMS " tag on those lines ? postdoc e: so I m in the There is . postdoc e: So , so gloss in the same line that would have " gloss quote one one one dash one thirty " , you 'd have a gloss at the end of the line saying , " curly bracket NUMS curly bracket " . postdoc e: So if you if you did a , a " grep minus V nums " phd g: Oh , so you could do " grep minus V nums " . phd g: So there wouldn't be something like i if somebody said something like , " Boy , I 'm really tired , OK . Cuz I was doing the " grep minus V " quick and dirty and looked like that was working OK , postdoc e: Now why do we what 's the reason for having like the point five have the " NUMS " on it ? Is that just like when they 're talking about their data or something ? postdoc e: This is more because phd g: Or postdoc e: Yeah . Oh these are all these , the " NUMS point " , this all where they 're saying " point " something or other . phd g: These are all like inside the spontaneous postdoc e: And the other thing too is for readability of the transcript . if you 're trying to follow this while you 're reading it it 's really hard to read , you know eh , " so in the data column five has " , you know , " one point five compared to seventy nine point six " , it 's like when you see the words it 's really hard to follow the argument . And this is just really a a way of someone who would handle th the data in a more discourse - y way to be able to follow what 's being said . postdoc e: So this is where Chuck 's , overall h architecture comes in , phd g: I see . , there will be scripts that are written to convert it into these t these main two uses and th some scripts will take it down th e into a f a for ta take it to a format that 's usable for the recognizer an , other scripts will take it to a form that 's usable for the for linguistics an and discourse analysis . These will just be things that are generated , grad d: Right postdoc e: and e by using scripts . postdoc e: When things change then the the script will cham change but the but there won't be stored copies of in different versions of things . phd g: So , I guess I 'd have one request here which is just , maybe to make it more robust , th that the tag , whatever you would choose for this type of " NUMS " where it 's inside the spontaneous speech , is different than the tag that you use for the read speech . phd g: that way w if we make a mistake parsing , or something , we don't see the " point five " , or or it 's not there , then we phd b: phd g: a Just an And actually for things like " seven eighths " , or people do fractions too I guess , you maybe you want one overall tag for sort of that would be similar to that , postdoc e: Except phd g: or As long as they 're sep as they 're different strings that we that 'll make our p sort of processing more robust . postdoc e: Well phd g: Cuz we really will get rid of everything that has the " NUMS " string in it . phd b: I suppose what you could do is just make sure that you get rid of everything that has " curly brace NUMS curly brace " . postdoc e: You know , as I said I was considering changing it to " digits " . And , it just i you know , it 's just a matter of deciding on whatever it is , and being sure the scripts know . phd g: It would probably be safer , if you 're willing , to have a separate tag just because , then we know for sure . , phd b: Yeah , and it makes it I guess the thing about phd g: but it it 's probably not hard for a person to tell the difference phd b: Yeah . phd g: because one 's in the context of a you know , a transcribed word string , phd b: Right . postdoc e: The other thing is you can get really so minute with these things phd g: and So postdoc e: and increase the size of the files and the re and decrease the readability to such an extent by simply something like " percent " . Now I I could have adopted a similar convention for " percent " , but somehow percent is not so hard , you know ? grad d: . postdoc e: i It 's just when you have these points and you 're trying to figure out where the decimal places are And we could always add it later . And you 'll find both of those in one of these meetings , where he 's saying " well the first point I wanna make is so - and - so " and he goes through four points , and also has all these decimals . phd b: what does the SRI recognizer output for things like that ? " seven point five " . phd b: Right , the word " seven " ? grad d: Well , the numbers ? phd b: The number " seven " ? phd g: The word . professor f: So I 'd so " I 'd like I 'd like to talk about point five " . phd g: it 's the same point , actually , the the p you know , the word " to " and the word y th " going to " and " to go to " those are two different " to 's " and so there 's no distinction there . phd g: It 's just just the word " point " has Yeah , every word has only one , yeah e one version even if even if it 's A actually even like the word " read " and " read " Those are two different words . phd g: So , yeah , I I like the idea of having this in there , I just I was a little bit worried that , the tag for removing the read speech because i What if we have like " read letters " or , I don't know , grad d: We might wanna just a separate tag that says it 's read . OK ? Are we done ? postdoc e: Well I wanted to say also regarding the channelized data , grad d: Oh , I guess we 're not done . postdoc e: that , Thilo requested , that we ge get some segments done by hand to e e s reduce the size of the time bins wh like was Chuc - Chuck was mentioning earlier that , that , if you if you said , " Oh " and it was in part of a really long , s complex , overlapping segment , that the same start and end times would be held for that one grad d: Well postdoc e: as for the longer utterances , grad d: We did that for one meeting , right , postdoc e: and grad d: so you have that data don't you ? phd a: Yeah , that 's the training data . postdoc e: And he requested that there be , similar , samples done for five minute stretches c involving a variety of speakers and overlapping secti sections . postdoc e: He gave me he did the very nice , he he did some shopping through the data and found segments that would be useful . In addition the I 've I have the transcribers expanding the amount that they 're doing actually . postdoc e: So right now , I know that as of today we got an extra fifteen minutes of that type , and I 'm having them expand the realm on either side of these places where they 've already started . postdoc e: But if if you know , and I and he 's gonna give me some more sections that that he thinks would be useful for this purpose . postdoc e: Because it 's true , if we could do the the more fine grained tuning of this , using an algorithm , that would be so much more efficient . phd a: So I I thought we we sh we sh perhaps we should try to to start with those channelized versions just to just to try it . Give it Give one tr transcriber the the channelized version of of my speech - nonspeech detection and look if if that 's helpful for them , or just let them try if if that 's better or If they if they can postdoc e: You mean to start from scratch f in a brand new transcript ? phd a: Yeah . As it stands we 're still in the phase of sort of , cleaning up the existing data getting things , in i m more tight tightly time , aligned . I also wanna tell , I also wanted to r raise the issue that OK so , there 's this idea we 're gonna have this master copy of the transcript , it 's gonna be modified by scripts t into these two different functions . postdoc e: So right now we 've taken this i initial one , it was a single channel basically the way it was input . And now , thanks to the advances made in the interface , we can from now on use the channelized part , and , any changes that are made get made in the channelized version kind of thing . But I wanted to get all the finished all the checks phd b: Yeah , so that has implications for your script . So , have those e e the vis the ten hours that have been transcribed already , have those been channelized ? And I know I 've seen @ @ I 've seen they 've been channelized , postdoc e: Yes , they have . grad d: All ten hours ? grad c: but postdoc e: Except for the missing thirty minutes . grad c: have they have they been has the time have the time markings been adjusted , p on a per channel grad d: Great . postdoc e: for for a total of like twenty m f for a total of Let 's see , four times total of about an thirty minutes . grad c: I guess , I don't know if we should talk about this now , or not , but I grad d: Well it 's just we 're missing tea . grad c: No , but my question is like should I wait until all of those are processed , and channelized , like the time markings are adjusted before I do all the processing , and we start like branching off into the into the our layer of transcripts . postdoc e: Well , you know the problem the problem is that some some of the adjustments that they 're making are to bring are to combine bins that were time bins which were previously separate . postdoc e: And so , i i i it 's true that it 's likely to be adjusted in the way that the words are more complete . postdoc e: so I it 's gonna be a more reliable thing and I 'm not sure grad c: I 'm sure about that , postdoc e: Yeah . grad c: but do you have like a time frame when you can expect like all of it to be done , or when you expect them to finish it , or postdoc e: Well partly it depends on how , how e effective it will be to apply an algorithm because i this takes time , grad c: Yeah . phd b: So right now the what you 're doing is you 're taking the , the o original version and you 're sort of channelizing yourself , right ? grad c: Yeah . i if the time markings aren't different across channels , like the channelized version really doesn't have any more information . grad c: So , I was just , originally I had done before like the channelized versions were coming out . grad c: phd b: So I I th I think probably the way it 'll go is that , you know , when we make this first general version and then start working on the script , that script @ @ that will be ma you know primarily come from what you 've done , we 'll need to work on a channelized version of those originals . phd b: And so it should be pretty much identical to what you have t except for the one that they 've already tightened the boundaries on . phd b: So postdoc e: Yeah , phd b: and then probably what will happen is as the transcribers finish tightening more and more , you know , that original version will get updated postdoc e: yeah . phd b: But the I guess the ef the effect for you guys , because you 're pulling out the little wave forms into separate ones , that would mean these boundaries are constantly changing you 'd have to constantly re rerun that , grad c: I know . phd g: I I think the harder part is making sure that the transc the transcription phd b: OK . phd g: So if you b merge two things , then you know that it 's the sum of the transcripts , but if you split inside something , you don't where the word which words moved . phd g: And that 's wh that 's where it becomes a little bit , having to rerun the processing . grad c: You know , if I just have to run three scripts to extract it all and let it run on my computer for an hour and a half , or however long it takes to parse and create all the reference file , that 's not a problem . And I know exactly like what the steps will work what 's going on , in the editing process , phd b: Yeah . postdoc e: So that 's I I could there were other checks that I did , but it 's I think that we 've unless you think there 's anything else , I think that I 've covered it

The group discussed the possibility of assigning additional tasks to ICSI's transcriber pool, specifically focusing on tagging more detailed acoustic information, as well as discourse and disfluency tagging. Grad E initiated the conversation by introducing a model developed by Saul, Allen, and Rahim, which utilizes independent tests to detect phonetic features. It was explained that using multiple detectors trained on different features provides greater robustness compared to a full-band of Gaussian mixtures. To facilitate the transcription process, transcribers will be provided with channelized data that has already been segmented for speech/non-speech boundaries. Additionally, efforts will be made to correctly re-classify breathy channels, which are currently mislabeled as speech, using alternative methods.

Question: Summarize the personal presentations on the appearance design, speak recognition system, and ideal materials of the remote control, and the recommendations made by the Industrial Designer during the discussion. Article: marketing: Where are are all the other presentations ? industrial designer: I just put it in the in the shared folder so it should be marketing: The conceptual or industrial designer: yeah I think so . Because I see only my own presentation user interface: industrial designer: No no no , can you go back one ? marketing: yeah . industrial designer: 'cause it has to be PowerPoint pre yeah components design , that's it . industrial designer: 'cause I knew that I didn't have time so I just copy and paste everything into the user interface: marketing: Ah , project manager: Ah . marketing: I can't cut and paste it into the other folder but project manager: You can look at the final report , 'cause I have to record everything we are deciding and such , so I'm trying to write it down between everything else . industrial designer: Sometimes I have these pop-ups or these sounds and there's nothing there , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: and also with I don't know how to use PowerPoint , so it takes me forever to get something done with it . we have again three presentations and then we have to decide on what concepts the mobile phone has to f the remote control has to support . project manager: Yes ? industrial designer: Who wants to start ? marketing: Me first again or project manager: Yeah sure . So the developments I will address them project manager: marketing: oh yeah well this is the fruit and vegetables looks of fresh bright colours . Well the first aspect was twice as important as the second aspect,w which was twice as important as the third aspect . user interface: marketing: nothing about the buttons but just sponge kind of thing , and and some fruit and colours user interface: Yeah . Yeah you're just the user interface ? user interface: It's better than than my drawing . And I used possibilities from our manufacturing department about current components which will have to be implemented in the design . I could not drag the pictures into the the slides so s so I don't have examples of how it looks like . But it comes down to what you what you think we should do with the spongey and the fruity looking type . If you , the young dynamic people want soft primary colours , which looks like fruits you know , you can and shapes that are curved and not solid straight lines anymore . user interface: project manager: industrial designer: There's a lot of options that we have to discuss . we have a hand dynamo , which we yeah we Dutch refer to it as the kneipgatt . industrial designer: the kinetic provision of energy which means if you move the thing , if you shake it . project manager: industrial designer: Which will be fun for toddlers right , if they wanna use the project manager: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: yeah also also in you know countries where there's n isn't much light like in Scandinavia , they wouldn't be y able to use it half of the year you know . I wasn't able to finish my personal preferences sheet , but well you know that we will have to go for the double curved 'cause it's daring and different from what we have now . industrial designer: Well we have all kinds of hard materials like the the hard plastic , the wood and the titanium . we can use a scroll buttons for the menus , but we already kind of decided to go for the f for the pushbuttons , for the the arrow buttons . industrial designer: Electronics ? Yeah , maybe we wanna decide on what electronics to use the advanced chip I think is easiest to implement for the production , 'cause they they can print it better . I first chose for the battery , 'cause yeah I'm traditional and that's the most obvious , easiest choice to go to . user interface: Or combine both with a with one project manager: I think you can only fit one source of energy on the industrial designer: Yeah maybe we marketing: I guess we can only choose one . But it is more longlasting , that the people don't have to ever buy batteries again . I always chuck my remote control around , so marketing: Yeah , just playing with it project manager: Yeah . It can be done , you can't harm it , project manager: S yeah it's safe . industrial designer: You don't have to be scared about bouncing it off the g floor and breaking it or whatever . marketing: So double curved is like this , this , this , or industrial designer: No it means curved in two dimensions . So w single curved ? let's say would be a b square box , but then with curves on one dimension . So Yeah yeah that's one thing which I'm not sure of how to implement it into the remote control . project manager: Well the visual representation is not there with speech industrial designer: Design ? user interface: No okay but it has to be combined with with the menu for functions and project manager: but you can Yeah . user interface: But do j do we do the speech just for the basic options , for the simple buttons ? project manager: Both . Everybody says it so that's what's yeah Yeah in the in the last meeting we we were yeah putting the the simple and the advanced options separated . And only the the L_C_D_ panel will light up and then you can only change the yeah the options . project manager: user interface: you have to delete this but this is the the the simple layout . user interface: display on the upper side with the the menu button and maybe a some sort of cancel button or save button . project manager: You did read the minutes I wrote ? user interface: project manager: You did read the minutes I wrote ? user interface: What ? A little bit I think but not not everything w industrial designer: I project manager: Oh okay 'cause I pretty much summed up all the buttons there were . user interface: But But this is the the basic design for the for the m yeah for the buttons . And if there are older people they wanted more yeah more luxurous so that's an a also an option . Okay so what we have to decide is what kind of components do we use ? energy source , chip type , case type . industrial designer: Yeah we need the the chip on print to be able to support the the screen and and f audio function . industrial designer: I'm just thinking , this is not my department , but I I'm not sure what this is gonna cost , marketing: Kinetic . industrial designer: to be able to m project manager: I didn't get any info on this . industrial designer: That's gonna be difficult huh ? marketing: The cost of making it should be twelve and a half ? project manager: I have total here . project manager: Yeah the interface , maybe can user interface: it's it's quite difficult because we we haven't got all the options yeah . do you have a picture of doubly curved case ? And could you put that in the group folder ? Of the project folder . marketing: If you go to your homepage or something , you should industrial designer: Yeah I'm going there now . marketing: I got my fresh and fyoo fruity picture also over there , so project manager: Ah you didn't draw it yourself . industrial designer: S see this is the the the standard traditional type , where the form yeah serves the function , you know . industrial designer: where your thumbs would be laying in the instrument and it has to be nice to hold . And user interface: But it has also to it it has also to be luxurous for for yeah rich people . industrial designer: Yeah but that's that's the the problem yeah the dilemma actually , project manager: Distinction . industrial designer: 'cause we wanna appeal to the to the young public with fancy with flashy colours , and with a lot of shape . industrial designer: Yeah , and the and the rubber , it it will look cheap always , user interface: The colour Yeah . Okay but the the colours , you you can make it make the colours with LEDs beneath the the buttons . user interface: If you press a button and you can disable the the colour LEDs for for people that don't like it . industrial designer: To customise it and so kids can make it look more flashy with different kinds of colours user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and people who want something , you know , different , or more design , they can go for one colour project manager: Different . marketing: industrial designer: Just give me the thing that it's inside there project manager: Yeah but this this the is for the . industrial designer: A compromise between what ? project manager: instead of doubly curved we take a single curved . marketing: Yeah so we keep it singly c single curved then ? project manager: Yeah that would be an option . industrial designer: And I I'm I'm thinking you know a drawing palette , where you have the shape for your thumb . user interface: Yeah but if you if you make it more curved we we can make more and more options for buttons . user interface: If you have it have it in your hand , you you you are not only yeah you don't need one dimension but you can use other dimensions for pressing the the buttons . Something to shoot at your television industrial designer: Yeah or that that is the confirmation button or something , project manager: industrial designer: That would be a nice way to use it but , yeah , I'm thinking big already , and we need something that well that that you can able to use in one hand I think . marketing: Maybe because the the screen is on top you can have project manager: To switch from buttons to interface . industrial designer: How about marketing: Well well you have it in your hand so it's a kind of an angle from your eyes to the screen . And the buttons are more , well it's very thick now but industrial designer: Yeah I understand what you mean . marketing: That's that's industrial designer: How about we do a a pop-up screen , like the laptop . marketing: Yeah ? That that you can press it and then it comes up ? Or industrial designer: And then if you want project manager: so you have a the the side view . marketing: maybe it's too much project manager: make this industrial designer: No like project manager: . industrial designer: Yeah or preferably even keep the simple buttons here , and then under the screen even you could put more more advanced buttons . user interface: But you you want industrial designer: F for the L_C_D_ menu right ? user interface: okay . industrial designer: So w w project manager: No not all because you need most of them , the arrow buttons . project manager: and you can maybe even drop the menu button because maybe if you flip it open it will auto activate amauto automatically . Yeah and it says menu and it flips open and then you have the buttons to control it , in combination with your user interface: That's but it's it's not industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Well yeah the the idea of it was , is that because you close it , you cover the L_C_D_ screen and it won't be vulnerable to scratches or whatever . marketing: An adv an adv and it will be covered in some kind of thin rubber layer or something like that . industrial designer: That actually will offer some extra protection for the project manager: Okay but then we still have the the the thing of the the the shape . project manager: What kind of industrial designer: Yeah I was thinking , if if you have your hand , it this is your th project manager: Harder . marketing: Yeah the lower part doesn't work I guess , so maybe you should try it over there . project manager: industrial designer: That you , that it would be kind of shape like this , you know . So it's easier to hold in your hand , to y f user interface: But when you are left-handed , that's that's a problem . user interface: But that's that's very expensive industrial designer: Like like you drew here . user interface: We we could make some some rubber some rubber yeah mouse , with which you can change industrial designer: project manager: Oh yeah . marketing: we have to make industrial designer: Yeah but we have hardware inside , which is so it has to have some sort of basic shape . marketing: Yeah we we better so choose one industrial designer: And also the screen , you cannot mould it . marketing: But that's the kind of the idea , industrial designer: And then you can marketing: so it lays good in the hand , and then on on the side with with your thumb , industrial designer: You can place the screen here , which can come . marketing: yeah , you can use the button option project manager: So the keywords are primary co colours , spongey ? industrial designer: And but then I w I would marketing: Spongey . marketing: Spongey can be reached by means of industrial designer: Those buttons ? And the simple buttons here , user interface: . And and the and the control thngs in the middle ? The the the arrows ? industrial designer: I y eah that's what . industrial designer: or do we wanna make its shape look like a banana or something ? user interface: industrial designer: I dunno . project manager: Yeah that's user interface: marketing: bananas wierd shape and other fruits also , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: so it's better to have some sort of basic print and then a fruit print in some primary colours . industrial designer: Yeah we could make marketing: I don't know what what colours should the basic print be like ? Like some soft green or something ? project manager: Orange or something . marketing: Or and then user interface: Or blue ? Dark blue or marketing: Oh yeah yeah , dark blue industrial designer: We should use marketing: and then and then very bright , a yellow banana , an orange , a green apple , stuff like that , user interface: Yeah . user interface: Yeah but the primary colours w we can create with the with the LEDs on the on the remote control . If you make it just a yeah bl give it a blue colour , then it's just a neutral colour , project manager: user interface: also for the for the more yeah for the people . project manager: Y marketing: So that's that's a dark blue basic colour I guess . industrial designer: Like you have on the Samsung , well I don't like to call brands phones , marketing: industrial designer: the you know that 'cause I remember from one of our first meetings that people lose their remote controls often . marketing: Yeah ? industrial designer: So it not not only in in the colours of the LEDs , that we want something to keep it visible at all times , or marketing: How do you mean ? project manager: Yeah if you if flashing colour so you can't lose it , basically . project manager: Well I think it's a bit too much but user interface: Maybe a industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: but it's should be more real dark blue , so the contrast with the with the fruit objects is pretty high . user interface: And which which colour should should I give the the display ? project manager: Who ? user interface: Or marketing: the the colour of the background of the display ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: Ah well I don't guess it s has to be a sixty sixty six five thousand colour , so yeah too expensive . J industrial designer: As long as you loo use high contrast between the the background and the foreground colour . user interface: maybe a maybe a white a white backlight ? industrial designer: So that people with with marketing: White backlight , and dark . Or is it too expensive ? marketing: But maybe they have to they have to have some colour right ? project manager: It's difficult . industrial designer: But don't we wanna make the background the the bright colo colours ? So th the total of the thing is very bright ? project manager: Yeah you can industrial designer: Like the pictures I showed you guys . user interface: It's it's not industrial designer: The green ? project manager: Why ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: But the but the buttons have their own LEDs or not ? project manager: They have LEDs but they have a colour . marketing: How do you mean ? project manager: they they don't determine the colour that much , I think . Yeah I I was think about a red red LEDs and blue LEDs and project manager: 'Cause you have to print on them you have a background marketing: No that's that's too busy I guess . project manager: So you can't change the colour so marketing: You better bet better better keep the LED and the button itself in the same colour I guess . industrial designer: what we should do I think is is make kind of a see-through plastic button , with one coloured LED behind it . industrial designer: as the colour the And if you think about easy to use buttons , we have to , well we have to make it the shape so that it's easy to hold f for both hands , marketing: industrial designer: but also that you can reach the buttons with your thumb , if you hold the machine . project manager: Okay with Don't mean to discourage you but basically you two are going to work on the smartboard . project manager: Yeah about user interface: marketing: So wh how should I do that ? project manager: Yeah I don't know . marketing: because you are going to design it on this board right ? project manager: Yeah but maybe you can do the evaluation you don't have to evaluate yet but you can make a procedure which to follow . industrial designer: So we're gonna work here ? On this sketchboard ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: But we have to do it at this moment , after th this meeting ? industrial designer: Alright . user interface: Ah so this is basically the what what we are thinking about ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: So if you'll rather draw in paint or something industrial designer: Current colour ? marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah 'cause I have to focus on the on the basic look-and-feel design . And you have to think how we're gonna put the screen in it and those kind of things . industrial designer: So if I'm drawing and you think okay I'm not gonna be able to put a screen in there , you have to correct . industrial designer: so we kind of want the girlish marketing: project manager: That's included . Excuse me ? marketing: Well it's a good thing that the buttons aren't , well that they are plastic , because then you can light up the light on when when they are usable . industrial designer: How do we marketing: Erase ? industrial designer: or insert text ? project manager: I dunno . industrial designer: I thought for the side view , that the w the basic section would be rather a bit thicker than the middle , where you're holding it with your project manager: Jesus . industrial designer: 'cause your fingers have to fit underneath and user interface: The middle has to be very small so you can have it in your hand . marketing: I don't see a sign that the meeting is over yet but industrial designer: Exactly but the but the upper side has to be a bit more like that I think . user interface: Yeah the display , industrial designer: don't you think ? user interface: we yeah we can put a display . industrial designer: So the display we will put in here , the basic functions in here , where it's most reachable . user interface: industrial designer: What do don't have to draw it exactly do we ? user interface: No it's it's it's okay . industrial designer: So this is gonna be from the marketing: I is it if if this is from the side industrial designer: from user interface: From the marketing: woah . marketing: So then it's like this , industrial designer: Yeah ? marketing: or that's not convenient because then you have the screen like this and look like the it's better to have it somewhat like this . Or does it flip all the way ? user interface: Yeah I'm I'm industrial designer: The the idea is that it has to flip up to here . user interface: May maybe it's it's easier to to integrate the the the L_C_D_ screen just into this this bubble . user interface: Because here marketing: It's better to to have this like this I guess , and then flip it like this . user interface: But why why do we need the flipping industrial designer: you can adjust the angle to which it flips . industrial designer: Yeah because I think it will feel weird if you would make this smaller and this bigger or something that user interface: marketing: user interface: Yeah . marketing: user interface: the the shape is okay but yeah ? I don't see the the yeah why why we should use the the flipping mechanism . It's it's for for for more trendy marketing: Yeah but maybe Yeah but maybe we we should then user interface: Because we have enough space . marketing: Yeah there the middle Sh sh shouldn't we integrate it ? user interface: Yeah and then h we sh . user interface: marketing: Okay but the screen is a bit lower because if it falls on the other side , it doesn't fall on the screen . user interface: Yeah , then it's marketing: So there's a layer of rubber on the side . project manager: marketing: So no flipping but just user interface: No flipping or project manager: No flipping ? marketing: no . user interface: you wanted the flipping so industrial designer: Yeah I guess but most votes count right ? user interface: But if you if you If you drop it it it just breaks . user interface: And it's also for the for the children , it's yeah for people not sixteen years . user interface: But there are more marketing: they are responsible enough to have a mobile phone , so also to to deal with their remote control . user interface: Okay wi industrial designer: Remember that the weird pocketphone thingy which looked like kind of a Gameboy . project manager: I don't see any power cables here so industrial designer: Let's see . But do we want options on the on the side with the with the buttons ? industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah I'm just thinking , if we i we wanna make something different project manager: industrial designer: right ? So the with the scroll is is more futuristic than the standard arrow buttons

The Marketing department identified the lack of aesthetic appeal as a drawback of existing remote controls, prompting the conceptualization of a remote with a bright and attractive color. The Industrial Designer emphasized the need to avoid a formal design reminiscent of remotes used by older generations. In terms of the User Interface, the proposal was made to incorporate a voice recognition system, enabling the remote to function based on user instructions. To align with the current trend of fruity elements, the suggestion was made to design the remote in the shape of a banana. This choice would not only be in line with fashion trends but also appeal to younger users. However, there was a concern that the banana shape might become outdated in the following year, making it an imperfect solution.

Question: Summarize the discussions on issues related to potential closures of colleges and universities, as well as university mergers. Article: I'll take this opportunity to welcome Dawn formally to the committee but also to place on record our thanks to John Griffiths for his service to the committee. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Cabinet Secretary for Education, Eluned Morgan, Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning, and Huw Morris, who is the group director of skills, higher education and lifelong learning. If we can just start with teacher training and teacher training for secondary school teachers in particular, obviously there's been what looks like a trend in recent years in filling the places for secondary school training. Do you think there's still a problem recruiting teachers into the 300 priority places, or is there a trend where things are getting better? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Suzy. I think, for this year's intake, although we're in touch with our providers, we're not in a position to be able to give figures for this year's intake for a couple of months. But what we have seen over recent years is that we are only recruiting to about 65 per cent of those targets. So, what we're doing is first of all making sure that our ITE provision is world class, so that, actually, Welsh centres are the place to go to train to be a teacher. You'll be aware that we've recently been through an accreditation process for new ITE provision that will start in the next academic year. It's not the whole answer, I think, to these issues, but it's part of a mixture of things that we need to do. You'll be aware that, for priority subjects, with graduates with the very highest levels of qualifications, those financial incentives are now £20,000 a year. We have initially done some work in the last year specifically targeting Welsh students in studying for priority subject degrees, e-mailing them, sending them materials to ask them to consider (1) becoming a teacher, and (2) crucially coming to do that training here in Wales. We are now part of a full national programme of ITE recruitment, giving people that idea that you can serve your nation and your community by training to be a teacher. In January of this year I set up an advisory board on the recruitment and retention of teaching staff, and we are awaiting some reports from that advisory group on what they feel that we should do next. I can see there's a lot of activity, but what exactly is it responding to? Presumably, some research has been done about why people don't want to become teachers so that the answers you come up with are appropriate answers. I can't believe it's just about ITE, although this is very valuable, what you're talking about. Is there something that's running through our younger learners at the moment that makes them think that teaching isn't a profession they want to go into? Is that something that's happening just in Wales or is it happening elsewhere as well? kirsty williams am: No. I think they are suffering quite acute problems across the border, which proves to me that money isn't necessarily the entire answer, because, despite higher financial incentives to join ITE courses, they're not able to do that in England either. So, that proves to me—what the research does show—that it's not money alone that will get people onto these courses. Recently, as you'll be aware via my written statement, I attended the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory, which is a system-to-system conference. If you talk to education systems in different parts of the world, the one common factor that we are all grappling with is teacher recruitment and retention. In the USA, they have seen a 40 per cent drop in the number of students training to be teachers. I met with New York state—significant teacher recruitment and retention problems in New York state, and in Finland, Australia. That's why we set up the advisory group under the chairmanship of Professor John Gardner—it's to understand what the issues are exactly that are preventing people or putting people off. One of the things that we have got strong performance in, and I think this is perhaps something that we're trying to follow up on, are employment-based routes into qualified teacher status—so, those are people who are training on the job. There's high demand for those places, so much so that we've increased those places to 90 last year and 90 again this year, which says to me that—there's definitely a place for the traditional, 'Take a year off, do a postgraduate certificate in education in a university for a year'—actually, that type of course suits some students but it might be preventing other people from pursuing a qualification in teaching, which is why, of course, from next year, we will have our unique part-time PGCE route into qualification. So, that allows people to perhaps combine some of their employment opportunities, so they can earn while they learn, or maybe they've got caring responsibilities that prevent them from going to do a full-time course. I think that will give us an alternative route that people can take to gain qualified teacher status and work in our schools. So, there's no one thing, I think, that we can do that will solve this issue. Well, that's what I was after finding out, and, actually, what you've just said about the part-time PGCE is pretty interesting as well, because if you can bring your outside world experience into teaching, that's got to help, hasn't it? kirsty williams am: Can I just agree with you? I think that is really, really important—that we have a diversity in our teaching workforce. I think the different dynamic that brings to a school and the experience that brings to children is really, really valuable. I was up in the Deeside Sixth just last week, talking to the A-level chemistry teacher. She had been a teacher for a while, she'd gone into industry, worked in industry, and now had come back into teaching. She said that she felt that that made her a better educator and she could talk with knowledge and experience about the opportunities outside of teaching that the students in front of her could pursue. I'm very keen to increase the diversity in our teaching workforce and I'm very keen in looking at career changers, who perhaps have different life experience and work experience, coming into our teaching profession. Part of that diversity, of course—it would be great if you had more people interested in qualifying to teach through the medium of Welsh. No-one can solve this in 280 characters, I get that, but can you give us some indication about why you think this is proving still such an unattractive option when it's clear that there's a policy for this country to improve the number of Welsh speakers? You'd have thought there'd be a pretty good carrot for this. Again, data for recruitment for the 2018-19 cohort is not yet available and we are, as I said, keeping in touch with our ITE centres to keep a close eye on them. I think an important thing to recognise is that there is a difference between the number of people who are on courses where there is a specific designation that enables them to teach through the medium of Welsh and those people who have linguistic ability and Welsh ability but don't necessarily do a course that allows them. We do think that, for the 2016-17 cohort, there were an additional 130 qualifiers that, actually, were fluent in Welsh and who could have gone on to teach in Welsh-medium schools, didn't necessarily do a course that gave them that designation. But, clearly, we've got three academic years now to get to the targets that we've set ourselves. The evaluation of Welsh-medium provision in ITE reported at the end of last month, and the Minister and officials are busy working now to implement the recommendations of the report that was published, I think, on 28 September, to be able to move this agenda forward. Again, we've got new incentives, this year, both for people starting their course and then for teachers who complete their QTS after a year. So, we've added in new financial incentives this year to try and address some of those issues. But, clearly, these are ambitious targets and we will need to have a step change over the next three years if we're to meet them. If they're from Wales, they will have had Welsh as part of their education from day one, and we'll accept there are varying qualities in different parts of Wales, different attitudes towards it as well. But there isn't a single a person now who's been through Welsh education who can say they have no Welsh at all, unless they've moved into the system from, say, England very, very recently. What is being done within the teaching qualifications, including the degrees, to ensure that, at least in Welsh universities, those nascent Welsh language skills are at least kept alive, even though we're not talking necessarily about being at a level where people can teach through the medium? It's the age-old question: once the school gate closes, is that the end of their Welsh use? So, is there something—it won't be Donaldson, but in the teacher training qualifications—that is keeping this going and, hopefully, increasing the usability of the Welsh skills they have? kirsty williams am: Well, in terms of how we can encourage children who have got Welsh skills as a result of their education up to 16, how they can continue to use those skills and, potentially, use them in the workplace, I'm sure Eluned will want to talk about some of the work, for instance, in other, non-teaching sectors. But, with regard to ITE, you'll be aware that, in the evaluation report, as I said, that was published, the report comes forward with two options in how we could develop an intervention programme to support Welsh language skills amongst all primary and secondary ITE entrants. So, what we'll be doing now as a result of that report is that we'll be working very closely with our ITE centres to develop and agree upon minimum provision that constitutes those skill levels within ITE provision for all teachers. llyr gruffydd am: You have your targets for 2021, in terms of numbers of teachers coming through the system, which is positive, although, clearly, the report or the review itself said that, actually, we need to double the numbers, really. But it's not just the trends that are going down; it's a cataclysmic drop, really. We've lost 24 per cent in the number of people over the last four or five years who are going into teacher training to study subjects that they could teach through the medium of Welsh. So, it's a huge turnaround that we're looking for, and I'm not getting the feeling that the level of ambition and the answers that you're giving here this morning reflect the level of action that's needed, really. kirsty williams am: Well, first of all, as I tried to illustrate to Suzy, the figures on their own tell one story, but there are additional people in the system with an ability to speak Welsh and to be able to use— llyr gruffydd am: I think it's 40 per cent of those who are currently in the system who don't— kirsty williams am: —the language and skills. And if we look at qualifiers of ITE courses in Wales by degree type, actually, we see a different trend—we see numbers going up. That's why we have got the evaluation of provision in ITE and that's why we'll be taking that ambition forward. Clearly, there are statistics and there are statistics, so could you just explain to us which statistics you've used for your targets for growth over the next three years? kirsty williams am: Well, that comes as a result of the work done for the 2050— llyr gruffydd am: Upon which baseline are you basing the increases that you're projecting? kirsty williams am: We're using the baseline of 2012-13. llyr gruffydd am: That's the one I was using when I said '24 per cent reduction'. That's why, as I said, we're doing the work that we need to do to reverse that decline. In using those numbers, we also know that there are additional people in the system who are not captured in those figures and who do have the linguistic ability to use their language positively in school settings. So, what I'm saying is that that doesn't tell us the whole story, but I will be the first to admit that there is a significant job of work with our ITE providers to ensure that we will have the skilled professionals that we need to deliver on our ambitions, and I'm not hiding from that. eluned morgan am: Also, I just think it's worth saying that a lot of this is about building the confidence of those people who actually can speak Welsh, who are not teaching through the medium of Welsh, and to give them that support. First of all, we need to identify who these people are, so there is a job of work being undertaken now in terms of registration in particular—when people register, let's just make sure that we collect that kind of data. One of the recommendations of the report is that there is no consistent approach to understanding this baseline data and there's no consistent competency test that people start at the beginning of their course, so we need a national approach rather than leaving it to individual institutions. llyr gruffydd am: Have we missed any tricks, potentially, in terms of the reforms to accrediting ITE, for example, in terms of, maybe, strengthening aspects around the Welsh language and provision in that respect? kirsty williams am: No, I don't believe so. The accreditation process, which is independent of the Government—the accreditation process demands of our ITE providers that their provision will be able to meet the goals of our curriculum. Our curriculum is very clear about the equality of the language and the ability of our children, through all stages of their education journey, to be able to be bilingual children. llyr gruffydd am: So, that requirement, as far you're concerned, is there. lynne neagle am: Before I turn to Hefin, can I just clarify—? In answer to Suzy Davies, you said that 65 per cent of the places in Welsh training centres had been filled. hefin david am: The decision by the Education Workforce Council not to accredit the University of South Wales with the ability to deliver teacher training—what are your views and concerns about that? kirsty williams am: The process is independent of Government, and it would not be appropriate for me to comment on that, especially as I understand that there is an appeals process that may be being undertaken. What I would say is that from the very outset of our ITE reforms we have made it very clear that I expect very high standards in our ITE system, but the process is independent of this Government. I have confidence in the people who have been appointed by the EWC to undertake that process, but it is independent of me, and it's not appropriate for me to comment on that further. hefin david am: I fully understand that and the need for distance for the EWC, but there'll be an impact on students and staff. Students, first of all: are you concerned that the reduction in providers might have an impact on students, and those students going through the second year at USW? Would you have concerns about that issue? kirsty williams am: In terms of the overall numbers, we will be looking to commission from those institutions that have been accredited the number of training places that our planning tool says that we need. Clearly, there will be a responsibility upon the University of South Wales to ensure that those students already in the system are able to complete their studies and their course, with the appropriate level of support and tuition to enable them to achieve their career aspirations and to graduate from that programme. hefin david am: And what about the uncertainty for staff, or would you say that's an issue for the university itself? kirsty williams am: These are autonomous bodies. They have to act accordingly, in compliance with any employment law or any statutory responsibilities that they would have as an employer. That's not a matter for me; that is a matter for the institution that is an autonomous body. hefin david am: But I would be surprised if you weren't keeping an eye on this, given that it has been a key provider. Are you aware of when the appeal decision will be known? kirsty williams am: My understanding is that the appeals process is ongoing, and next month, perhaps. But as I said, this is a process that is independent of Government— hefin david am: But it will have an impact for what you do. kirsty williams am: It will potentially change the nature of the people from whom we commission places, but as I said, I do not have any concerns that we will not be in a position to commission the appropriate number of training places that we will need as a result of our planning. suzy davies am: It's not directly about USW; it's about the geographic spread of provision. I wonder if you could just give us a snapshot of what that looks like, and whether you think—certainly for PGCE or postgrad courses, anyway—that if they're not accessible geographically and we've got students who already have three years' worth of debt, they're not going to be looking to, necessarily, live away from home for a fourth year, and may want to study nearer home. Has there been any research done on the access to these postgrad courses, about where people are coming from and whether that's had an impact on the fact that some of these places haven't been filled? kirsty williams am: Currently, with our current providers, there is a significant geographical spread. There are centres here in the south-east, there are centres in the south-west, in mid Wales, and in north Wales. We do think that, for some students, accessibility is an issue, and of course that's why we are responding with our part-time PGCE route, which actually will be location neutral, because you will be able to study that as a distance learner, and so you will be able to remain in your community and undertake that course. So, if geographical disadvantage is stopping somebody from pursuing a career aspiration to qualify as a teacher, our new part-time PGCE, as I said, will allow them to do that. We're going to move on now to talk about reform and reconfiguration of the post-16 education sector. There are some encouraging provisional signs regarding the demand for part-time undergraduate study for the first year of Diamond, but the £12.5 million reduction Higher Education Funding Council for Wales is having to make this academic year has potentially placed the funding for part-time provision under pressure. Is there a danger that, without maintaining and growing this funding, Welsh Government will undermine the Diamond reforms and increase the cost of part-time courses? kirsty williams am: Let's be absolutely clear what this Government has done for part-time students. We are unique, Janet: unique in the UK and, I believe, unique in Europe, in the parity of the support that is available for full-time and part-time students. So, Welsh part-timers have something that they do not get if they are in England or if they're in Scotland. It's too early to have definitive figures for the impact of Diamond on the number of people who are undertaking part-time study. I don't want to get into trouble by not having that verified data, and I know Members get testy with me for anecdotal evidence, but I can tell you this: there is one provider that is reporting at this moment a 40 per cent increase in the number of students that are registered to start part-time study with them this year, as compared to last year, and that reflects really, really well, compared to the onward downward trend that we see across the border for part-time. What this means, for us as a nation, is that people are able to take this opportunity to upskill themselves and to be able to develop their qualifications and to be able to move themselves up career ladders, and I think that's such an important economic factor for us. So, rather than feeling doom and gloom about the prospects for the part-time sector, the early indications, at least, show that the Diamond reforms are leading to an increase in demand and, more importantly, an increase in uptake—students taking advantage of that system to go away and study. Is the Welsh Government able to reassure the committee that its ambitions for the post-compulsory education and training reforms are still in line with the original Hazelkorn recommendations, and go beyond the Labour manifesto commitment of simply replacing HEFCW with a new funding body for HE and FE? kirsty williams am: Okay. So, you will be aware, Janet, that the agreement between myself and the First Minister that brought me into the Government and the Government's programme state very clearly about our desire to pursue the recommendations of the Hazelkorn report. I hope, by the end of this week, we will have published the responses to the technical consultation, and we will continue to move forward. And I would argue, certainly, that the reforms that we are intending to implement do go beyond just simply a body that replaces HEFCW and joins in FE. And, as I said, I believe we've had in the region of about 450 responses to the technical consultation and I'm pleased to say that there remains a consensus—we will always have some arguments about the details—but there remains a consensus on the direction of travel that we are pursuing. A summary of the consultation responses will be available to Members and will be published by the end of the week. Is the Welsh Government still committed to introducing the PCET Bill before the end of the fifth Assembly, and are you confident this will happen? kirsty williams am: Well, I'm absolutely determined that we will get the PCET legislation on the floor. So, it is a substantial piece of work, but I believe that we are on track to be able to do that by the end of this term. llyr gruffydd am: Can I just pick up on that? , it is going to be a big job, and, clearly, there's a strong focus on creating the commission and putting the structures in place, but, of course, one of the drivers is that we want to effect a cultural change in the way that people perceive post-16 education. When are we going to see this coming forward? Because I think we're putting structures in place, so there's a big discussion about the technical stuff, but I feel there's a bit of a vacuum in terms of the vision. kirsty williams am: Well, I would disagree with you, Llyr, because— llyr gruffydd am: Right, okay. kirsty williams am: Well, I would disagree with you because, of course, the technical consultation has followed what we had last year, which was a consultation on the vision, on what we needed to do to bring the sector together beyond just HE and FE, to the inclusion of sixth forms; work-based learning providers; apprenticeships; and bringing all of that together under one body. I believe that that gives us an opportunity to have better strategic planning; to help us prevent duplication; to help us bridge gaps that are not available for learners at the moment. My vision is that it will promote collaboration between institutions rather than simply having the market-based process that we see in other places where there's competition rather than collaboration. I want to see it strengthen links between schools, FE and HE, strengthen links between schools and employers and business, to make sure that we've got better information and advice services so that young people know what their pathways are and can make really informed choices about what's best for them, to help them make them. So, I think: we've done the vision, we're now doing the technical consultation, that will be published by the end of the week, and we'll move forward with our overarching vision that Hazelkorn elaborated and that we are now taking forward. llyr gruffydd am: So, you would be very concerned if FE institutions were saying that we really need to see the vision, that that's the next step, that we really need to understand the vision. As I said, I was with one of our excellent FE leaders just at the end of last week; it wasn't raised with me then. I think there's a shared understanding of the vision, but I understand and I do see some nervousness about, actually, in the end, will this just be HEFCW by another name, and, the opportunity for FE, will this be realised in this new body? We need to keep ensuring that, as we go forward and develop the policy, and as we develop, eventually, the legislation, that that parity of esteem and that true equality across all parts of the sector is realised. Your paper to the committee says that there's a need for more analysis and research into the outcomes for learners from different backgrounds. If you don't have the analysis, how can you be sure that the investment that's being made by the Welsh universities is actually going to have a positive outcome in the right places and lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups? kirsty williams am: Okay. Well, of course, that would be one of the duties of the new commission set up as a result of our post-compulsory education and training reforms that I would anticipate. The universities are required, under the Higher Education (Wales) Act 2015, to produce fee and access statements, and the £104 million that they have to take off their fees to be able to promote this work—those fee and access plans have to be signed off by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales as being robust and truly promoting equality of opportunity. We are looking at—. It's quite early days, still, for that new regulatory regime to come through, so we ask HEFCW, when I meet with HEFCW, about the adequacy of those plans. That's why we're introducing the Diamond reforms—so that those from the poorest backgrounds can be adequately financially supported and are not put off from going to a university. So, for instance, in the FE sector, we're introducing new joint monitoring for outcomes for sixth-form learners and FE learners, because we've never tracked them in the same way. So, we're introducing that now so that we can see the destinations for those two sectors, but the PCET reforms give us an opportunity to do that right across the board. Huw, is there anything else I need to add? huw morris: Well, I'd just reinforce the point the Cabinet Secretary made about the fee and access plans being the vehicle through which we get universities to specify what they're going to do, and the funding council tracks that. To make sure that we're doing that in a full and appropriate manner, periodically, we ask for that system to be reviewed. I think it was in 2017 that the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods—the research arm of Cardiff University—reviewed the system and looked at how widening access was being promoted by different institutions and whether that was working in all parts of Wales. The report from that group was considered by one of the sub-committees in HEFCW and they are revising the process as a consequence. So, I think we can be confident that there are ambitious targets that are monitored, and, periodically, the system as a whole is reviewed. michelle brown am: Can you tell us what sort of research and data the universities are basing those access plans on? I assume they'll all have slightly different methods—I appreciate that—but can you give us any idea of how they actually formulate these access plans? huw morris: So, there are data collected across the UK by a body called the Higher Education Statistics Agency. They produce detailed breakdowns, along with UCAS, of where applicants come from, which institutions did they study at, what courses, what their particular characteristics are, including their socioeconomic status, and that data is then analysed at a UK level and in Wales, through HEFCW and its agents, to track what's happening at different institutions at different stages, not just in terms of who's applying and who gets access, but who progresses and what happens to people once they've graduated. I'm just wondering how that data that's already there differs from the research and analysis that you were talking about in your paper. What specific analysis and research were you referring to in your paper? kirsty williams am: We use the HESA—. kirsty williams am: That's shorthand—the HESA data, and institutions use that. This is a source of real concern to me, that Welsh institutions may not be able to have the ready access to that data because of changes the OfS may be making. So, we supplement where we think that there's value to be added in additional breakdowns, or in additional slicing of data and understanding of what is motivating people to come forward. huw morris: And to give you a specific example of that as it applies in north Wales—. So, take a university like Wrexham Glyndŵr University; they have quite a large intake of mature students. The data that's collected and analysed at a UK level tends to look at people who are going into university at a young age, not a mature profile. So, some of the analysis that we do in Wales—indeed, the deliberations of the sub-committee that I spoke about earlier—is about how do we make sure that those differences in Wales are reflected in the data and reflected in the targets that are set. hefin david am: Cabinet Secretary, are you in favour of more university mergers? kirsty williams am: I wouldn't use the word 'agnostic', but what I'm in favour of is a healthy, strong and sustainable HE sector. If individual institutions wish to collaborate or, indeed, go further to a formal merger then, obviously, that is a matter for them. We're not pursuing or urging a policy of mergers, but, if individual institutions feel that is of benefit to them and their students, obviously, we would have an interest in that and making sure that they were robust plans, but that's a matter for individual institutions. kirsty williams am: Well, again, what HEFCW are interested in is a sustainable HE sector that is strong but, as I said, I do not have a burning desire or a set policy to try and pursue mergers. The reason I say it is because I was kind of on the inside when Cardiff Metropolitan University was under pressure from the then Minister to merge with the University of Glamorgan and Newport. You had the University and College Union and the Minister pushing it; the vice-chancellor of Cardiff Met at the time very much against it. So, do you think that it's really—? You're agnostic, but do you think perhaps it's not worth the disruption that can occur to staff and students? kirsty williams am: As I said, Hefin, I have no formal policy for reconfiguration or mergers. Going back to the issue of ITE, a very interesting programme came forward from Cardiff Met and Cardiff University for their ITE provision. So, I'm all for universities and institutions working together, but there's no formal policy. If they see that there is an advantage—I would hope for the student first, and, if we put the student at the front of this process, then we would obviously have an interest in that and making sure that that was the right thing to do. hefin david am: Just to be clear, then, that's likely to be a policy for the foreseeable future as well; you're not going to change that view. kirsty williams am: I have no intentions at this stage, but 'Events, dear boy'. [Laughter.] You know, sometimes there may be a situation that I cannot foresee at this moment that would necessitate, for the benefit of students, the benefit of Wales, a merger. So, never say never, but, at this point in time, I do not foresee us changing that policy. julie morgan am: Yes, just looking back at that time, which I remember very vividly— hefin david am: So do I. Do you feel there has been any disadvantage to Cardiff Met because that merger didn't go ahead? kirsty williams am: I, personally, am not aware of any disadvantage to Cardiff Met, but I would recognise—I would absolutely recognise—for staff and students caught up in those deliberations and those issues, then that would have had a personal impact on them. In terms of the institution going forward, I'm not aware that they are currently struggling with any disadvantage from that discussion. And, as I said, I'm really heartened by some of the really interesting collaborative work that Cardiff Met are interested in doing, and new partnerships and new collaborations between institutions, whether that be Cardiff Uni or local colleges, and I think that's to be welcomed. julie morgan am: So, following on from what Hefin said, was it worth all the fuss? kirsty williams am: Well, look, as it's turned out, we have a strong institution in Cardiff Met, and I think, rather than looking at the past, we need to look at the future. But, of course, there was some reconfiguration and we need to understand any lessons that arose out of reconfiguration, and HEFCW are currently doing some work, actually, to look at reconfiguration, the experience of reconfiguration that did happen, and were benefits realised and what are the lessons that can be learned from that process. So, they are doing a piece of work to reflect, and that will, perhaps, help inform us as we go forward. hefin david am: I'd just say—Julie Morgan was one of our heroes at the time, I've got to say. If I turn that on its head and have a look at University of South Wales, one of the concerns I'm getting from former colleagues and staff is that the Newport aspect—because it was a merger between Newport and the University of Glamorgan—has been somewhat denuded by the merger, and the amount of activity in the new Newport campus and elsewhere in Newport has been reduced by the merger. Are you aware of those concerns that staff may have? kirsty williams am: As I said, it's not for me to second-guess the judgment of previous Ministers who pursued— hefin david am: But it's happening now, . Obviously, one campus closed completely, and there are concerns about the level of activity at the new campus. And we continue to discuss with the University of South Wales and the local FE college what offer is available to the local population, but also the wider contribution that that institution can make to the rest of Wales, and we continue to have conversations with both the college and the university about utilisation of the facilities in Newport and opportunities that could be made available in Newport. hefin david am: That's interesting, because that's the first time I've heard it confirmed from the Government that those concerns that have been raised by former staff and colleagues in Newport are actually echoed by yourself, then. Clearly, going back to the point that I believe Suzy made about geographical coverage, we want to make sure that FE and HE opportunities are available for people throughout Wales, and we continue to work with providers in that area to explore what can be done to enhance the opportunities. hefin david am: And, from a financial point of view, they had £25 million for the merger. Are you satisfied that's value for money, and, at this point in the 10-year plan, that things are going as they should, with incomes being squeezed across the sector? kirsty williams am: Yes. , it's difficult, isn't it, to second-guess what would have happened, what might have happened, if the merger hadn't gone ahead, around the financial stability and sustainability of an institution. How do you prove that, if that hadn't happened, something worse or something better might have happened? It's difficult to do that and to second-guess those judgments, but, as I've said, what I am interested in—. And I can't change that decision that was made by a previous Minister—it wasn't my decision—but what I can do is to ensure that any lessons learnt, any evaluation of that particular set of circumstances, can be looked at and can help inform future policy, which is why HEFCW is doing the piece of work. When that's published, you and I will be in a better position to understand whether the aspirations of that particular merger were realised, not realised, and if we were in that situation again, could we do it better next time? hefin david am: Okay, so you'll reflect on that later. At this point in time, you don't have any concerns about the long-term sustainability of the University of South Wales. The Welsh Government's draft outline budget for 2019 states that it will continue to provide £20 million to further and higher education in 2019-20. Can you outline how this will be allocated between HE and FE and if conditions will be attached to the funding? kirsty williams am: Janet, you will have to wait until the end of the month, when the detailed, main expenditure group by main expenditure group lines of the budget are published, otherwise I will be stealing the finance Minister's thunder. There is a process by which the Welsh Government's budget is dealt with, and those details will emerge later on this month. kirsty williams am: But can I just say on conditions—? You will be aware that there are conditions attached to Government spend, both in the FE sector and in the HE sector. Those budgets will be subject to those existing arrangements; so, for instance, in the HE sector, the remit letter to HEFCW. We're— llyr gruffydd am: Can I just pick up on funding, generally? Sorry. Because, we did talk about HEFCW and part-time funding earlier, and I'm not sure that we addressed the issue of this £12.5 million cut in a specific budget line from HEFCW, because what they've done, if I understand correctly, is that they've put four priorities into one budget line, which includes part-time teaching, and cut that budget line by £12.5 million. Are you not concerned that that'll have an impact on part-time teaching, given that it's such a success story that you're proud of? kirsty williams am: HEFCW have to take cognisance of the remit letter, but then, ultimately, they are free to allocate resources as they see fit. What will drive part-time provision is the students taking it up, and universities responding to that desire and that need within their institutions. We're going to move on now to look at the parity of esteem between academic and vocational post-16 education. Welsh Government wants to achieve parity of esteem between academic and vocational education, and I think that's a very laudable aim. Higher apprenticeships are a key part of this, but Estyn's recent inspection found that only four providers from 17 were achieving good outcomes for learners. What action do you propose to take about this, to make sure that those learners have much better outcomes across the board? eluned morgan am: First of all, just to make it clear that that is very much our intention. I think we have got work to do to make sure that we do reach that parity of esteem, but let's be clear that, in relation to these higher level apprenticeships, we were concerned that, actually, we weren't doing as well, perhaps, as we should be, which is why we commissioned Estyn to look at this specifically, and what it was that we were doing well, and what we needed to improve on. One of the things that we found is that we are doing very well in relation to foundation courses in terms of attainment—we've got 83 per cent attainment levels—but if you look at that at higher level apprenticeships, then we've got 77 per cent, so what is going wrong there? But, also, it's worth underlining the fact that, actually, we're still miles ahead of England, who are only reaching levels of about 61 per cent. So, we're already doing much better than England, but we're ambitious, and we want to make sure that if we are serious about this parity of esteem, how do we get there if we're not offering the kind of quality that we'd like to see in those higher level apprenticeships? So, some of the recommendations in that report, we'll be taking up. I think we're also very keen to make sure that people don't repeat learning that they've already done. So, there are lots of these recommendations that now we'll set in motion, and I think the important thing for us then is to understand that, in relation to who's doing well and who's not doing well in the FE sector, the bulk of where that finance goes is actually doing quite well. It's pushing some of the private sector providers where we need to actually make sure that the quality is where we want it to be, and is, very importantly, matching the needs of employers. So, we've constantly got to be looking at the courses: are they responding to the needs of the market and what employers are looking for? And that means revising the offer sometimes in terms of the courses. michelle brown am: Where are the difficulties arising—? You refer to difficulties arising with the private providers. What are those difficulties? eluned morgan am: Well, some of it is about, perhaps, not giving the kind of guidance that we'd like them to give in-house. So, they're perhaps not doing the kind of on-the-job work that we'd like them to do. So, I think it's making sure that, when they're in the workplace, they are still being pushed to attain those levels. But I think it's clear that what we need to do is to also listen to what the advisory board that we've set up in relation to apprenticeships is also asking us, and we've got the Confederation of British Industry advising us on that as well. michelle brown am: Do you have a service level agreement with the private providers? eluned morgan am: Yes. , the whole thing is under a tender procedure, obviously, and we will be revising that soon. There'll be a new apprenticeship procurement process that we'll be undergoing and starting to look at that process next year. michelle brown am: Would you be willing to share the targets under the SLA with the committee? eluned morgan am: Well, I think the—. I can't see that there'd be a problem with that, so I'm sure we could do that, but I think the way to make people move, quite often, is through making sure that you put the finances where they need to be, and then they're likely to shift. And, so, I think, in responding to this Estyn report, we can then build that into the next framework. If we're going to get parity of esteem, we've got to, probably, get more investment in. Could you say why there isn't more investment in degree, and there doesn't seem to be any investment in Master's-level apprenticeships at universities? eluned morgan am: Well, I think we've got to be careful that what happens is that the state doesn't pick up what, currently, people are prepared to pay for themselves, and, so, we've got to just make sure that that balance is right. So, what's happened in England, for example, is lots of people who were previously sitting Master of business administration courses, for example, are now switching into apprenticeship programmes. So, the system—it means that, previously, they were prepared to pay and now the state is paying or the employer's playing it in a slightly different way. So, I think we've got to just be aware about how—making sure that we don't get employers passing that responsibility that, actually, they have to upskill and to uptrain their workers and pass it back on to the state, whereas, actually, they need to step up as well as employers. julie morgan am: So, how are you going to judge that? How are you going to tell when, maybe, you should start putting some money in? eluned morgan am: Well, what we are doing is we're putting money into areas where we know there are skills shortages. So, we're focusing where we want those apprenticeships—and particularly at the higher level—to be. So, that's where we'll be prioritising our funding, and that's what we're doing already. kirsty williams am: And that's for degree-level apprenticeships, not Master's. And then, in terms of getting data, could you clarify the progress on developing outcome and destination data for higher apprenticeships? Your plan seems to suggest that data won't be available until 2020-21, at the end of the programme. eluned morgan am: And that's because we're only just starting on this, and it takes a long time for people to complete an apprenticeship. So, we won't have anybody going from the higher level apprenticeship into a destination until around 2021, so there's no point in measuring that until that point. And then, can you tell us when you'll publish Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol's new operational plan to develop post-16 Welsh-medium provision, which was presented during July, and clarify if the plan requires additional funding? eluned morgan am: So, there is a report that was published in July, and we are waiting for the operational actions from that report to be published, probably within the next month. In terms of the implementation of that programme, some of that journey has already begun, so they're not waiting for the report to—. We're not waiting for the actions to be very clearly set out; actually, some of that work has been done. I think what's clear, and something that's very much driving me as the Welsh language Minister, is this understanding that you reach 16 and you get this fall off a cliff in terms of the number of people who actually speak and use Welsh. So, that's the thing that we need to address, and that's why moving now into that area of further education is crucial. And the report, written by Delyth Evans, did suggest that we do need to move into this area but, actually, there wasn't necessarily a need for further funding in that area. But it may be something that we will consider, but it's something that we'll try and absorb, perhaps, from within the department. kirsty williams am: A relatively modest amount of money was being made available this year to be able to kick-start some of this work, but we are mindful of the recommendations from the Evans report. So, future allocations will have to reflect the priorities within the implementation plan, and that's not just money that goes directly to y coleg, but also trying to get better alignment between other budget lines that support the Welsh language, and making sure that all budget lines that could help on this agenda are aligned to the recommendations and the implementation report. Just on coleg cenedlaethol's extended remit, have you had—? I haven't read the Evans report, but is there anything in there about the role of increased use of Welsh in adult community learning, for example? That's a further education pot, isn't it? eluned morgan am: Yes, it is, and we are very much in touch with adult community learning, and they are aware of the responsibilities they have in relation to the Welsh language. suzy davies am: Oh, yes, I don't mean the higher education sector that's taken over responsibility for this; I'm talking about community learning, low level, just having Welsh there. And, you know, as you mentioned yourself, post 16, people stop using it, so getting it in wherever you can as part of a strategy. They're aware of that responsibility and we— suzy davies am: They're free to choose partners, then, are they, to help them deliver that? eluned morgan am: And also to work with the new organisation that we've set up to promote the learning of Welsh, in particular, that is based in Carmarthen. So, that's something also that's being driven, and they're working closely, I think, on this. So, for instance, up in Wrexham, if a student has gone into the college to do A-levels, then they may decide to do those A-levels through the medium of English. But if they were previously in a Welsh-medium school, they are actively encouraged—indeed, persuaded—to do their Welsh baccalaureate through the medium of Welsh. So, they may be doing their A-levels in English, but if they've come from a Welsh-medium school, the college proactively seeks them out and makes sure that there is provision for them to do their Welsh bac qualification through the medium of Welsh, or, for instance, they are working very hard to form tutor groups. So, the tutor group—you might be doing your qualifications in English, but your tutor group will be a Welsh-medium tutor group, so that you are placed with other students who have come from Welsh-medium schools, and your tutor does all that tutor work through the medium of Welsh. So, there are other ways in which we can continue to help support children's linguistic ability, even if they have made a decision not to formally study their A-levels, for instance, or a course, through the medium of Welsh, and we're constantly looking at new ways. I think one particular aspect of the market—if we call it that word—that we're interested in are those students who've been to Welsh-medium schools, but at 16, perhaps, as I say, decide to go to a college. So, for instance, here in Cardiff, looking at childcare, and the opportunity—you know, there's a sector where we know we need a Welsh-medium workforce. kirsty williams am: So, again, it's trying to target those children, and track them from a previous Welsh-medium education into a college, capturing their language skills, and finding ways in which they can use them. Merthyr college—there's a Welsh-medium champion in Merthyr college actively looking for children who have come from a Welsh-medium background, and they are allocated roles as Welsh-medium champions within the college, to promote. So, there are lots of innovative ways, especially in the FE sector, that they're looking to keep children's linguistic skills relevant, and they're using them, even if they make that decision to switch the language of their tuition. My question was about community learning, where it's essentially older people who perhaps are coming back to education in a way that wasn't as formal as it was before, if I can put it like that—so we don't lose sight of them as well. I've still got an abiding worry that there's a cohort in the middle here of people who we might lose, and maybe pass on bad attitudes towards the Welsh language to their children, despite the fact that those children now have huge opportunities to absorb Welsh language skills and make the most of them. I'd like to ask about the regional skills partnership—partnerships, I should say—because they are having a direct influence now on courses and provision in FE, and with degree apprenticeships in universities as well. You, I believe, received the Graystone review back in March, so could you tell us a bit about what was in it, and what the recommendations are? eluned morgan am: So, some of the recommendations—. He did suggest that, actually, what they need to be producing is much shorter, sharper, focused reports. There was a suggestion of a lack of transparency, in terms of reporting from those regional skills partnerships, and that's obviously something now that we've undertaken to review. And there, I think, is an understanding that what we need to do now is to put in place those changes. But, on the whole, what we've done is to reinforce our commitment to the regional skills partnerships, and in particular now, through allocating £10 million to further education colleges to respond directly to the wishes and the desires of the regional skills partnerships, you can see actually the status of the regional skills partnerships has just grown significantly. So, you've seen quite a dramatic shift, I think, in the respect for regional skills partnerships over the past year. llyr gruffydd am: So, are there any recommendations in terms of governance as well— eluned morgan am: Yes. llyr gruffydd am: —because, clearly, there may have been concerns about the way that people ended up being members of the partnerships? You touched on transparency—clearly, that's an issue as well. eluned morgan am: So, on governance, I think there was an understanding that that needs to be looked at again, and that we need to get the right people around the table. And what is interesting is, I think, because it was a voluntary approach, because now people can see an outcome, we're getting different people now really showing an interest in being a part of the regional skills partnerships. So, governance is something again we're going to be addressing and following up the recommendations on in that Graystone review. Is there anything to add to that? huw morris: Well, I was just going to say, I don't see why we couldn't share the review with you. llyr gruffydd am: The normal course of action would be, of course, to have published it and then to publish a Government response. Any reason why that wasn't done? I find it quite strange that you're saying that you're actually actioning the report and you still haven't published it. There's nothing to hide here, so why wouldn't we? We're the people who commissioned the report— llyr gruffydd am: I'm the one asking the questions. huw morris: May I just say: we ask a number of people periodically to comment on what we do, and agencies we work with do the same. I don't suppose we'd anticipated there would be the interest in this issue that there is and so, as the Minister said, there's no problem that I can see with that. llyr gruffydd am: And do you have a timeline in terms of by when you want to introduce some of the reforms that you're looking at now, because of this report? eluned morgan am: Some of them have already been introduced, so we're not waiting. The transparency issue that I think there was a bit of concern about—that's already been introduced. So, it's just about making sure that people understand what is going on in these regional skills partnerships. I think that's really important— llyr gruffydd am: Well, quite, given the influence that they have now. Just another short one on the regional skills partnerships, really: how effective are they in supporting the planning and delivery of Welsh-medium provision in post-16? eluned morgan am: I think there's more we can do in relation to that. So, if you think about the care sector, for example, what we do need is more people who have those skills to speak through the medium of Welsh in the care sector. And, coming back to the point that was made earlier, what we're doing now is looking at the curriculum: to what extent can we include—? You don't have to do your whole course through the medium of Welsh, but there are aspects that would be very useful. One of the things that the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol are looking at is building the resources that will be needed in order to mainstream those into, in particular, those front-line service areas where we have a skills shortage. Cabinet Secretary, you know that this committee has taken a very keen interest in the emotional and mental health of our young people. In the summer, the English universities Minister made an announcement about the development of a new mental health charter. Is Welsh Government expecting Welsh universities to sign up to that charter or are you planning to work on your own? kirsty williams am: Thank you for raising this. I think it's really important that whilst for many, many, many young people moving away from home and starting their degree course is an incredibly exciting time and something they look forward to hugely, it can bring significant stresses with it, especially for first-year students, who, as I said, are moving away, perhaps are suddenly responsible for finances in a way they've never been responsible for, for all the day-to-day living that perhaps they've relied on other people to assist them with. So, it is right that we look at how we can support health and well-being for students, especially mental health and mental resilience. So, I very much welcome the work on the mental health charter, and HEFCW are engaged and keeping a very close eye on what's going on to see the opportunities for Welsh universities to participate in that. But this was on a recent agenda item that I had with HEFCW, and indeed with the vice-chancellors, when I met them last week, or the week before last. So, they are developing their own strategic approach to well-being and health for students, which will be underpinned by a co-created action plan with the universities themselves on supporting students with mental health problems in particular. So, the strategic approach and the action plan are being developed by HEFCW at the moment and HEFCW are also meeting with colleagues from England and Scotland to see the opportunities for a universal approach across the UK to supporting students. The universities, when I met with them recently, all shared a commitment to do better in this particular area. One, because it's the right thing to do, but, actually, stopping people from dropping out and not completing their courses obviously is of a financial benefit to the institution. So, it's actually the right thing to do for their students, they want to do it for that reason, but, actually, there is a strong financial underpinning to ensure that students complete their studies. So, it's looking at, again, each university looking at individual approaches of how better they can do that. But it's not just responding to students who become unwell, it's actually, 'What can we do to in the campus to maintain good mental health?' So, rather than just trying to fix a problem once it's occurred, it's 'What can we do?' And you'll be aware of individual institutions taking different approaches. It's not something that we dictate, but individual institutions—when they do exams, how work is assessed and marked and graded—are taking different steps to promote well-being, as well as then responding to situations where students become unwell. We do know that financial pressures can be a source of huge stress for students, so we are constantly working with the Student Loans Company to make sure that the services that they offer to people are as good as they can be, and that there are no unnecessary delays that, perhaps, put a student under pressure or give students worries about their financial situation. And I would argue our Diamond reforms, which allow students access to a living wage—for some students, completely by a grant, for some students, a combination of grant and loan, with no expectation at all that your parents will contribute, which is not the case in other places where there is an expectation of parental contribution—that actually, hopefully, addresses some of those financial worries that some students may have. But I am aware that if people are waiting for their grant or people are waiting for their payments, that can be a source of stress. Are you able to give us any indication of timescale by which you'd expect HEFCW and the individual universities to actually have this work in place? kirsty williams am: I'm not sure, but I will write to the committee and let you know. In fact, we can probably provide, from Universities Wales and from the work that's going on centrally, a list of proposals that are being undertaken. I wanted to ask you about the pay dispute, and I know that you're not the employer, because I know that's going to be the first answer— kirsty williams am: You're right, that is the first answer. dawn bowden am: But we are in a stalemate here and you clearly have an interest in making sure that this dispute is resolved quickly in the interest of the students and the reputation of the colleges et cetera, et cetera. When we've seen the teachers' pay settlement, we've seen FE settlements in England and Scotland higher than what's on the table here. And I am concerned, and I do think this is where the Welsh Government does have a role, because I am concerned that the employers seem to be using the funding issue as the reason not to have a reasonable settlement with staff. So, they've walked away from the table, they've said, 'One per cent, take it or leave it. Unless Welsh Government gives us any more money, that's the end of that.' And I'm really concerned about that, because this is potentially going to have a major impact on whether we can recruit and retain staff in FE colleges. And I look at the college in my constituency, Merthyr college—it's a tertiary college, they're providing A-level education across Merthyr and they're astounding results they've been getting as well. It's really: what more do you think you can do as a Government to try to get these parties back round the table and not allow the dispute to become a political football? eluned morgan am: Thanks very much for that. I think, first of all, you're absolutely right—this is about ColegauCymru's negotiation, but we are keeping a close eye on the situation. I think it's probably worth emphasising that the reason this has come about, or part of the reason, is because you've seen that pay settlement in relation to teachers' pay and we've had the consequential. The people actually providing the same teaching course in a different institution, you can understand why they may say, 'Something needs to change here.' The problem here is that it's about that, actually, that falls to the Welsh Government. Or at least it falls to FE colleges to fund that, and it's up to them to come up with that proposal. I think it's fair to say that we'll wait until they get further along down the line, but we are extremely aware of the sensitivities of the situation. When you say you're keeping a close eye on it, have you actually had conversations with ColegauCymru? Because I note what you just said there: 'We'll keep an eye on it and wait and see what's happening.' Well, all the unions are currently consulting. , this isn't something we want in the FE sector, clearly, so is there anything more proactive that Government could actually be doing to try to bring a resolution to this dispute? eluned morgan am: Well, we are listening and speaking to ColegauCymru, and also we're aware of what the unions are saying as well. When they come to a conclusion, and when they come to us and say, 'Look, this is the consequence and this will finish'—at this point, we have no idea where that settlement is likely to fall. Yes, we wouldn't expect you to make an announcement on this, because it's happening outside of Government, but there is a principle here, isn't there, in terms of pay equality between schoolteachers and FE? So, would you not wish to see a situation where we do have greater equality in that respect? eluned morgan am: In relation to teaching, I think it's fair to say that we would wish to see pay equality in relation to teaching, yes. You emphasise 'in relation to teaching'—my next question is that, of course, within FE establishments you have teaching staff and non-teaching staff, and if there was to be some sort of increase, then would you not expect all staff to have that? eluned morgan am: Well, let's see—that's up to ColegauCymru to negotiate and to discuss, so let's see what the outcomes are. llyr gruffydd am: Because some of the non-teaching staff are the lowest paid, as well, aren't they? So, you know—. We're aware of what the requests are from the trade union members, and we'll wait to see what they come up with before responding formally. llyr gruffydd am: Could I just briefly as well ask about pensions, because that's coming down the line, potentially, isn't it, and the impact that's going to have on FE? One college was saying it will cost them £1 million if it happens next year. Are you thinking about any steps that you could take to support them, potentially, because obviously this is coming down the line, really, isn't it? eluned morgan am: Well, I think, already, we've got the situation in relation to teachers, and again what we've seen is the consequential and the UK Government honouring that. Again, what we don't have, necessarily, is that money coming down from the UK Government for us to be able to support it in the way that we might like to. It's early days on this, but it's something, again, we're keeping an eye on. llyr gruffydd am: The fundamental question, really, is: if the money doesn't come down the line from Westminster, are you in a position to underwrite that? eluned morgan am: Well, we'll wait until we see that situation arising, but we're aware that that is an issue that we're going to have to deal with in future. lynne neagle am: In relation to the pay dispute, it's the committee's understanding that ColegauCymru's position is that, in order to meet a pay award that is commensurate with schoolteachers, an additional 3.5 per cent or £10.1 million is needed. Are you aware of that being their position? eluned morgan am: We are aware of their position, yes. hefin david am: You will have had, Cabinet Secretary, a letter from Professor Colin Riordan on 26 September regarding essay mills, in which he refers to the other letter that was sent by him and 39 vice-chancellors regarding essay mills and the fact that it's legalised cheating. In the letter—it was actually to me—that was copied to you, he says: 'We have requested the UK Government commission the QAA to publish a draft Bill by or before the beginning of the next parliamentary session. We've also requested the Department for Education give support to the establishment of a UK centre for academic integrity, which would research, analyse and combat academic misconduct. Any support that the Welsh Government can provide in this regard will also be appreciated, so I'm copying this letter to the Cabinet Secretary for Education.' Can you just give me your opinions on that, please? kirsty williams am: I think 'legalised cheating' is a polite way of describing what goes on. My officials have been in touch with their counterparts in the UK Government to see if we can co-ordinate a UK approach, which I think is necessary. I don't think there's any merit in us trying to do this on our own; it would be pointless. I hope that we can agree a formal approach as quickly as possible, and I will take every opportunity—. We're trying to establish a meeting with the UK Minister for HE before Christmas, and I will take every opportunity that I can to ensure that we can take some very, very strong action in this regard. I want people who attend our universities and who work hard to achieve the grades that they get not to be disadvantaged by people who look to find an easy way out and are not willing to put—. I think it undermines the individual effort of individual students who are doing the right things, as well as the integrity of our system. I'm proud of the quality of the system that we have in the Welsh HE sector, and I want that maintained. And in addition to the specifics regarding the quality assurance agency and the proposed centre for academic integrity, let's be clear: what we're talking about it outlawing those websites that offer to write essays for cash. [Laughter.] My understanding is— hefin david am: Well, they get through the system and they guarantee—. The websites, and I've experienced this, and I mentioned it in First Minister's questions— kirsty williams am: You did. hefin david am: The websites say to you, 'Unless you tell anyone, you won't get caught', and students are believing that. kirsty williams am: Absolutely, and, unlike you, I have no experience of this myself— hefin david am: Well, I have experience of it. [Laughter.] kirsty williams am: I'm so old, Hefin, that such internet sites didn't exist when I was a student. [Laughter.] But, you know, I'm sure you listened to it too: a recent article, on a radio station, where, actually, it was an experiment just like you did—a student deliberately went through this process to expose, but, actually, what they got in return wasn't even very good. It was a particularly poor essay on the portrayal of women in Victorian literature, so they weren't even getting very good value for their money. [Laughter.] But, clearly, this is a terrible and abhorrent practice in our system, and, as I said, I will do everything that I can to work with colleagues across the United Kingdom to find a solution to this. If I thought it would help if we did it on our own, we could do that, but it won't help if we act unilaterally. hefin david am: And just—final question—with regard to the representations you've made, do you feel that the UK Government is open to this course of action? kirsty williams am: Well, officials are the ones who have had those direct, face-to-face conversations, rather than me. Huw, would you like to comment? huw morris: We haven't had anything formally, but I understand from what I've heard in England that there is an interest to do something. Whether that will take the form of a Bill in the timescale you've outlined, I'm not sure, but as the Minister said, we'll be exploring that with officials through the ministerial meetings. Well, can I thank you all for attending and for answering all our questions? As usual, you'll have a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you very much for your time. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education regarding eligibility criteria for free school meals. Paper to note 2: a letter from the Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care on the Childcare Funding (Wales) Bill. Paper to note 3: also from that Minister, which is his response to the Constitutional and Legislative Affairs Committee on the Bill. And the final paper to note is from Mind Cymru regarding the task and finish group on a whole-school approach to mental health, and I will update Members on that when we go into private. Happy to note those? Item 4, then: can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.<doc-sep>I've received apologies for absence from Siân Gwenllian, and I'm very pleased to welcome Helen Mary Jones, who is substituting for Siân today. Can I ask whether Members want to declare any interests, please? Can I just, then, place on record that I have got a son who was about to do A-levels, so is affected by the exam decision? We'll move on, then, to our substantive item today, which is an evidence session with the Welsh Government around the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on education in Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Minister for Education; Steve Davies, who is director of the education directorate; Huw Morris, who is the group director, skills, higher education and lifelong learning; and Rob Orford, who is the chief scientific adviser for health. We know that this is a really difficult and pressurised time for everyone, and we appreciate your attendance. As you know, it's not usually my practice to do that, but I think it is important today. COVID-19 coronavirus is one of the most significant issues that the Welsh Government and the people of Wales have dealt with in recent times. But I would like to assure you that our aim, and my aim, and my main concern as the education Minister is to protect all staff and pupils in our schools and other educational settings. Public health is clearly the priority here, but that does not change our belief that no child should miss out on any education, unless absolutely necessary. So, the decision to close all schools from tomorrow for statutory education provision was not taken lightly, but I believe it was necessary, given the advice and recommendations that we had received from a public health perspective and the situation that was developing on the ground. They will help support those most in need, including people involved in the immediate response to the coronavirus outbreak, and I'm working with my colleagues in the Cabinet, with Government officials and our partners in local government to develop and finalise these plans. The key areas that we're looking at are supporting and safeguarding the vulnerable and ensuring continuity of learning. I can confirm that all maintained schools in Wales already have access to a range of digital tools that can support distance learning through the world-class Hwb digital learning platform, including virtual classrooms and video-conferencing facilities. A guide on what tools are available and how schools can use them has been developed and is being promoted widely. Yesterday, I announced that, whilst there are no easy choices, we have agreed that the best way forward is not to proceed with the summer exam series. Learners due to sit these exams will be awarded a fair grade to recognise their work, drawing on a range of information that is available, and I will announce further details shortly, but I felt it necessary to give early certainty to students and to staff. I would like to put on record my thanks to everyone working in education settings for the hard work that they have put in over the last few months in dealing with the virus and ensuring that pupils have been able to continue to learn. We need to continue to do this work together, as we face the continuing challenges posed by the coronavirus. We'll go to questions from Members now, and I've got some questions from Dawn Bowden. Can I thank you, Kirsty, for your statement and the really difficult decisions that you've been having to make? You've already indicated in your statement this morning that these decisions are not taken lightly, and we understand that that is the case across Government. You've outlined a little bit further there in your statement to us this morning about the new purpose. I take from what you're saying that you haven't really developed that yet in terms of exactly what that is going to look like. Is there anything else you can tell us about that at the moment and how you might staff the schools in those particular areas? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Dawn. So, you're absolutely right, our priority now is to operationalise, with colleagues in local government and schools, a practical response. And I have to say, we're working to timescales that I would have hoped to have avoided, but given the fact that we're having to make these decisions quite quickly, I hope that you will understand that perhaps where we start on Monday might change when we have more time and more opportunities to develop programmes going forward. Steve will be able to give you more details of the practical work that has already been going on, but our expectation will be that schools will be playing an important part in providing safe and secure places for children of those on the front-line response to dealing with the coronavirus to attend, and work is already under way with local authorities and individual schools on what that will look like for the emergency situation on Monday. Our other priority is indeed free school meals, and, again, where we eventually end up might be a different place to where we are on Monday. Again, we're responding to the emergency situation that there will be families that were expecting a free school meal on Monday, and, again, individual schools and local authorities are developing those plans at pace to be able to provide an emergency response as we work out a longer term plan to deal with the situation. The same thing also goes for additional learning needs, and attending to the needs of that particular group of learners. I had the opportunity to meet with the First Minister and Andrew Morgan, the leader of the Welsh Local Government Association, yesterday to talk about what local government could do, and what they were already doing. Those plans in some places are already quite developed, and are now working at pace, but I hope you will understand that where we start on Monday is the emergency response, and that work will develop as we go forward. But, Steve, perhaps you could—? Because Steve was the one making all those phone calls and doing the practical operational stuff, rather than me. steve davies: In short, the new purpose is to meet the needs of particular groups of children and young people. In some cases, some of the response to supporting free school meals, in the short term in particular, we may use the schools as part of that, and I'm certain that will happen in some cases. Now, there is still work to be done on identifying exactly the categories of key workers, but I think it's really encouraging that in my discussions yesterday—I spoke with all 22 directors of education, and the examples we're picking up in their work with schools is they're already ahead of the curve in working with schools. They're vulnerable sometimes in terms of education other than at school, vulnerable in terms of mental health, and for those children, as well as having an experience that we want to be planned, some have compared it to a snow day, particularly on Monday, when you're putting something together in the short term, but it will not be a formal curriculum that those children would normally go through. So, the range of activities—some will be focused on educational activities, some will be cultural, some will be sporting, and that plan will be developed on the basis of the age range of children, which in some cases may go from extremely young children up to those at the age of 16 in our all-through schools, but there will be a planned set of activities to cater for those children. What we are doing currently—I have staff back at Cathays Park who are in touch and working with directors of education to ensure that schools over the next two days will have been able to identify, at least at the earlier stage, in terms of health workers, the type and numbers of people. There are already schools who have informed us, and local authorities, of their plans for these activities to be starting next week, which is quite amazing, actually, given where we are. But we are expecting, and we're writing to schools today, that during the course of next week, headteachers to be in schools, and with their staff, taking into consideration the health guidance as to which staff should or should not be in, and in that period from next Monday through the two-week period, to Easter, we expect staff to be both planning for delivery post Easter, but also, as I said, building on and reflecting the good practice that's already in place for schools that have engaged in activities, and I'm sure a number of them will be inviting and enabling those children to come in on Monday. So, Monday will be a challenge for some, and not all will be delivering it, but we will be working so that we can get as much as possible delivered for those groups over the next two weeks, and particularly to have resilient programmes post Easter for the groups of children in those three categories that I said. Can I just clarify one thing? One of the identified vulnerable groups would clearly be children on the at-risk register. kirsty williams am: In our discussions, we have asked local government to be working with the social services departments and individual schools to identify those children who may be in that situation. We know that, for some children, being at school is part of their safeguarding arrangements, and obviously we will need to be able to respond to those needs. steve davies: I wrote specifically yesterday to all directors of education to be assured that, for those children, the register is up to date and the plans are in place. I'm working with Albert Heaney my colleague, the director for social services, who is meeting with the 22 directors of social services today to look to ensure that we are joined up in ensuring none of these children fall through the gap. hefin david am: A very quick and simple question: how are you going to communicate this to parents? There's a bigger picture and it's changing all the time, as you said. The most helpful thing I've seen is that Public Health Wales have a single website with information regarding the wider issue of the virus. How will this then be cascaded to schools, because there's obviously a time lag? So, have you considered how this is going to be communicated directly to parents? kirsty williams am: We're using all of our platforms of communication to get these messages across. So, we're using the more informal methods of communication, but are relying on a systematic approach via individual directors and through to individual schools. We're looking, as quickly as we can, to have a frequently asked education questions page that we can update. It is impossible for the communications team here to be able to respond individually to every single person that is sending Facebook messages and sending tweets, so the best way we can do that is to collate the types of questions people are asking and then to be able to have a frequently updated question and answer page to try to respond to that. With regard to parents, for instance, we're aware of schools that have already sent a questionnaire out last night to parents saying, 'Do you consider yourself to be a key worker? Do you work in the NHS? Please let us know by tomorrow so we can put arrangements in place for your children.' So, schools are already taking the initiative and having those conversations with parents about what their needs will be. It won't be perfect by Monday, because we're working to such constrained timescales. We also have to think about systems that look at what might the epidemic do and have systems of resilience that may work next week, given the situation we find ourselves in with public health advice at the moment. Therefore, have we got a system that will be resilient in those circumstances? These are some of the challenges that we're having to grapple with. So, as I said, what happens on Monday might look very different to where we are if schools are still off in May. suzy davies am: Yes, just on this question of vulnerable children, I'm just wondering how much discretion teachers are going to have in including individual children who may not be obviously under social services' care or on a risk register or whatever. Teachers know their pupils and, very sensitively, they could include people who may not be obviously in need. kirsty williams am: We would absolutely respect the professional judgment of individual headteachers to be able to have those conversations with their directors. As you said, quite rightly, they are the individuals who know their children best and know which children, perhaps, will need this extra support. The second part of my question is: there were going to be Easter holidays anyway, weren't there? What was going to happen about free-school-meal children during that period? Has that gone out of the window now, the normal holiday provision for children? Because that's not there normally, is it, except in separate— kirsty williams am: We do find ourselves in a strange situation. My understanding is what we're trying to work to is that we would have ongoing provision and not to make some strange, 'You get this for two weeks, then you don't get it for two weeks, and then you're back in.' My understanding is, in England, that is what they're going to do. We're trying to create a system where it will be seamless and it will not necessarily matter that two of those weeks were formally holidays. It won't matter to those nurses and doctors who will need to be in work during those weeks. helen mary jones am: Just briefly, building on Suzy's question, one particular group of children and young people that I hope will be eligible to be included in the potentially vulnerable category is young carers. For some of them, they may not be able to come into school because the people they're caring for may have to be excluded because of their conditions. But I think that, for other young carers, coming to school is an absolute lifeline, because they're working at home. So, I don't know if it's appropriate for you to specifically mention those in discussions with local authorities, but it's a group of young people who, again, may not be vulnerable in other ways, but because of their caring responsibilities they may need school. And the other group—and this, I suppose, goes back to Suzy's point about teachers knowing their young people—is the children who may be living in situations where they're at risk of witnessing domestic abuse. Again, these may very well not be children who are in any formal contact with social services, but being at home may be really not a good place for them to be. So, again, I'd put in an appeal for that to be something that perhaps can be raised with schools. If a teacher is worried about what a child's circumstances are like at home, whether they can be, as you said, Kirsty, included as one of the—. They may not be formally identified, but if the teacher knows that they're at risk, or there is an instinct that they're at risk, they might be able to be included in children who are allowed to take advantage of this special provision you're making at this difficult time. We have to do that in the context of what is deliverable, and we also have to do that in the context of the public health advice that we are receiving as well. We know that the ability for school closures to make a contribution to that diminishes if we have significant children in school still. So, we will take these issues into consideration, but remembering this is part of an epidemic mitigation plan. This is a rapidly-evolving problem and the scale is something that we haven't seen in 100 years, and so we're having to evolve and iterate things as we go. We've all got a role to play, and schools certainly have a significant role to play in breaking those chains of transmission. We need to send a really clear message that you're all part of the solution, and the things that you do by distancing yourselves from your friends and your family are really important for us to get on top of this outbreak. helen mary jones am: I'm sure that that's true, but I'm sure that we wouldn't be wanting a child who's in a very pressured environment with perhaps a very difficult relationship between mum and dad—. janet finch-saunders am: Thank you, Chair, and good morning, Minister, and your team. Can I just put on record my thanks for all that you're having to endure at this moment? I think it's fair to say you have the support of Assembly Members and, indeed, our communities. Now, the question I have: if Cylch Meithrin have to close, where will they get money from to pay their staff? Because, currently, thankfully, there's support for businesses. lynne neagle am: Janet, we're not doing Cylch Meithrin at the moment; we are sticking with schools, as we discussed in advance. dawn bowden am: Can I just get some clarity, Steve, around what you were saying in terms of next week? Because I think the practical applications of this—and I understand that you don't know all of this yet, I understand that—the practical applications are what is coming to us, obviously, with constituents saying, 'Well, what's going to happen to that?' Just so that I can be clear, are you saying that, at this stage, every headteacher will be in school on Monday, as will all their staff? steve davies: Within the scope of the guidance in terms of their health, the expectation—and this will be conveyed in letters by the Minister today, to be made clear—is that they are closing for the majority of pupils, but our expectation within the guidance is that the headteacher with their staff will be coming in; for some to start the delivery of what we just described, but that will probably be small numbers, but more importantly to plan to ensure that, after the formal Easter period, which is school holidays, the schools are geared to cater for the range of pupils that we've been discussing. dawn bowden am: So, would you anticipate—again, I know this is all a bit 'if and when', and it depends on the changing nature of the advice, but from what you're saying, I think we can probably anticipate that, as we go forward, there will probably be fewer schools opening and operable—that we may be moving those children on to fewer sites. So, we already know that one of our local authorities already has identified a strategic pattern of schools that they will want to operate in this way. That local authority has already chosen those locations, and is already having communications with how they will then staff those centres. That, I expect, in the longer term, will be the nature of the provision that we will get to. The local authorities are best placed to understand what is the best, pragmatic use of the resources that they have available; and of course those resources, primarily, are human beings. So, we've talked a lot this morning in the context of teaching staff, teaching assistants, but we're also having discussions with local authorities, and I met with the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services this week, to look at deploying youth workers, to look to be deploying other staff that the local authority may employ, like sports development officers. Welsh Government will be talking with a range of our partners who perhaps their normal activities can't continue at the moment, but actually have personnel who want to add to this effort, who want to be able to be part of a provision going forward in the longer term, to be able to provide a great place for children to be. Let's think about it, in these worst of times, we're asking parents to leave their children so that they can go and do essential work, and some of that essential work is putting themselves at risk, potentially. And we want to give those parents confidence that, when they leave their child with us, that child will receive something really worthwhile, and they can direct all of their attention to doing their job. Janet, have you got a supplementary on schools now, not on early years settings? janet finch-saunders am: I lost the signal before, so it's a little bit confusing at this end, so bear with me. Just in terms of the closure of schools, I have been asked by teachers what does new purpose—you may have covered it, but bear in mind [Inaudible.]—mean in practice. And also, they're already asking what will next—? I know you said earlier that next week could look and probably will look significantly different than this week, but what can they expect to be happening next week in terms of this new purpose work? lynne neagle am: We've covered that, Janet. kirsty williams am: First of all, Janet, I just want to say thank you very much for your kind comments. lynne neagle am: I think you're having trouble hearing us, aren't you, so I think—? janet finch-saunders am: No, I heard that loud and clear. lynne neagle am: But I think you missed the earlier comments, when we went into some detail on the new purpose of schools. dawn bowden am: Just in relation to special schools and how they will fit into this new purpose arrangement. We know, again, that some of these children are our most vulnerable and they are some of our most pressurised families. We'll be having discussions about what arrangements can be made for those children within their own usual settings. Can I give a shout out to the work of Rhondda Cynon Taf in this regard, who are already doing some excellent work with regard to how they can keep in touch with their children who usually would attend their special schools. steve davies: I think special schools have already been hit by this challenge, because a significant proportion of their children, because of their conditions, have not been coming to school, they've been isolated. But the principle we've used there is, actually, even if it's a minority of children who go to those schools and are vulnerable, they deserve and need that support through the school. But similarly, even in special schools, there will be children whose parents will be key workers, so we would expect them to apply that same principle. Just quickly in response to the earlier question, while we may bring some groups of children into separate schools, we’ll have to continue with the principle of keeping social distance and any provision for a child in a special school in a different setting would be unlikely, given the nature of the special school, so we would look to cater for that within the original school. It’s likely, because I know it has already happened, that some schools might actually close before Monday. Are you quite happy that headteachers still have the discretion to do that, if they feel that’s the right thing to do? kirsty williams am: In this situation, the discretion of the head still remains. As I said, we will be communicating with all schools today about our expectations, if at all possible, to have schools open for staff to do some of this planning and to be able to respond to these priority needs that we've just talked about. steve davies: The rationale of headteachers for closing schools up to now has been that they can't cope with the safety of the children. I think, moving forward, it's unlikely that that would be a rationale that headteachers would want to use for not engaging and planning for the future. dawn bowden am: We're only talking about one more day, now, anyway, aren't we? So, just in terms of confirmed cases in schools, is your view at this stage that, if there is a confirmed case in a school, once that school has been deep-cleaned, it can reopen again? kirsty williams am: If we had a confirmed case in a school, then all the usual mechanisms arranged by Public Health Wales would kick in at that point. I know that kind of crosses over into somebody else's portfolio as well, but I think we know that. Certainly what I've seen, and I'm sure this is true elsewhere as well, we've seen nurseries closing down because the parents are actually taking the children out of those nurseries. I've got one in particular, there are kids from the ages of 6 to 12 years in there, and the parents are taking them out. They've got 30 staff there, catering for 200 children and no children to care for and the organisation, at this stage, is unable to claim on their insurance for the ongoing payment of those staff wages. Is there any advice that we can give to people in that situation at this stage? kirsty williams am: Sure. As you say, many of these settings are businesses—people's businesses and they play a hugely important role and it's a very worrying time for them. We have said that we will continue to pay for childcare, delivered under the childcare offer even when a child is unable, or a parent is unwilling, to take up that place. So, if that setting is receiving a childcare payment from the Welsh Government as part of our childcare offer, that will be paid, regardless of whether that child attends or not. And I know that we're also working with local authorities to ensure a similar position on Flying Start childcare and early education. It's also important that childcare settings will be able to apply for the various packages of support that are being made available by my colleague, Ken Skates. hefin david am: Yes, I'd just like to turn that around from the parents' point of view. With schools closing, there are a lot of parents then losing 10 hours of free childcare, but from a settings point of view, they'll continue to be able to receive, for the time being, the nursery care. kirsty williams am: Yes, so the decision that has been taken by my colleague, Julie Morgan, is that settings should stay open at the moment unless public health changes. Again, the issue is that we know that that childcare is vital to many families, especially—and we're particularly concerned about those individuals who are trying to help us overcome and solve these problems. If you have any specific questions about that, we'll be happy to take them back to Julie Morgan. janet finch-saunders am: Is this the Cylch question? lynne neagle am: Yes, please. Yes, just basically, Cylch Meithrin, there are concerns—[Interruption.] lynne neagle am: We've lost Janet. kirsty williams am: I think if the issue is about funding for Cylch Meithrin, these are not normal circumstances. As a Welsh Government, we will take every step to provide continuity of funding, if at all possible. We will overcome this, and when we overcome this situation we find ourselves in, we will need those childcare settings, we will need those private businesses and we will need our Cylch Meithrin to be there to respond and to be able to go on doing the job that they usually do for us. And if there is any way that we can, as a Government, ensure that that happens by carrying on funding things, even if they are not able to run, all usual—[Inaudible.]— around service-level agreements are off. [Laughter.] But, you know, we will not undermine businesses and voluntary provision like Cylch by withdrawing Welsh Government funding. lynne neagle am: If we can move on to talk about exams, obviously you made the announcement yesterday. I completely understand that everything is a very fast-moving situation, but, as you know, there are a lot of questions that people have about young people who've put a lot of work in. Are you able to tell us any more today? In particular, have you got any idea about timescales now for setting out what the approach will be to handling the lack of summer exams? kirsty williams am: Yes, it is a devastating decision to have to have been taken, but I have done so on the very, very clear and unambiguous advice from Qualifications Wales. What was most important to them was that I made an early decision and I did not equivocate on what would happen for the exams. I was able to make an informal decision at that meeting, and then, of course, there is a formal process that we have to go through. That, now, allows Qualifications Wales and the exam board to operationalise that decision, and they will be communicating with schools as quickly as possible about what schools will need to do to ensure that the systems that they will now put in place can work. We are trying, as far as we can, as I understand it, to be able to mirror as closely as possible the usual results day, for instance. It might not be possible, because, of course, we're dealing with a situation that requires human beings to be involved in it, and those human beings could find themselves unwell. So, our best attempts will be to maintain the normal rhythm of an exams day in August, but that has to be caveated by the fact that we're dealing with difficult circumstances. But, the WJEC and Qualifications Wales will be making urgent communications to exam centres to explain what will need to happen next. janet finch-saunders am: Yes, I think I raised it yesterday, Kirsty, but you were receiving loads of questions. I'd just ask for some further clarification about coursework, because only 30 per cent of that is done. Years 11 and 13, typically, in my case they're what's been raised with me—do you have any advice for them? kirsty williams am: Okay, so, all exams are cancelled, but year 11 and year 13 will be given a grade—I think that's a distinction that people need to be aware of. That is because those years and those grades are gateway qualifications, and they are points of movement in the education system. So, it's really important for those students that they are not disadvantaged in any way by not being able to receive a grade that helps them to make a decision as a qualifying step into what they will do next, whether that be university, whether that be a degree apprenticeship or whether that be going into sixth form, into a college, into an apprenticeship or into some work-based learning opportunities. That's why we have to focus on those children, because for them, it is absolutely critical that we do. We are at an advantage in Wales, can I say? Because of the nature of our examination system, those students already have a lot of externally assessed work that we can use as a basis to move forward on. Our year 11s, if they're doing triple science, they've already done 40 per cent of their paper, so we're very fortunate. Because of the structures that we have got in our qualification system, there is already lots and lots of externally-verified work that we can use, alongside, potentially, teacher evaluation of students as well. What will also be important is that these children have confidence in those qualifications, and so we will be looking at a modulated arrangement within Wales, and I know that Qualifications Wales are discussing with their counterparts across the UK a modulated system across the UK. So, actually, we can make sure that our standards are maintained by actually having that modulation across the UK. So, we know that those children never have to worry about the rigour that has gone into determining that grade. You'll know that the National Union of Students has suggested that black and minority ethnic children and children from the working class, on the whole, don't do as well, in terms of their assessment by their own teachers. We also know, of course, that boys tend to do better in exams, and girls tend to do better at coursework, for whatever reason that is. So, just to ask you at this early stage to build in those considerations around potential unconscious bias into that overall system that you're talking about. And, of course, you are right to say that, because we have got some elements of external moderation here, those factors may be less for us in Wales than they might for colleagues in England. kirsty williams am: Yes, I think we are starting at a different base, thank goodness. As I said, students will have done unit 1 papers last year if they're GCSE students. I have every confidence that they and the WJEC will come up with a very comprehensive way of establishing those grades, but I have to say, in some ways, I have to step back now, because you would not expect me, in normal circumstances, to dictate to the WJEC how much percentage goes for that, and how much percentage is allocated for that; that would not be appropriate for a Minister. My job is to make the decision on the examinations on the basis of having confidence that what can be put in place is fair and is equitable, and I have confidence that that will be the case. One is, obviously, pupils are being asked to work at home as well now, some of whom will be doing GCSE and A-level courses. So, there's just a question, generally, from me— because we're encouraging these kids to carry on working—how that will be accommodated by Qualifications Wales, I guess, in this modulation process. It may be that your at-home work will be of a higher standard or a lower standard than a teacher would be expecting. Secondly, you mentioned the AS-levels, of course, as being of value at the moment, but we've got people in Year 12 who now won't be doing their ASs. Is there any steer at this stage about what they will be expected to do? Will they be doing two sets of exams next year, for example? Or is AS just off the table? In which case, how are the A2s going to be calculated in due course? And then, finally from me, we do have some vocational qualifications that are up for examination as well—your BTECs, and I think it's the Association of Accounting Technicians, which is a lot of computer-based learning—which is due to be examined within three weeks. I appreciate that you may not have the answer just at the moment, but are they off as well is the question, I guess? kirsty williams am: With regard to AS-levels—no final decision has been made for exactly how those students will be treated. There are a range of options that could be used, but again, we will want to be thinking about student well-being, fairness and equity in that regard, and I will update Members as soon as I have received definitive advice from Qualifications Wales around that, and that hasn't happened yet. With regard to other types of qualifications, as you will be aware, the vast majority of BTECs is a modular, continually-assessed piece of work, and we would have every expectation that BTECs will be able to be awarded, but clearly, those conversations are with awarding bodies—they tend to be UK awarding bodies, rather then necessarily our WJEC exam board—and those conversations are ongoing. But I have every expectation that those qualifications will be awarded and, of course, because of their nature there's even more evidence of continued assessment. Huw, I don't know if there's anything else that you would like to add about those types of qualifications. I don't have a definitive answer for the ATT qualification, but we can look into that and come back to you. suzy davies am: Well, I've just had a constituent ask, so that would be very helpful. suzy davies am: —is that going to count towards the assessments, overall assessments? kirsty williams am: Well, potentially, as I said. What will be absolutely necessary is that Qualifications Wales and the WJEC will be able to give absolute clarity and simplicity around how those grades will be arrived at, because parents, teachers and students will want to know that, and my expectation is on them to be able to clearly communicate what elements will and will not be taken into consideration when awarding those grades. lynne neagle am: And, just before we move on, have the universities across the UK indicated that they are content with this approach going forward—content to accept students on this basis? kirsty williams am: Certainly. There have been discussions with universities and UCAS, of course, that this also has a bearing on. And the views of university and how university terms might be impacted is one of the ways and one of the reasons that we've factored in to making these decisions. Those discussions with universities are ongoing, aren't they, Huw? huw morris: Yes. So, we've been in regular conversation with Universities Wales and through them with Universities UK and we've received every indication that the approach that's been adopted here has been welcomed by the institutions. Those conversations will continue as we work through the practicalities of how the gradings that are awarded are going to feed through into university admissions decisions and enrolment. Well, we've got some questions now from Suzy on the potential closures of colleges and universities. I appreciate you've already indicated there are lots of ongoing conversations, but my understanding is whether colleges or universities close is pretty much still at their own discretion. We're going to be asking some questions on emergency legislation shortly, which may impact on the answer you can give today, but what sort of conversations are you having with FE and HE at the moment about how they decide? kirsty williams am: Well, you're absolutely right. As we often say in this committee, universities are autonomous institutions—a status that they guard jealously and we would never want to question. Universities have been making the decision to move as much of their learning online as they possibly can and we continue to have conversations with them. Colleges are in a similar position, looking to do as much as they can to be able to provide continuity of learning via distance learning methods, and the Bill, potentially, does give us more powers of intervention in both the FE and the HE sector. suzy davies am: I might ask you about that in a minute, because I don't even know what the Bill says yet. kirsty williams am: Huw, I don't know if there's anything you want to add. huw morris: No—just to confirm what's been said and also to add in that independent training providers, similarly autonomous, like colleges and universities, have been moving in the same direction. We've been very impressed with the maturity and forward-planning that's been adopted by all of those institutions and their representative bodies. We've got consistency in the approach and a common desire, and investment in moving towards online support for students. Certainly, colleges have indicated, as with schools, that, for the most vulnerable learners, they'll have something in place that might permit attendance on an individual basis. huw morris: That's my understanding, yes, and, again, we've been in regular conversation with them about that. My understanding is that they're going to spend the next week working through the detail of how that will work for the institutions. You indicated that any Welsh Government support's going to stay, whatever the circumstances are—in your portfolio. helen mary jones am: Just further to EMA, of course, at the moment, that has an attendance qualification, doesn't it? And you don't get your EMA if you don't turn up. Should we take from your last answer that that attendance qualification doesn't apply anymore? kirsty williams am: Yes. They can't turn up if the institution is not open, and that's not their fault. helen mary jones am: No, but that is something that's been a worry, so that's really encouraging to hear. Thinking about students in higher education, can you give an assurance that student maintenance payments will continue as normal? Is that the intention? kirsty williams am: Yes. And have you given any special ministerial instruction to Student Finance Wales on processing applications for support or changes of circumstances, or is that something that's kind of ongoing at the moment? kirsty williams am: Those conversations are ongoing with the Student Loans Company. Individual student circumstances could well change and our expectation would be that the Student Loans Company would respond to that. All I would say is, just to remind people: people who work for the Student Loans Company are no more able to resist this disease than anybody else. There will undoubtedly in some cases be really practical challenges to service delivery, simply because organisations could be losing staff because of illness or the need to self-isolate or because they are reacting to social-distancing messages from the Government. So, I think we just need to bear that in mind: that these organisations are doing their best, but, if they are badly affected by staff numbers being off because of the virus, then I hope people will give them due consideration. helen mary jones am: Yes, that makes sense, of course, because we've been told that universities won't be able to entirely close, because there will be students who can't go home— kirsty williams am: It is their home. What discussions have you been having with the sector to make sure that those students' basic needs are met, that there's still food, shelter, whatever they need? kirsty williams am: Well, obviously, universities have a duty of care to those students that find themselves in those circumstances, and every conversation that Huw's been having would suggest that universities are well aware of their need to do that. huw morris: We instituted a monitoring process very early on in the onset of the disease, not least because a number of institutions have campuses and activities in China and other parts of south-east Asia. And so, as the disease has progressed, we've seen lessons being learned from the support for students who are in isolation coming from there to the UK, and I am assured that the universities here in Wales have got processes in place that support those learners. And on this specifically—last question from me— have you considered whether students might need to be refunded some of their tuition fees, should the academic year not be completed? huw morris: So, as the institutions move more and more of their material and some of their assessment online, clearly, there are lessons that will need to be taken on board. There are established quality assurance and enhancement procedures in institutions to enable the tutors and other supporters to make sure that that material meets their needs. There are appeals mechanisms and feedback mechanisms through the students union and through course committees and other things within institutions to make sure that any concerns or incomplete work are addressed. Failing those institutional mechanisms, there is a UK-wide system through the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for students to take forward any concerns that they have. So, we're confident that that system will be robust and will make sure that the students are getting a course of learning that meets their needs. But thinking just a little bit more broadly about the mental health and well-being of staff and learners across a range of educational settings, or, indeed, young people who can't access educational settings, what considerations are you giving to how that mental health and well-being might be supported through what is an incredibly difficult time for everyone? kirsty williams am: Yes, that is correct. So, our expectation would be that during a prolonged period of closure—which I think, if we're honest, we have to acknowledge is what we're looking at—we would expect school staff—well-being staff, for instance in school—to be doing check-ins—phone check-ins, potentially, or FaceTime check-ins, with students, just to keep in touch with them as we go forward. We'll be looking to promote amongst young people a range of online facilities that are available—so, for instance, Meic website—so, looking to use a variety of platforms. I'm concerned, of course, that for some children their access to their counsellor is via their school. We know that, and we're just double checking the capacity of online counselling that already exists—online counselling tools that children already use because they don't want to go to the counsellor in the school and be seen in the school corridor going to the counsellor. They're already using those online methods and we expect to be able to continue, as far as possible, those kinds of mechanisms where children can have their mental health needs and their questions answered, and their worries. One of the reasons, again, that we wanted to keep schools going as long as possible—and teachers have been working so hard to do that—is because that routine of going into school and that normality is one that we've needed and wanted to maintain. Children will have worries about their own health; they'll have worries about the health of their parents and their grandparents; they will be consuming potentially media and news stories that have empty supermarket shelves. So, we need to understand, and I think we will also have to recognise, that this support will have to be ongoing once we're back to normal, and we will have to continue to look to support children in the longer term who will have lived through this experience. They are incredibly resilient, and they have been the champions of some of our public health messages. They are so much better and so much more compliant on the whole 'washing your hands' and things like that than even adults have been. So, they are incredibly resilient, but we also have to recognise that it can be a really worrying time for them. helen mary jones am: Can I just—? Just a supplementary to that—you've mentioned already, Kirsty, the importance of youth services, and, particularly thinking voluntarily youth services, you've given the commitment, when were talking about Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin earlier, that services that are part-funded by grants through the Welsh Government, for example, thinking of the national youth voluntary service—will those be able to be maintained even if settings have had to be shut as well? Obviously, local authorities will have to make their own decisions about whether youth settings are kept open, but, in terms of the direct support from Welsh Government, can organisations that receive it rely on that through this time? kirsty williams am: No formal decision has been made, but if people are in receipt of a Government grant from my department to run a service and that service can no longer run because of the public— helen mary jones am: Because it's not safe. kirsty williams am: —because it's not safe to do so, I do not foresee that we will be turning around and saying, 'We'll have our money back, thank you very much.' lynne neagle am: Okay, thank you. The normal rules of engagement have to change and, those organisations, we'll need them to be providing youth services for children when we are back to normal, and we wouldn't want to do anything that would undermine their ability to do that. When we're trying to maintain services for vulnerable children and for front-line staff children, they have a valuable role to play and I know that local government and the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services are already in discussion about how youth services—. Those traditional youth clubs, because of austerity, are not necessarily there anymore, so they are well used to being out and about and doing outreach work, and they will have an important part to play in the services that we talked about earlier. Hefin, briefly, and then we're going to take one final question from Suzy on emergency legislation. I'll declare an interest as a parent of a child with additional learning needs, although the question I'm about to ask doesn't reflect her interests. Additional learning needs pupils who are waiting outcomes of referrals—if they're currently waiting an outcome of a referral, will that process will be suspended or will it continue as normal? And, if it is suspended, will it pick up where it left off from this point? kirsty williams am: I think we have to recognise that the ability to deliver business as usual has been massively compromised. I'm sure people will try and continue to do their normal activities and their normal jobs, but that might not be possible. I don't want to give you any false assurance if, actually, the intelligence on the ground is that that simply will not be able to happen. But we don't— hefin david am: Can we have a clear line on that? kirsty williams am: We don't want to jeopardise anybody, but as I said, some of the normal services are simply not available as everybody turns their attention to trying to respond to the pandemic. Final question—because I know that the Minister's got a lot of things that she needs to get on with—from Suzy on emergency legislation. suzy davies am: I'm not going to ask you if you'll use any powers you get under the emergency legislation, but are you able to give us some indication of what they might be? kirsty williams am: Sure. For instance, the Bill will provide Welsh Ministers with powers to temporarily close schools or other educational institutions, childcare premises; powers to give temporary continuity direction—so, actually, the other way around, force things to be open—and to be able to direct resources. So, that includes, as I said, I could direct something to stay open if that institution was trying to close down. The powers also give flexibility to maybe be able to direct staff to other institutions that they would not normally work in, if that was part of our resilience needs. We'd also be looking at, for instance, relaxing requirements around ratios in childcare settings, or we might be wanting to do things around food. If there is a continuing role for schools in providing food, we might have to be a bit more flexible about what that might look like. So, those kinds of flexibilities—to be able to suspend things, direct things—that we would not normally have in normal circumstances. And just to finish this one off—you may not be able to answer this one, in all fairness—in those situations where it's the Government who says 'no' to various things, does that then help people in the situation of Dawn's nursery, and insurance claims suddenly become more likely? kirsty williams am: I'm not an expert on insurance, and I don't know if anybody here can help me. But what my understanding is, is that even where Government has given a direction that does not necessarily mean that you will be covered by your insurance. What we're finding in the private sector is that insurance companies are not paying out, because even when a Government has directed it, they do not regard this as a disruption to business. kirsty williams am: It's not my area of expertise, but from what I understand from discussions around the Cabinet table, this is particularly problematic. Let me give you an example about how we've been trying to overcome some of this—it feels like an awfully long time ago now— you'll be aware that we gave directions earlier around cancellation of school trips abroad. Trying to make sure that that direction came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, rather than the Department for Education was a real battle, because again there were fears that, unless that advice came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, insurance would not kick in, and that was a two-day discussion. kirsty williams am: So, these are the kinds of things that we're grappling with. But, as I said, thinking about it, that was only last week, but it feels like an aeon ago. suzy davies am: I'm not holding you to that, but it helps us manage the questions we get asked. kirsty williams am: Yes, but as I said, insurance is not my area of expertise. Can I thank you for attending this morning, and your officials? We do recognise what an incredibly challenging time this is, and we'd like to place on record our thanks to all of you for the work that you're doing to try and see us through this crisis. Item 3, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting

The institutions and representative bodies have impressed Kirsty with their maturity and forward-planning, as well as their consistent approach and investment in online support for students. There is a safety net in place for vulnerable learners, allowing for individual attendance. The Welsh Government is committed to providing support regardless of the circumstances, and they will strive to avoid any disruption to EMA. Kirsty Williams's main goal is to have a healthy, strong, and sustainable higher education sector. While they do not push for mergers, they welcome them if they benefit individual institutions. Hefin David contrasts this with the pressure faced by Cardiff Metropolitan University in the past to merge with other universities. Kirsty Williams believes it is important to focus on the future and learn from past experiences, acknowledging the strength of Cardiff Met.

Question: What were the reported problems encountered with the interaction of SmartKom system modules? Article: professor f: So the what w we h have been doing i they would like us all to read these digits . grad b: OK and the way you do it is you just read the numbers not as each single , so just like I do it . So we 're gonna try to finish by five so people who want to can go hear Nancy Chang 's talk , downstairs . professor f: And you guys are g giving talks on tomorrow and Wednesday lunch times , phd a: Yes . OK so , do y do you know what we 're gonna do ? grad b: I thought two things we 'll introduce ourselves and what we do . And we already talked with Andreas , Thilo and David and some lines of code were already written today and almost tested and just gonna say we have again the recognizer to parser thing where we 're working on and that should be no problem and then that can be sort of developed as needed when we get enter the tourism domain . phd a: S grad b: and There one of our diligent workers has to sort of volunteer to look over Tilman 's shoulder while he is changing the grammars to English phd a: Either we do a syllable concatenating grammar for the English generation which is sort of starting from scratch and doing it the easy way , or we simply adopt the ah more in - depth style that is implemented in the German system and are then able not only to produce strings but also the syntactic parse not parse not the syntactic tree that is underneath in the syntactic structure which is the way we decided we were gonna go because A , it 's easier in the beginning phd a: grad b: and it does require some some knowledge of of those grammars and and and some ling linguistic background . Johno , are you gonna have some time t to do that w with these guys ? grad e: Sure . And an Yeah , so I I actually wanna f to find out about it too , but I may not have time to get in . grad b: the the ultimate goal is that before they leave we we can run through the entire system input through output on at least one or two sample things . And and by virtue of doing that then in this case Johno will have acquired the knowledge of how to extend it . grad b: And also Ralf has hooked up with David and you 're gonna continue either all through tonight or tomorrow on whatever to get the er parser interface working . grad b: They are thinning out and thickening out lattices and doing this kind of stuff to see what works best . grad d: Yeah , very much professor f: OK , before before you got put to work ? grad d: Yeah professor f: Great . OK , so that 's Sort of one branch is to get us caught up on what 's going on . Also of course it would be really nice to know what the plans are , in addition to what 's sort of already in code . professor f: and we can d I dunno w w was there a time when we were set up to do that ? It probably will work better if we do it later in the week , after we actually understand better what 's going on . professor f: So when do you guys leave ? phd a: we 're here through Sunday , grad d: Oh phd a: so All through Friday would be fine . professor f: Oh , OK , so OK , So so anyt we 'll find a time later in the week to get together and talk about your understanding of what SmartKom plans are . professor f: grad b: Should we already set a date for that ? Might be beneficial while we 're all here . I can do earlier in the day on Thursday , or most of the time on Friday , not all . grad b: Thursday morning sounds fine ? professor f: Wha - but , Johno , phd a: professor f: what are your constraints ? grad e: Thursday afternoon doesn't work for me , but grad b: Neither does Thursday morning , no ? grad e: Thursday morning should be fine . professor f: Eleven ? Eleven on Thursday ? grad e: I was just thinking I w I will have leavened by eleven . grad b: but David is here and he 's actually knows everything about the SmartKom recognizer . grad b: OK so facing to to what we 've sort of been doing here well for one thing we 're also using this room to collect data . grad b: no not meeting data but sort of sort ah our version of a wizard experiment such not like the ones in Munich but pretty close to it . grad b: The major difference to the Munich ones is that we do it via the telephone phd a: OK . grad b: even though all the recording is done here and so it 's a sort of a computer call system that gives you tourist information phd a: and part of that is sort of trying to find out whether people change their linguistic verbal behavior when first thinking they speak to a machine and then to a human . grad b: and we 're setting it up so that we can we hope to implant certain intentions in people . For example we have first looked at a simple sentence that " How do I get to the Powder - Tower ? " OK so you have the castle of Heidelberg phd a: OK . grad b: and so What will you parse out of that sentence ? Probably something that we specified in M - three - L , that is @ @ " action go to whatever domain , object whatever Powder - Tower " . grad b: And maybe some model will tell us , some GPS module , in the mobile scenario where the person is at the moment . And we 've sort of gone through that once before in the Deep Mail project and we noticed that first of all what are I should 've brought some slides , but what our So here 's the tower . And our system led people here , to a point where they were facing a wall in front of the tower . There is no entrance there , but it just happens to be the closest point of the road network to the geometric center Because that 's how the algorithm works . So we took out that part of the road network as a hack and then it found actually the way to the entrance . But what we actually observed in Heidelberg is that most people when they want to go there they actually don't want to enter , because it 's not really interesting . grad b: And so what a s you s let 's say a simple parse from a s from an utterance won't really give us is what the person actually wants . Does he wanna go there to see it ? Does he wanna go there now ? Later ? How does the person wanna go there ? Is that person more likely to want to walk there ? Walk a scenic route ? and so forth . There are all kinds of decisions that we have identified in terms of getting to places and in terms of finding information about things . And we are constructing and then we 've identified more or less the extra - linguistic parameters that may f play a role . And we also want to look closely on the linguistic information that what we can get from the utterance . That 's part of why we implant these intentions in the data collection to see whether people actually phrase things differently whether they want to enter in order to buy something or whether they just wanna go there to look at it . And so the idea is to construct suitable interfaces and a belief - net for a module that actually tries to guess what the underlying intention was . And then enrich or augment the M - three - L structures with what it thought what more it sort of got out of that utterance . So if it can make a good suggestion , " Hey ! " you know , " that person doesn't wanna enter . That person just wants to take a picture , " cuz he just bought film , or " that person wants to enter because he discussed the admission fee before " . Or " that person wants to enter because he wants to buy something and that you usually do inside of buildings " and so forth . These ah these types of these bits of additional information are going to be embedded into the M - three - L structure in an sort of subfield that we have reserved . If not you know , then that 's also something that we can't really at least we want to offer the extra information . grad b: t s Ultimately if you have if you can offer that information , somebody 's gonna s do something with it sooner or later . grad e: What was he saying ? grad b: for example , right now I know the GIS from email is not able to calculate these viewpoints . So that 's a functionality that doesn't exist yet to do that dynamically , phd a: grad b: but if we can offer it that distinction , maybe somebody will go ahead and implement it . Surely nobody 's gonna go ahead and implement it if it 's never gonna be used , so . What have I forgotten about ? Oh yeah , how we do it , professor f: Well th grad b: yeah that 's the professor f: No no . I s I see questions on peoples ' faces , so why don't phd a: Oh professor f: let 's let 's Let 's hear phd a: Well the obvious one would be if if you envision this as a module within SmartKom , where exactly would that Sit ? That 's the d grad b: so far I 've thought of it as sort of adding it onto the modeler knowledge module . grad b: but it could sit anywhere in the attention - recognition basically this is what attention - recognition literally sort of can phd a: Well it 's supposed to do . phd a: Well f from my understanding of what the people at Phillips were originally trying to do doesn't seem to quite fit into SmartKom currently so what they 're really doing right now is only selecting among the alternatives , the hypotheses that they 're given enriched by the domain knowledge and the discourse modeler and so on . Is there other other things that cuz we wanna not Pa - pass over any you know , questions or concerns that you have . phd a: Well there 're there 're two levels of of giving an answer and I guess on both levels I don't have any further questions . phd a: the the two levels will be as far as I 'm concerned as standing here for the generation module grad d: Mmm . phd a: and the other is is my understanding of what SmartKom is supposed to be professor f: Right . phd a: and I I think that fits in perfectly professor f: So well , let me Let me s expand on that a little bit from the point of view of the generation . professor f: So the idea is that we 've actually got this all laid out an and we could show it to you ig Robert didn't bring it today but there 's a a belief - net which is There 's a first cut at a belief - net that that doesn't it isn't fully instantiated , and in particular some of the the combination rules and ways of getting the the conditional probabilities aren't there . professor f: There are only three possibilities and the what one would like is for this , knowledge modeling module to add which of those it is and give it to the planner . professor f: But , th the current design suggests that if it seems to be an important decision and if the belief - net is equivocal so that it doesn't say that one of these is much more probable than the other , then an option is to go back and ask for the information you want . For the debugging we 'll probably just have a a drop - down menu and the while you 're debugging you will just OK . But for a full system , then one might very well formulate a query , phd a: professor f: give it to the dialogue planner and say this , you know ar are you know you are you planning to enter ? Or whatever it whatever that might be . So that 's under that model then , There would be a a loop in which this thing would formulate a query , phd a: Yes . professor f: OK so , th that , We probably won't do this early on , because the current focus is more on the decision making and stuff like that . professor f: But While we 're on the subject I just wanted to give you a sort of head 's up that it could be that some months from now we said " OK we 're now ready to try to close that loop " in terms of querying about some of these decisions . So my suggestion then is that you look into the currently ongoing discussion about how the action plans are supposed to look like . And they 're currently Agreeing or or in the process of agreeing on an X M L - ification of something like a state - transition network of how dialogues would proceed . D did you know this Robert ? grad b: Michael is doing that , right ? phd a: Well Marcus Lerkult is actually implementing that stuff and Marcus and Michael together are leading the discussion there , yeah . professor f: And it may be that that we should early on make sure that they have the flexibility that we need . But they Have I understood this right ? They they govern more or less the the dialogue behavior or the action phd a: grad b: It 's not really what you do with the content of the dialogue but it 's So , there is this this this nice interf grad d: No , it 's it 's also a quantrant grad b: i Is it professor f: So there 's ac so there th the word " action " , OK , is is what 's ambiguous here . professor f: So , one thing is there 's an actual planner that tells the person in the tourist domain now , phd a: OK . professor f: per tells the person how to go , " First go here , grad d: So that 's that form of planning , and action , and a route planner and GIS , all sort of stuff . No , in SmartKom terminology that 's called a function that 's modeled by a function modeler . That 's simply a functionality that you give data as in a query and then you get back from that mmm , a functioning model which might be a planner or a VCR or whatever . professor f: I think tha I think it 's not going to I think that 's not going to be good enough . So I think the idea of having a , you know , transition diagram for the grammar of conversations is a good idea . professor f: OK ? And I think that we do hav definitely have to get in on it and find out OK . But I think that when so , when you get to the tourist domain it 's not just an information retrieval system . professor f: Right ? So this i this is where I think this people are gonna have to think this through a bit more carefully . professor f: So , if it 's only like in in the in the film and T V thing , OK , you can do this . professor f: y y your I d I think the notion of this as a self contained module you know th the functional module that that interacts with with where the tourism g stuff is going probably is too restrictive . professor f: Now I dunno how much people have thought ahead to the tourist domain in this phd a: Probably not enough , an another more basic point there is that the current tasks and therefore th the concepts in this ac what 's called the action plan and what 's really the dialogue manager . professor f: Yeah phd a: is based on slots that have to be filled and the kind of values in these slots would be fixed things like the a time or a movie title or something like this professor f: phd a: and I 'm not sure if if complex slots of that type are really being taken into consideration . phd a: So that 's that 's really something we professor f: Could you could you put a message into the right place to see if we can at least ask that question ? phd a: phd a: nothing 's being completely settled there grad b: rea yep phd a: so this is really an ongoing discussion grad b: - phd a: and that 's grad b: yeah and it might actually OK ah also because again in in Deep Map we have faced and implemented those problems once already phd a: grad b: And mmm You don't know OK th I 'll I 'll talk to Michael it 's what I do anyway . Who How far is the the the M - three - L specification for for the la natural language input gone on the the I haven't seen anything for the tourist path domain . grad b: right ? together with the usual gang , Petra and Jan grad d: Mmm . Yeah , there 's a meeting next next week I think grad b: OK because That 's Those are the I think the the true key issues is how does the whatever comes out of the language input pipeline look like and then what the action planner does with it and how that is specified . I didn't think of the internal working of the the action planner and the language the function model as sort of relevant . But the internal workings of of the whether you know there 're dialogue action planners that work with belief - nets that are action planners that work with you know state automata . it does matter because it does have to keep track of you we are on part six of r a route that consists of eight steps and so forth phd a: Right . OK , so that , for example , the i it 's the action planner is going to take some spec and s make some suggestions about what the user should do . What the user says after that is going to be very much caught up with what the action planner told it . professor f: If the If the parser and the language end doesn't know what the person 's been told OK th it 's you 're making your life much more difficult than it has to be . professor f: Right ? So if someone says the best t to go there is by taxi , let 's say . OK , there 's all sorts of dialogues that won't make any sense which would be just fine . professor f: phd a: That would b but that I think that that point has been realized and it 's it 's not really been defined yet but there 's gonna be some kind of feedback and input from the action planner into all the analysis modules , telling them what to expect and what the current state of the discourse is . professor f: Yeah , but this is not the st this is not just the state of the discourse . professor f: OK so it z and s , It 's great if people are already taking that into account . professor f: I think you 're gonna need We talked about this several times that that the the input end is gonna need a fair amount of feedback from the planning end . phd a: professor f: In in one of these things which are are much more continuous than the just the dialogue over movies and stuff . phd a: And even on on a more basic level the the action planner actually needs to be able to have an expressive power that can deal with these structures . And not just say the dialogue will consist of ten possible states and th these states really are fixed in in a certain sense . professor f: ? phd a: You have to professor f: Would there be any chance of getting the terminology changed so that the dialogue planner was called a " dialogue planner " ? Because there 's this other thing The o There 's this other thing in in the tourist domain which is gonna be a route planner phd a: That 'd be nice . professor f: Huh ? So , s So what would happen if we sent a note saying " Gee we 've talked about this and couldn't we change this th the whole word ? " I have no idea how complicated these things are . phd a: and I think this is just for historical reasons within , the preparation phase of the project and not because somebody actually believes it ought to be action planner . So if there is resistance against changing it , that 's just because " Oh , We don't want to change things . professor f: Yeah , but that 's not g eh tha That ha has all the wrong connotations . I think you can't it 's fine for looking up when T you know when the show 's on TV . You go to th but I I I I think it 's really really wrong headed for something that you that has a lot of state , it 's gonna interact co in a complicated way with the understanding parts . Yeah I think just the the spatial planner and the route planner I showed you once the interac action between them among them in the deep map system professor f: Right . grad b: so a printout of the communication between those two fills up I don't know how many pages phd a: grad b: and that 's just part of how do I get to one place . Markus phd a: Wh - where 's ? grad b: Is he new in the in the ? phd a: Yeah , he 's he started I think January . grad b: Is he gonna continue with the old thing ? phd a: No , no he 's completely gonna rewrite everything . grad b: Yes I was just that 's my next question phd a: grad b: whether we 're we 're gonna stick to Prolog or not . grad b: OK But I do think the the function modeling concept has a certain makes sense in a in a certain light phd a: Yeah . grad b: because the action planner should not be or the dialogue manager in that case should not w have to worry about whether it 's interfacing with something that does route planning in this way or that way phd a: grad b: and it cant sort of formulate its what it wants in a in a rather a abstract way , you know f " Find me a good route for this . grad b: It doesn't really have to worry ab how route planner A or how route planner B actually wants it . It 's tricky because one could well imagine I think it will turn out to be the case that , this thing we 're talking about , th the extended n knowledge modeler will fill in some parameters about what the person wants . One could well imagine that the next thing that 's trying to fill out the detailed , route planning , let 's say , will also have questions that it would like to ask the user . You could well imagine you get to a point where it 's got a a choice to make and it just doesn't know something . grad b: professor f: And a I a a good design would would allow that to happen . professor f: If if you know if if you can't make it happen then you you do your best . phd a: Yeah but that doesn't necessarily contradict an architecture where there really is a pers a def well - defined interface . But but what it nee but th what the point is the in that case the dialogue manager is sort of event driven . So the dialogue manager may think it 's in a dialogue state of one sort , phd a: professor f: and this one of these planning modules comes along and says " hey , right now we need to ask a question " . phd a: Sure , professor f: It could be y phd a: ye yeah I I think that 's that 's the concept that people have , professor f: Yeah , yeah it it phd a: yep . phd a: And and the the underlying idea of course is that there is something like kernel modules with kernel functionality that you can plug certain applications like tourist information or the home scenario with controlling a VCR and so on . So wouldn't That 's an additional reason to have this well - defined interface and keep these things like tourist information external . phd a: But of course the the more complex grad b: Yeah , there is another philosophical issue that I think you know you can evade phd a: yep . grad b: but , at at least it makes sense to me that sooner or later a service is gonna come and describe itself to you . and that 's sort of what Srini is working on in in in the DAML project where you you find a GIS about that gives you information on Berkeley , phd a: Yeah . grad b: and it 's it 's gonna be there and tell you what it can do and how it wants to do things . and so you can actually interface to such a system without ever having met it before and the function modeler and a self - description of the external service haggle it out phd a: . grad b: and you can use the same language core , understanding core to interface with planner - A , planner - B , planner - C and so forth . grad b: Which is , you know , utopian completely utopian at the moment , but slowly , you know , getting into the realm of the contingent . And language input for example , is of course crucial you know also when you do the sort of deep understanding analysis that we envision . Then of course , the , you know what is it poverty of the stimulus , yet the m the less we get of that the better . and so we we 're thinking , for example how much syntactic analysis actually happens already in the parser . Yeah , are there currently is no syntactic analysis but in the next release there will be some . grad d: unless professor f: How 's it grad d: and it 's you can access this professor f: S so y we we looked at the e current pattern matching thing . , So what are what are the plans roughly ? grad d: it 's to to integrate and syntactic analysis . So then an utter more than one utterance is There there 's often pause between it and a segmentation occurs . professor f: So , the So the idea is to have a pa y y a particular grad d: yeah professor f: Do you have a particular parser in mind ? Is it partic d have you thought through ? Is it an HPSG parser ? Is it a whatever ? grad d: No no it 's I think it 's it 's totally complicated for it 's just one one person professor f: OK . grad d: and so I have to keep the professor f: Oh , you have to do it . grad d: ah and so things must be simpler professor f: I see , grad d: but , Miel syntactic analysis with finite state transducers . grad d: Yeah , the problem is th that it has to be very fast because if you want to for more than one path anywhere professor f: OK . grad d: what 's in the latches from the speech recognizer professor f: So , So there was a chunk parser in Verbmobil , that was one of the branchers . And I know one of them was a chunk parser and I don't remember who did that . grad b: A Alan ? grad d: I think it 's that might , at Tuebingen I thought . grad d: was Do you know something about that ? phd a: Tubingen was at least involved in putting the chunks together grad d: In Tub - at phd a: I can't quite recall whether they actually produced the chunks in the first place . phd a: Or wh grad d: Oh from from Stuttgart , professor f: There w That 's right . They w They had There were This was done with a two phase thing , where the chunk parser itself was pretty stupid grad d: yeah , also professor f: and then there was a kind of trying to fit them together that h used more context . Yeah professor f: Right ? phd a: Well you s and and especially you did some some , l was a learning - based approach which learned from a big corpus of of trees . phd a: And yes the it the chunk parser was a finite - state machine that Mark Light originally w worked on in while he was in Tuebingen professor f: Right . professor f: But is that the kind of thing y It sounds like the kind of thing that you were thinking of . yeah that 's In this direction , yes professor f: What ? grad d: Yeah , it 's in in this direction . grad b: From Michael Strube , I 've heard very good stuff about the chunk parser that is done by FORWISS , which is in embassy doing the parsing . grad b: So this is sort of came as a surprise to me that you know , embassy s is featuring a nice parser but it 's what I hear . grad b: And they 're doing chunk parsing and it 's I I can give you the names of the people who do it there . But But given th the constraints , that you want it to be small and fast and so forth , my guess is you 're probably into some kind of chunk parsing . And I 'm not a big believer in this statistical you know , cleaning up It That seems to me kind of a last resort if you can't do it any other way . professor f: There is this this one that they did at SRI some years ago Fastus ? grad d: professor f: a grad d: yeah , I 've I 've looked at it but but it 's no not much information available . I found , professor f: ah ! grad d: but it 's also finite - state transducers , I thought . grad d: and professor f: And of course it was English oriented , grad d: Yeah , and and Purely finite - state transducers are not so good for German since there 's professor f: w Right . grad d: The word order is is not fixed professor f: Yeah , I guess that 's the point is is all the morphology and stuff . Also it 's it 's Yes , the choice between this processing and that processing and my template matcher . grad d: professor f: So what about Did y like Morfix ? a a e y you 've got stemmers ? Or is that something that grad d: yeah but it 's all in the in the lexicon . So it 's professor f: But did you have that ? grad d: Yeah th the information is available . So , but grad d: So professor f: So y you just connect to the lexicon grad d: Yeah professor f: and at least for German you have all all of the the stemming information . grad d: It professor f: Did we look at the German ? I don't remember . professor f: So w wha phd a: n Well I think I think there 's some misunderstanding here professor f: i phd a: it 's Morphix is not used on - line . phd a: s so the lexicon might be derived by Morphix grad d: What ? phd a: but What what 's happening on - line is just a a retrieval from the lexicon which would give all the stemming information professor f: Right . professor f: What I didn't reme grad b: We threw out all the forms professor f: Huh ? grad b: because , you know , English , well professor f: Oh OK , so it yeah , s s I thought I 'd grad d: professor f: So in German then you actually do case matching and things like in the in the pattern matcher or not ? grad d: Not yet but it 's planned to do that . grad d: Yeah professor f: Have we looked at the German ? Oh , I haven yeah that 's getting it from the lexicon is just fine . In terms of if you 're trying to build some fast parser and so forth and You really might wanna do it in a significantly different way . So you 've you guys have looked at this ? also ? in terms of You know , w if you 're doing this for English as well as German Do you think now that it would be this doing it similarly ? grad d: Yeah , it 's I think it 's yes , it 's it 's possible to to do list processing . grad b: Well there 's m I 'm sure there 's gonna be more discussion on that after your talk . grad d: - , grad b: We 're just gonna foreshadow what we saw that grad d: yeah . grad b: and professor f: Now actually , Are you guys free at five ? Or Do you have to go somewhere at five o ' clock tonight ? W in ten minutes ? grad d: Ah phd a: I think we 're expect grad d: mmm . professor f: That 's good , because that will tell you a fair amount about The form of semantic construction grammar that we 're using . professor f: so So I th I think that probably as good an introduction as you 'll get . professor f: It won't talk particularly about how that relates to what Robert was saying at the beginning . So we talked about the fact that There 're going to be a certain number of decisions That you want the knowledge modeler to make , that will be then fed to the function module , that does , route planning . And then one half of this we talked about at little bit is how if you had the right information , if you knew something about what was said and about th the something about was the agent a tourist or a native or a business person or young or old , whatever . That information , and also about the , what we 're calling " the entity " , Is it a castle , is it a bank ? Is it a s town square , is it a statue ? Whatever . But the other half of the problem is How would you get that kind of information from the parsed input ? So , So what you might try to do is just build more templates , saying we 're trying to build a templ you know build a template that w somehow would capture the fact that he wants to take a picture . But from our point of view this is also a research project and there are a couple of people not here for various reasons who are doing doctoral dissertations on this , phd a: professor f: and the idea that we 're really after is a very deep semantics based on cognitive linguistics and the notion that there are a relatively small number of primitive conceptual schemas that characterize a lot of activity . But also , importantly for Lakoff and these guys is all sorts of metaphorical things are also characterized this way . professor f: and so s So , what we 're really trying to do is to map from the discourse to the conceptual semantics level . professor f: So another one of these primitive , what are called " image schemas " , is goal seeking . professor f: And that all sorts of things , particularly in the tourist domain , can be represented in terms of source , path and goal . So the idea would be could we build an analyser that would take an utterance and say " Aha ! th this utterance is talking about an attempt to reach a goal . The goal is this , the pers the , traveller is that , the sor w where we are at now is is this , they 've mentioned possible obstacles , et cetera . So if you can do this , then the notion would be that across a very large range of domains , you could use this deep conceptual basis as the interface . professor f: And then , The processing of that , both on the input end , recognizing that certain words in a language talk about containers or goals , et cetera , and on the output end , given this kind of information , you can then make decisions about what actions to take . professor f: And Nancy is going to Her talk is going to be not about using this in applications , but about modeling how children might learn this kind of deep semantic grammar . Would it be highly ambiguous if and then there would be another module that takes that highly underspecified deep semantic construction and map it onto the current context to find out what the person really was talking about in that context . or or a professor f: Well that 's that 's that 's where the belief - net comes in . professor f: So part of what you 'll get out of this will be the fact tha w if it works right , OK , that this is an agent that wants to go to this place and that 's their goal phd a: professor f: OK , phd a: th professor f: part of it comes from the ontology . professor f: And the idea of the belief - net is it combines the information from the dialogue which comes across in this general way , phd a: professor f: you know this is a this is a goal seeking behavior , along with specific information from the ontology about the kinds of objects involved phd a: Yeah OK , Yeah , yep yep yep yep professor f: and about the situation about " Is it raining ? " I don't know . professor f: And so th the coupling to the situation comes in this model from , at th at th at the belief - net , combining evidence from the dialogue with the ontology with the situation . professor f: But Nancy isn't gonna talk about that , phd a: Yeah , oh yeah , I see , professor f: just about the phd a: yeah yeah , really . phd g: Is it i in , then , your place , in five five - A ? phd a: Alright .<doc-sep>grad b: grad d: How many batteries do you go through ? grad b: Thank you . My suggestion is that Robert and Johno sort of give us a report on last week 's adventures to start . So everybody knows there were these guys f from Heidelber - , actually from DFKI , part of the German SmartKom project , who were here for the week and , I think got a lot done . The we got to the point where we can now speak into the SmartKom system , and it 'll go all the way through and then say something like " Roman numeral one , am Smarticus . " It actually says , " Roemisch einz , am Smarticus , " grad b: OK . " grad d: " I am Sm - I am Smarticus " is what it 's saying . grad d: I gue grad e: The sythesis is just a question of , hopefully it 's just a question of exchanging a couple of files , once we have them . And , it 's not going to be a problem because we decided to stick to the so - called concept to speech approach . So I 'm I 'm I 'm going backwards now , so " synthesis " is where you sort of make this , make these sounds , and " concept to speech " is feeding into this synthesis module giving it what needs to be said , and the whole syntactic structure so it can pronounce things better , presumably . Bu - , i The way the , the dialogue manager works is it dumps out what it wants to know , or what it wants to tell the person , to a er in XML and there 's a conversion system for different , to go from XML to something else . And th so , the knowledge base for the system , that generates the syntasti syntactic structures for the ge generation is , in a LISP - like the knowledge base is in a LISP - like form . So , you have a basically , a goal and it , you know , says " OK , well I 'm gonna try to do the Greet - the - person goal , grad b: grad d: so it just starts , it binds some variables and it just decides to , you know , do some subscold . grad e: But I think that the point is that out of the twelve possible utterances that the German system can do , we 've already written the the syntax trees for three or four . grad d: and instead of , you know , breaking down to , like , small units and building back up , they basically took the sentences , and basically cut them in half , or you know , into thirds or something like that , and made trees out of those . And so , Tilman wrote a little tool that you could take LISP notation and generate an XML , tree . And so basically you just say , you know , " noun goes to " , you know , Er , nah , I don't re I 've never been good at those . So there 's like the VP goes to N and those things in LISP , and it will generate for you . grad e: And because we 're sticking to that structure , the synthesis module doesn't need to be changed . So all that f fancy stuff , and the Texas speech version of it , which is actually the simpler version , is gonna be done in October which is much too late for us . Right now it 's brittle and you need to ch start it up and then make ts twenty changes on on on on seventeen modules before they actually can stomach it , anything . And send in a a a couple of side queries on some dummy center set - up program so that it actually works because it 's designed for this seevit thing , where you have the gestural recognition running with this s Siemens virtual touch screen , which we don't have here . grad e: And so we 're doing it via mouse , but the whole system was designed to work with this thing and it was It was a lot of engineering stuff . No science in there whatsoever , but it 's working now , and , that 's the good news . grad d: Why I had I did need to chan generate different trees than the German ones , mainly because you know like , the gerund in in German is automatically taken care of with just a regular verb , grad e: You have to switch it on . grad d: so I 'd have to add " am walking , " grad b: OK . grad d: or I 'd have to add a little stem for the " am " , when I build the built the tree . Yeah , I noticed that , that some of the examples they had , had you know , non - English word orders and so on , you know . professor c: So it might be worth , Keith , you looking at this , grad b: Yeah . professor c: grad b: I I still don't I still don't really understand e like grad d: Well Tilman s grad b: we sort of say , You know , I I still don't exactly understand sort of the information flow in in this thing , or what the modules are and so on . So , you know , like just that such - and - such module decides that it wants to achieve the goal of greeting the user , and then magically it sort of s professor c: Yeah grad b: how does it know which syntactic structure to pull out , and all that ? professor c: I thi Yeah . professor c: but sort of when you get free and you have the time either Robert or Johno or I can walk you through it . , was this , I I think he talked about the idea of like , He was talking about these lexicalized , tree adjoining grammars where you sort of for each word you , grad d: OK , you know how to do it ? grad b: For each lexical item , the lexical entry says what all the trees are that it can appear in . If it turns out we can also give them lots more than that by , you know , tapping into other things we do , that 's great . professor c: But i it turns out not to be in an any of the contracts grad d: There 's like a little The twisty thing , you can move it with . So , the reason I 'd like you to understand what 's going on in this demo system is not because it 's important to the research . So that if we come up with a question of " could we fit this deeper stuff in there ? " or something . professor c: So it 's just , in the sam same actually with the rest of us we just need to really understand what 's there . Is there anything we can make use of ? , is there anything we can give back , beyond th the sort of minimum requirements ? But none of that has a short time fuse . professor c: So th the demo the demo requirements for this Fall are sort of taken care of as of later this week or something . And then So , it 's probably fifteen months or something until there 's another serious demo requirement . professor c: That doesn't mean we don't think about it for fifteen months , grad b: Right . The plan for this summer , really is to step back from the applied project , grad e: Right . professor c: And , so The idea is there 's this , other subgroup that 's worrying about formalizing the nota getting a notation . But sort of in parallel with that , the hope is tha in particularly you will work on constructions in English Ge - and German for this domain , grad b: professor c: but y not worry about parsing them or fitting them into SmartKom or any of the other anything lik any other constraints for the time being . professor c: It 's hard enough to get it semantically and syntactically right and then and get the constructions in their form and stuff . professor c: And , I don I don't want you f feeling that you have to somehow meet all these other constraints . And similarly with the parsing , we 're gonna worry about parsing , the general case you know , construction parser for general constructions . And , if we need a cut - down version for something , or whatever , we 'll worry about that later . grad b: So , the the point is that like the meetings so far that I 've been at have been sort of been geared towards this demo , professor c: Right . grad b: And then we 'll sort of shift gears a Fairly substantially , professor c: Yeah . What I what I think is is a good idea that I can can show to anyone who 's interested , we can even make a sort of an internal demo , and I I show you what I do , grad b: grad e: And so you when somebody on the streets com comes up to you and asks you what is SmartKom so you can , sort of , give a sensible answer . professor c: So , c sh we could set that up as actually an institute wide thing ? Just give a talk in the big room , and and so peo people know what 's going on ? when you 're ready ? grad e: Absolutely . professor c: Yeah , that 's the kind of thing That 's the level at which you know we can just li invite everybody and say " this is a project that we 've been working on and here 's a demo version of it " and stuff like that . Well d we we do wanna have all the bugs out b where you have to sort of pipe in extra XML messages from left and right before you 're grad b: - huh . Actually , roughly starting let 's say , nex next meeting , cuz this meeting we have one other thing to tie up besides the trip report . there are a lot of issues , what 's the ontology look like , grad b: professor c: you know what do the constructions look like , what 's the execution engine look like , mmm lots of things . Now before we do that , let 's get back in Oh ! But , it 's still , I think , useful for you to understand the demo version enough , so that you can can see what what it is that that it might eventually get retro - fitted into or something . professor c: And Johno 's already done that , looked at the dem the looked at the SmartKom stuff . grad d: Wa To some de what what part of th the SmartKom stuff ? professor c: Well , the parser , and that stuff . So , the trip the report on these the last we we sort of interrupted you guys telling us about what happened last week . Well it was just amazing to to see how how instable the whole thing is , professor c: Maybe you 're done , then . grad e: and if you just take the And I g I got the feeling that we are the only ones right now who have a running system . I don't know what the guys in Kaiserslautern have running because e the version that is , the full version that 's on the server d does not work . And so it 's And even Tilman and Ralf sort of said " yeah there never was a really working version that did it without th all the shortcuts that they built in for the October @ @ version " . So we 're actually maybe ahead of the System Gruppe by now , the system the integration group . And it was , It was fun to some extent , but the the outcome that is sort of of scientific interest is that I think both Ralf and Tilman , I know that they enjoyed it here , and they r they they liked , a lot of the stuff they saw here , what what we have been thinking about , and they 're more than willing to to , cooperate , by all means . And , part of my responsibility is to use our internal " group - ware " server at EML , make that open to all of us and them , so that whatever we discuss in terms of parsing and and generating and constructions w we we sort of put it in there and they put what they do in there and maybe we can even , get some overlap , get some synergy out of that . And , the , If I find someone at in EML that is interested in that , I I may even think that we could look take constructions and and generate from them because the tree adjoining grammars that that Tilman is using is as you said nothing but a mathematical formalism . And you can just do anything with it , whether it 's syntactic trees , H P S G - like stuff , or whether it 's construction . So if you ever get to the generation side of constructing things and there might be something of interest there , but in the moment we 're of course definitely focused on the understanding , pipeline . professor c: Anyth - any other repo visit reports sort of stories ? we so we now know I think , what the landscape is like . And one of the things we need to do is the , and this I think is relatively tight tightly constrained , is to finish up this belief - net stuff . And I was going to switch to start talking about that unless there 're m other more general questions . OK so here 's where we are on the belief - net stuff as far as I understand it . Going back I guess two weeks ago Robert had laid out this belief - net , missing only the connections . Right ? That is So , he 'd put all th all the dots down , and we went through this , and , I think , more or less convinced ourselves that at least the vast majority of the nodes that we needed for the demo level we were thinking of , were in there . So , Bhaskara and I went off and looked at some technical questions about were certain operations sort of legitimate belief - net computations and was there some known problem with them or had someone already , solved you know how to do this and stuff . The answer seems to be , " no , no one has done it , but yes it 's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if that 's what you set out to do " . And , so the current state of things is that , again , starting now , we 'd like to actually get a running belief - net for this particular subdomain done in the next few weeks . So Bhaskara is switching projects as of the first of June , and , he 's gonna leave us an inheritance , which is a hopefully a belief - net that does these things . And there 're two aspects to it , one of which is , you know , technical , getting the coding right , and making it run , and stuff like that . OK ? What all you know , what are the considerations and how and what are the ways in which they relate . So he doe h he doesn't need help from this group on the technical aspects or if he does we 'll do that separately . professor c: But in terms of what are the decisions and stuff like that , that 's something that we all have to work out . Is is that right ? that 's that 's both you guys ' understanding of where we are ? grad e: Absolutely . grad g: So , I guess , Is there like a latest version of the belief - net of the proposed belief - net ? Like grad e: We had decided grad g: like grad e: . We wanted to look into maybe getting it , the visualization , a bit clearer , but I think if we do it , sort of a paper version of all the nodes and then the connections between them , that should suffice . grad d: Yeah , I professor c: We do in the long run wanna do better visualization and all that stuff . grad d: I did look into that , in terms of , you know , exploding the nodes out and down ag professor c: Yep . It 'd probably take two weeks or so to actually go through and do it , professor c: Not not at this point . grad d: and I went through all the other packages on Murph - Kevin Murphy 's page , professor c: Right . grad d: and I couldn't find the necessary mix of free and with the GUI and , with this thing that we want . OK , so then I 'll go back and look at the ones on the list that professor c: OK . grad e: But grad g: Yeah , the one that people seem to use is Hugin or whatever ? professor c: Hugin , yeah that 's free . grad g: How exp I don't think it 's Is it free ? Because I 've seen it advertised in places so I it seems to professor c: it may be free to academics . professor c: but yo I noticed people do use Hugin so , grad d: How do you spell that ? professor c: HUGIN . So then , in any case , But paying a lit You know , if i if it 's Probably for university , it 's it 's gonna be real cheap anyway . grad e: I I also s would suggest not to d spend two weeks in in in changing the the JavaBayes code . grad e: I I will send you a pointer to a Java applet that does that , it 's sort of a fish - eye . You you have a node , and you click on it , and it shows you all the connections , grad d: Mmm . grad e: and then if you click on something else that moves away , that goes into the middle . If that doesn't work , it 's not a problem we we need to solve right now . What I 'm what my job is , I will , give you the input in terms of of the internal structure . Maybe node by node , or something like this ? Or should I collect it all grad g: grad g: just any like like sort of rough representation of the entire belief - net is probably best . And you 're gonna be around ? t again , always Tuesdays and Thursdays afternoon - ish ? As usual ? Or will that change ? grad g: Yeah , yeah , I can like I c . This week I guess , kind of I have a lot of projects and stuff but after that I will generally be more free . professor c: Yeah and this is not a crisis that , you do , e everybody who 's a student should , you know do their work , get their c courses all in good shape and and and and then we 'll dig d dig down on this . grad b: How do you go about this process of deciding what these connections are ? I know that there 's an issue of how to weight the different things too , and stuff . grad e: It 's professor c: One is you design and the other is you learn . OK ? So what we 're gonna do initially is is do design , and , i if you will , guess . that is you know use your best knowledge of of the domain to , hypothesize what the dependencies are and stuff . professor c: If it 's done right , and if you have data then , there are techniques for learning the numbers given the structure grad b: Yeah . professor c: and there are even techniques for learning the structure , although that takes a lot more data , and it 's not as @ @ and so forth and so on . So but for the limited amount of stuff we have for this particular exercise I think we 'll just design it . Fo - Hopefully as time passes we 'll get more and more data from Heidelberg and from people actually using it and stuff . grad e: But to solve our problems ag a mediocre design will do I think in the beginning . Yeah , oh , and by the way , speaking of data , are there I could swore , I could swear I saw it sitting on someone 's desk at some point , but is there a a transcript of any of the , sort of , initial interactions of people with the with the system ? Cuz you know , I 'm still sort of itching to to look at what look at the stuff , and see what people are saying . So and and , of course Keith would like the German as well as the English , so whatever you guys can get . Yeah , I I sort of found the , the audio of some of those , and , it kind of sounded like I didn't want to trudge through that , you know . professor c: OK , so while we 're still at this sort of top level , anything else that we oughta talk about today ? grad e: Ho - how was your thingy . grad b: Oh , I just wanted to , s like mention as an issue , you know last meeting I wasn't here because I went to a linguistics colloquium on the fictive motion stuff , professor c: Oh right . grad b: and that was pretty interesting and you know , seems to me that that will fairly obviously be of relevance to to what we 're doing here because you know people are likely to give descriptions like you know , " What 's that thing right where you start to go up the hill , " or something like that , you know , meaning a few feet up the hill or whatever from some reference point and all that stuff so , I 'm sure in terms of you know , people trying to state locations or , you know , all that kind of stuff , this is gonna be very relevant . So , now that was the talk was about English versus Japanese , which obviously the Japanese doesn't affect us directly , except that , some of the construction he 'd what he talked about was that you know in English we say things like th you know , " your bike is parked across the street " and we use these prepositional phrases , you know , " well , if you were to move across the street you would be at the bike " , but in in Japanese the the more conventionalized tendency is to use a sort of a description of " where one has crossed to the river , there is a tree " . , and you know , you can actually say things like , " there 's a tree where one has crossed the river , but no one has ever crossed the river " , or something like that . So the idea is that this really is you know that 's supposed show that 's it 's really fictive and so on . But But the point is that that kind of construction is also used in English , you know , like " right where you start to go up the hill " , or " just when you get off the train " , or something like that to , to indicate where something is . grad b: So we 'll have to think about professor c: So how much is that used in German ? grad e: . grad e: the the Deep Map project which is undergoing some renovation at at the moment , but this is a a three language project : German , English , Japanese . grad e: And , we have a , I have taken care that we have the the Japanese generation and stuff . Well , if yo if you 're interested in that , so how how , it does sort of go d all the way down to the conceptual level to some extent . professor c: So , where is this huge project ? grad e: It 's KLEIST . grad e: professor c: Well , that may be another thing that Keith wants to look at . grad e: But , I I think we should leave Japanese constructions maybe outside of the scope for for now , grad b: Yeah . phd a: Are are you going to p pay any attention to the relative position of of the direction relative relative to the speaker ? For example , there are some differences between Hebrew and English . We can say " park in front of the car " as you come beh you drive behind the car . In Hebrew it means " park behind the car " , because to follow the car is defined as it faces you . phd a: So , i i i is German closer to to E , to E grad e: phd a: I don't think it it 's related to syntax , though , so it may be entirely different . Did you ever get to look at the the rou paper that I sent you on the on that problem in English and German ? grad b: I think grad e: Carroll , ninety - three . grad e: So it 's they actually say " the monkey in front of the car , where 's the monkey ? " grad b: grad e: And , they found statistically very significant differences in English and German , so I I I It might be , since there are only a finite number of ways of doing it , that that German might be more like Hebrew in that respect . phd a: That but it wasn't was grad e: That syntactic facto factors do do play a role there , wh whether you 're more likely , you know , to develop , choices that lead you towards using intrinsic versus extrinsic reference frames . grad b: it seems to me that you can get both in in English depending o professor c: . grad b: You know , like , " in front of the car " could you know Like , here 's the car sideways to me in between me and the car or something 's in front of the car , or whatever . grad b: but But anyway , so you know , this was this was a a very good talk on those kinds of issues and so on . grad e: I can also give you , a pointer to a paper of mine which is the the ultimate taxonomy of reference frames . " reference frames " ? grad e: It 's called a phd a: grad e: It 's it 's spatial reference frames . You can either do a two - point or a three - point which is you You 're familiar with th with the " origo " ? where that 's the center " Origo " is the center of the f frame of reference . professor c: So that would be " origin " in English , grad f: This was like grad b: The origin . grad e: And three - point relations is if something has an intrinsic front side like this chair then your f shoe is behind the chair . You you can actually say things like , " it 's behind the tree from me " or something like that , I think , in in in certain circumstances in English , right ? As sort of " from where I 'm standing it would appear that " grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , it sounds like it , doesn't it , grad b: Yeah . Egocentric two - point , egocentric three - point , or you can have allocentric . grad e: So , " as seen from the church , the town hall is right of that , fire station " . aa - huh It 's hardly ever used but it 's w phd a: I 'd love to see it if you if you have a copy kind of . Well , why don't you just put it on the web page ? There 's this EDU Right ? grad e: Yeah it 's or or just Yeah . professor c: By the way , there something that I didn't know until about a week ago or so , is apparently , there are separate brain areas for things within reach , and things that are out of reach . professor c: So there 's there 's all this linguistic stuff about you know , near and far , or yon and and so forth . That , you know they do MRI , and and if you 're got something within reach then there 's one of your areas lights up , and if something 's out of reach a different one . So there 's a a line on the wall over there , and you give them a laser pointer , and you say , " Where 's the midpoint ? " And they do fine . There 's just that part of the brain isn't functioning , so they can't do that . The same thing on the wall , you give them a laser , " where is it ? " , grad b: Give them a stick , long stick , and say " do it " , they can't do it . So they doubled the the end the end of this grad f: Because it 's within reach now ? grad b: Yeah , professor c: It 's not within reach and you use the Within - Reach , mechanism . professor c: And so this doe This is , First of all , it explains something that I 've always wondered about and I 'll do this this test on you guys as well . How - I have had an experience , not often , but a certain number of times , when , for example , I 'm working with a tool , a screwdriver or something , for a long time , I start feeling the tip directly . professor c: And people who are accomplished violinists and stuff like that , claim they also have this kind of thing where you get a direct sensation of , physical sensation , of the end affector . What 's going on at the end of the tool , phd a: The ext the the The extension , grad b: yeah . professor c: Huh ? grad b: What 's going on at the end of the tool , or whatever . i i it 's not exactly the th same thing , but but s it it it 's getting close to that . grad f: W what does it feel like ? professor c: Oh i it feels like your as if your neurons had extended themselves out to this tool , and you 're feeling forces on it and so forth and and you deal directly with it . phd a: I once I I was playing you know with those devices that allow you to manipulate objects when it 's dangerous to get close ? So you can insert your hand something grad b: Oh , OK . phd a: Very kind of you stop back and suddenly it goes away and you have to kind of work again to recapture it , but yeah . professor c: Right , Yeah , so anyway , so So this was the first actual experimental evidence I 'd seen that was consistent with this anecdotal stuff . So in addition to e ego and allocentric which appear all over the place , you also apparently have this proximal - distal thing which is very deeply embedded . S grad e: Well , Dan Montello sort of , he he does the th the cognitive map world , down in Santa Barbara . And he he always talks about these He he already well i probably most likely without knowing this this evidence is talking about these small scale spaces that you can manipulate versus large scale environmental spaces . Well there 's there 's been a lot of behavioral things o on this , but that was the first neur neuro - physiological thing I saw . We 're starting to do science , right ? And so these issues about , reference , and spatial reference , discourse reference , - - - all this sort of stuff , deixis which is part of what you were talking about , grad b: And so , in addition to the business about just getting the linguistics right , and the formalism and stuff , we 're actually gonna build something and , Johno is point person on the parser , analyzer , whatever that is , and we 're gonna start on that in parallel with the , the grammar stuff . professor c: But to do that we 're gonna need to make some decisions like ontology , so , And so this is another thing where we 're gonna , you know , have to get involved and make s relatively early I think , make some decisions on , " is there an ontology API that that " There 's a sort of standard way of getting things from ontologies and we build the parser and stuff around that , or is there a particular ontology that we 're gonna standardize on , and if so For example , is there something that we can use there . i Does either the SmartKom project or one of the projects at EML have something that we can just p pull out , for that . But we aren't gonna ignore those cuz we 're we 're not only going The plan is not only to lay out this thing , but to actually build some of it . Part of it , if it works right , is wh It looks like we 're now in a position that the construction analyzer that we want for this applied project can be the same as the construction analyzer that Nancy needs for the child language modeling . It 's always been out of phase but it now seems that , there 's a good shot at that . So we 've talked about it , and the hope is that we can make these things the same thing , grad b: OK . professor c: and of course it 's only w In both cases it 's only one piece of a bigger system . To to come full circle on that , this formalization task , OK ? is trying to get the formalism into into a shape where it can actually grad b: Yeah . Be of use to someone who 's trying to do this , right ? professor c: d Well , yeah , where it actually is is covers the whole range of things . And the the the the thing that got Mark into the worst trouble is he had a very ambitious thing he was trying to do , and he insisted on trying to do it with a limited set of mechanisms . professor c: and he seemed fully committed to both sides of this i i irreconcilable thing . So there 's you know sort of , yeah , deep , really deep , emotional commitment to a certain theory being , complete . grad f: You don't have a hidden purist streak ? grad d: Oh no . professor c: We - well it hasn't it it certainly hasn't been observed , in any case . Why a actually , the thing is , you you do but , th the thing you have to im implement is so small that . professor c: Within that , yeah , grad f: Yes , professor c: and , it 's a and still , I think , you know , get something done . grad b: Cool ! professor c: But to try to do something upscale and purist Particularly if if what you 're purist about doesn't actually work , is real hard . And then the other thing is while we 're doing this Robert 's gonna pick a piece of this space , phd a: It 's possible yeah . grad e: The - th There there 's a drive - in thesis sh joint over in Saarbruecken . But , But anyway , so , that 's , also gotta be worked out , hopefully over the next few weeks , so that that it becomes clear , what piece , Robert wants to jump into . And , while we 're at this level , there 's at least one new doctoral student in computer science who will be joining the project , either next week or the first of August , depending on the blandishments of Microsoft . Nobody believed th th that grad f: Yeah , I thought it had to be a joke , of your part , you know professor c: Yeah . " grad g: Is this person someone who 's in first - year this year , professor c: No , first year coming . grad g: or professor c: So , she 's she 's now out here she 's moved , and she 'll be a student as of then . professor c: And probably she 'll pick up from you on the belief - net stuff , so sh she 'll be chasing you down and stuff like that . grad f: We always get these people who are not in the class , who professor c: Some of th some of them , yeah . professor c: So anyway , but she 's another one of these ones with a three point nine average and so forth and so on . Oh there 's yet another one of the incoming first incoming first - year graduate students who 's expressed interest , so we 'll see how that goes . , anyway , so , I think as far as this group goes , it 's certainly worth continuing for the next few weeks to get closure on the belief - net and the ideas that are involved in that , and what are th what are the concepts . We 'll see whether it 's gonna make sense to have this be separate from the other bigger effort with the formalization stuff or not , I 'm not sure . And then , Ami , you can decide , you know , how much time you wanna put into it and , it it 's beginning to take shap shape , phd a: OK . professor c: so and , phd a: Right professor c: I think you will find that if you want to look technically at some of the your traditional questions in this light , Keith , who 's buil building constructions , will be quite happy to see what , you know , you envision as the issues and the problems and , how they might get reflected in constructions . phd a: I I may have to go to Switzerland for in June or beginning of July for between two weeks and four weeks , but , after that or before that . And , if it 's useful we can probably arrange for you to drop by and visit either at Heidelberg or at the German AI center , while you 're in in the neighborhood . Yeah be actu actually I 'm invited to do some consulting with a bank in Geneva which has an affiliation with a research institute in Geneva , which I forgot the name of . professor c: Well , we we 're connected to There 's a there 's a a very significant connection between We 'll we 'll go through this , phd a: Yeah . professor c: ICSI and EPFL , which is the , It 's the Fr Ge - Germany 's got two big technical institutes . professor c: E T and then there 's one , the French speaking one , in Lausanne , grad b: Oh , so in Switzerland . Yeah , and so anyway we c We can m undoubtedly get Ami to give a talk at EML or something like that . I I think the one you you gave here a couple of weeks ago would be of interest there , too . Actually , either place , DFKI or Yeah , so , and and if there is a book , that you 'll be building up some audience for it . professor c: Cuz they 've actually these DFKI guys have done as much as anyone over the last decade in trying to build them . So , unless we wanna start digging into the the belief - net and the decisions now , which would be fine , it 's probably grad e: I I tho It 's probably better if I come next week with the version O point nine of the structure . So , how about if you two guys between now and next week come up with something that is partially proposal , and partially questions , saying " here 's what we think we understand , here are the things we think we don't understand " . professor c: OK ? , " these are the decisions " I don't think we 're gonna get lots more information . grad e: And , the the sem semester will be over next week but then you have projects for one more week to come ? grad g: No , I I think I 'll be done everything by this by the end of this week . This Well , I 've I have projects , but then the my prof professor of one of my classes also wa has a final that he 's giving us . professor c: OK , so I guess that 's grad d: So , the seventeenth will definitely be the last day , like it or not for me . So let 's do this , and then we we well there 's gonna be some separate co these guys are talking , we have a group on the formalization , Nancy and Johno and I are gonna talk about parsers . professor c: Of course , nothing gets done even in a meeting of seven people , grad b: Right . professor c: right ? So , two or three people is the size in which actual work gets done . Oh , the other thing we wanna do is catch up with , Ellen and see what she 's doing because the image schemas are going to be , an important pa grad b: Yeah . Yeah , I 'm actually probably going to be in contact with her pretty soon anyway because of various of us students were going to have a reading group about precisely that sort of thing over the summer , grad d: OK . professor c: That 's great ! Yeah , I I Shweta mentioned that , although she said it 's a secret . grad d: Hi grad b: Right , no faculty ! professor c: Th - the faculty aren't faculty aren't supposed to know . professor c: But , I 'm sufficiently clueless that I count as a grad b: Yeah , right . It 's as if we didn't tell anyone at all , grad d: Bhaskara

The translation of SmartKom to English is nearing completion, with only the synthesis module remaining to be done after the completion of English syntax trees. Despite the system still being buggy and unstable, it will soon be ready for a demonstration. However, the action planner, as a functional module, is deemed too restrictive for the tourist domain and necessitates complex slots from the dialogue manager. The interactions between the spatial planner and the route planner in a deep map system are overly convoluted. To address these challenges, SmartKom requires a fast and robust parser with language-specific extensions.

Question: What is the group's opinion on the EAS consortium's approach to using the looked-after and adopted PDG as part of a broader strategy for vulnerable learners? Additionally, what is the group's perspective on the high exclusion rates among looked-after children, who are over six times more likely to receive a fixed-term exclusion? Article: lynne neagle am: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this morning's Children, Young People and Education Committee. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Cabinet Secretary for Education; Steve Davies, director of the education directorate; and Ruth Conway, deputy director, support for learners division. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for your attendance and also for the paper that you've provided in advance. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions, and the first questions are from Llyr Gruffydd. I just want to start by asking some questions around the targeting of the pupil development grant because, clearly, we've had a lot of evidence around this apparent blurring of eligibility to an extent. I'm just wondering how comfortable you are that the money is being targeted appropriately because, clearly, it's being targeted more widely than just those eligible for free school meals, from some of the evidence we've had, but also that it seems to be predominantly focused on low-attaining frees—pupils who are eligible for free school meals. I think it's important to be absolutely clear that when it comes to individual interventions, those individual interventions should only be targeted at those children who are eligible for free school meals. But in some cases, schools may use their PDG funding to provide a universal intervention, but we would want to—in challenge advisers' discussions in schools—we'd want to have evidence that that universal intervention would have a disproportionate effect on the outcomes for children on free school meals. So, for instance, if I give you an example in your own region, Llyr: at Brynteg County Primary School in Wrexham, if you look at that primary school in Wrexham, their results for free-school-meal children at the end of their primary school period in school are equivalent to their non-free-school-meal counterparts. One of the things that they've used their PDG for is to really focus on the concept of growth mindset in school. So, that's a universal thing that they've trained all the teachers in, but what we know is that that has a disproportionate effect on those children who are on free school meals. So, if you're familiar with the concept of a growth mindset, it's about really challenging learners to think that, 'I can do things. If sometimes I fail, I pick myself up, I'm more resilient.' Now, that has been, as I said, trained to all the teachers in the school—it's an ethos for the whole school—but we have seen that the impact on the free-school-meal children has been even greater, and now they're at the same level. Individual intervention per child has to be targeted at those children who are eligible for free school meals, but sometimes a school will employ a whole-school approach to train their staff, for instance, and that, then, has to demonstrate it has a disproportionate effect on free school meals. So, growth mindset; it may be attachment disorder training for staff, for instance, where we know it's of benefit to everybody, but will have particular benefits for that cohort of students. With regard to more able and talented, you know, Llyr, that this is an area of concern for me, generally, within the Welsh education system; that we've not been particularly good at identifying, supporting and driving attainment for those children. I'm absolutely clear that PDG needs to be used for those children who are eligible to drive potential, whatever the potential of that child is, including more able and talented. And again, I'll give you an example that has been seen as good practice in Pembrokeshire: a window on the world bus, again paid for by schools. kirsty williams am: Oh, you've heard about it; well, it's a really good example the window on the world. And, again, that's very much targeted at raising aspirations and giving children who are more able and talented, who are eligible for PDG, those experiences, and to really push them. So, yes, I'm absolutely clear that PDG shouldn't just be seen to be getting individuals to the average. For those children who are more able and talented, it should be used to support them— llyr gruffydd am: And we all share those aspirations, I'm sure, and you pointed to examples of good practice, but of course, it's not universal, is it, so what I'm asking is: do you think that the guidance is sufficient as it is? Do you think that there's a great enough awareness of how the PDG should be used at the coalface? And also, are you confident that consortia and others have the measures in place to be able to demonstrate that it is being used properly? kirsty williams am: I think, if we look at what Estyn has said about PDG, it does actually recognise that the PDG is being used to push more able and talented children, but as always with the system, Llyr, it's whether we can be sure that that is strategic and that it's happening across all of our schools. So, you're— llyr gruffydd am: But not just in relation to more able and talented, I'm referring to the eligibility and the targeting. You'll be aware that, on the advice of Sir Alasdair, we have employed and appointed new PDG regional advisers, and I think their role is going to be absolutely crucial in spreading that good practice across the region, whether that's use of PDG for more able and talented, or ensuring that PDG is used in the appropriate way. And obviously, we have been very clear with regional challenge advisers, in the relationship and the conversations they're having with individual schools, that they're really challenging their schools about the use of PDG, not just in terms of targeting, but the programmes, what the money is being spent on, whether there is an evidence base for that and whether we are clear on impact. So, I think the new regional advisers are going to be crucial in enabling us to ensure more consistent practice across the regions. llyr gruffydd am: So, are you content that eligibility for free school meals is the best measure, really, of identifying which pupils to target? kirsty williams am: Llyr, in the absence of anything better. I'll be the first person to say that maybe it's not as absolutely focused, but in the absence of anything different to identify a proxy for need, I think it's probably the best that we've got at present. Some of the policy levers in this area are out of my hands, so if we look at the roll-out of universal credit, for instance, we've got officials working very hard at the moment to try and understand what universal credit is going to mean and where we are going to be able to identify relative need, going forward. We haven't had any additional resource as a result of this, but we're very mindful that, potentially, this has an impact, going forward. And, officials are working all of the time, I must say, in conjunction with the department in England, to understand their thinking in this area so that we are in a position to make some decisions about what a notional eligibility for free school meals will look like going forward, but before I make any decisions, I want to assure everybody that there will be a full public consultation on that. Finally for now, on this issue of once a year, in January, if you're eligible for free school meals, then you're in that group for that year. We've had some quite strong evidence about how difficult that makes longer term planning for a number of schools and we've also been pointed in the direction of what's happened in England with the Ever 6, and I'm just wondering whether you're giving any thought to maybe changing that a little bit. In conversations with Alasdair, who is our independent adviser on this agenda, and individual schools, we're actively giving thought to greater flexibility and maybe longer term projections, so that schools know, for a number of years ahead, what their allocation will be. There are advantages to that system, because you could give that flexibility, you could give that long-term approach, but then, how do you make that responsive if a school suddenly has more children? We do know that, actually, the number of free-school-meal pupils is dropping. But there can be changes, you know, regional working in areas of north Wales in tourism, or maybe in other areas at Christmas time, parents are able to get a period of work. So, how can we create a more flexible system? We're actively looking at that at the moment. I wouldn't use it as an Ever 6 concept, but as an 'Ever 2' concept. We have looked at Ever 6, and I'm going to be absolutely blunt with you: to introduce an Ever 6 concept for Wales would mean in the region of identifying an additional £40 million. I'm going to be absolutely straight and blunt with you: we're not in a position at the moment to be able to identify an additional £40 million to introduce an Ever 6. In fact, we'll be having a discussion later on today about decisions, going forward, for the next two years. darren millar am: It's just a very brief point in response to the £40 million price ticket that you just put on that. That's, of course, assuming that you maintain the current level of PDG, yes? So, if you reduced the level of PDG slightly, but made it available to more individuals, if you like, via allocating it in a different way, then that £40 million price ticket wouldn't be there, would it? kirsty williams am: I was asked a question about had I ever considered an Ever 6. We could, indeed, change the way in which we allocate PDG money, but we have to do it within the envelope that is available to me, over £90 million. That's a significant level of investment, but, of course, as always, Darren, we could cut the amount per pupil, but that might have quite challenging swings in allocations. What we have done—because what I am clear on is that there was evidence to suggest that in the secondary sector, a great deal of PDG was being focused on years 10 and 11, especially year 11, in catch-up provision, and you'll be aware, because we've said this in evidence to the committee in the papers, we've set a challenge to secondary schools to say, 'Actually, the majority of your PDG allocation has to be used in key stage 3.' Now, we have to balance the needs, the moral hazard of turning round to children in years 10 and 11 and saying, 'We're not going to provide catch-up opportunities for you,' because, clearly, those children need that support. But the evidence and the advice that we're receiving is: actually, strong focus on early years, primary and key stage 3, if we get that right, should negate the need for spending money on catch-up at years 10 and 11. That's why we, in our advice to local authorities and schools, say that we want to see evidence that they're spending this money earlier on in a child's career, rather than just a scramble at year 11 to say, 'Right, we've got to get you through your exams.' darren millar am: Okay, but have you actively considered, then, reducing the level you have? kirsty williams am: We've— ruth conway: Sorry—I was just going to say that one of the things is looking at the scope of the definition, and I think it's about being more flexible with the definition, rather than reducing the amount per head. If we can go on, then, to talk about some of the practical uses of the PDG, you write in your written paper that 'the majority of schools are making well thought out and appropriate decisions' on how to use it. But Estyn reported that only two thirds of primary and secondary schools make effective use of the PDG. Given that we've had it now for six years, would you not have expected there to be a higher level of schools actually making good use of that funding? kirsty williams am: Well, to flip it on its head, the vast majority of schools, as identified by Estyn, are using this money to good effect. So, that's the way I like to see it—that the vast majority of schools are doing well. What Estyn has also indicated is the intrinsic link here to leadership within individual schools, and as you'll be aware, leadership, improving capacity in leadership and developing leadership talent in the Welsh education system is a key priority for me in our national mission. I think we are seeing, increasingly, more and more schools understanding how best to deploy that money for best effect for students. So, if we're honest, when PDG first started, I think, in some schools it was spent on investing in tracking of children, because they'd never thought about tracking these children, they didn't have systems in place to look at the performance of these children, and to have a system in place. So we've moved now from spending money on the infrastructure around support for FSM children into actual inputs in terms of teaching and learning. We're also seeing from Estyn that, actually, in terms of money following the evidence of what we know works, Estyn says that PDG is probably the best example of schools following tried and tested and evidence-based interventions to deploy the money. But clearly we want all of this money to be deployed as well as it can be, and again we come back to the decision I've made to appoint regional PDG advisers so that we can get that better consistency of approach. We are, in the discussions that I have with the regional consortia about how they challenge individual schools on usage, looking for very clear evidence of schools using the Sutton Trust toolkit, and we could have a discussion about whether that's the right thing, because that's on my mind too. But we want to see schools demonstrating their evidence base, and if they're not, if a school isn't doing that, okay, so demonstrate to us why you've made those decisions and, crucially, what are you doing as the school to judge whether that decision is actually making a difference for your individual pupils. So, if you're moving away from tried and tested interventions, what we know works, if you're doing something different with your money, okay, you need to justify that and you need to explain how you're going to demonstrate impact. But I think what we're seeing is increasing good practice in this area as the PDG develops and as our understanding of our school-to-school working in our self-improving school system also develops. llyr gruffydd am: You mentioned some schools will be moving from the tried-and-tested interventions, really, and I'm just wondering to what extent that evolution of use of PDG is being driven by cuts to core funding. kirsty williams am: No, I don't think it's being driven by cuts to core funding. One of the biggest impacts of PDG has not been—well, I suppose it is the money in itself, because the money has concentrated the minds, hasn't it? So, one of the most important things that PDG has done is highlight the importance of this agenda within schools, and really raise this up in the thinking of leadership and senior management teams in our schools, and has driven a focus on scrutiny and accountability in the systems that are working with our schools. I think the changing use of PDG reflects the journeys that schools have been on, some of them from a very low base where this was not a priority for them, to better understanding, and as research and as intelligence grows over time in this area, both in Wales and outside of Wales, schools are increasingly learning to use that evidence to tailor approaches in their schools. llyr gruffydd am: So you wouldn't accept at all that some of this money's being used to paper over some funding cracks from elsewhere. Because the unions and some others have told us that, whether we like it or not, there is some of that going on. kirsty williams am: As I said, Llyr, we're very clear about the usage that this money can be spent on in terms of individuals or universal application within schools, and that forms an important part of the checks and balances that we have in our system. Can we continue to improve, and ensure that more and more of our schools are employing best practice? Yes, we can, and as I've said, we've taken steps to put in place the infrastructure to support that. mark reckless am: Cabinet Secretary, how would you assess the impact of PDG on attendance and hopefully subsequent engagement with education from children who have free school meals? kirsty williams am: I think what's important to note is that, as Estyn have themselves said, over the period of the last inspection report, we have seen improvements in attendance, but I do think we need to, again, look at how PDG can support this particular agenda. And as always in the Welsh education system, there are some excellent examples of how schools use the money to address this. Ysgol y Preseli in Pembrokeshire is a very good example of how they've deployed their money. Forgive me; I can't off the top of my head remember the name of the primary school I visited, again in north Wales, where the school has proactively used this money, and they actually send teaching assistants out of school in the morning before the start of the school day, and they actually have a walking bus. So, they're proactively going out into the community and making sure that those children are in the classrooms, because the teacher said, 'We recognised we had a problem with attendance. We tried a variety of means of improving that, but in the end we have taken this quite bold step—we actually send the staff out and they create that walking bus, and they walk the children into school'. They say that they know that, for some of those children, because of the difficult circumstances they and their families are living in, they probably wouldn't be in school if it wasn't for that proactive approach. So, we're looking again at what more we can do to support this particular agenda in terms of improving attendance, because although, again, there are examples of good practice, there is still a gap between the attendance of free-school-meal pupils and non-free-school-meal pupils. And, of course, we can have the best curriculum in the world with really high-quality teaching, but unless the children are in the classes then we're not going to make the difference for them. Whilst that differential exists, then it's going to be hard to close the attainment gap for those children. mark reckless am: I was actually quite shocked just reading in advance of this meeting that the proportion attending 95 per cent or more, who have pretty full attendance, was only 35 per cent for free-school-meal children at level 4, compared to 60 per cent for non-free-school-meal pupils. My colleague here showed me, I think, last week, a graph showing the link between attendance and attainment, in particular. What more can PDG do to deal with it? In the example you give I can see how a school with an awful lot of free-school-meal children could do that, but a lot of the free-school-meal children are actually in schools that don't have that high a proportion of free school meals, where it would be much more challenging to bring in that type of initiative. kirsty williams am: Yes, indeed, and I think it gets more challenging the older the children get. I think it's more difficult to find interventions that are successful higher up, so key stage 4. So, you can do a walking bus with little ones, can't you, but I don't suppose your average 15 or 16-year-old is going to take very kindly to that. But again, we see in Ysgol y Preseli the employment of staff to directly work with families of older children to reinforce the messages around, as you quite rightly say, the linkage between attendance and attainment, and really work with individual families to understand the barriers to attendance: what's going on in the family that is preventing that child from going to school, and what more can the school do to address those situations. But you're absolutely right; there is more that we need to do to address this particular agenda of attainment. steve davies: There is also another very good example—and I take what you say about where there are small numbers—but in our secondary schools where there are significant numbers, they're investing PDG in resources like a school nurse and a school counsellor, not just to work with the children but link to other agencies on whom the children and the families are dependent to support them in terms of working with schools. So, it's something, particularly in our most challenging areas, where it cannot just be delivered within the school. So, good use of that resource is being made to employ people to support them in those wider areas. To what extent is PDG also used to seek to reduce the higher rates of exclusion for children entitled to free school meals? kirsty williams am: So, if we looked at permanent exclusions, there isn't a differential, but if we look at temporary exclusions, there we see there is a disproportionate number of children on free school meals that are subject to those exclusions. Again, I think what schools employing best practice understand is that you need a multi-agency approach to supporting that particular child. Some of those exclusions can be as a result of the need to address other issues going on in a child's life. So, this is where we come back to the committee's work, for instance, on mental health and support for children, support for behaviour in school. So, again, it's a multi-agency approach that I think we need, and, in our good schools, our really, really good schools, there's a recognition of that need to have a whole team around a child to support that child in education. So, for those children who do find themselves in education other than at school, we are providing additional support that previously was not available. hefin david am: It appears that the attainment gap at 2017 has actually widened, in spite of PDG levels. So, if you look at it—with the usual caveats about whether you can make direct comparisons on level 2 plus between the exams the year before and the exams that we had last summer—on the face of it, the gap has increased. I'm sure we all want to, because I want to, have a discussion about why children on free school meals were less resilient in the exam system last year. But, if we look at the period that we have been employing PDG, over that period, we have seen a narrowing of the gap. So, if we look at where we started from: in 2009, one in five children on free school meals got level 2 plus—one in five—by 2016, we had got that down to one in three. Obviously, there's still a way to go, but, Sir Alasdair, who knows about these things, says that that is a significant improvement. Last year, we got some challenges. We need to understand why that happened, but I do think it's— hefin david am: Why, do you think? kirsty williams am: Why, do I think? What I do think is there is no one answer. I think we could look at and we can have discussions around the move from BTEC to science GCSEs. I think we have supplied figures to the committee about the significant change in the number of children on free school meals who weren't doing a single science GCSE and are now doing science GCSEs. Where children have done language and literature, whether that be through the medium of English or through the medium of Welsh, there is more resilience. So, it's that exposure to literacy in all its forms that I think could potentially make a difference. So, I think there's no one answer to why free-school-meal children were not so resilient last year. At my next ministerial policy board, in May, we'll be doing a deep dive into this particular subject. hefin david am: So, to what extent would exam boards be responsible for lack of grade stability? kirsty williams am: It could be one of the contributory factors. What I think is important is that there is no one, single reason why there seems to be less resilience in this cohort of children. hefin david am: Will you be speaking to the exam boards about this and raising concerns? kirsty williams am: I have written to Qualifications Wales, we've had discussions about it, but I've asked them to formally submit evidence ahead of my policy board for May, where, as I said, we will be doing a formal, deep-dive discussion across the department about these issues. But, again, Hefin, what we've got to be clear on is—while we look at overall factors, you know, our overall national statistic—we did see some schools last year whose FSM performance was better than it had been the year before. So, what was it in those schools that enabled those children to do really well, whereas, in other schools, the performance was different? Even in individual cities, you can see a huge variety of performance. So, you could have really high-performing schools with a very small number of the cohort on free school meals. The difference between those performances in a single city—so, that's the same local education authority and the same regional consortium—you can see a massive change. There's one school I can talk to: their free-school-meal performance is 88 per cent. A similar school in the same city with the same proportion of children on free school meals, their performance is down in the 20 per cents. For me, the challenge is to go into individual schools and understand what was happening in that particular school that ensured that their children did really well. We've got one school in Swansea, their FSM performance at GCSE level 2 outperforms non-FSM pupils. If we take your argument that 2017 was an unusual year and the trends up to 2016 were positive, in a few years' time, when we will be looking back in two years' time, how are we going to measure this progress, say, in 2019? What are we likely to see and what methods are you going to use to measure progress that way? kirsty williams am: Well, you'll be aware that we are moving away from level 2 plus as a performance measure anyway because of the— hefin david am: So, what performance measures will you use? kirsty williams am: So, for the lack of sophistication around the level 2 plus, and for the unintended behaviours that that particular performance measure has driven within our schools. What's important to me is that we have a more sophisticated model that looks at school performance for all children. What level 2 plus does is narrow, very much, the focus of schools on an individual part of the cohort, usually the C/D borderline, which is why then we have problems with the number of students getting a B grade or above. Well, if a child gets a C but came to you in year 7 and they were destined to get an E, yes, indeed, a C is a success, because you've moved that child on; but, if that child came to you destined to get an A* and gets a C, then we haven't done a good job by that particular child. So, we need a performance measure that is much more sophisticated, looks at each individual child, tracks that progress, and measures the value added by that school in performance. hefin david am: Last question: therefore, should we have confidence in the data up to 2016? Is there a lack of confidence in that data? kirsty williams am: No, it's not a lack of confidence in the data. What I'm saying is, using that as a performance measure and an accountability measure within our school system may have been right for the time. I think that particular set of performance measures has driven certain behaviours—not because Ministers wanted that to happen, but as an unintended consequence. I think we can work together with our school system, learning the lessons of international best practice, to develop much more sophisticated accountability and performance measures for individual schools, and, I should say, for the Government. So, you will be aware of my intention to issue the first national report card on Government performance later on this year. It's about trying to develop a more sophisticated way, which is in line with our national mission, where every child's education is valued, and where the impact of the school can be tracked more effectively. Can I just ask, Cabinet Secretary, are you still holding on to your target of 37 per cent of free-school-meal pupils achieving the level 2 threshold? kirsty williams am: Well, we're moving away from the level 2 threshold. So, we will want to develop a new suite, in line with our new accountability measures, as we go forward. So, we will be absolutely continuing to track and evaluate the performance of free-school-meal pupils. When we announce our new accountability measures, I will be in a position to address how we'll measure the Government's performance, and national performance, going forward. But, given the fact that we're moving away from level 2 plus, then we will need a different set of performance indicators. The next questions are on looked-after children and adopted children, and I've got questions from Michelle then Mark. mark reckless am: I think my questions are first, but, Michelle, please do correct me if you were planning to come in before. The PDG for looked-after children doesn't quite seem to have the degree of visibility as the PDG for the free-school-meals. I think we had the MORI/WISERD survey—only 15 per cent of primary schools and 23 per cent of secondary schools were aware that PDG was targeted at looked-after children. I just wonder—can you clarify on the record here what is the role of schools with PDG for looked-after children as compared to the regional consortia in this field? kirsty williams am: Okay. I think that's probably in the nature of the cohort, so, there are more children subject to free school meals than are subject to being looked after. My understanding was that the thinking behind that at the time was around a greater strategic deployment of that resource and to try and drive a greater impact than how it was being used previously. We have looked-after children PDG co-ordinators—they're in their second year this year—to look at a regional deployment of that resource. And that resource can be done in a variety of ways, through individual allocation to a school to support an individual child, through to capacity building for the whole system. So, for instance, if I give you an example, in Carmarthenshire, there's been a big emphasis on attachment disorder and training teachers with regard to the impact of attachment disorder. Carmarthenshire happens to be one of those local authorities that does quite well in terms of attainment for looked-after children. But I have asked officials to give greater scrutiny to how that resource has been used in the last year. Steve, on my behalf, wrote out to the system, setting out our expectations, but also advising them of the fact we will be asking very detailed questions of accountability for that money. So, what has that money been used on and how can you account for the effect? But, Steve, maybe you can give some greater detail. One of the rationales for shifting—not that all the money stays in the region, but having a regional strategic support—was that, historically, the money was going directly with that child to the school. Given the quite often rapid turnover of children in schools—the very nature of looked-after children is they do sometimes move through foster parents—historically, what happened, the money lands in the school, because, at that time in the year, when it's measured, the school gets the money and can spend it on some additional support for staff, but quite often that child moves on to another school and the money doesn't transfer. Some schools will go through quite a number of years without having a looked-after child and will not think strategically, 'How do I need to support them?' So, that was the rationale of the shift. In terms of the implementation of the regional allocation, as of this financial year finishing, we are going into local authorities and regions to evaluate where they've located the resource, what the impact of that resource has been, so that is reinforced and shared more widely. kirsty williams am: And then, to reassure, it's not just internally that we're looking at this. We have a contract with an external agency to do an evaluation— mark reckless am: That's ICF consulting. Yes, so that was done in the autumn of last year, because, as I said, we had concerns about whether this was really having the effect that was intended. So, my expectation is that we will be in a position to receive that report later on this spring, and of course it would be my intention that that report would be made public for people to have a look at what— mark reckless am: That was commissioned last autumn— kirsty williams am: Yes, in November 2017. kirsty williams am: So, I'm hoping to have that published before the summer recess. I'm very reluctant to say months; I've learnt not to say months, because they move. lynne neagle am: I'm going to go to Michelle now, Mark, because— mark reckless am: Sure. lynne neagle am: —both of you asked for these questions, and that's what the pre-meeting is for. Would you be open, Cabinet Secretary, to the idea of adjusting the eligibility of the PDG so that pupils who have been looked after or adopted at any point within a previous given period of time would attract the PDG, rather than only if they're looked-after on a one-off date? kirsty williams am: As I said earlier, in questions from, I think it was, Llyr, who was talking about concepts of concepts of Ever 6, we are constantly looking at how we can get that balance between focus and flexibility for this resource. Llyr opened with the question of, 'How can you absolutely ensure that these children are getting the money?', but then there's also a tension about how can you create some flexibility around the school's usage of the grant. Issues around adoption are slightly more sensitive, because we couldn't force a family to tell a school that their child was an adopted child. So, a family may be very open and very keen to explain that to a school, but we can't necessarily track as closely children who have been adopted, especially if that adoption happens before the child goes to school. We can't be in a position of forcing families to disclose this information if they don't want to, but we certainly can, as I say, look to strengthen our monitoring arrangements around PDG support for looked-after children and the impact that that's having. If they don't want to divulge that, it wouldn't be my job to tell a family, 'You have to let us know if your child is adopted.' lynne neagle am: Michelle. The EAS consortium's approach to using the looked-after and adopted PDG is to use it as part of a broader approach targeted at vulnerable learners in general. What are your views on that approach? kirsty williams am: I'm a great believer in if we can get it right for our most vulnerable learners, we'll be getting it right for all of our learners. I gave the example earlier, for instance, of attachment disorder, and, Chair, you will know that I have had conversations. One of the emerging themes for me, as I go around visiting schools, is the impact and the growing awareness and the growing numbers of children who have attachment disorder, and how schools are best able to respond to that in their children. So, for instance, as I said about Carmarthenshire, there's been a huge effort to address that in the school sector in Carmarthenshire. Now, that has a disproportionate benefit for those children, because you're more likely to see attachment disorder in children who are care experienced, because of the nature of the lives that those children have lived, but that doesn't necessarily mean that attachment disorder is exclusively found in those children that are looked after. So, that vulnerable learner, regardless of their background, will benefit from having teachers who are better trained, understanding and have intervention strategies in place to be able to address that need. steve davies: I think it's also important to add that this is not one region's approach; this is across four regions, so the others—. For example, ERW have run a significant programme looking at the impact of adverse childhood experiences on pupils, which has enabled teachers to detect some of the impact of some of those and then considers some of the work they need to do within the school but also with other agencies. kirsty williams am: I was in Pil Primary School recently where they use their PDG, both FSM PDG, and no doubt an element of PDG for looked-after, for nurture groups. So, for those children who really, really find it very difficult to be in the main classroom, they can have that nurture group experience to address issues around emotional behaviour, feelings, and it gets them in a position where they are able then to join the main classroom because issues around behaviour have been addressed and they're in a better position to learn. Can I follow up on tracking adopted children? I entirely understand that you can't force parents to disclose that their child is adopted. However, my understanding was that, in England, there was a dataset with social services that was shared with schools in a way that I'm not clear is happening in Wales and how, if at all, that links to the pupil level annual school census data. Perhaps sort of linked to that, isn't there an argument for making the parents of adopted children in the schools, potentially, with adopted children more aware that adopted children who were previously looked after have this potential grant, and would they not be more willing to disclose this, at least confidentially to the school and Government, if they knew there was this upside of doing so? kirsty williams am: We're actively looking at whether we should try and find a way of collecting this data, with the caveats that I just gave earlier. We can't force parents to divulge information that is a matter for them, nor would I want to. But there is an active discussion going on at the moment about whether we could create a dataset where people divulge this information and we can then track the children through. One of the ways in which we can often encourage take-up, for instance, of free school meals, especially in those communities where there is a sense of reluctance to apply for support—even though people are entitled to it, there's a reluctance to do it; sometimes we see this in rural areas—. Actually, appealing to the parents by saying, 'Actually, this will mean more money for your child's school budget' is a much more compelling reason why people will apply for it then saying, 'Actually, it's going to help you', because they don't want to be seen being dependent, they don't want to be seen being helped. But, if you say to them, 'Actually, do you know that this means more money for your child's school?', they go, 'Oh, all right then, I'll fill in the forms now.' So, you're right, I think there is something that we could do to make parents understand, in the round, that this has an impact. But we are actively looking at and discussing whether we could create a dataset around adopted children and how we can do that in line with data protection and data sharing. One of the things I am concerned about in the performance of looked-after children generally is how we can, across Government, work more closely together. We can't see the educational attainment of looked-after children just being a job of education. Now, officials were at the ministerial advisory group that's chaired by David Melding on prospects for looked-after children. I will be sitting down with David Melding to talk through what more we can do on the education side. I think there's really an appetite between me and the Minister for children to get a closer working relationship on this. We can't expect schools to do it on their own and alone. And there are things that we can do out there in local authorities to help improve outcomes. It's not just about the PDG; it is about, when social services are thinking about a placement, where does the discussion about where children are going to go to school—when does that take place? Do we talk about the placement, move a child and then think, 'Oh my goodness me, what are we going to do about the schooling?' If you can imagine, the school could have been working really, really hard with a pupil to get them in a good place, to get them being able to access the curriculum, and then social services decide that the placement is being changed. So, a greater involvement in education and better linked-up working in local authorities will help us with this. If we think we can crack this with just PDG, then we're being delusional. It has to be a cross-government approach at a national level, and at a local government level as well, to get this right. Sometimes, data protection—how can we break down some of these barriers between, you know, the school doesn't need to, schools shouldn't see, the entire social services report? Well, maybe the school does need to see some of that background information if they're going to have an impact for that child. So, there's more work to do, but it cannot be just the job of education on its own if we're going to make a difference, nor can it just be the job of the PDG to make a difference for those children. julie morgan am: Yes, before I go on to those, I just wanted to support, really, what Mark was saying about adopted children and how important it is, I think, that the adoptive parents feel able to speak to the school and to give information. Because certainly any evidence we've had from adoptive parents, and generally knowing about what adoptive parents do feel, is that they often feel that there's a degree of a lack of sensitivity in the school about the issues of adoption. I would certainly support some move towards ensuring that the atmosphere was open in a way that would encourage them to realise that it would be a help for the children if there was an awareness in the school. kirsty williams am: Yes, and that would chime with what I hear from many adoptive parents. I'm just trying to be sensitive by saying we can't force people to divulge this information if they don't want to. We need to make sure that those parents feel that they can discuss this with school leaders and classroom teachers and explore how best those individual children can be supported, and how best we can support parents. Because, again—and I've said this a lot—after the quality of teaching, the second biggest impact on a child's educational outcome will be parental engagement. So, being able to create an environment where adoptive parents feel very confident and able to talk about their children's education is absolutely crucial if we're going to get that parental engagement that we need for all of our children. Going on to looked-after children, you say that the latest data on looked-after children's attainment is extremely disappointing. Can you expand on that and what effect the PDG has had in this result, or not had? kirsty williams am: Well, there's no getting away from it: the way in which we currently measure outcomes for looked-after children, the results are not good enough. That's why officials are engaging with the group that David Melding is chairing, to make sure that education is integral to that group and it's not lost sight of. There's a discussion to be had about the cohort, whether it's right and correct to compare looked-after children to the main cohort, or whether these statistics are useful in any way. Sometimes as well—this is not to make an excuse because, as I've said in my paper, it's extremely disappointing, but sometimes it can be really difficult. Because the cohort sometimes can be very, very small, it can swing the statistics to look perhaps more dramatic. julie morgan am: I think, generally, when you look at how looked-after children do— kirsty williams am: It's not good. julie morgan am: —in a much wider evaluation, they're not doing well, are they? kirsty williams am: They're not doing well. So, that's why we've got the review, the independent review, into the impact of the PDG in this area. This is why Steve is doing the work that he is doing with the regional consortia because, clearly, at the moment, we are not doing what we need to do for that particular cohort of children. steve davies: I think we will not move away from the fact that these children need good GCSEs to gain employment, so we'll continue to measure that. I think we need to look at more nuanced evaluations of the data at a lower level. So, for example, there were significant improvements in terms of PDG pupils who got three and four good GCSEs but didn't get past the threshold. That's not to cover anything that is not working in terms of improvement, but we will look at the full range and still hold on to the fact that we have to look at a measure that relates to the likelihood of these children going on to further education and training. So, is there any way of trying to address this? Is the PDG used for anything to do with exclusions? kirsty williams am: We can look at exclusions. We also have to read across about how the whole system works, not just the PDG element of the system. So, we know, for example, that 66 per cent of looked-after learners have some additional learning need, so we can't just look at it in terms of this particular source of funding; we have to look at it at a wider level of support. So, given that the majority of those children will have an ALN, how can we make sure that our new ALN legislation and our new ALN regime meets the needs of these children? So, I think what we're looking at, again, is to say that it can't be just the job of the PDG. That's there as an additional level of support, but actually, we've got to get our ALN right. Unless we get our ALN right, lots and lots of these children are not going to get the support that they need day in, day out via that system. We do know that sometimes, if we're not addressing ALN, then we're not addressing behaviour issues that then potentially lead to an expulsion or potentially lead to non-attendance. So, we've got to look at it in the round and recognise the connections between the sometimes quite complex needs that these children have within the school setting, that are not just as a result of the fact that they're looked after; they have other needs as well. Steve is reminding me that that's why well-being is part of the national mission—to address issues around supporting children with their well-being, which is a way of keeping them in school. I was just wondering what your assessment is as to why some schools made progress and others didn't. kirsty williams am: I think we have to recognise that the 39 schools that were part of the programme were in very, very different places. So, I think one of the reasons why some schools did well was because their needs were not so complex, not so deep-seated and a certain level of intervention was enough to get them moving forward. I think, talking to those involved in the programme, as always, we had some support advisers, challenge advisers working with those schools as part of the programme who were really, really excellent and really good, and were the right fit for the school and really drove the school onwards. We had other people employed in the programme who, perhaps, were less effective at driving change within those individual schools. So, what we have is a mixed bag of performance, again reflecting the very different challenges that those schools were facing, which led them to be chosen for the programme in the first place. One of the other key additional factors was the extent to which there had been recent appointment of a new headteacher to that school just before the programme had started, because— kirsty williams am: Leadership is all. I think one of the challenges is that sometimes the time it takes to make changes in leadership can be protracted and can be a barrier, sometimes, to the speed with which you can move. But, for a significant minority of the schools, there had been recent new appointments of headteachers, which was seen to be contributing, when you looked at the evaluation, to the speed with which they were able to engage. llyr gruffydd am: The reason I was asking was I wanted to understand what lessons the Government is taking from that three-year investment, really, and how, maybe, you're applying some of those lessons to your wider school improvement programme. I know Professor Mel Ainscow identified six interconnected lessons, although I also note that the Cabinet Secretary didn't actually meet him for about six or seven months after coming into post. So, I'm just wondering, can you give us confidence that, actually, you are serious about taking lessons from Schools Challenge Cymru and applying them to the wider school improvement agenda? kirsty williams am: Well, absolutely, Llyr. I don't think anything should be read into when I met the individual concerned, because officials were meeting the individual concerned. Individual challenge advisers were meeting with the regions, there was crossover work with the FSM agenda as well, and we are absolutely determined that best practice and those interventions that drove school improvement are embedded in the new support that we have via the regional consortia. It's no coincidence that some of the best people that were employed by Schools Challenge Cymru are now in the employment of our regional consortia. So, those people that were really good and really made a difference don't work for the Schools Challenge Cymru scheme any more, they work for our regional school improvement services. It is absolutely key and crucial to have strong, capable school leadership as a driver for change within the system. We're looking at systems and processes, so, actually, has a school got in place comprehensive systems of tracking and processes within the school? We're looking at the teacher quality—how can we ensure that we have got consistent strategies in place to drive up pedagogy and teacher quality in the classroom? Collaborative activity—again, absolutely key. A school cannot see itself in isolation, and one of the key themes of the national mission is a self-improving system, so, collaborative working where schools are looking outside of each other, learning from best practice from other schools. So, there are lots of things that we've drawn from the evaluation that you will see as key themes running through the national mission, and, as I said, it's no coincidence that our really good people that were working in Schools Challenge Cymru are now working for the regional consortia, being able to use that expertise not just for a very small proportion of our schools—but that expertise is available to all our schools. llyr gruffydd am: Although Estyn has told us, of course, that you can't expect the consortia to really carry on with that level of intervention and the same kind of intensity as was provided previously, so I'm just wondering— kirsty williams am: In what way? llyr gruffydd am: Well, we were told by Estyn in evidence that they didn't necessarily think that we could expect the consortia to provide the same type of tailored support, and certainly the level of intensity with the improvement boards and everything— kirsty williams am: Well, the improvement boards are carrying on, so the improvement boards still exist, and I would—not that I want to argue with Estyn— llyr gruffydd am: Well, feel free; this is your opportunity to do so if you— kirsty williams am: What I would say is that those improvement boards are staying on, and our schools categorisation system is used to identify the level of support. Now, if you're a red school, that gives you the entitlement to 25 days of support. That is more than you would have got under the Schools Challenge Cymru programme, which would've been 20 days. So, actually, moving to this system allows us to really focus in on those schools that need that intensive level of support. And what's important for me, Llyr, in this, okay, is that those schools are not necessarily just the schools that were in the programme. Our system now of challenge, advice and support allows us to target resources across all of our schools and across all of our sectors, because you'll be aware that Schools Challenge was only available to secondary schools, not available to primary schools. What our system now allows us to do, via the schools categorisation, is to identify schools, wherever they are in Wales and whatever sector they're in, to have that intensive level of support that they need to make improvements. llyr gruffydd am: So, you're confident that that level of momentum is continuing through the consortia that was previously enjoyed by those particular schools, and you're also confident that there is minimal risk that they'll slip back to where they were, potentially, or at least part of the way back. kirsty williams am: Well, actually, there are some really good examples of some of the Schools Challenge Cymru schools making that sustained improvement now that the programme has come to an end. You only have to look at Tredegar, where we have seen continual improvement and moving up through the categorisation system. That school is now a green school, so they've been able to sustain their progress at the end of the programme. If we look at Armando in Eastern High School, again—gosh, my goodness me, we had lots of debates in a previous Chamber about the future of Eastern. There was one person that said that Eastern had to be closed and that the only way forward for that particular school was for it to be shut down, but what we have seen is investment via Schools Challenge Cymru, but ongoing, continual support from the regional consortium, and that school has come out of special measures. I pay absolute tribute to the staff of that school and that community that have done such a good job. So, I'm absolutely convinced that where we've got good leadership and good support, some of those schools are making continued, sustained progress even after the end of the programme. The challenge for me is for those schools that Schools Challenge Cymru didn't work for, and we haven't seen that progress—how we can use our school improvement system now to continue to work with those schools to give them the level of support that they need to make a difference. So that's what my focus is on now: a whole-system approach, rather than choosing 39 schools to get that level of support, when we recognise that there are schools everywhere, potentially, that need intervention, support and challenge, and in the primary sector as well. So, you wouldn't agree with a number of—well, the near-unanimous evidence that we've had from academics, some of whom are Government advisers from consortia et cetera, that this kind of programme such as Schools Challenge Cymru would probably need about five years to really have the impact that it was intended to have. kirsty williams am: What I would say is that, from my understanding, from the outset, it was a time-limited programme. That's not to say it was the wrong decision, because what's important, and an ongoing legacy of the programme, was the investment in regional school improvement capacity, because at the time our school improvement services and the regions were young, in their infancy. The ability of individual local authorities to make a difference, with so many local authorities in an Estyn categorisation, was limited, so one of the ongoing legacies of the programme is that significant investment of over £10 million in the capacity of the regions to be able to continue this support and the school improvement work. llyr gruffydd am: So, how disappointed were you that the money for Schools Challenge Cymru went back into reserves and didn't stay in your envelope, as you described it earlier? I presume you made a pitch for it. Did you make a case for that money to stay within your department? kirsty williams am: Llyr, we are constantly having discussions with the Minister for Finance around support for the education budget. We were able to secure investment from the Finance Minister to be able to secure the programme and run it and phase it out to make sure there was transition support, so as we moved from the schools challenge programme into the regional consortia, there were resources to do that. llyr gruffydd am: Did you feel there was a case to be made to add to the consortia's resources and be able to continue that level of support that schools had previously had? kirsty williams am: Well, we did make resources available to the regional consortia to do that. As I say, from the outset, the previous Minister was very clear it was a time-limited programme. And I want to be absolutely clear: I have visited many, many Schools Challenge Cymru schools. I have used that opportunity to talk to them about—Heolddu being one of them, Hefin, which we went to visit, and Willows, for instance. I'm going to one this afternoon—I'm going to St Illtyd's this afternoon, and I always take—. I always take the opportunity to speak to those teachers about their experience of the programme and to understand and assure myself that they are getting ongoing support that they see as an appropriate level for them. hefin david am: With regard to it being a time-limited programme, the previous Minister was clear that it was a time-limited programme, but it wasn't quite as time-limited as you've decided to be. Is that fair to say? kirsty williams am: No, it was supposed to be a three-year programme at the most. So, there's no differential between when I decided it was time-limited and the expectations— hefin david am: So the time limit was the same that the previous Minister put on it. llyr gruffydd am: But Mel Ainscow did tell us that there was a fade out in that third year—not that people were giving up, don't get me wrong, but clearly there wasn't that commitment coming from Government because the decision had been made, and people felt that it was just fizzling out a little bit, and that impacted on the momentum. I think there certainly was a transition phase when we knew that the programme was moving and schools were moving into a different level of support, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as a fading out—not at all. As I said, we were aware that the programme was transitioning and we were determined to get that right for those individual schools, and to learn the lessons and, crucially, to be able to apply those lessons right across the board. steve davies: I can see where the perception would come if a programme director like Mel was managing the programme right to the end of the three years exactly the same, and it falls off—not a cliff, but it falls off, then the readiness for schools and the readiness in the system to hand over—so part of the shift of focus was that working as a Government with the programme in those schools to working with the programme, those schools and the region. So, I think, inevitably, one party might see it as a decrease in terms of emphasis on their work, but it was necessary for the transition. llyr gruffydd am: But does that cast a bit of a shadow over the transition, then—that one key player within that process felt as such, or are you confident that that was managed well and effectively? kirsty williams am: I think it was managed well, and we were very clear to recognise success where success has been achieved, but not to gloss over where the programme had not made an impact, because that wouldn't be good for anybody. There was a formal event to close the programme, which gave everybody an opportunity to get together, to be formally thanked, and for, as I said, congratulations to be given to those people who had really made a difference and, crucially, key staff transferred over into the regional consortia. So, for those individuals, they were able to continue their work, but just be able to apply that work on a regional basis rather than just in an individual school. So, I don't see that there was any fading out, but there was a transition into a new system, and many of those key personnel transitioned into the system with us. lynne neagle am: Have you got any figures for the numbers of staff who went from the programme into the consortia? kirsty williams am: Not off the top of my head, but I can let you know. kirsty williams am: And can I just say, I met with some of them? I met with a selection of those people who had been involved in the programme to get their feedback on what they felt had gone right, and what they didn't feel had gone right in the programme. So, I took the time not just to meet the figurehead of the programme, but actually to meet the people who were doing the work in the individual schools. darren millar am: Yes, I just wanted to ask you, you mentioned the figurehead there, I assume by 'the figurehead' you mean Professor Ainscow. And you've mentioned as well that you said you wanted to learn lessons from Schools Challenge Cymru, but he told us that nobody had been in touch with him since March of last year in order to have any sort of follow-up engagement, or to have a dialogue about his perspective on what worked, what didn't work, why there were failures in some areas and why there were successes in others. Why haven't you sought that level of engagement with the person who was responsible for running the programme? kirsty williams am: I've had that conversation with Mr Ainscow. We've spoken to the people who were actually involved in running the programme on a daily basis in individual schools. We've spoken to a wide variety of people to get their insight into the lessons learned, what was valuable and what was not valuable. darren millar am: But you've hardly engaged with Mr Ainscow—with Professor Ainscow himself. steve davies: I would actually say that I have had meetings— darren millar am: Since March of last year. I've had discussions with Mel Ainscow, and my line manager at the time, Owen Evans, also had meetings and discussions. darren millar am: So, when he told us, 'Since last March, I literally have had no contact at all with anybody from Welsh Government', he was telling porky pies, was he? steve davies: That's not my recollection. kirsty williams am: Yes, well, I just talked about the celebration event to formally mark the end of the programme. And this idea that somebody has been ignored or frozen out is not how I see or how I regard that situation. mark reckless am: I have to say, with Professor Ainscow my impression was he took great, great pride in the work that he'd done with Schools Challenge Cymru, and I think he really enjoyed the engagement, the work and the positive relations with the Welsh Government. But I think there was just a degree of disappointment, perhaps, that at least he didn't feel that he'd been interrogated as much as he might have been about the lessons learned from the programme, and how perhaps to entrench those as well as possible with the regional consortia. I just wonder, Cabinet Secretary, if you could invite the professor in, perhaps to have a further debrief with you and take account of some of his thoughts and suggestions for what might help in this area. kirsty williams am: Well, Mark, as I said, I just don't think it should be right to characterise this as a failure to engage with a single individual. kirsty williams am: As I said, I met with him, Steve has met with him, Owen Evans has met with him, my special policy adviser has met with him and had discussions. But, Mark, I hope that I have demonstrated since I took on this job that I am willing to work with a wide variety of people and to tap into their expertise if it can help me to deliver on the national mission. And if the advice to me is that we haven't sufficiently learnt the lessons, then I'll gladly have another conversation. What I'm saying to you—and I'm absolutely confident—is that we have learnt the lessons, we are taking that work and the good practice forward, and we have done that with conversations with a wide variety of people who had a view on this, from individual schools that were involved in the programme, individual people who were working in those schools, local education authorities, some of which have been very scathing about the programme, I should say, regional consortia—. mark reckless am: I'm glad to hear that, Cabinet Secretary, but I still say that, listening to Professor Ainscow's evidence, there was a perception, at least from him individually, that the programme should not be seen to be a failure, but a desire that the lessons should be learnt and a feeling or exception, at least on his part, that there was more that he still had to contribute to the process. And just to take one particular example, I think he referred to the Schools Challenge Cymru advisers being very successful in bringing in people who might not otherwise have contributed to this, and the regional consortia have had greater challenges in recruiting people, perhaps in some areas, of the same high standard of some particular individuals, but also from a wide range of different areas that the Schools Challenge Cymru do, and that there could be more to learn in that area as to how to support real excellence and a greater diversity of recruitment for those people. Is that something you could perhaps draw on his thoughts further about? Because I think he does feel that he has more to say to Welsh Government to help in this area. kirsty williams am: Firstly, can I say that I have never described the programme as a failure? I would understand, as someone who has put so much personal investment into the brand of schools challenges, that he would not want anybody to characterise that particular approach to school improvement as a failure. And I want to be absolutely clear that I have never described the programme as a failure, and I want to reassure Mr Ainscow of that. As I've said, gosh, my goodness me, if you saw my e-mail inbox and you saw the letters that come in, people are never shy in coming forward to give me advice on what I need to do, what I need to do next, what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, and, you know, our doors are always open to listen to people who have interesting things to say about how we can deliver our educational mission. I'm sure the Minister is aware that Cardiff put extra funds of its own in to continue Schools Challenge Cymru advisers. So, obviously, they appreciated the value of the scheme, but it does query whether it should have gone on longer. kirsty williams am: Julie, I think, to be fair, there are some people who think the scheme was absolutely fantastic. I've had feedback from people who didn't think the scheme was helpful at all—in fact, they felt it was a hindrance. I'm very much of the view that the scheme worked really well for some schools in some areas and had less impact in some areas. What's important to me is that we understand what it was that led those schools to make those big changes, how we can—like Mark talked about, the expertise—how we can keep that expertise in the system, and how we can apply the lessons to all schools. john griffiths am: Some questions on regional consortia, Cabinet Secretary, and, first of all, the role that you believe they should play and how schools use PDG. It's one of the things that I have been very clear to the regional consortia that I expect their challenge and support advisers to be asking schools about. So, one of the conversations that they need to have when they are in schools is exploring, with that school, how they are using their PDG, and how they're demonstrating an impact for those resources. So, it's a fundamental role for the challenge and support advisers in the regional consortia in their school improvement work. john griffiths am: That sort of brings to mind some of the research that's been done on the role of the challenge advisers, Cabinet Secretary, which suggested that they're not actually challenging schools in that way, and that there's very little evidence of schools changing their decisions on the use of PDG as a result of any challenge from those challenge advisers. So, how would you respond to those findings? kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, in my scrutiny of the role and success of our regional consortia, I specifically asked them about free-school-meal performance and the use of PDG within their particular region. I think there is increasing evidence to suggest that good use is being made of that resource, and I think that is being fed back into us. Estyn tell us that it's one of the areas of school expenditure that is closely linked to research and an evidence base. But, clearly, there is more to do, and that's why we have appointed the new regional advisers for PDG going forward, because we think there can be improvements in how this agenda can be supported at a regional level. There's always more that we can do, and we are strengthening that role by the appointment of the new regional PDG advisers, so that individual school challenge advisers know what they should be looking for, know what they should be doing, and there is a regional approach to good practice. Could you tell the committee, Cabinet Secretary, how effective you believe the relationship was between the Schools Challenge Cymru programme and the regional consortia's school improvement functions, and to what extent it varied by region? kirsty williams am: I think it's fair to say that, on occasion, I have received feedback that there was a conflict between what was going on at an individual school under the school improvement programme and whether, then, they welcomed support from the regional consortia as part of that. So, in some cases, if we're being absolutely honest, there could sometimes be tensions between the two, but in most cases, the relationship was very, very positive and there was continuous feedback between the work going on in the schools under the programme and the regional consortia challenge advisers. But I'm going to be blunt and honest with people—in some cases, it has been reported to me—it's only anecdotal evidence; I haven't got hard and fast evidence—that there sometimes was a conflict: 'We're a school challenge school so we don't need to participate or listen to any advice that's coming from the regional consortia.' Or, a local education authority said to me, 'We felt that we couldn't get involved in that school anymore because it was part of a different programme.' Those were isolated incidents, and, as I said, it's only anecdotal feedback. steve davies: Just very quickly, I think that, across the board, it was more complex in the beginning, getting—[Inaudible.]. But when the programme itself recognised that they needed to work with the regions, and the regions needed to work with them—and I think Mel Ainscow in his evidence referred to this—it strengthened after some early challenges. I think Mel Ainscow was working in a number of regions—I can't remember which ones—so he's established relationships—[Interruption.] Sorry? kirsty williams am: Central south. He has already been working in that, so I think it possibly had a stronger springboard in terms of the early working. kirsty williams am: Because he already had relationships that he had already developed in that particular region. Finally from me, Cabinet Secretary: in 2015-16, Estyn reported on regional consortia not sufficiently focusing on particular groups of pupils and tracking their outcomes—for example, vulnerable pupils. I just wonder what you are able to tell us in terms of to what extent there has been necessary progress since 2015-16. Well, I think it's important to recognise that all four consortia underwent monitoring visits in the autumn of last year, of 2017, which weren't reflected in the Estyn annual report for 2015-16. Estyn, through these 2017 inspections, have said that three out of the four regional consortia are making strong progress in their particular work, and we are continuing, as Welsh Government, to work with the other regional consortia to address the findings of the Estyn report. The committee probably hasn't had an opportunity to see, but, only this morning, Estyn has released a report on more able and talented, and has positive things to say in the field of more able and talented, which was being asked about earlier by Members—you know, evidence of improved working and support in that particular arena. But, again, we need to ensure a consistency across all the regions, and that the findings of Estyn's most recent reports into regional performance are followed through. As we've got a couple of minutes left, if I can just jump back to the issue of practical uses of the PDG—because it's the only thing we haven't really covered and it would be good to get on the record—can I ask to what extent you'd like to see the PDG used to track the progress of eligible pupils? And the committee's heard that there are several different tracking systems and tools used by schools. To what extent is that an issue to do with what the Welsh Government is promoting? Or is it down to consortia or individual schools? And do you think there needs to be a more centralised push on how the tracking is undertaken? kirsty williams am: Firstly, can I say it's absolutely crucial that we track performance, absolutely crucial? That's the bedrock. We don't dictate to individual schools the nature of the system that they should employ in their school. There are a number of different programmes that allow schools to do this, but we are absolutely clear, and best practice and evidence shows us, that individual pupil tracking is key and crucial. And, as I said in the beginning, where we weren't tracking pupils at all, initial investment in PDG was used to establish these systems within schools. Again, one of the outcomes from the schools challenge review, and one of the lessons learnt, was, again, the importance of individual tracking of pupils throughout their school career. lynne neagle am: Okay, and you don't think there's more scope to look at what the best system is that can be recommended to schools. At the moment we use the Sutton Trust toolkit, which is fine and excellent, but we are having active discussions about whether we're in a position, now, to look at developing a suite of a Welsh toolkit to support this agenda, and that's under active consideration. Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary and the officials for attending and for answering such a wide range of questions? As usual, you'll be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again for coming. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education, updating us on the supply teacher issue. Paper to note 3—another letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education, providing further information following our meeting on 15 February. And paper to note 6 is a letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education to the Children's Commissioner for Wales, following up on the dialogue that they've been having about our inquiry. Item 4, then, is for me to propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting

The focus is on ensuring the success of all learners, especially the most vulnerable ones. There is a growing awareness of attachment disorder in children and the need for schools to respond effectively. The goal is to provide better training for teachers, improve understanding, and implement intervention strategies. This approach is being implemented in four regions. It is important to consider exclusions and understand the entire education system, not just the PDG element. 66% of looked-after learners have additional learning needs, so funding cannot be solely attributed to the PDG.

Question: Summarize the discussions in the meeting regarding universities securing funding for estate investments, the satisfaction of UK universities with the approach, Bob Saroya's disagreement with the government on reducing rent for individual businesses, and Dawn Bowden AM's explanation of sports infrastructure. Article: We've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies, and I'm very pleased to welcome Angela Burns, who is substituting for Suzy this morning. Can I also welcome Siân Gwenllian to the meeting? Siân is joining us from her constituency office via video-conference. I'm currently registered as an associate lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, although I haven't done any work for them for some time. We'll move on, then, to item 2 this morning, which is our evidence session on the higher education new academic year allocations. I'm very pleased to welcome David Blaney, who is chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Bethan Owen, who is deputy chief executive of HEFCW. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions from Members, and the first questions are from Angela Burns. I just wanted to talk about, really, the financial sustainability of the higher education sector because, as we know, there's been all sorts of things going on in the press. So, can I just start with, actually, quite a technical question and ask you what the financial indicators look like for the universities here in Wales, and are there particular indicators that are really flashing warning signals to you? dr david blaney: Well, shall I just start with a couple of contextualising comments and Bethan can come in then with some detail? It's undeniably the case there are financial challenges facing our universities. They result from three main causes: one is the impact of the demographic dip of 18-year-olds, which is deeper and longer in Wales than it is elsewhere in the UK. And, of course, we also have current uncertainty as a result of the Augar review in England, and whether that might play into Wales, and also Brexit. These challenges are not unique to Wales; the majority of the UK universities are actually taking out cost one way or another. Before the Diamond review of fees and funding in Wales, there was a pre-existing funding gap in resource between England and Wales, and even now, that's still the case. So, Welsh higher education institutions are approximately £40 million worse off than they would be in the English system. That's a challenge, and that is a result from a political decision to invest in students, and that's fine. We're not seeing a crisis; we are seeing some real challenges, and there is a distinction, I think, between—. We have to understand, though, that taking out cost to balance the books has a detrimental effect on the capacity. Obviously it impacts on the people who lose their jobs immediately, but there's a medium to longer term impact on the capacity of the system to deliver for Wales. They are taking out capacity; they're not cutting at fat now, they're cutting out core capacity. And so, the range of the curriculum, the range of research and innovation, the range of the contribution that universities can make will be diminished by that. And against that backdrop, the introduction of the Diamond reforms is hugely important—delivery of that is going to be really important—and we are really pleased to see the Minister able to meet her commitments in respect of that. This forthcoming year will be the first year we see an increase in the resource, through us, to higher education. There are some very tired staff in universities, and we've seen some stuff in the press recently about some of the impact of stress there as well. angela burns am: Can I bring you back to the financial element of that? Can I just ask a question: what are the university reserves looking like at present? dr david blaney: Here, I refer to my learned friend. There's a difference between the distributable reserves—I don't have those numbers before me, but looking at reserves, what is more important are those reserves that are available as cash or liquid cash. So, universities have reserves, but a large amount of that is tied up in their estates, so they're not immediately realisable. So, one of the key measures that we're looking at, which is even more important than surpluses and deficit, is the operating cash that our universities are generating at the moment. When we look at operating cash in 2017-18, they were generating, as a percentage of income, about 7.6 per cent, which contrasts with nearly 10 per cent for the same year for English institutions. And that represents their capacity to generate surplus cash to meet their costs, which now, increasingly, include the costs of servicing their borrowings. So, again, because capital funding has not been as available to universities as it was, they've invested in their estates and that's largely been funded by borrowings. The costs of those borrowings have to be met on an annual basis, so that's becoming an increasing proportion of the operating cash that universities have. angela burns am: I just asked that question because I know that about four years ago, the universities were sitting on substantial reserves and were less than keen to deploy them back into actually using them for the students—it was more about building up the war chest, if you like, of the universities. And I just really wanted to have an understanding of how that picture might have changed over the last four years and are they actually skinnier cats now, rather than before. bethan owen: We can get you that analysis, but even four years ago, I think the definition of exactly what's meant by reserves, it's really important to look at what are distributable reserves as opposed to the assets that universities have. bethan owen: And, there are also differences in the way that universities have secured funding for investing in their estates. So, for example, Cardiff University have had a bond rather than borrowing, which you draw down as you're spending. So, in the short term, the reserves of Cardiff will appear as though they have significant cash balances, but all of those are restricted for investment in the estate and, over the next two or three years, will be utilised for that. angela burns am: So, overall, you're painting a picture of a sector that's under a significant degree of financial stress, and this is obviously using your key financial indicators. Do you monitor each and every university, or do you wait for them to come back and tell you what their situation is? bethan owen: We monitor, we receive forecasts, five-year forecasts, and we meet frequently with all our universities now. It varies, depending on the risks of the universities, as to how frequently we meet, but we're actually meeting with every university because even the forecast that we received last July, the changes, even in the 12-month period, are significant enough for us to need a better understanding of what the latest position is. Although it had a turnover and income of £1.5 billion, which had increased, nonetheless it had a small deficit of 0.4 per cent of income in 2017-18, which was an improvement on the deficit the year before of 1.7 per cent, but notably, again, the sector in England were looking at surpluses of 3 per cent to 4 per cent in the same period. The forecasts that we had this time last year were indicating that, for 2018-19, we should have a sector that's roughly in a break-even position, but that has to be caveated with waiting for new forecasts in July, where there will have to be a reflection of the pension costs, and there have been significant changes in pension costs, both for the teachers' pension scheme and the universities' superannuation scheme as well, and those will be significant costs that universities have to build into their forecasts at a time when their income, certainly their fee income, is not increasing, and that is the challenge. angela burns am: Are we going to lose any universities in the next couple of years? dr david blaney: I don't think so. As I said earlier on, we're not seeing a crisis, we're seeing really challenging circumstances for institutions to manage. At the moment, our sense is they are managing them, so one of the things we try to do is to make sure that, insofar as we can see it, we are making sure that the institutions are alert to the challenges they're facing, and are actually engaging those challenges properly, and we are seeing that at the moment. So I think what we will see if the pressure continues unabated is more costs being taken out, so more jobs being lost, more capacity being lost, but that's not the same as falling over. There is always the possibility of structural change within the sector, and that might be one of the solutions that institutions think about, but it's not a policy position, and it's not always a good short-term response to crisis anyway, actually. But I think, as I say, we're in a managed situation, but the challenges are quite acute. angela burns am: When you talk about structural change, are you referring to the fact that certain offshoots or divisions might close? I bring this up because I'm the Assembly Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, and I have had multiple representations from students, and their parents, who are about to go to Lampeter and who've been told that courses are being restructured, there's a massive staff loss, and they have concerns about whether the three-year commitment they're about to make to a course is going to be able to be sustained. So I am trying to drill down a little bit, because I think it's only fair for the students to know what they're up against, and also it's a bit like in the great depression—you can start a run on something, can't you? Because if enough people believe it, then suddenly enough people will stop going to what is an excellent little university, really top-quality in medieval literature, in archaeology. And I'm just talking about one, but I know there are problems in other universities around Wales, so I just wondered if you could comment on that and also what processes you as HEFCW might have in place to protect any student who does find themselves in a situation where their course appears to be disappearing before their eyes. So, if we look at the debate that happened in the Senedd last week, from my reading of the transcript, it was actually quite a balanced debate where pretty much every contributor made reference to the contribution that higher education is making. There was reference to the national student survey scores, and in many ways Wales is the best place in the UK to come and be a student, because you are looked after properly in Wales. But there was also a perfectly legitimate exploration of whether or not there's a crisis, and if you look at the way in which that was represented in the media, the crisis bit stuck and the rest of it didn't. At the point where the sector is trying very hard to recruit students, it's really quite unhelpful that you get that sort of representation. So we do need to make sure, I think, all of us, that we try to avoid a situation where there can be media amplification of a problem that's not actually as acute as the media are portraying it, and that is very harsh. I'm not being critical of the political process here, but it has ripples and we do need to be careful that we don't start a run on this. In terms of the specifics at Lampeter, we understand that there are no plans to close any of the departments, and there certainly will not be plans to pull the rug out from under continuing students. So there's an absolute obligation on them to meet their commitments, and that's a contractual obligation anyway, so it's a legal obligation. But we also have a quality machinery that we operate where we would expect institutions to be able to demonstrate that they've put in place appropriate arrangements to ensure that students can finish their programmes of study. So they're not going to be recruiting students to programmes that they're not planning to continue—they just are not going to do that. And if you think about it in a market context, it would be suicidal for a university to treat their students like that. angela burns am: But I have to ask these questions because the auditor was very clear that there was a material uncertainty in Trinity Saint David's financial plans. dr david blaney: Yes, I understand that, so let’s come back to the material uncertainty. What I'm hoping to try and express is that we have absolute confidence that the institutions will not do the dirty on their students. They will look after their students and if they're recruiting to programmes, they are recruiting to programmes that they are planning to run, and run through to completion. And the expectations that we place on them in terms of our quality assurance machinery is precisely that—when they are engaged in portfolio change, they have to look after the interest of the students that they currently have. In terms of our oversight and monitoring, our primary consideration, again, is the interest of the students. They are the people who have, in many ways, least influence over what happens in terms of the way an institution is managed. Although, they do have a voice and, actually, the arrangements for the student voice in Wales are, again, better than elsewhere in the UK. But, nonetheless, we do not wish to see students becoming innocent victims of difficulties of management and financing. Our institutional risk review process is fundamentally designed to make sure that institutions are grappling with their problems before they become a crisis. So, we have machinery, which has 70/80 different factors and hundreds of questions that we ask twice a year, to interrogate the performance of the institutions and to make sure that we are seeing them managing the issues that they're facing. So, it's not the challenges you face, it's the way you face your challenges—it's a cliché—and, at the moment, they are managing them, but if we were in any way concerned that they weren't, the people who are most at risk in that context are the students and we will be intervening to make sure that they were cited, and we do intervene when we have to. angela burns am: Well, following on from what you said, I've just got two really specific technical questions, then, to ask, because you said that you look across the whole scope to make sure that they are meeting all of their correct liquidity ratios and so on. So, considering how much is invested in their estates, are you happy that each university's estates strategy and its financing is prudent and has appropriate governing-body oversight in place? dr david blaney: Yes, so the estates strategies that institutions operate are overseen by either the full governing body or relevant sub-committees in respect of every institution, so there is proper governance oversight. And in all of those instances, there is staff and student engagement as well in the strategic approach on estates. So, the machinery is in place— angela burns am: Because it's the big thing that drives most of university borrowing, isn't it? dr david blaney: Indeed, it is. angela burns am: So, if our universities are on a sticky wicket, we just need to know that the borrowing that they're undertaking is absolutely prudently assessed and is appropriate. So, as long as you're content, if I can hear you say that—[Laughter.] dr david blaney: Okay. We're content on two fronts: one is that the governance machinery within the institutions is structured appropriately to look at that, but also that if the institutions are wanting to engage in anything other than relatively trivial borrowing, they have to get our consent as well. And what we don't do is second-guess everything, but what we do do is make sure that the governing body, or its relevant committees, have been asking the right questions. bethan owen: Can I just add to that, then? angela burns am: Yes, of course. bethan owen: In asking for the forecasts, we have reinforced this year the importance of universities looking at different scenarios. So, to be looking at the demographic and maybe in the past, where there's potentially been growth in the system and universities have built that into their forecast, we have explicitly asked this year that we are provided—not just the governing body—with the scenario where there is no growth in the income. That's not the core forecast, but a scenario, so that it's quite clear how reliant the forecasts are on that growth, and if that growth doesn't come through, what the contingency plans are for ensuring that all the cost commitments can be met. And we should probably just differentiate between—we have a role before borrowings are entered into, but all the best forecasts in the world can never quite predict, certainly what's happened in the last two years, probably, in universities. So, there are significant borrowings that are now committed to and the key measures we are looking at are universities' capacity to meet their covenants and their repayments under those borrowings, because that's essential for maintaining their liquidity. angela burns am: Which actually, neatly, thank you, brings me to my last question, which is: have any universities broken those loan covenants or been close to breaking them, unable to pay their borrowings as and when they fall due? bethan owen: There was a significant change in accounting standards in 2015, financial reporting standard 102, so most universities had to renegotiate their covenants, but it was because the accounts were looking very different. The accounting standards brought about changes in how income was recognised and how some service concession arrangements, largely student accommodation arrangements, and pension costs, significantly, were recognised in the accounts. So, most universities have had to renegotiate covenants, but we're not aware of any who've had to renegotiate due to covenant breaches, other than one which the University of Wales Trinity Saint David disclosed in their financial statements—that they did need to renegotiate their financing arrangements, which they have done earlier this year, and they have now negotiated new covenants. It's a core part of financial management in universities now that you manage your relationship with your lender as well as with us. Breaching covenants in themselves is different to doing that with your lender being unaware and the factors being within your control. So, again, from that perspective, we have the covenants built into our forecasts, we require the forecasts to show how the university are planning to be within their covenants. The nature of those covenants vary, but most of them require a measure of cash flow, a ratio between the cash generated and the cost of debt, so there is close monitoring that is required because of the borrowing in the system, as well as our ongoing monitoring as well. Just before we move on to Hefin David, can I just ask you what your view, then, is on the statement included by auditors in the accounts of Trinity Saint David that there is material uncertainty? bethan owen: Yes, I'll pick up on that. The material uncertainty largely relates—there is a note in the accounts that explains the factors that are being taken into account, but it largely relates to some significant cash receipts that have been subject to timing delays and the fact that the timing of these is essentially outside the control of the institution. The main delay relates to the receipt of funding for the Egin project, which was due to be received from the Swansea city deal. That funding has been delayed, but the sums due to the university are still due to the university—it's the issue of the timing of those receipts that is causing a cash pressure. Just in terms of cash flows, all universities have to ensure that they are maintaining enough cash in their system to meet their payments as they fall due. Most of their costs are incurred on a monthly basis, staff costs in particular, but the income flows into universities are now less regular. In days gone by, that funding would largely flow from us and that would also come on a monthly basis. A quarter of that money comes in in October, a quarter in February, and the majority of it, half of it, doesn't come into the university in cash until May. So, that's quite a different cash management scenario for universities to manage; it requires holding cash balances to do it. Just before I bring Hefin in, we're going to need to have a bit of agility, as Dai Lloyd would call it, in our questioning and our answers if we're going to cover the ground that we need to cover. hefin david am: How can we be assured that governance arrangements across the eight institutions are sufficiently rigorous but also consistent? dr david blaney: So, the first point to make, of course, is that universities are autonomous, as you know— hefin david am: I've just written 'independent and autonomous'. The university governing body obviously is an important part of the machinery, particularly in terms of generating constructive challenge for the executive within universities. The governing bodies all are expected to behave in a way that is consistent with the guidance produced by the Committee of University Chairs, the CUC guide, which identifies good practice. Just in terms of governing bodies, it's also important that governing bodies engage in a process of continual refreshing, because that gives you a greater variety of perspectives, which is important. But it’s also important they have people who understand the higher education business as well as from other contexts. But I think our view would be that when you get an increase in the contextual pressures that we’ve been discussing already this morning, the role of the governing body actually becomes even more significant. So, we have encouraged the sector, both the chairmen of the university councils, but also the vice-chancellors, to engage in a process of an independent review of governance in Wales. And it hasn’t been hard for us to encourage that—they have been keen to take this opportunity to take stock. The Welsh higher education system is part of a UK system—they don’t want to be a million miles away from the rest of the UK in terms of expectations, but there is scope in Wales, given the scale of the sector, to actually construct something that is more challenging, I think, in terms of expectations, than might be the common denominator across the UK, and maybe some more exemplification. It’s going to be quite hard to do this, but I’m very keen that we engage—and the sector are up for this—in governance culture, because, actually, you can do process checks and you’ll have the right structure of committees and have the right sort of papers going, but, in the end, it’s the dynamic within that room and who’s asking which questions and how well informed they are, and whether it's an open culture or is it a defensive culture—these are really what influences the quality of decision making. hefin david am: And how different are those cultures across institutions? dr david blaney: I think it’s very hard to say. Typically, that’s at a point where there are sufficient difficulties going on that we feel that we need to— hefin david am: Do you have the option to observe at any point? dr david blaney: We can't insist, I don't think. But in the main, actually, our presence would change the dynamic of that anyway, so I'm not sure that's necessarily helpful. But we are keen to see what we can achieve with the sector in addressing these issues of what constitutes constructive challenge. Is your aim to see consistency in the same approaches, then? dr david blaney: I think we’d like to see a consistent minimum set of expectations. In the end, it’s about personalities, it’s about people’s background and it’s about their knowledge. And we have a role to play in this as well, so we have a toolkit that we produce for governors, which, essentially, is a set of information that locates their university in the context of the UK, across a number of factors. So, if they had been told something that is not perhaps as true as it might be by the executive, they can see that in the data. Whether that toolkit needs a refresh—I’m sure it probably does, it’s been there for a while now—. So, part of that is what information we can provide to help governing bodies be properly informed as well. This is quite distant from Government—unlike other institutions, where you can prescribe some of these approaches. dr david blaney: Yes, and in the end I don't think there's any pushback from the sector in terms of wanting to operate in accordance with best practice. hefin david am: So, what about risk appetite? Do you feel that any governing bodies are exhibiting what might be considered to be an imprudent risk appetite? dr david blaney: I don't think so, and this manifests itself in two ways. So, we would see this coming through in forecasts, and we would see it coming through in requests for borrowings, predominantly. Our links into institutions are many and various, and we have our formal stuff, but we all have links into institutions that are informal and we—. One of the beauties of the scale of the sector in Wales is we can see the institutions in a way that they can't hope to in England. But we have, in some instances, I think it's fair to say, helped institutions to think again about some of their aspirations. So, where we've seen things and we think, 'That just looks ridiculously optimistic,' we've just asked the questions. We don't say, 'No, you can't do that,' because they are autonomous, they make the decisions, but we try to make sure that they're asking the right questions. hefin david am: So, would you see that governing bodies are falling short in doing that themselves, in that, where they become strategic decisions that require due diligence, are the governing bodies themselves presenting that challenge? Or the fact you've just said that, does that suggest to us that, actually, they are falling short? dr david blaney: I think there's a mixture of things going on. We have a slightly different perspective and we have a perspective that is very intimately informed in terms of how the institution is performing. So, you have a governing body with a range of perspectives, and you will also have people who are very committed and very enthusiastic about the institution, and just occasionally it's helpful to get a slightly external perspective on these things. So, I don't think it's a shortfall as such, but I just think— hefin david am: The kind of honest broker role, kind of. dr david blaney: The machinery depends on having a body like HEFCW doing some of that role, and the people who lend money to institutions are absolutely clear about that. So, we have relationships with the banks; they come and see us every now and again—typically not to talk about individual clients but just to talk about what we do and how we do it. Interestingly, for example, when Michael Barber got up before Christmas and said there will be no bail-outs of universities, we had banks on the phone to us within a couple of days, wanting just to talk about how it is in Wales and is it still how it used to be. So, it's not really a governance failure; it's just that the machinery includes us. And one of the things, from a distance—, I've been involved in different ways in an institution, and looking at the institutions from a distance. Do you find that the relationships between executive teams and governors is effective, and are they sufficiently robust and challenging as well? Those executive permanent staff and the governors—is there challenge there? dr david blaney: I would say, in the main, yes. Occasionally, we help the governors to ask the right questions, so occasionally that external perspective we've just discussed is helpful in that regard. Actually, there are times when there are tensions between the executive and governing bodies, inevitably—that's not something that's remarkable—and we can feel that as well. hefin david am: And that can become apparent from a public point of view as well—you know, media reports and—. dr david blaney: Yes, sometimes these things can spill, and the governing bodies also include student representation, staff representation, who are typically union reps, and so, you know, there are all sorts of—. I'm not in any way saying that people are indiscreet, but there are all sorts of interests that are sitting around that table that have to be managed within a governance context. And these tensions are not all-out war, but there are sometimes differences of view and they have to be worked through, and that's governance working properly, I think. hefin david am: Okay, which is—some of the work you've suggested will help towards that. hefin david am: And a last question: you've identified one university as high risk, five as medium, and two as low in the short to medium term. You're obviously not going to tell us which, but what I'm interested in is the direction of travel, and whether those that are 'medium'—are they at any point at risk of becoming 'high' in the near future? dr david blaney: I think it's fair to say that the direction of travel is that we're seeing an increased risk profile in the sector in Wales, and it's about the financial pressures that we've already discussed this morning. And that is why the efforts that the Minister has gone to to secure the Diamond settlement, and, indeed, other bits of money now and again, are so important. So, she's doing what she can, and that's really good, but we always knew that, between the point of the Diamond recommendations being made and the full implementation, there was going to be a valley to cross. So, the amount of funding was always going to be under pressure; there's a demographic dip, and there are the other contextual factors we've discussed. And the institutions have been working very hard to try not to take cost out now that they really don't have to take out, because they don't want to reduce capacity, which they'll struggle to recover again when the financial position improves. So, they are seeing deficits, which are managed deficits, where they're spending more than their income in order just to keep the capacity in. hefin david am: And, if you're back in a year or two's time, the next few years, are we confident that there won't be more in the high-risk category? You said you don't see collapse, but are we confident there won't be more in the high-risk category? dr david blaney: Well, I think what I would always say about this process is that it doesn't guarantee 100 per cent accuracy. HEFCW is innately cautious as an organisation, so I'm not going to say we're confident, but that doesn't mean to say we're worried either. So, to answer my question: are we likely to see more in the high-risk category or not? dr david blaney: We might. bethan owen: And, just to add, I think the key bit of that is maintaining the attractiveness of Welsh universities to students, because a large proportion are coming not from just Wales, but from England and internationally—so, that's a key part—and also that our research portfolio is invested in, and that also brings economic benefits. So, I think those are the two that we are [correction: need to be] able to maintain: the institutions as attractive options for students, and that our research capacity is invested in. sian gwenllian am: Just in the interest of transparency, are you able to tell us which universities are in which categories of risk? dr david blaney: We don't publish that; we publish numbers. hefin david am: They didn't even try to—[Inaudible.] [Laughter.] lynne neagle am: Okay. Can you explain your overall approach to the 2019-20 allocations and what your priority for allocations has been? bethan owen: We publish our funding allocations, and we published the 2019-20 allocations on 4 June. For 2019-20, we're allocating £149 million, and, as David said, this is the first year that we've been able to start putting funding, additional funding, in from the Diamond recommendations for investment in the sector. So, that means we've been able to increase our recurrent teaching funding by £7 million—not a significant amount, but it's a start. And we have maintained QR, which is our funding for research, quality research, and postgraduate research, at least at the same levels of £76 million, as it's been that in previous years. We've increased part-time funding by £1 million to £26 million, and we've started to increase support for expensive subjects—that's medicine, dentistry and conservatoire provision—and higher cost subjects—those are the sciences and the STEM. So, we made a start on that and increased that support by about £6 million to £20 million in total. And, in addition to that, we have strategic funding that we're maintaining for Reaching Wider projects and the Sêr Cymru project. And then, in addition to our recurrent funding, we have had strategic funding in our remit letters for the last two years. So, we're developing programmes for civic mission, community engagement, collaborations between higher education and further education, and, more recently, we had funding at the end of March to start to implement the recommendations of Graeme Reid's report for research investment, and also for developing mental health and well-being. That strategic funding is very welcome, but to be able to build those activities into our core funding, which we hope Diamond will bring, would be more sustainable for institutions. How do your allocations to the 2019-20 academic year support and incentivise collaboration between HE and FE? dr david blaney: So, there are probably two dimensions to this. First of all, we have provided £3.5 million of separate funding specifically targeted to improve and increase collaboration between HE and FE. So, we put out a circular inviting proposals for that, and it was competitive, so we funded what was the best of the proposals, and we constrained it to be available only to pump-prime new activity or to add value to existing activity, but not just to keep things ticking over. We had seven bids submitted from across the three Welsh regions on a whole range of activities, which we probably haven't got time to go into now. I've got a long list here, but, for example, in south-east Wales, the University of South Wales is leading on a bid partnering with Cardiff University, Cardiff Met, with the Open University and all the FE players in the region. We tried to get it within regions, because that's how you get the biggest impact for learners in the area and also for smaller enterprises in terms of innovation work. And then we direct fund a couple of FE institutions for delivery of higher education for historical reasons, and we also have our funding going through to support franchise activity between HE and FE. There are about 5,000 students who are studying HE programmes under franchise in FE colleges in Wales, and our funding method has, historically for some time now, protected that money. So, we try to prevent universities from taking the money out of franchise and onto campus, because we think it's important to try to encourage local provision within particular localities. And, certainly in areas where public transport infrastructure is perhaps not what it might be, for people to move to universities can be quite a disincentive, so—. Then, finally from me, the council's remit letter for the 2019-20 academic year from the Minister does ask you to consider how you'd increase openness and transparency around the use of fee income. So, what are the issues here, and how will you take this forward? bethan owen: The reporting of the income and expenditure is largely provided, probably more so in narrative form in the accounts and the financial statements and annual reports of institutions. A number of institutions also provide graphs and more easily accessible information to understand the income and expenditure of universities. There are examples of good practice across the sector in presenting as simply as possible what the income sources are for universities and how they spend their money. And we're going to be working with the Welsh universities and sector bodies to improve the accessibility of that information for Welsh institutions. More transparent reporting of income and expenditure, and not just fee income, is actually very important for understanding how income cross-flows work in universities. Some reasonably simplistic analyses can assume that all the student fee just covers the direct costs of academic provision, but there's much more to the student experience than that, so there are costs: there are the infrastructure costs, the student support costs, even the community engagement and all the research activities bring benefits to the teaching and fee provision. So, more transparency of all the universities' income sources and expenditure and a better understanding of the income cross-flows and why you can't look at universities in isolation of student provision and research, you have to look at the whole—so, we'll be working with them to improve that information. We're going to go to Hefin David now for some questions on part-time student funding. hefin david am: Part-time student numbers are bucking the trend in Wales, as I understand it, and we are seeing a bigger increase in Wales of part-time numbers than elsewhere in the UK. How is that going to be sustainable within current arrangements? bethan owen: We've allocated £26.5 million in 2019-20 to support part-time provision, and we have been able in 2019-20 to fund some growth. So, there is growth in that funding to allow those institutions and incentivise those institutions who have recruited more students than last year to continue to do so. That came at an overall additional cost of £1.9 million, and, based on what we're hearing from student support, we're expecting to see that requirement increase. So, it's one of the areas where we'll need to look at how we prioritise Diamond funding. And at the moment, our intention—but subject to knowing the quantum of it—is to continue to support and fund growth in part-time provision. hefin david am: So, is it possible—? With the Welsh Government's policy of developing lifelong learning, is it possible that will be ever spread more thinly? dr david blaney: That is the challenge, and there's a piece of work that we have in our sights to look again at part-time and what it is and what the various drivers are. There's a temptation, I think, at times, to see it solely in terms of skills for an economy, and it is important for reskilling and upskilling, but actually, it's important for other things as well. If we see higher education solely in terms of skilling an economy, we've missed an important part of the contribution that higher education makes. But part-time is really quite difficult, because there's part-time that is about upskilling, part time that's about reskilling, there's part-time for social purposes, there's employer-supported part-time, there's student—. dr david blaney: Well, there is a sense that they are more price sensitive, yes, and so the support regime that the Government is putting in place is important, and that probably has made a difference to the numbers of part-timers entering the system this last year. But I think we need to stake stock of what is important about part-time, what the market will deliver, what the market won't deliver, what we should fund and so on. And there's a complexity around all that, as I've indicated, which we need to do a bit of work on with the sector, with the student body as well, just to take some stock of this over the next year or so. hefin david am: Could we end up seeing significant fee increases for part-time students? dr david blaney: My sense is we won't. The Government wishes us to monitor, so we monitor, and that in itself is not straightforward, actually. There's a limit to how much a fee increase would be acceptable to the part-time market. I don't think we'll see massive fee increases; we might see a bit, but we won't see masses, I don't think. We've got some questions now on funding for research and innovation, and also we'd like to talk a bit about a replacement for European Union funds. If I could turn specifically to research, we know, of course, that both the Diamond and Reid reviews called for QR funding to be maintained in real terms, but the allocation is exactly the same for 2019-20 as it has been for the past nine years. Have you carried out any kind of assessment of the impact of this level of research funding on universities and, indeed, on the Welsh economy? dr david blaney: I'm sorry; I missed the beginning of that because I couldn't hear this headset. I was talking about the Diamond and Reid reviews at the beginning of my question and the fact that they had recommended that QR funding should be maintained in real terms. The reason the sum hasn't increased is because we haven't had enough money to be able to increase it and still meet the obligations we have to other bits of the HE system. Both Ian Diamond and Graeme Reid were very clear about the importance of being able to invest in our QR research funding, for a number of reasons. The capacity of the sector to be able to respond to funding opportunities elsewhere in the UK and across the rest of the world is itself determined by the size and the strength of the research base, which is sustained by QR funding. If they go for UK-based competitive research funding, that is typically constructed on the absolute assumption that QR will be part of that mix. So, they tend to fund to 80 per cent of the actual cost of the research, with the expectation that QR will plug the gap. And we know that, although the Welsh research base is extraordinarily productive, and really is punching above its weight in many ways—and I mentioned earlier the impact of the research base in the last research excellence framework—we know that, actually, it could do so much more, if it just had more scale. So, we fully endorse the reports from both Ian Diamond and Graeme Reid that QR is important, and it's important also to be able to allow institutions to invest in research areas that emerge over time. It's almost impossible for a body like us, far less the Government, to know where these emerging strengths are going to come from, and QR provides the flexibility for institutions, which is absolutely fundamental to keeping the research base dynamic. sian gwenllian am: Therefore, you do have concerns that this isn't increasing—you have that concern of a lack of increase in the level of investment. But has any particular assessment been made of the impact of not increasing that funding? dr david blaney: So, there is—. Graeme Reid's report produced an assessment of the correlation between QR funding and capacity to generate funding from other sources, and there's a very close correlation— sian gwenllian am: Has HEFCW done any assessment to look at the effect of underfunding research, to all intents and purposes? dr david blaney: Not directly. sian gwenllian am: Your remit requires you to encourage universities to continue to develop one particular element of research, which is educational research. How does your allocation for 2019-20 contribute to that in terms of pedagogy and educational research specifically? dr david blaney: Bethan, did you want to say something on this? bethan owen: I was just going to add that, when we look at the funding that comes into our sector in Wales, compared with the rest of the UK, it's easy to see from the figures that our percentage of income that comes from research is smaller than in England, so the figures show that we receive less of the money that's available, which is a factor that results from us having less QR as a percentage, so we're in a situation where we get less of that UK funding that's available as well. sian gwenllian am: So, there's a knock-on to that; that's what you're trying to say. But from the point of view of my question on educational research—? dr david blaney: So, we have provided funding in 2017-18 and 2018-19 to WISERD Education, which is a research collaboration between a number of the Welsh universities, specifically looking at educational issues, and we're providing additional funding to that to add value to the Welsh Government's existing evaluation of the progress of pioneer schools in developing the three-to-15 curriculum in Wales. I won't go into the full detail of it now, but it's a five-partner project feeding into this with researchers from Cardiff, Cardiff Met, Trinity Saint David, Aber, Bangor and the University of South Wales. So, it's a collaborative effort, and we have, in the past, also funded WISERD Education, so it's an important research facility and increasingly being used, I'm delighted to say, by Welsh Government in underpinning its own policy thinking. sian gwenllian am: And likewise, in 2019-20, there will be allocations specifically for this. Well, could you provide the remit letter from—[Inaudible.]—do that? You have to do everything in the remit letters. dr david blaney: We do what we can to pay due regard to the remit letters, as the wording goes. sian gwenllian am: And then turning to the impact of the loss of funds were we to leave the European Union. Of course, this is going to have a far-reaching impact on future research, and the Reid review has made recommendations to mitigate this impact. So, what assessment have you made of how allocations will be able to help universities to transition away from EU funding? dr david blaney: So, again, the Reid review has done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of an impact assessment for us. There has been an additional £6.6 million allocated for research very recently by the Government, which we have put out specifically in line with some of the recommendations from Reid. So, that's a start, but that's not sustainable funding, and it's not enough, really, but it is a good and welcome start. Reid was also not just talking about the money, but also talking about the way in which the Welsh research base both represents itself and also engages with UK-wide developments. And in response to that, we have recently issued our own vision for research and innovation, which was developed over a number of months, following the Reid report closely, working with stakeholders, including the Welsh Government, in order to try and set a vision for how we respond to the challenges facing research in the future, including the reduction, potentially, of access to EU funds. A lot of that requires investment in the Welsh research base in order to be able to go for competitive funding at a UK level. Since it seems possible at least, and possibly even likely, that any money retrieved from not having to invest in the EU will sit in London rather than necessarily being devolved to the devolved administrations—we understand fully the Welsh Government's position on that, and we don't disagree with it. But either way, we need a research base that's able to compete, and that's why the investment recommendations of Reid are so important. I think Reid was saying that there may be pots of money out there that aren't being accessed at the moment by Welsh universities. Are you able to help then within that process? bethan owen: One aspect that we do intend to fund—and this is from Diamond, as well as Reid—is to place funding back into the system for innovation. We're consulting currently, with the intention, if the funding is available to us, clearly, in the year 2020-21, to provide £15 million back into the sector in innovation funding. sian gwenllian am: Is that part of the UKRI funding? There is some £7 billion in the hands of that organisation, as I understand it, and there may be some possibilities there too. bethan owen: That £15 million will be money that comes from us, but the intention is that the money will go in in order to improve universities' ability to access that funding from UKRI. So, Innovate UK would be the part of UKRI—and that we improve our ability to get funding from outside Wales. And, then, Graeme Reid says the same thing in terms of research—that we need more funding to do the same thing there. dr david blaney: And, then, there's also the recommendation from Reid that Wales needs to be better embedded in the conversations that are going on on a UK-wide basis, so the Welsh Government has established a presence in London in respect of research, and we have a colleague in HEFCW who is fractionally embedded in the United Kingdom Research and Innovation specifically to respond to that recommendation. And that is actually paying dividends; we are strengthening our relationship with the UK machinery, which is essential if we're to understand where they're heading and what their funding bids are all about, and even to be able to influence those. lynne neagle am: Okay, Siân? sian gwenllian am: So, as far as research is concerned, it's not all doom and gloom. There is money coming in and if the Government, as it is able to, can find money and can invest in this area, then that will help. Just a couple of questions from me, then, before you close: what is your recent work on the 'basket of goods' show regarding student accommodation costs? And have any institutions used their 2019-20 fee and access plans to make commitments to more affordable accommodation for under-represented groups? dr david blaney: First of all, on the basket of goods, the work we're doing now—we're currently in train in terms of analysing the data in respect of the basket of goods, so this is slightly premature, but our early look at the data indicates that there are no increases in costs, accommodation or other, that would cause us concern. So, it doesn't look like institutions are succumbing to the temptation to up their income streams from other costs. In terms of the fee and access plans, the sector has committed over £28 million of investment in student support-related activities from the fee and access plans, and that includes, in many instances, bursaries that are designed to help students cope with the costs of accommodation and the cost of living more generally. The support is provided for a range of purposes, but a couple of examples, just very quickly: Trinity Saint David, since we've talked about them a lot today, they offer £1,000 bursary to care leavers, which is in addition to local authority support for care leavers. Bangor also offer targeted support for care leavers, and these are often also extended, so they apply not just in term time, but throughout the holiday time as well, because people still need to live during the holidays. And just one final question from me then, going back to Trinity Saint David: are you concerned that the governing body of Trinity Saint David has taken decisions that have led to that material uncertainty, and is that unprecedented in Wales? dr david blaney: My view is that the decisions that the governing body made were, in our view, perfectly rational decisions to have made, given the information they had at the time. So, what's happened is that a number of unforeseen events have arisen, which, actually, I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to have foreseen, and it's just a combination of these that has caused the cash pressure. So, I don't see this as a governance failure, and they are engaging with those challenges. We've come to the end of our time, so can I thank you both for attending and for answering all our questions this morning? You did say that you would give the committee a note on reserves for the last four years, so we'd be grateful if we could receive that. Paper to note 1 is a letter from me to the Deputy Minister requesting further information for our scrutiny of the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. Paper to note 2 is a letter from me to the Children's Commissioner for Wales also asking for further information to pursue our scrutiny of the Bill. And paper to note 3 is a letter to the Minister for Education asking for an update on the framework for young people educated other than at school. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to propose that we resolve to meet in private for the remainder of this meeting and for the whole meeting on 10 July<doc-sep>We've received apologies for absence from Michelle Brown and Jack Sargeant; there are no substitutions. We'll move on, then, to item 2, which is our scrutiny of the 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' draft strategy, and I'm very pleased to welcome Dr Frank Atherton, the Chief Medical Officer for Wales, and Nathan Cook, who is the head of the healthy and active branch at Welsh Government. If I can just start by asking about the fact that 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' is an all-age strategy, really, and how confident you are that it will deliver for children and young people. We have high prevalence of overweight and obesity among adults—we know that, and we can't walk away from that because that's translating into demand on health services. But we have to take a focus, a future generation's focus, almost, on the next generation. I don't write off the current generation, we can't afford to do that, but we do need to think about what can we do that would be different for the next generation so that they don't get into the sorts of problems that we're currently seeing with overweight and obesity. We know that the consequences of that for our young people are going to be enormous if we don't do something and something quite soon. We know that overweight children go on to become overweight adults, unfortunately, and that brings all the consequences of multiple disease issues—diabetes is often cited—cancer risk et cetera. So, we have to focus on children, and, in fact, during the consultation, we've been very clear that we need to engage with children and young people as well. Perhaps we'll get into that at some point, Chair, but, yes, I can give you that assurance. What my follow-up question, really, is: can you just tell us what kind of engagement you've had with children and young people to inform the draft strategy? dr frank atherton: Well, Nathan may be able to influence some of the detail, but in broad terms, we have discussed with young people in a number of fora. In fact, I was delighted that we had a young person, Evie Morgan, a schoolgirl from mid Wales, who came to the joint launch on the consultation. She met the Minister there and gave a very good personal account of her views on obesity and overweight. I'm visiting a school, either this week or next week, at Treorchy, to talk with teachers and young people there. nathan cook: I was going to say, we've also had a session with youth ambassadors as well, and what we've actually produced for the consultation is not just the children and young people's version, but also a toolkit in terms of getting schools really engaged and involved in terms of the work that we want them to do to feed into this as well. So, we've already had some really good responses from a lot of youth group and schools already. lynne neagle am: And you've got a structured programme, have you, to roll that out? Okay. We've got some questions now on leadership, and the first questions are from Siân Gwenllian. The Minister for health said yesterday, in answering a question from me on the Chamber floor, that you gave him advice not to have a target in terms of reducing obesity among children. Could you confirm that that's what your advice was and tell us why you don't think that a target is needed? dr frank atherton: My advice was not that we don't need a target—we may well need a target, and that's one of the issues we need to consult on—but that the target that had been adopted in England and in Scotland to halve the prevalence of obesity in children was more aspirational than deliverable, and that if we are to choose a target in Wales, then we need to balance deliverability with challenge. So, there is something about performance management, because I would be looking to not just the health system but the health and care system and to public services boards to think about how they're delivering on this, and I think we can use targets to that. But they are one tool in the box that I would think we could use, and part of the consultation is to ask that question—'If we are to go down a route in Wales of choosing a target, what might that look like?' sian gwenllian am: Okay. dr frank atherton: It's certainly something that we could consider in terms of the final strategy. Well, that is contrary to what I was told yesterday on the floor of the Chamber by the Minister, but there we go. I'm glad to hear that you're not ruling out having a target, because without a target, without something to aim for, how do we know that we're getting there? dr frank atherton: I think your point about evaluation is really important. Whatever we produce at the end of this process—and we're looking to produce a final strategy towards the autumn—we do need to have a strong evaluation. So, some metrics in there, it would seem, would be appropriate, but what those are, what the nature of those are, do we frame them as targets or ambitions—that's the point we need to consult on. If the Government is going to be successful in terms of the aim of reducing childhood obesity, then it needs to fund and support the actions. Have you made an assessment of the level of investment needed to implement this plan? dr frank atherton: Resourcing will be important. We currently do make investments in a number of areas that relate to child health generally, and, of course, obesity and overweight in particular. Now, we can't quantify an absolute amount of resource that will be needed to deliver until we know exactly what's going to come out of the consultation and what actions we might want to deliver to a greater degree in Wales. A figure of £8 million to £10 million a year has been banded around as a broad kind of area of what we might need to invest, but that would need to be drawn from existing programmes. Can we make them more effective? Can we get better value from them? And there may well be a case for new investment, and that's a question, of course, that would need to be discussed with Ministers when we're producing the final strategy. nathan cook: But I think a key consideration as well is we already know there is investment across health boards in some kind of obesity-related services. So, I think what we really need to think about across Wales is how we can drive greater scale, how we can look at current programmes in terms of making sure that they're better evaluated, and how we can make sure that we're also drawing up on the existing resources and capacity out there as well. sian gwenllian am: And does the level of investment depend on what the target is—what the goal is? dr frank atherton: I don't think you can necessarily just link the two. The issue of resourcing is one that's there irrespective of whether we choose to put a target in place. sian gwenllian am: But how would we know that it's being used effectively if there isn't something to aim for? dr frank atherton: Which brings you back to the question about evaluation. sian gwenllian am: Yes, but without a target, how can you properly evaluate? If you don't know what you're trying to do, how can you properly evaluate? Anyway, you're open to suggestions about having a target, which is great. Would you agree that Government could use the revenue that's being produced through the levy on soft drinks towards some of these efforts to—? dr frank atherton: Well, of course, there are some consequentials that are coming to the Welsh Government as part of the levy on sugary soft drinks. That funding, of course, is less than we had anticipated, and that reflects, actually, a success story because industry is reformulating, and so the amount of sugar in soft drinks is already starting to decrease, which is a good thing. I'm not personally in favour of hypothecation, I think I'm more interested in the totality of resource that goes into public health programmes than into marginal resource. And when I think about obesity, I don't just think about the relatively small marginal amounts of money that come in through whatever source, but I think about the totality of the £7 billion we spend in health and social care and how we can divert and channel some of that towards broad prevention initiatives in general, and towards tackling being overweight and obesity in particular. Could you give us any kind of figure? dr frank atherton: I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? sian gwenllian am: You say that there is less money that's come in through these consequentials from the levy, can you mention some sort of figure? dr frank atherton: The figure that I have in mind is about £56 million that's coming in in terms of revenue over a two-year period. When the sugar levy was first brought in, there was some modelling at UK level about what level of revenue that would bring, but it was based on the amount of sugar that was currently then in drinks and the fact that the sugar has reduced in drinks, the total amount available to the UK is less and hence our consequentials are less. nathan cook: Yes, I was going to say, there was a mid-year report done where the levy has raised £150 million to date since coming into force in April, and the original forecast was £520 million a year. So, I think that shows the amount of work that's been done by industry around reformulation. sian gwenllian am: And the consequentials of that? That is the consequential—£150 million. sian gwenllian am: Yes, so what's the Welsh consequential? lynne neagle am: Fifty-six. Anyway, it's a good sum of money and you're talking about investing £8 million to £10 million. So, obviously, you know, we can be more ambitious because there is money in that pot if that money was ring-fenced for this particular scheme. dr frank atherton: Well, the resource is going to be a real issue that we need to address, and I think as Nathan has said, there is funding of various initiatives currently in the system, and we need to look at that and make that as effective as possible. Will there be a need for some additional resource? There may well be, and that's a question that we'll have to look at in terms of the strategy when we develop it and have a discussion with Ministers about the level of resourcing. lynne neagle am: Can I just ask on that before Siân moves on? What assessment have you made of how that money is being spent in other UK nations? Because my understanding is that the money is being used in other UK nations to directly impact on obesity. Have you given any consideration to—? As I understand it, that money now is being dispersed around a plethora of programmes, including the transformation programme, and what I found very odd, really, was vaccination, which is surely the core business of the NHS. Have you got any view on that? dr frank atherton: I'm not sure I understand your point, Chair, in terms of the link between the consequentials from—. Are you talking about the consequentials from the sugar levy or are you talking about—? lynne neagle am: Yes, because in other nations, it is being used to directly impact on initiatives to tackle obesity, whereas, we've kind of put it here in Wales into the general pot and it's being used to fund a plethora of different things. My preference—it's a personal view—is that hypothecation doesn't really help us too much. , what we need to look at is whether the programmes, the sorts of programmes that are being funded in England, or indeed in Scotland, are working effectively, and if they are, are they being delivered here in Wales? We have looked very carefully at the plans that England and Scotland have for tackling obesity and overweight, and we've made a comparison with what we're doing in Wales, and our ambition in Wales is to go further than those nations, in many ways. But I come back to the point that just linking the hypothecation of a relatively small amount of resource is likely to be less impactful than asking a question of public services boards and of the health system, indeed, about how much money, overall, are we putting into prevention. lynne neagle am: No, I recognise that, and I think we're talking about additional resource. suzy davies am: I was just wondering whether you thought that there was a useful psychological link on the part of the public between saying, 'Here's a sugar levy', and 'It's going to be used to help children and adults stay healthier.' Going into a pot, it actually makes it quite difficult to explain the purpose of the tax in the first place. So, I take your overall point, but in terms of the people who we're trying to help in all this, actually creating a direct link might be quite helpful. You're putting an emphasis on the whole-system approach in implementing the plan, how are you going to create a system that co-ordinates action and drives change across relevant partners, avoiding a situation where it's everyone's role, but nobody's responsibility? How are you going to avoid that? dr frank atherton: It's a very important question, and one of the four strands in the consultation is exactly related to that, around leadership and drive nationally. You may notice, by the way, that we've chosen not to talk about an obesity strategy but a healthy weight strategy, because I think having a positive construct is really quite important to us here in Wales. But leadership will be really important, and we will need some sort of structure to lead this, to provide oversight. I'm not a great believer in creating new structures, so we do need something that will give that drive, but the leadership comes from the top down. And then we need to make sure that the public sector generally is engaged in this, but it goes way beyond the public sector, of course, because we have to work with industry, and we have to work with communities, and we have to work with the public on this. Interestingly, we had quite a large discussion two days ago between health and social care, but also involving the third sector and some members of the public, around how can we drive prevention more generally. It wasn't specifically on obesity, but of course obesity came up because it's such a pressing issue. This question of governance was discussed quite extensively, and we do have governance systems, of course, in Wales. We have public services boards, we have regional partnership boards, and how we can get those aligned behind this common agenda is really important. But I'd like to see—and I know I'm a public health professional, so I know that only maybe 10 per cent, 15 per cent, possibly 20 per cent of what makes and keeps us healthy as individuals and as communities can be driven through the health system; but I would like the system to step up and take these kinds of issues more seriously as well. So I'd be looking for local leadership through directors of public health and indeed through chief executives to work with their public services boards on this. So, we'll need some sort of national oversight, absolutely, but we need local ownership and local leadership, too. Which Minister do you believe it should be accountable to, or, given the complexity of obesity, should the board be directly accountable to the First Minister? dr frank atherton: Ultimately, the First Minister will be responsible for this and will want to have a strong oversight of this. It is often framed as a health issue, and the Minister, Vaughan Gething, has a strong personal commitment to this, I know. We've talked extensively with him and with sports and recreation colleagues about that, so there's a link there. It does cut across all portfolios, and so this is an issue that I have discussed with Cabinet, and that collective ownership is really important, and will be, because it can't just sit in one domain. I think what you do need to have is you do need to have a lead organisation or a lead ministry, and I would see health as—I work within health, so I'm perhaps biased, but I would see health as leading this, but it needs broad ownership across Government. janet finch-saunders am: I know my colleague Siân Gwenllian mentioned earlier targets and things, but I know in Wales we're not too good at collecting data. What data is currently available on childhood obesity and what metrics will be used to measure progress against the plan's objectives? dr frank atherton: Well, of course, our main data source is the child measurement programme, which collects information on children entering school aged four or five. Well, I'm sure you're familiar with the statistics, but it'll be just under a third of children at that age who are overweight or obese— janet finch-saunders am: Could I just ask—sorry to interrupt—how up to date is that? dr frank atherton: The last survey was just last year. dr frank atherton: So, it's pretty up to date, and what it shows—. It's not getting radically worse—there's always statistical variation in these things—but it's not getting any better. And, for the first time last year, we did look at the question not just of children who were overweight or obese, but we actually singled out the proportion who are obese, severely obese. So we have a figure for that for the first time, which is about 12 per cent, which is quite shocking, in a way. Does that answer your question? janet finch-saunders am: Yes, but how will any gaps in your data be addressed? dr frank atherton: Well, one of the questions that are often asked is: could we measure more on a longitudinal basis? By that in England, for example, children are measured at school entry and then again at year 11—at age 11 or 12., that kind of age group. I think that would be helpful to us in Wales, and it's one of the questions in the consultation about whether we should expand that. Obviously, that would have significant resource implications, not just for the funding, but also for schools and for the system to deliver it. But it's something that maybe would help us in terms of better understanding and better evaluation—the point that was made earlier. nathan cook: And the other data we do have is the millennium cohort study, which has been released, for 14 and 15-year-olds. We're starting to think about how we can utilise some of that data, looking at that longitudinal picture around children as well, which will be really helpful. lynne neagle am: Can I just ask about the child measurement programme? The strategy commits to looking at whether we can have a second measurement taking place in Wales. Can you just tell us a bit more about your thinking on that and when you would see a second measurement taking place and how you would use that data? dr frank atherton: I touched on that just now, but personally I do think it would be helpful to have more information. It's always the case, There's always a trade-off between the cost of getting that information and the value of the information. We know an awful lot about obesity and being overweight and the causes of it, but we don't really have a very clear understanding, in Wales at least, of the point at which children start to become overweight. Although we know that overweight children tend to go on to become overweight adults, we don't know what proportion of them between school entry and later teenage years—what those changes are. So, it would help us to have some better understanding, which would help to direct some of our initiatives. We'll wait and see what comes out in the consultation, and it's something that we need to give thought to,  but we do have to trade off the additionality of what the information would give us with the cost of doing that, of course. In the draft plan, some of the measures in there suggest legislating for restricting price promotions and banning energy drinks, and that sort of thing. Do you think that, if we go down that road, there's going to be time within this Assembly to introduce such legislation? And, if not, what do you think might be the timescale for such legislation? dr frank atherton: It may well be that there are things in Wales that we might wish to legislate on, and you've mentioned two of them, and they're good examples. We would, obviously, need to undertake quite detailed consultation on those and, in a way, we need to mirror what's happening in England and in Scotland to some degree around the consultations they're having on energy drinks. We also need to influence the issues that are not devolved to us and we seek to do that. The timing of that will have to be subject to other pressures, and I come back to the point that legislation, of course, is one of the tools that we've got—we need to deploy them all. We've heard from the Government, on other calls for legislation, that the programme's very tight, certainly for this term, so I was just wondering whether we might get that in, but okay. If I turn now to the planning system—and this might not be something that you have great deal of knowledge of; I'd just welcome your view on this, because, when we discussed with stakeholders, we talked about whether the planning system, for instance, could be used to, as an example, restrict hot food takeaways around schools and so on. Would that be a measure that you would support, something like that? dr frank atherton: I think it's definitely something we want to look at and, of course, that question is asked in the consultation, so we would like to know people's views on that. I think there is a question—a really important question—about how we can use the planning system more effectively. I've discussed with Nathan on a number of occasions, with planning colleagues in Welsh Government and in local authorities, about the art of the possible, let's say. I was very interested to see, up in the north-east, some time ago, that one of the local authorities up there did put a moratorium on the opening of new fast-food venues near to schools, or indeed in areas where levels of obesity and overweight were particularly high. So, that gave me comfort, because maybe there are powers within local authorities that can be used more effectively. I think my view at the moment is that the jury's kind of out on whether those are effective and how effective they're going to be. But the fact that we have some initiatives around the UK does give us an opportunity to study that and to learn from experience perhaps and then, if it is shown to be beneficial, to think about that here in Wales, yes. Of itself, it wouldn't address the problem, but, added to other initiatives, I guess it would. Can I just ask you briefly, then, about community sport infrastructure and, in particular, of new schools? So, Welsh Government, as you know, has ploughed a huge amount of money into the twenty-first century schools programme. What we heard when we spoke to stakeholders recently, particularly headteachers, was that, in some of the new schools that have been built, we haven't had changing rooms and toilet facilities, for instance, built into the new buildings. So, if we're going to try and utilise these buildings for general community activity to get kids and the wider public, actually, more active, do you think that's something that we ought to be building in? Again, not your particular direct area of responsibility, but something that you might have an input into, is that, when we're developing schools, we should be making sure that they have those kinds of facilities so that they become accessible to the wider public. Is that something that you would be prepared to make a recommendation around? dr frank atherton: Well, it's certainly a fascinating area and one that I think has a lot of potential. You're right to raise it in the context of schools, and I can understand why this committee would, but I think it goes beyond that, actually, into all developments in the public sector and how they're developed and whether we're building health into our environment, which perhaps is your starting point. One of the things that I was really pleased to see in terms of the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017 that was passed a couple of years ago was the use of health impact assessment as a tool, and we're still working on how that will inform policy and how that will be applied in issues such as policy decisions through Government, but also in more downstream issues about how we create the public infrastructure that the public can and should be using. And so I would like to see the use of health impact assessments to a much greater degree to inform those kinds of decisions. If you apply that kind of lens and you take the point, which is inherent in your question, I think, that schools are not just for kids, they're for communities, then you would—it would lead you to a conclusion that you would perhaps design and build them in a different way. So, on a personal basis, I would certainly support your view that we should be looking to use the sports environment in schools in the same way as we use leisure centres. There are all kinds of barriers in there, and I understand all of that, and it's not really my field, exactly as you say, but, as a matter of principle, I think it's a good one to pursue. Yes, perhaps if we could just stay in this area of education just for a moment, I think we all agree that healthy habits acquired early on probably tend to last quite well, so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the healthy and sustainable preschool scheme and whether you think some timescales should be made public about what you expect the achievements from that scheme to be. But, in particular, I was struck with what you said about local leadership, and I just want you to bear that in mind in answering the next question, which is about the foundation phase. You're probably aware that this committee has heard from various school leaders that they're struggling in some cases to meet the ratio of staffing for the foundation phase, which potentially compromises the purpose of it in terms of physical activity. I'm just wondering how the strategy development board is considering that at the moment. Is it something that's come on the radar for the board? Is it something you're thinking about? And, if so, who do you think should be responsible for pinning that down a little bit? Because this is education, not health, and—. dr frank atherton: Well, look, I've got to confess to you, I'm not an educationist, and so the question on staffing numbers in schools is not one that I have been asked to give a deal of consideration to, and it hasn't really been discussed, I don't believe, in the context of development of the strategy. If there is a specific point around that that the committee would like to make in terms of a response into the consultation, which I presume you'll be making, then we'd be happy to consider that. We have standards and we perhaps need to think about how we tighten those standards and how we—enforce isn't the right word, but how we implement and make sure that those standards are properly implemented, because you're absolutely right to say that habits are developed early in life. That's in the preschool; it's also in the home of course, and then later in the school. So, we do need to look at all of those as settings and are there more things we can do within those settings to drive healthier behaviours—that's exactly why we need the consultation. nathan cook: But I would say, through that scheme as well, we've really got a really good bank of preschools that are actually doing some really great work in this area as well. So, I think the more we can understand the successes that some of those environments are having—you know, how we can roll those out and work across other settings to create that wider impact as well is going to be really important. What I'm thinking about is expectations at that level will be expectations at a slightly older level, which will be contained within the foundation phase. And while you're quite right—obviously, parents have a role in this, or families—there will be, particularly with the introduction of the new curriculum, certain expectations on schools to provide not just healthy environments but to actively work towards well-being and healthy weight in children and things. And that's why I asked you about local leadership, because, if it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the plan at foundation phase, it's going to fail further up the school years as well. I think it might be something that the board might want to consider here, because at some point there'll be an accountability question and we will want to know how 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' fits in with the new plans for the new curriculum, and whether it's merely persuasive and influential or whether it has the weight to place some obligations on school leaders about what they do in their schools. So, this connection, I think, is quite an important one, and, if the strategy development board could consider that, I think it would be very helpful, because this doesn't exist in a vacuum. dr frank atherton: Well, I'd certainly be delighted to take that back and we can look at it in terms of how we move from the consultation into the final strategy. suzy davies am: Because we will want to know who to ask: 'you're the accountable person—why has something worked, or not worked?' We will need to know that at some point. dr frank atherton: Just building on Nathan's point, some of the schools—I know it's schools rather than the preschools, and I take your point, but some of the schools we've been working with have absolutely brilliant models of good practice and good local leadership. I remember the Minister actually at the launch, and one of the schools was represented there, and they presented—the school came and some of the children came and presented—to the whole audience about the activities that they were undertaking in their school around physical activity and on healthy eating, and it was such a model of good behaviour the question was, 'Well, why not everywhere?', so that probably speaks to your question. lynne neagle am: And have you had any discussions, then, with education officials around things like teacher training and CPD, because you'll be aware the Health and Social Care Committee has made a number of recommendations in this area? It's crucial that we skill up the staff to develop these things in an appropriate way, isn't it? dr frank atherton: Well, we certainly discuss with education colleagues in Welsh Government. There's more we need to do in terms of that, because you're absolutely right: there's something about building the whole of the workforce—education is really important, but elsewhere as well; it's about how do we really make every contact count, you know, that construct. So, everybody who's working in the health and social care system should have a role in this; everybody who works in education, whether it's the old—. Do we still have dinner ladies? Or teachers, you know, they have a role to play in supporting children to be as healthy as they possibly can. And, actually, I see them, Chair, as a really essential part of the public health workforce. Suzy, are you going to do your curriculum one? suzy davies am: Well, I've bound it in together, but that final point you make about teachers being part of the answer to this, they're already under a range of pressures: is it fair to make them accountable for whether this works or not? Or should that local leadership lie somewhere else? I don't expect you to pin down a person today. dr frank atherton: I wouldn't like to blame a teacher or performance manage them on the proportion of their children in their class who are overweight. That would clearly be nonsense, wouldn't it? But they are part of the solution, and so the accountability lies further up the chain, doesn't it? The question I think we would have, and public services boards might well ask, and the local education authorities may well ask, is: how effective is any particular school at driving forwards these healthy behaviours? suzy davies am: Okay, thank you. hefin david am: Is that all right, Chair? lynne neagle am: You've got the floor, Hefin. What would that look like? dr frank atherton: Just in terms of the physical activity, I have to say it's a really important dimension and we need to move further on. We know not enough of our children are physically active and they're not meeting the various guidelines, so it's really important. It does have an impact on healthy weight, but it has a huge impact in terms of socialisation, in terms of mental health issues, et cetera, you know. nathan cook: I'd just say that one thing we have got in train is, obviously, Sport Wales, Public Health Wales and Natural Resources Wales—we have them working together as a collaborative at the moment to look at how their joint delivery on physical activity can be taken forward more efficiently. So, one of the things they are looking at is obviously the schools programmes they do through eco-schools, the Welsh network of healthy schools and the sports programme to really think about that physical activity and how we can have better join up in terms of the programmes that we're already delivering as well. hefin david am: With that in mind, I'm going to confess to you, chief medical officer, I did anything in school I could to avoid physical education lessons. Yet, two weeks ago, I played for the Assembly rugby team—I wanted to get that in. How can we get children more engaged with physical education in ways that—? I felt completely alienated in school. dr frank atherton: Well, you're right, and many people go through that same journey and come to physical activity later in life, and that's great if they do that. The sad reality is that many people don't, and we also know that there are issues around the dropping off, particularly for girls, of physical activity towards the teenage years. , at the heart of it, it's about making sports and physical activity enjoyable and attractive to people. Sometimes that's easier, I sense, for boys than for girls, but we need to tailor things to different audiences. hefin david am: Yes, that's the trick, isn't it? It's about finding out what children enjoy doing. It's not just about elite sports; it's about getting everybody engaged and active in sports, and that partnership with Public Health Wales that Nathan talked about is really important, because we need a population approach to driving physical activity. hefin david am: So, do you think, with that in mind, we need statutory guidance for schools on physical education? dr frank atherton: Again, I'd look to the consultation as to whether there was an appetite for any kind of guidance. And finally, with regard to free school meals to all pupils in primary and secondary schools, do you think that extending that to all pupils would be beneficial in providing a more varied diet for pupils? dr frank atherton: I don't have a personal view on that. I think it's the quality of the food that kids are getting, whether that comes from home or through school, and whether it's free or whether it's paid for. The question of children being hungry at school is a really important one and needs to be addressed at a national level. I think that's a— hefin david am: So, you think that's more about the provision of food for those who might not have access to it than providing a varied diet. dr frank atherton: I think it's important that children have access to food, absolutely, if that's your question, but we also need to look at the quality of the food and what's in that food offer. I've been around some amazing schools in my own constituency, where they've got proper canteen facilities for pupils and really, really good produce in the meals. And, to be honest, I've been very surprised and shocked at what I've seen of the quality of the food in the packed lunches. Nobody can really police, and I wouldn't want to see parents being policed over what goes in a packed lunch, so if there is data out there to suggest that there's a larger percentage of parents providing packed lunched that are really not good at all, then there is some merit to be said for what Hefin is—. Would you be willing to carry out any research? dr frank atherton: So, your point about food that's brought in in the packed lunches is a really important one, and I've talked to some headteachers as well about this. We could go down a route of guidance and prohibition, but that gets you into the role of nanny in chief and I don't really see that as my role or Government's role, and I don't think it's effective either. Do you remember—? You must have seen on tv—I think it was in Scotland; I don't know if it's happened in Wales—parents pushing the fish and chip packets through the school railings. What I have seen, though, is some really good innovative practice in schools where, for example, they reward children for bringing the healthy options. Schools can give guidance to parents about what would be a healthy lunch and what sort of things might be expected to be seen in the lunch box. So, I've seen some of those approaches that have transformed, actually, the offer of what comes in school boxes. So, my point to the question was: isn't there some merit, perhaps, about all children being equal and eating similar good-quality food in schools? dr frank atherton: Yes. The draft plan commits, doesn't it, to updating the healthy eating in schools regulations—the 2013 regulations? I appreciate this is a consultation, but what is it that needs changing in those regulations at the moment, just to give us a bit of steer? nathan cook: It's mainly on sugar content, so, obviously, they don't adhere to current Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition guidelines around sugar levels. So, what we'd want to consider is, you know, what we need to be careful of is unintended consequences of changing that, as well, if you see a shift to more kids bringing in school packed lunches as well. So, I think we want to consider the best way of doing that and consider through the consultation how we can go about it. janet finch-saunders am: The 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' plan commits to a review of the clinical obesity pathway. What are the time frames for this review, and what do you think are the basic essentials of a clinical obesity pathway for children and young people? dr frank atherton: We do have a pathway for managing overweight, and that's been in place since about 2010, I believe, and we do need to bring that up to date in terms of current knowledge and experiences. We've challenged Public Health Wales; we've asked Public Health Wales to undertake a review of that pathway, and they are going through that process now. nathan cook: We were asking them to review the pathway before we launch the final strategy in October because, obviously, what we want is for that to inform what that final strategy looks like. dr frank atherton: The second point of your question about what are the essential elements, they are already there; we need to tweak them and we need to make sure that they're properly delivered. But it's a tiered approach, so, having access to information through schools and through communities and into families is part of the first step of that. And then, if children are overweight, it's a question about how they're identified. There are questions about the ability of the public to recognise large children, so there may be an issue there. But when children are running into issues around weight, what kind of interventions can be put in, either through primary care or through communities through health visitors, et cetera? And then of course we do have—and we've started to shine a light on this, haven't we—the very overweight children. I don't think we have enough in the way of targeted support to be able to support those. So, I think there's something about looking at our whole pathway, mapping out what the current evidence now shows us is needed, and then thinking about what is our provision in Wales and what do we need to do to bring that up to the level of the places that are the best. The draft plan recognises the importance of the first 1,000 days, but it doesn't appear to include any new proposals to help parents to enable lifestyle changes. Are you satisfied that the draft plan does enough to address the influence that family and parents have on children's healthy weight behaviours, particularly in the first 1,000 days? dr frank atherton: Well, the first 1,000 days are really critically in shaping lives, as I'm sure you'd agree. We are absolutely open to any other suggestions that the public or this committee have as to what more we can and should do. There are a number of things, the sorts of programmes you've mentioned, that I think could be more effective. We know that children who are breastfed are less likely to suffer from obesity in childhood and, indeed, to go on to be obese adults. If there are other interventions in other areas that we need to take, then we'd be delighted to hear what they are, but those are the ones that have jumped out so far. nathan cook: Can I just say—? One of the proposals we're looking for is, obviously, we know that during pregnancy it's a really critical time when we can actually look to work with mothers. We know from looking at some of the behaviour change that it's actually a really critical point when new mothers really start thinking about their lives, wanting the best for their child and their families. So, what we are thinking about is how we could develop some kind of approaches to that going forward. But we know our Healthy Start scheme is also a good lever for us, just in terms of how we can look to improve that kind of dietary offer at the earliest stage as well. Finally, we know that for some families day-to-day challenges can make it difficult for them to make healthy choices, particularly for those on lower incomes and/or maybe using food banks. Could the Welsh Government take bolder action to better support low-income families to eat healthily? dr frank atherton: Well, you've touched on a really important point about inequalities because overweight and obesity is not evenly distributed across our population. It absolutely is more prevalent in more socioeconomically deprived communities, and that's something that should really concern us all. So, it gets you to questions of availability of fresh food and produce; it gets you to questions of formulation of products and whether value brands are less healthy than more premium brands. So, it cuts across all of those issues that we talked about in terms of settings and in terms of environment earlier. We do need to think in broad terms—broader terms than just obesity, but we do need to think in broad terms—about how we create a society where families have the wherewithal to lead healthy lives, and that gets you to really important questions about the minimum wage and income poverty. There's no doubt in my mind—I'm a public health professional—and there's no doubt in my mind that economic success and health success go hand in hand. In terms of what we can do through this particular consultation, there are some things in there about providing better access, but without tackling some of those deeper determinants of health, their impact will necessarily be limited. lynne neagle am: Just finally from me, then, you referred earlier to the importance of making every contact count, but some stakeholders have told the committee that they struggle to do that because of difficulties in availability of people to refer to. Is that a situation that you recognise and what, really, can we do to improve that situation? dr frank atherton: Well, it depends what you mean as to where to refer to. What we're seeing across the NHS is a gradual transformation in primary care so that primary care is no longer about going to see your GP, it's about going to see a practice where you have a range of health professionals. Would I like to see more dietetic support, for example, in that setting? Absolutely I would. I think we need to think in terms of that pathway that we were talking about earlier, about access to that kind of advice and support, which can head off people getting into problems and kids getting into problems with weight issues. So, that question of redesign of the pathway really speaks to, I think, your point about, 'Well, where do people go when they have problems with their weight?' That's true for adults and it's true for children as well. Well, can I thank you both very much for your attendance? It's been a really productive session. Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee, because getting some input into the consultation from children's perspectives, this would be one of the routes we would absolutely welcome. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee on CAMHS tier 4 provision. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Health and Social Services also on CAMHS in-patient provision. Paper to note 4 is a letter from Qualifications Wales to the Minister for Education on qualifications for the new curriculum. Paper to note 5 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education on the development of the new curriculum. Paper to note 6 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education seeking clarification on the draft additional learning needs code. Paper to note 7 is a letter from me to the Minister for Education seeking clarification on the response to our Brexit report. Paper to note 8 is a letter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission on a cumulative impact assessment briefing for committee, which has been offered. Paper to note 9 is a letter from the Chair of the Petitions Committee on a national taskforce for children’s mental health. Paper to note 10 is a letter to the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union from the children’s commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the implications of Brexit for children. There are a few that I'd like to return to in private, but are Members happy to note those? Thank you. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the 23rd meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. A reminder to all members that in order to avoid issues with sound, members participating in person should not also be connected to the video conference. For those of you who are joining via video conference, I will remind you that when speaking you should be on the same channel as the language you are speaking, and please use your headsets. I remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of this special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. For members participating in person, I ask that they please come and drop their signed certificates off at the table once the petition is presented. I would ask members to be very brief and concise, and to summarize the exact content of the petition. The residents of SaanichGulf Islands are calling on the government to simplify the process for protection of marine protected areas. The marine protected area first proposed in the 1970s for the southern Strait of Georgia, now called the Salish Sea, has been awaiting designation for so long that it was originally endorsed by Jacques Cousteau. The second petition is from petitioners who are very concerned about our obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and our commitments under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action. They specifically reference the RCMP violation of UNDRIP in its actions on Wet'suwet'en territory and ask the government to commit to actually living the principles embodied in UNDRIP. I am presenting a petition on behalf of the one in a million Canadians who suffer severe and adverse effects from vaccinations. GuillainBarre syndrome is very debilitating, and this petition seeks the setting up of a no-fault accident or compensation system to help offset the loss of work, the loss of wages and the loss of quality of life that many of these people suffer. denis trudel (longueuilsaint-hubert, bq): Mr.Chair, culture is the soul of a people. Over the past 20years or so, culture, especially music, has never been as accessible as it is now. The advent of digital technology has completely overturned the system for distributing the wealth generated by creators for the benefit of various Web stakeholders, many of whom are billionaires. The third is for Internet and cell phone providers who sell their services as direct access to culture to share their profits with artists. Six thousand people have already signed the first version of this petition, launched last month by musician JordanOfficer and supported by singer BarbaraSecours. As an artist, I am proud to present this petition today because the issues it raises are fundamental to the survival of Quebec culture. garnett genuis (sherwood parkfort saskatchewan, cpc): Thank you very much, Mr. I will be as brief as you suggested, although I will observe that if some members are going on longer during petitions than they normally do, it might be because the government has taken away so many of the tools that opposition members normally have for raising important issues in the House. The petitioners are concerned that instead of focusing on improving medically assisted life, something that we know is a major issue in light of recent revelations, the government has put so much time and legislative energy into efforts to continually further expand euthanasia in Canada and remove vital safeguards. The reality of the way that bill applies is that people from certain backgrounds who wish to practise their faith are not able to fully participate in Canadian society if they are employed in the public service. This petition asks the government to provide a response on that issue, something it hasn't done in response to past petitions on this. The petitioners want to see the government take a strong response in dealing with illegal guns and gun smuggling. At the same time, the petitioners are concerned that the government has the wrong focusthat is, harassing law-abiding firearms ownerswithout putting in place substantial measures to deal with illegal guns. The petitioners want to see the reversal of the order in council from May 1 and strong measures to deal with illegal firearms. The fourth and final petition deals with Bill S-204, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a Canadian to go abroad and receive an organ from a person who has not consented to giving that organ. It would also create a mechanism by which someone could be deemed inadmissible to Canada if they were involved in organ harvesting and trafficking. The petitioners are supportive of Bill S-204 and of similar bills in previous parliaments and would like to see us pass that bill as soon as possible. These residents have signed a petition asking the Government of Canada, and in fact all members of Parliament, to put a high priority on assisting our poorest seniors. The increases to the GIS by $200, and $300 to the OAS, have been well received. They just want to highlight how important it is to support our seniors, in particular the poorest of our seniors. the chair: For members present in the Chamber, a reminder that they are asked to bring their petitions to the table. June 21 is National Indigenous Peoples Day, a day of acknowledgement and a day of celebration of the beautiful diversity of indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. I wish to recognize the leadership of Chief Shelley Sabattis of the Welamukotuk First Nation in Oromocto, New Brunswick. Each year she and her council, volunteers and staff go above and beyond to show appreciation for their members and to demonstrate pride and culture while promoting well-being. We gather in an event where all are welcome to take part, from traditional hand drum-making with elders to moose meat and tacos. This year we will celebrate a bit differently, but we will still stay connected, virtually and in spirit, to the vast network of indigenous peoples and allies. Chair, COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge for all communities across Canada, but as we do our part to flatten the curve, I often think about those who suit up every morning to serve on the front lines of our health care system. Even before the crisis, they would often share the hardships they faced on a day-to-day basis. Share this message and say thanks to our front-line workers, participate in the 7 p.m. doug shipley (barriespringwateroro-medonte, cpc): Thank you, Mr. Slowly, we are getting back to some resemblance of normalcy, although unfortunately not soon enough for some of our great summer festivals. It will not be normal in BarrieSpringwaterOro-Medonte this summer without the iconic Boots and Hearts weekend music festival, Kempenfest, Oro World's Fair, the Elmvale Fall Fair, or the Midhurst Autumnfest. Because of the lack of Canada Day celebrations, I've created Happy Canada Day lawn signs that are available through my constituency office, free to all residents of BarrieSpringwaterOro-Medonte. I'm also hosting a drive-through party on Canada Day at the Royal Canadian Legion on St. Among the countless ordinary Canadians who have stepped up to do extraordinary work during COVID-19, I wish to draw attention to our teachers. My father was a teacher, and my daughter-in-law, Kelly Webb, is one now. I'm certain that my colleagues can all easily remember a teacher in their past who played an important role in helping them achieve their potential. This is not the school year anyone imagined, and what the next one will look like is unclear, but our teachers in London West and across Canada have shown that no matter what, they will be there to help our next generation shine. the chair: Before proceeding to the next presenter, I just want to remind the honourable members in the chamber that I realize that the six-foot limit makes it harder to whisper to each other, but we're hearing a bit of rumble, so I just want you to try to whisper at your best. stphane bergeron (montarville, bq): Mr.Chair, on July1st, we will be celebrating one of the most important events for the riding of Montarville: the 175thanniversary of the city of Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville. The theme Proud of our traditions will be the focus of this celebration for the people of Montarville. This is a good illustration of the rich history of this municipality nestled in the western foothills of Mont-Saint-Bruno. The seigneury of Montarville was granted in1710 to the illustrious former governor of Trois-Rivires, PierreBoucher. The parish of Saint-Bruno, which took root there and in which a village grew, became a municipal corporation in1845. To this day, it is one of the most prosperous localities, with a strong sense of belonging, a very dynamic community life and jealously preserved natural environments. A whole program had been drawn up for the celebration, but the current health crisis has taken over some of the planned activities, which has in no way diminished the pride and festive spirit of the people of Montarville. Chair, thank you for allowing me to take a moment to highlight an initiative that I started early on during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Heroes of EtobicokeLakeshore is an opportunity for citizens in my riding to recognize the contributions of those in their community who make life a bit easier. I'm pleased with the number of nominations I received that honour everyone from front-line workers to businesses that are innovating in these difficult times to volunteers who are finding new ways to reach out. I think of Daniel Lauzon who set up Food for Now, a mobile service that helps take care of the homeless. I think of Toni Varone, who helped his business clients by forgiving their rents, or young Lucas, who wanted to thank his teachers. I've been moved and inspired by the countless stories of generosity, strength, resiliency, kindness, incredible character and creativity. Chair, it gives me great pleasure to thank a local Richmond-based charity, the Social Diversity for Children Foundation, SDC, for its hard work both in raising funds for the purchase of personal protective equipment and in distributing this PPE to long-term care facilities and individual seniors' homes in the lower mainland of B.C. The COVID-19 relief fund is supported by a dozen other non-profits, businesses and community groups. It is amazing to have witnessed how the younger generation have gotten involved in caring for the elderly at this very challenging time. Chair, June is ALS Awareness Month, and 79 years after Lou Gehrig died from ALS little has changed. On June 21, Canadians will gather virtually to raise funds for ALS Canada in the Walk to End ALS. In Halton, normally we meet each year at Bronte Creek Provincial Park on the May long weekend to raise funds for ALS Canada. This year I will virtually join Tim's Titans, a team formed to honour Tim Robertson, my friend who died in 2016 after living with ALS for 13 years. I have a T-shirt, with a picture of Lou Gehrig, that says, Great Player...Lousy Disease and Tim's Titans...Great Team! ALS...Still a Lousy Disease. Join me on June 21 for the virtual Walk to End ALS to raise funds to support patients and their families and for ALS research. The peaceful protests that we're seeing across the country and around the world were not triggered by an isolated incident. They are fuelled by decades of ineffective action against something that is so insidious and deeply entrenched in our history, systems and institutions. It exists when a shocking report exposes the Peel District School Board's failure to work fairly with the black community. It exists when D'Andre Campbell, who was fighting mental illness, loses his life at the hands of the police. We need to dismantle the systems that allow this privilege and oppression to take form, and address the unconscious bias plaguing our institutions. Chair, a few months ago I rose in the House on the eve of our closure due to COVID-19. I told Canadians we must not give in to fear, that we would carry on and get through this crisis stronger than ever. Businesses are reopening, jobs are returning and our lives are starting to feel a bit normal again. Canadians pulled together, and because of that we did not see the devastating death toll that many had predicted. Life may be returning to normal, but unfortunately, here in this chamber of democracy, the people's voices continue to be shut down. In the words of my grandfather, it's time for the Liberals to get with the program and bring back the House. Chair, from in-person learning to virtual classrooms, COVID-19 has drastically changed the lives of students across the country, especially those in post-secondary education who are worried about covering costs like tuition or rent this coming fall. Our government recognized that students should not have to worry or put their futures on pause during this difficult time. If you're a high school student headed to a post-secondary school, or a current post-secondary student or a recent graduate, you can receive the Canada emergency student benefit every four weeks and have the financial support that you need to save for school. We also doubled Canada student grants and loans, enhanced the student loan program, increased supports for indigenous post-secondary education and introduced the Canada student service grant for those who wish to pursue it. I wish them all the very best, and I wish all of you, my colleagues and those across Canada, a very happy National Indigenous Peoples Day, which is coming up on June 21. the chair: I want to remind the honourable members to keep to their 60 seconds so that we don't go over the time. Chair, I rise today to once again implore the government to do something about the horrible lack of access to and crazy cost of rural Internet service. Right now, too many areas of my riding have no access to rural Internet service at all, and those who can get service are paying through the nose. I've even heard constituents say that during this pandemic, they are having to choose between feeding their kids and educating them. Is that too much to ask of the government? the chair: We'll now go to Mr. Chair, these last few months have been incredibly challenging for the residents of CowichanMalahatLangford, who have been forced to deal with the economic and social consequences of COVID-19. The pandemic has laid bare the inadequacies of our social safety net, the weakness in our supply chains and the dependence of our society on essential workers, who often work long hours for low wages, putting themselves and their families at risk. We've also been forced to confront the systemic inequality, poverty and racism that continue to hold so many people back from achieving their full potential. I will not dishonour the sacrifice that so many have made during this time by allowing us to go back to the status quo that got us here in the first place. I will not apologize for demanding that the most vulnerable in our society get the supports and opportunities they need to live with dignity, and I will not relent from pushing my political colleagues to summon the courage necessary to implement policies that lead to environmental, economic and social justice. steven blaney (bellechasseles etcheminslvis, cpc): Mr.Chair, here is a beautiful story, the story of a woman from Bellechasse, a courageous young mother from Saint-Malachie, Marie-ChristineGoupil. With three children, including the eldest daughter with a disability, and realizing that her daughter with a disability had special clothing needs, she decided to go into business to meet the needs of other parents who, like her, were facing their child's clothing challenges. Marie-ChristineGoupil has discovered a passion for entrepreneurship and has moved and inspired many people with her passionate and courageous attitude. yves-franois blanchet (beloeilchambly, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I lend my voice to the Chief of the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec-Labrador, GhislainPicard, whose message is as follows: There have been no fewer than 14reports and conclusions of commissions of inquiry since1967 highlighting major problems in relations between law enforcement agencies and indigenous people. Are you going to respond, as you too often do, by moving on to the next one, or are you going to do what we expect you to do, which is to recognize that the justice system discriminates against indigenous people and that we have no less right to security than the rest of the population? In three months, police interventions have claimed more victims among our members than the pandemic. rachael harder (lethbridge, cpc): Over the last few months, Canada's democracy has been disregarded and an autocracy has been resurrected in its place. In 2014, he professed that Canadians want their Members of Parliament to be effective voices for their communities in Ottawa, and not merely mouthpieces for an all-too-powerful Prime Minister. A government that does not allow for effective opposition is not functioning in the best interest of Canadians; it is operating in the best interest of itself and, even more so, the interest of the Prime Minister. Canadians deserve to flourish in a democracy, not merely survive under the autocracy that this Prime Minister has created. Chair, I would like to recognize the work of Agincourt Community Services Association and its tireless executive director, Lee Soda, who have been serving our community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under more pressure than ever, their staff and volunteers continue to serve a community whose need was great even before the crisis. They have opened outdoor washrooms and hand-washing stations for vulnerable communities and are delivering groceries and other essentials to vulnerable seniors. ACSA is a bridge between those who can help and those who need help, and they are just one example of how our community has come together to meet this challenge. There are restaurants and businesses donating meals to front-line workers, residents answering the call to stock the food bank shelves and neighbours looking in on the vulnerable and isolated. Please note that we will suspend the proceedings twice in order to allow employees who provide support for the sitting to replace each other safely. Chair, for months Conservatives have been pointing out flaws in Liberal government programs that are preventing Canadians from getting the help they need. The Prime Minister has refused to make these very technical changes to get more help to Canadians who need it. For example, on the wage subsidy, more than two-thirds of the money allocated for that program has lapsed because businesses don't qualify. Will the Prime Minister change the program to allow companies who have made acquisitions to access the wage subsidy to keep more people working? right hon. Chair, from the very beginning we knew that as we rolled out measures, we would need to improve them and tweak them, and that's exactly what we've been doing over the past three months. But we continued to improve them, to make additions and amendments so that more people could get the help they needed, including with the proposed legislation last week that expanded the reach of the wage subsidy to more businesses. Chair, it was the Liberals who said no to the motion to allow this Parliament to sit to debate that motion, and even in that legislation they refused to allow businesses who have made acquisitions to access the program. Now, when we look at the rent relief program, it is so difficult to apply for it that many landlords are refusing to bother, leaving even more small businesses to fall through the cracks. In fact, of the $3 billion allocated to the rent relief program, only $39 million has been paid out. It's now June and he has refused to fix these programs and has successfully talked out the calendar on the days that the House of Commons could meet to discuss these programs. We recognize, in conversations with the premiers, how important it is to make sure that we're working together, the provinces and the federal government, on issues like rent subsidies where commercial rent is indeed a provincial jurisdiction. Many provinces have moved forward with the eviction bans that are necessary to go along with this, and we'll continue to work with provinces to make sure that we're getting Canadians the help they need. He has run down the clock on parliamentary sittings and he still refuses to make these changes to get more help to Canadians. Some of these sites are very near sensitive government institutions, like government departments, the National Research Council, RCMP headquarters and the Bank of Canada. How long has the Prime Minister known that Huawei technology has been installed in the Ottawa area? right hon. Chair, first off, on the issue of Parliament, it has been meeting four times a week over the past many weeks, and members of the opposition have been able to continue to ask questions on COVID-19 and a broad range of subjects. Moreover, every two weeks the finance department puts forward at the finance committee the full transparent measures that we've taken, so that parliamentarians can study them. justin trudeau: in regard to Huawei technology there are strict rules for companies to follow and we assume they will all follow those. I want to remind the honourable members who are joining us virtually that heckling really does disrupt the whole session. Your face does come up and we do see who it is, so I just want to make sure that you're aware of that. Chair, throughout this unprecedented pandemic, we have been open and transparent about all of the measures we've put forward. Chair, the Prime Minister has pursued a policy of appeasement in pursuit of a personal vanity product at the UN. He's abandoned Israel and committed funding to UNRWA, an organization whose schools have been used as storage facilities for Hamas rockets against Israeli civilians, and whose facilities have served as breeding grounds for racism and anti-Semitism. He has apologized for the Iranian regime when it shot down a plane full of Canadian citizens, and he refuses to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity. What's the point of having a seat at the table if you have to sell out Canadian principles to get there? the chair: The Right Honourable Prime Minister. That's why, when we took office five years ago, we demonstrated the kind of leadership on values that Canadians expected. elizabeth may: This being a committee, we can have a point of order during what would have been question period. I am not sitting that far away from the Prime Minister, and I'm sorry, but Andrew Scheer used to be the Speaker of the House and should show better decorum. Chair, on the same point of order, it is disgusting for the leader of the Green Party to use decorum as an excuse to interrupt the Leader of the Opposition in the middle of critical lines of questioning. The leader of the Green Party knows the rules of the House and shouldn't be abusing them to advance a partisan agenda. andrew scheer: I appreciate the honourable leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May, for that reminder. I just want to say to the member, and to all members, that the reason that I cannot control myself is that the Prime Minister used the word embarrassment in answering a foreign affairs question, and it just made me think of the India trip. yves-franois blanchet: Mr.Chair, while the Greens and the Conservatives are saying that they'll be waiting outside after the meeting, I will ask a question. The Prime Minister has extended the Canada emergency response benefit, and that's good news, but it's not enough. For us, it was also urgent to adjust the CERB to the needs of the tourism, arts and agriculture sectors. So what happened to the urgency of reforming the CERB? Why is the government refusing to talk to the opposition parties? right hon. We have unequivocally proposed to extend the debate to reach an agreement, which brings me to my second question. Last week, the issue of assistance to people with disabilities was also a pressing concern, and it's even more so a week later. The Bloc proposed to extend the discussions and split the government's bill in two to help people with disabilities. Why is the government refusing this assistance to people with disabilities, when it could have been debated with the opposition in a civilized and proper way in a Parliament in which it has a minority? right hon. justin trudeau: That was exactly what we wanted, but unanimous consent of the Chamber was required to debate this matter, and the Conservative Party of Canada voted against it. yves-franois blanchet: If the idea is so good and wonderful, why not start over and open the dialogue now? What's stopping the Prime Minister from being a rallying point and inviting us to take to each other and resolve the problem, rather than saying that he is going to pack up his toys and go home? The people with disabilities are the ones who will pay the price. Where was the Prime Minister on October21,2019? He received a minority mandate from Quebeckers and Canadians. Why is he behaving like something between a prime minister with a majority and a monarch by divine right? right hon. justin trudeau: I've heard the Conservative Party and the Bloc Qubcois throw their accusations around. They don't point out that the House of Commons did indeed give its consent to extend the mandate of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic until the end of June. Unfortunately, they too are part of a minority Parliament and must respect the voice of the majority of parliamentarians, just as we do. yves-franois blanchet: I might have been tempted, but that's unlikely to happen because the Prime Minister isn't me, he's him. In addition, the government wants to buy the right to interfere in provincial and Quebec jurisdictions for $14billion. However, Quebec and a number of provinces are refusing to allow it to interfere in their jurisdictions and are asking that this money be paid to them unconditionally. Is the Prime Minister trying to take advantage of the crisis or is he trying to create a constitutional crisis? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, the safety of Canadians is the responsibility of all levels of government. That's why we have proposed a $14billion agreement to ensure that all Canadians across the country experience a safe re-opening of the economy. This is a proposal that we are working on with the provinces because we know that there are needs across the country, including early childhood centres, screening and support for municipalities. Indigenous leaders have expressed a lack of confidence in the RCMP commissioner's ability to tackle full-scale systemic racism, but the Prime Minister has expressed his confidence in the commissioner. Chair, over the past two years, Commissioner Lucki has made significant strides forward on an issue where there is still much more to do. We know that systemic racism exists in all of our institutions across this country the chair: We'll now go back to Mr. jagmeet singh: This is the same RCMP commissioner who just recently said that they couldn't explain what systemic racism was. Why does the Prime Minister believe that the RCMP commissioner can tackle systemic racism in the RCMP? right hon. Chair, recent events have made it abundantly clear that to tackle the systemic racism at the level of the RCMP, we need a full-scale overhaul of the RCMP. Is the Prime Minister committed to a full-scale overhaul of the RCMP to root out systemic racism? right hon. Chair, I am committed to addressing systemic racism in this country and taking significant, bold actions to reduce the amount of discrimination that indigenous peoples, that racialized Canadians face on a daily basis. What it's saying is that we need to be better at where we spend our money, investing in communities and not policing. Will the Prime Minister commit to a review of the RCMP budget to allocate resources to community services and not to policing? right hon. Chair, over the past years we have been investing more directly and more money in community organizations, in the black community, and working with indigenous partners on the path to reconciliation. We have been investing in the kinds of community-based programs and solutions that are part of the solution. We know there is much more to do, and we will continue to look at all of our expenditures to make sure we're doing the right things. Chair, over the past few years, while the Prime Minister has been in office, the RCMP budget has increased by 31%. In recent events we've seen people who needed a health care response to a health care crisis been killed by the RCMP. Does the Prime Minister believe that we need to be investing in a health care response instead of a police response for people who are faced with a crisis? right hon. We need to make sure that our systems across the board, from our police systems to our judicial systems, to our health care systems, to our community systems, are actually addressing the systemic discrimination issues that are embedded within them That is exactly what we are going to continue to do in the coming years. Chair, with regard to the CERB extension, can the Prime Minister guarantee that everyone who is receiving CERB payments now will continue to do so without any gaps throughout the summer? right hon. Chair, I am happy to highlight that many Canadians who were on the CERB are now returning to work. We know that as the economy gets back to work, people will want to the chair: We will go back to Mr. jagmeet singh: Can the Prime Minister assure people who need it that they will continue to receive the CERB over the summer, yes or no? right hon. justin trudeau: We are very pleased to point out that we are going to extend the Canada emergency response benefit for at least another eight weeks, because a lot of people are going to need it. the chair: We're going to pause and suspend proceedings just for a few moments to allow our support staff to substitute for one another in a healthy and safe way. Chair, it was really a surprise in the middle of a pandemic to see the Prime Minister at his first campaign stop last week in Ottawa. He has a daily report show and he wants to sideline Parliament, dominate the news cycle and keep everyone in the dark about the state of the economy. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, there is no reason that he cannot provide the fiscal update during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the PBO has published a number of reports himself. Why won't the Prime Minister provide a fiscal update so we can all understand the state of our economy, or is that just not part of his campaign playbook? hon. mona fortier (minister of middle class prosperity and associate minister of finance): Thank you, Mr. We will continue to be open and transparent about the actions that we are taking to support families, businesses, workers, our health care system and our economy. cathy mcleod: Chair, Canada's economy was in trouble prior to the COVID, with some of the worst numbers since 2009. Government revenues in March dropped by 7.2%, and it's shameful and, quite frankly, it's outrageous that they refuse to provide Parliament and Canadians with an economic update. Households during this challenging time know how much money is coming in and they know how much money is going out. mona fortier: The Canadian economy is going through a period of extraordinary uncertainty due to COVID-19. We've continued to be open and transparent about the measures we've put in place for Canadians, workers and businesses. In fact, we have reported biweekly to Parliament on the total cost and status of our plan's measures. As soon as it's possible to provide clear economic projections, we will provide a comprehensive update to Canadians the chair: We go back to Ms. cathy mcleod: Other governments have managed to provide updates for their citizens and carry out their responsibilities, but of course this government has sidelined Parliament with simply a question-but-no-answer period. The forestry industry was in crisis even before the pandemic, with mills closing down and thousands of jobs lost. Eight weeks ago, Minister Freeland said, I have had many discussions with leaders in our forestry sector and the provinces about what we can do to support the industry today. Meanwhile, we've had support going to the arts and we've had support going to fisheries, just to name a few, but arguably for the industry that was having some of the most numerous challenges, it has been radio silence. Can the government at least commit to releasing an updated softwood lumber transition plan before we rise? hon. Chair, we remain committed, of course, to the forestry industry and seeing it through this pandemic and this very uncertain time. The expanding market opportunities program, for instance, has helped Canada's forestry sector diversify, create jobs and open new markets. We've had new construction projects that are active today, using Canadian wood in key markets like Korea, Japan, China and the United States. Tomorrow this House will vote on our government's investment of $20.97 million for this program. It's part of our budget 2019 commitment to invest $251 million over three years, and I hope the opposition will support us in that. cathy mcleod: It was stated in a major newspaper this morning that this government is like a sexy sports carvroom, vroom, vroombut with a history of breakdowns and major repairs. The sector is also an essential link in the medical equipment supply chain, and we thank them for all the work they're doing. We're aware of the immense pressures faced by this sector, especially at this time, and Deputy Prime Minister Freeland and others are taking that seriously and working through this issue. duties on Canadian softwood lumber are unfair and unwarranted, and we will pursue all means in order to the chair: Before continuing, I want to remind honourable members who are at home to make sure that the boom on their headsets is down. grard deltell (louis-saint-laurent, cpc): Mr.Chair, before I ask my question, I'd like to pay tribute to the Minister of Justice, particularly to his versatility. I like Mr.Lametti very much, but I'd like Mr.Morneau to answer my question. Yesterday, in a Senate parliamentary committee, the Minister of Finance half-opened the door to an economic update. Based on what he said, it seems that, as we speak, a committee of the Department of Finance is working on an economic update. mona fortier: Mr.Chair, as we know, the Canadian economy is going through a period of extraordinary uncertainty. As soon as it's possible to provide clear economic projections, we will provide a full update to Canadians. Right now, we can say that we have supported workers, businesses and Canadians with the emergency measures we have put in place. We will continue to do so, because we need to be sure that Canadians can get through this crisis. We don't know when the economic update will take place, yet all across Canada, provinces are doing economic updates. mona fortier: Mr.Chair, since the beginning of the crisis, we have implemented the economic action plan to respond to COVID-19, and we've provided immediate assistance to Canadians, businesses and workers. In addition, 8.4million Canadians the chair: We are returning to Mr.Deltell. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, next Friday, the Quebec minister of finance, EricGirard, will give an economic update. If EricGirard can give one for Quebec, why can't BillMorneau give one for Canada? hon. mona fortier: Mr.Chair, once again, we have been open and transparent from the outset. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, I cannot judge the quality of the work done by the provinces, but what I do know is that Quebec, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland have also made efforts to support their residents economically. We have reported biweekly to Parliament on the total cost and status of the measures in our economic response plan. Once again, as soon as clear economic projections can be provided, we will provide an update the chair: Mr.Deltell has the floor. So I ask the question: so far, over the past three months, how much has the pandemic cost Canadians? hon. mona fortier: As I said earlier, it is important to note that we have put forward measures, including the wage subsidy, which have helped more than 2.5million the chair: Mr.Deltell has the floor. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, I have been trying for four minutes to get anything remotely resembling an answer, and I'm getting absolutely nothing. Why are the government and the Minister of Finance, Bill Morneau, not able to table an economic update when some provinces are able to? hon. We have continued to support businesses and Canadians during this time the chair: Mr.Deltell, you have time for a very brief question. grard deltell: The only thing that distinguishes the provinces that table economic updates and the current government is political will. As soon as it is possible to provide clear economic projections, we will provide Canadians with a full update. The difference between our government and the previous government is that we will actually consult with Canadians, including black Canadians, including Asian Canadians, to respond to the challenges, including with an anti-racism secretariat and an anti-racism strategy. Chair, this program was made possible by working with the provinces, and we will continue to encourage landlords and tenants to work together to make sure they have relief for this very difficult time in which they're living. We're continuing to monitor the CECRA program and we will make it possible for businesses to have access to the program. What is it going to take for the government to admit that the program is a disaster and needs changes? hon. Chair, we know our government has been working closely with the provinces and territories to deliver the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance. Although the tenant-landlord relationship is ultimately the responsibility of the provinces and territories, our government has stepped up to provide support through the tools we have and through CMHC so that small businesses can get the rent relief they need. At committee, we were told only around 5,500 of them are receiving COVID-19 rent relief. We will continue to monitor this program closely and ensure that Canada's small businesses are supported during this challenging time. Chair, I want to assure the honourable colleague that we are doing everything and will continue to do everything to help small businesses in our country. Chair, on May 27 the CBSA seized 65 small handguns at Pearson airport, the largest firearms seizure on record. Chair, I would point out that gun violence in any of our communities is unacceptable, and it's important that governments and communities take steps to prevent guns from getting into the hands of criminals. That's why we do important work at our border to keep guns from being smuggled into our country, but it also necessitates additional work. That's why our government has taken a very strong position and will strengthen gun control to keep Canadians safe. We know the Liberals' gun ban won't change anything, but a focus on smuggled guns and criminals will. Chair, stronger gun control laws are an effective tool, and that's been told to us by police leadership and communities across the country. is a strong partner of Canada, as is the European Union, and we're looking forward to continuing that strong relationship the chair: We'll now go back to Mr. With respect to the negotiations with the U.K., when will the minister publish her goals and objectives for this agreement? hon. Chair, we're going to continue to work to ensure that any future agreement is going to be based on the best interests of Canadians, and we will the chair: We will go back to Mr. randy hoback: Can the minister confirm whether they've entered into negotiations with the U.K. mary ng: Our government is analyzing the most-favoured-nation tariff regimes schedule the U.K. Chair, during the CUSMA negotiations, a deal was struck between the Liberal Party and the NDP that the government would notify this House 90 days before it starts any negotiations on any trade agreement. Right now, we are analyzing the most-favoured-nation tariff regimes schedule put out by the U.K. Has the minister discussed a WTO reform with the USTR, the United States trade representative? hon. mary ng: The Ottawa Group is a consensus-based group limited to WTO members who are committed to bringing forward ideas and proposals the chair: We'll go back to Mr. randy hoback: Just as with any other trade agreement, the minister has committed to this House that she will publish the list of goals and responsibilities for the negotiations. Chair, I'm thrilled that we had an excellent meeting of the Ottawa Group yesterday where, as a group, we agreed to take concrete action. randy hoback: Will the minister be releasing a list of Canada's objectives we would like to see the new WTO's director-general pursue prior to the upcoming DG election? hon. I would remind the member that we have access to a billion and a half customers through our very robust mr. randy hoback: A billion and a half customers is fine if you have a functioning WTO, but if you don't have a functioning WTO, then a billion and a half customers may not be fully accessible to our suppliers, manufacturers and agriculture producers. Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that nothing is more important than standing up and helping create markets for our Canadian businesses and to help our small businesses get more export-ready so that they can grow into the international marketplace. This is work that we've committed to do, and we will keep working on it, particularly the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Not only did they present the budget, but they'll also actually debate the budget and pass the budget in Parliament. Chair, the House is sitting in this hybrid format so that people can participate in the House on the screens. I'm sure my colleague is happy to see that his own colleagues are able to ask questions and participate. New Brunswick families and businesses are rapidly making adjustments to manage and live with the coronavirus pandemic. Chair, our government is committed to ensuring that Canadians continue to have access to the benefits that they rely on through Service Canada. We have redeployed over 3,000 additional staff to ensure that Canadians continue to have access to their benefits. We've established a 1,500-agent call centre to make sure that people can get access to the phone lines to get the help they need. Provincial governments are working hard to adjust to Canada's new normal by opening up businesses and front-line government services. Chair, we're currently working with our world-class public health experts to determine how best to reopen the Service Canada network for the public. Make no mistake: Our Service Canada employees have gone above and beyond to ensure that Canadians continue to have access to the services that they rely on and the benefits that they need. john williamson: Please don't hide behind health experts when the Prime Minister is appearing in the middle of large protests, yet is afraid to bring back the Parliament of Canada to do its business. Bills are being studied, opposition input is being heard and MLAs are voting on legislation, not rubber-stamping government bills. When will the government table an economic update so taxpayers understand what was spent, what is owed by our kids and grandchildren, and what the government's fiscal footing looks like? hon. The only reason my colleague is able to ask a question and I'm able to answer his question is that he's right there on the screen. We have this hybrid format that cares for MPs across the country, not only the ones sitting in the House. When will the government table an economic update so that taxpayers understand what was spent, what is owed by our kids and grandchildren, and what the government's fiscal footing looks like in today's environment? hon. We have been open and transparent about the measures we have been providing to support families, businesses and workers. Again I will ask when the government will table an economic update so that we can have an understanding of what the government's fiscal footing looks like. Chair, we have included biweekly reports to Parliament on the full cost and status of our economic response plan measures since the beginning. I have said, and I will continue to say, that when it is possible to provide a clear economic projection, we will provide an update. john williamson: What is the full cost to date of the government's COVID-19 relief measures, as the minister just claimed the government has provided to Parliament? hon. Chair, we have provided support for workers, and 2.5 million Canadians have been helped through the Canadian wage subsidy. stphane bergeron: Mr.Chair, as the leader of the Bloc Qubcois mentioned a few moments ago, the government promised $14billion to Quebec and the provinces, but in targeted transfers. But Quebec and the provinces don't just want this money to be transferred unconditionally, they also want a real discussion on a permanent increase in health care transfers. The federal government, which does not manage any hospitals or long-term care centres, must stop playing armchair quarterback and transfer the money to the only governments with jurisdiction over health, that is, Quebec and the provinces. Will it do so without delay and without nitpicking? the honourable patty hajdu (minister of health): Mr.Chair, we know that the Government of Quebec is working hard to ensure the safety of Quebeckers and we are here to support them. As part of this co-operation, we have developed health and safety recommendations for workplaces, we have purchased medical equipment for workers and we have supported the province in developing its reopening program. stphane bergeron: The co-operation is so effective that the money is staying in the federal government's coffers. We see it with housing, for which Quebec has not received a dime of the $1.4billion it is owed. pablo rodriguez: I am pleased to confirm to my colleague that there is no messing around, no quibbling, nothing of the kind. There is a clear willingness on the part of the federal government to co-operate with Quebec and all the provinces. stphane bergeron: We don't want to bicker, we want the money to be paid out. There is $1.4billion that should be paid to Quebec for social housing and is sitting in the federal government's coffers. We are waiting for money for water treatment and water systems, but it is sitting in the federal government's coffers. What is the government waiting for to pay out the money so that we can get our economy rolling? hon. stphane bergeron: MadamChair, things are definitely at a standstill, because the money is owed and has not been paid out. We need more flexibility in the gas tax program and Quebec's contribution to allow municipalities to undertake work on city halls, community centres and fire stations. We need the federal government to contribute to funding public transit operations, which have become a real financial drain because of the drop in ridership. pablo rodriguez: When it comes to just talking, the Bloc Qubcois has a lot of experience, I admit. iqra khalid (mississaugaerin mills, lib.): Madam Chair, I'll be splitting my time with the member for GlengarryPrescottRussell. During a consultation with the business community in Mississauga, the concerns of businesses, big and small, included the need for stable, affordable and safe child care. With the lack of such child care spaces, an economic recovery plan post-COVID cannot be effective until and unless we make sure that people are able to get back to work. I've heard from parents across Mississauga that they're being forced to stay home because of inadequate child care and that they have to choose between putting food on the table and keeping family safe. More and more employers are realizing that good employees are unable to contribute to their business growth because of this challenge. Now more than ever, we need to find long-term sustainable solutions for Canadians who face challenges with regard to child care. I ask our Minister of Families, Children and Social Development this: What is our strategy to tackle this ever-growing need for a national child care plan? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, I thank the honourable member for her question and for her important advocacy and work on this important issue. That is why we're committed to continuing to work with provinces and territories to renew our agreements on early learning and child care, and to provide, at the earliest opportunity, $400 million in support. In addition to that, the Prime Minister has already indicated that child care will be part of the $14-billion pledge to provinces and territories to assist them with respect to COVID-19 recovery efforts. Over the next decade, we will continue to invest $7.5 billion, and together we have achieved the goal of over 40,000 affordable child care spaces. We are also committed to continuing to create over 250,000 before-school and after-school child care spaces for kids under the age of 10. We will continue to work with our partners in the provinces and territories to ensure that Canadians can continue to have access to safe, quality and affordable child care. francis drouin (glengarryprescottrussell, lib.): MadamChair, small businesses play a fundamental role in the Canadian economy. In an article in LaPresse, the Minister of Economic Development warned us that the economic crisis caused by severe lockdown measures could have more serious consequences in small municipalities than in large cities. Based on discussions with the chambers of commerce in my riding, it is clear that federal government assistance will be essential for the reopening of the economy, specifically for the rural economy. In fact, I would like to acknowledge the work of the Prescott-Russell community development corporation , under the leadership of John Candie. After announcing almost $57million to help SMEs adopt e-commerce, how does the minister plan to help SMEs and the business community in our rural areas? hon. mlanie joly (minister of economic development and official languages): MadamChair, I also thank my colleague from GlengarryPrescottRussell for his important question. It is also why we have doubled the budget of CFDCs and Community Futures organizations across the country. In southern Ontario we have reinvested over $260million in the regional economic development agency FedDev. In the great riding of GlengarryPrescottRussell, which I am particularly fond of and where there is a very good member of Parliament, there is an additional $1million for entrepreneurs in the region. carol hughes): The honourable member for GlengarryPrescottRussell has 36seconds left. daniel blaikie (elmwoodtranscona, ndp): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. She has been working from home since late March, taking care of her child, who is out of school, and caring for her father, who is living with her and vulnerable to COVID-19. As a parent and a care provider to a vulnerable person, she's not comfortable with physically returning to work. Service Canada won't give Krystal a straight answer as to whether going on leave and collecting CERB would count as refusing a reasonable job offer. With Bill C-17 looming in the background, Krystal is worried about jail time and fines if she does right by her child and her father by applying for CERB. Can Krystal reasonably refuse to go back to work and collect CERB, or will she be considered a fraudster? That's my question for the minister that is specific to Krystal's case. As well, what is the minister doing to provide clear direction to Canadians and to Service Canada agents so that people can get a clear answer before making their decision about returning to work? hon. We recognize that Canadian workers will face various different situations, including those who are ineligible for the Canada emergency support benefit. We'll continue to work with workers to make sure they're able to be supported throughout this pandemic. daniel blaikie: Madam Chair, that answer is really not good enough, because the problem here is that Krystal needs to know whether she can continue receiving CERB or not. That's a federal government decision, and she needs to know whether the federal government is going to accuse her of fraud and put her in jail or assess fines against her if she refuses to go back to work because she wants to take care of her child and her father. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, I can assure the honourable member that if a Canadian has to take care of a loved one due to circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, they are indeed eligible to receive the CERB and remain receiving that benefit. laurel collins (victoria, ndp): As we deal with the global pandemic, we cannot lose sight of the ongoing climate emergency. Canada has missed every single climate target it set, and we need to break the cycle of empty promises. Canadians want their government to be accountable, and environmental groups such as Ecojustice, CAN-Rac, Environmental Defence and West Coast Environmental Law, as well as the government's own climate institute, are all calling for legally binding climate targets. When will the government put its climate targets into law with legally binding milestones so we never miss another target again? hon. navdeep bains (mississaugamalton, lib.): Madam Chair, I thank my honourable colleague for her question. It is a priority not only for us as a government, but it should be a priority for all Canadians. That is why we have a comprehensive plan that also includes significant investments in clean technology, which will help reduce our carbon footprint. I am confident that these measures will enable us to not only meet but exceed our 2030 target and also allow us to achieve our net-zero 2050 target. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I think the fundamental issue here is having a plan when it comes to the environment. I'm confident that the measures that we have takenputting a price on pollution, investing in clean technology, and other key measures to reduce our carbon footprint, including the investment in infrastructureunderpin a plan the acting chair (mrs. laurel collins: This government is not meeting its targets, but it is meeting with oil and gas lobbyists. Are we going to choose a just recovery with good, sustainable jobs for Canadian workers, or are we going to keep subsidizing oil and gas companies to the tune of billions, subsidies that we know are ending up in the pockets of CEOs and shareholders? the acting chair (mrs. navdeep bains: Again, Madam Chair, this is the fundamental difference between us and the NDP. We fundamentally believe that the entire economy needs to work together, including the energy sector, to enable us to achieve those 2030 and 2050 targets. We are going to work together to support our workers, including in the energy sector, to reduce our carbon footprint. When I was last here in May, I was on my way back to Saskatoon from Toronto, and there was actually someone on my flight who tested positive for COVID-19. Why hasn't the government put rules in place requiring airlines to reach out to individuals like me who may have been exposed to COVID on their flights? hon. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, it's hard to speculate on what happened from such a vague description of his experience, but I will say that we have every confidence in local public health, which is doing the hard and heavy lifting of contact tracing and working very closely with all kinds of different sectors, including airline sectors, to make sure that close contacts of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 are found, are traced and are isolated. I assume that the member took appropriate precautions on the flight and I hope that he continues to do so. kevin waugh: Madam Chair, it was reported that the individual on my plane who had COVID was actually connecting in Toronto from an international flight. The Prime Minister announced last week that they would begin mandating temperature checks for those bound for Canada in July. Will international travellers be tested when they land in Canada, or will they be relying on the tests that take place in other countries? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, this is a very important question, because the protection and safety of all Canadiansin particular, Canadian travellersis a high priority for our government. That will initially be done primarily by the airlines that are in the best position to do it at this point in time. We are also now going to be including CATSA, the people who do the security screening, so that when people enter the airport, they will also be screened. kevin waugh: Madam Chair, last week five of the largest professional sports leagues in North America put out a statement of support for my private member's bill, the safe and regulated sports betting act. Given the struggles that clubs and leagues are facing due to COVID-19, including having no fans at all in the stands for the foreseeable future, the legalization of sports betting would be a welcome opportunity not only to engage fans but to generate much-needed revenue. Will the government commit now to supporting the sports and gaming industries by supporting my private member's bill, Bill C-218? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, I've had the opportunity on many occasions to speak to members of Parliament and also to mayors and councillors and people living in border communities where there are casinos. I would like to advise the member that I look forward to the opportunity for a careful examination of his bill. At the same time, we will examine his bill with all of the necessary attention to make sure it's given full consideration. kevin waugh: Madam Chair, it's the first time in history that we've had the five professional leagues in this country joining together for this bill. I've heard major concerns from a number of newspapers in this country about competition they're receiving today from Canada Post, which is offering massive free postage services. In fact, I have one of their ads here, which says that the first 6,000 pieces of postage are 100% free. If the government is genuine about wanting to ensure that newspapers and journals can succeed in this country, why are you allowing Canada Post to use its monopoly power to actually threaten local newspapers in this country? hon. steven guilbeault (minister of canadian heritage): Thank you, Madame Chair, and I thank the member opposite for his question. As you well know, a healthy news and media sector in Canada is a priority for our government, which is why we have put in place a number of measures before COVID-19 and during COVID-19, and we will continue to be there for them after this crisis has gone by. carol hughes): Before we go on, we will be taking a break to do a bit of a changeover. Blair stated yesterday here in the House that the AR-15 has been used in mass killings in Canada on many occasions. Blair, please provide just one specific instance in which an AR-15 was used in a mass killing in Canada. I think this is an excellent opportunity to point out to the member opposite how important it is to actually listen to what was said. If you go back and review that tape, and I would invite you to do so, you'll see that I said the AR-15 and other weapons like themreferring of course to military-style assault weaponshave been used in mass killings, and I actually cited a number of examples. Madam Chair, I think it would be very useful if the member's questions were based on facts. Blair that I actually have watched the video a couple of times, and he specifically states that the AR-15 was used in mass killings in Canada, yet he has yet to provide one. Out of the recently banned firearms on May 1, how many have been or are still currently in use by the Canadian Armed Forces? hon. bill blair: That's an excellent question, Madam Chair, because it's very important to provide Canadians with clarity. I asked him a question on whether any of them is being or ever has been used in the Canadian Armed Forces. Are any of the recently banned firearms still in use, or have they ever been in use, in any military in the world? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, I think it's important to also recognize that the basic origin, the provenance of the weapons that we have prohibited, was in their original design. As I've said previously, they were designed for soldiers to use in combat to kill other soldiers. alex ruff: As someone who has used many military-style firearms and who is actually involved in helping define what we purchase in the military, I would use none of the ones that are currently prohibited. Can he please confirm whether Veterans Affairs has a plan to address the claims backlog, yes or no? hon. lawrence macaulay (minister of veterans affairs): Madam Chair, I appreciate my honourable colleague's question, and yes, we've indicated that it's a major priority. That's why I'm so pleased that the supplementary estimates contained just under $90 million to address hiring more staff, improving the process and making sure that we attack the backlog in an appropriate manner. lawrence macaulay: Well, Madam Chair, I can assure you that it's in the supplementary estimates, and of course, this money is the acting chair (mrs. lawrence macaulay: Madam Chair, I can tell my honourable colleague that the money is in the supplementary estimates, and with the money we're able to attack this problem in an appropriate manner, and that's what is important for our veterans. alex ruff: The deputy minister committed on March 10 that a written plan would be provided to the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs within a month and made public. lawrence macaulay: Madame Chair, I'm sure my honourable colleague wants an appropriate plan and he would be fully aware this just under $90 million would make a big difference in the plan to attack the backlog. Therefore, my question is, if the deputy minister in the department provided him with an appropriate plan or a written plan, why is he questioning how appropriate that plan is? I have complete confidence in the deputy minister's ability to produce a written plan. lawrence macaulay: I can assure my honourable colleague that with the appropriate funding, we will address the backlog in Veterans Affairs. carol hughes): We will go now to the honourable member for Parry SoundMuskoka, Mr. Three weeks ago, I asked this government if the finance minister would meet with the beleaguered summer camp sector. Summer camps, which are a social and economic mainstay in Parry SoundMuskoka and all of northern Ontario, have been crippled by the global pandemic. Aside from a brief follow-up conversation over the phone with the junior minister, there has still been no action from this government. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, I recognize the honourable member's important question and his focus on summer camps. We will continue to engage with them, as we have, to ensure and find ways in which we can get their feedback and find ways in which we can support them. That work is ongoing, and I assure the honourable member that our focus is on the kids and on ensuring that they have access to summer camps for this year. The summer camps association has given lots of feedback and my office has given lots of feedback, so I don't see what's confusing about this. However, I've become accustomed to not really getting answers to questions, so I will go to the next one. The Ontario government's regional reopening plan permits cruise boats to resume on Georgian Bay, yet the federal government is refusing to allow these vessels to operate until July 1. Therefore, small businesses such as the Island Queen cruiser in Parry Sound, which has only a very few precious weeks to operate in the first place, is losing yet another two weeks because of federal inaction. Will the Minister of Transport take a regional approach himself by lifting the federal ban on Georgian Bay, just like the Province of Ontario has done? the acting chair (mrs. There have been a number of very important discussions with the provinces, in particular with the Province of Ontario, around provisions regarding pleasure craft. We're working very closely with our provincial counterparts to address this issue, but we want to ensure that it will be done safely. scott aitchison: Madam Chair, I actually gave the minister a heads-up that I would be asking that question. He sent me an email today saying he was not going to be able to be in the House, and it's great of him to do that. He said that whoever was going to fill in for him would have an answer, but again, that was not really an answer. The next issue I would like to bring this government's attention to is the deplorable state of rural Internet service in Parry SoundMuskoka. Quite simply, there are too many gaps in service, and what is available is generally way too expensive. We have families trying to work and teach their kids from home on unreliable and outrageously expensive Internet service, and we have too many small businesses that either cannot access or afford reliable Internet services. Today Greg Rickford, the Ontario energy minister, and Laurie Scott, Ontario Minister of Infrastructure, announced $2.3 million for seven northern Ontario broadband projects. Minister, will when your government get serious and become a reliable partner for the Government of Ontario and the private sector to deliver this crucial modern-day infrastructure to rural Canadians? the acting chair (mrs. carol hughes): I remind the member that he needs to address the questions and comments to the chair. maryam monsef (minister for women and gender equality and rural economic development): Madam Chair, in the best of times, life without access to high-speed Internet is hard. Our government's unprecedented investments are already connecting a million more Canadian households to this essential service, but until we achieve universal access our work is not done. We will work with our partners, including provinces across the country, to connect every Canadian household to high-quality Internet access that is affordable and reliable. I'm wondering, then, Madam Chair, since the Province of Ontario has used the Northern Ontario Heritage Corporation Fund to make this announcement, what about using FedNor to make the same kind of announcement, and partner with the province? the acting chair (mrs. mlanie joly: Obviously we believe in the importance of northern Ontario; that's why we nearly doubled the budget of FedNor. We will continue to invest in businesses and people all around Parry Sound, Muskoka and northern Ontario. If my colleague has specific projects in mind, please come and see me and let's have a conversation. carol hughes): The honourable member for Montmagny-L'Islet-KamouraskaRivire-du-Loup, Mr.Gnreux, has the floor. bernard gnreux (montmagnyl'isletkamouraskarivire-du-loup, cpc): Thank you, MadamChair. During this pandemic, we are realizing the extent to which reliable high-speed Internet service is needed for Canada's economy. There are still places where telework is not possible today because of the lack of adequate coverage. Benot Pilotto, who is the mayor of Saint-Onsime-d'Ixworth, in my riding, wrote to me a few days ago. That is why I am asking you what concrete results the government plans to achieve for our rural areas by the end of the year. maryam monsef: At the best of times, life without high-speed Internet access is difficult. bernard gnreux: MadamChair, I am simply asking the minister to tell me when the mayor of Saint-Onsime-d'Ixworth will be able to tell his residents when the Internet will be available in his municipality. What does the government plan to do so that rural municipalities across Canada can have access to the Internet as soon as possible? What is its plan? hon. maryam monsef: We are working with partners across the country to ensure that every Canadian household is connected to a high-quality, accessible and affordable high-speed Internet service. Madam Chair, I assure my colleagues that we share the same goal, and we will work with all our partners across the country to ensure every Canadian household has access the acting chair (mrs. According to the government's plan, when will rural Canadian businesses and households be connected? the acting chair (mrs. maryam monsef: Madam Chair, those plans are under way, and we will have more to share in the coming days. bernard gnreux: It seems that the Minister of Rural Economic Development plans to announce a new plan this week. Can she tell us how this program will differ from the Connect to Innovate program, which is already in place? Can the minister tell us whether her program will solve the problem of the 25square kilometre hexagonal zones, which unfortunately make many projects ineligible for the CRTC's broadband fund? hon. maryam monsef: Madam Chair, I'm pleased to share with my colleague that the model he's referring to, the hexagon model, is no more. bernard gnreux: MadamChair, this year, the Canada summer jobs program is a real fiasco. On May13, 100jobs were announced in my riding; on May20, 16jobs were announced; on May27, 13jobs were announced; on June3, 12jobs were announced; and on June10, only one job was announced. Can we have an announcement, once and for all? Let's stop the piecemeal announcements and finally confirm the remaining jobs today so that our organizations can have young people before the summer starts on the weekend. We recognize the important role that the Canada summer jobs program is playing in supporting employers and young workers in communities right across the country. Our government is working very hard to help employers adapt to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, and at the same time is supporting young Canadians as they begin to look for summer employment. We've introduced flexibilities into the program to ensure that more young workers have opportunities to get employed. The honourable member also has to understand that we're in the COVID-19 pandemic, and as such it will take some time for businesses to equip themselves to hire students. Addiction is a health and social issue, but criminalization creates stigma, so people hide their drug use and die alone. Access to a safe supply of drugs and safe injection sites saves lives and puts addicts in daily contact with people who can help them. Will this government end the war on drugs by decriminalizing them, providing a safe supply and reallocating resources from policing addicts to providing treatment for them? hon. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, I think it's really important we make sure that when we speak about people who use substances, we remove stigmatizing language like the word addict. We can stand together, as this government has, with people who use substances and their families to ensure a range of options for people who are struggling with addiction, who are using substances in a way that is harming their health and their communities. Madam Chair, we're working with communities to make sure there are more community-based approaches to treating the acting chair (mrs. paul manly: Madam Chair, the Geneva Convention considers both tear gas and pepper spray to be chemical weapons and prohibits their use in war, yet our police forces use these weapons on Canadian civilians. Will the government prohibit the use of these weapons and require police to use de-escalation techniques to keep legal protests peaceful? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, the right to peaceful protest in this country is a constitutionally protected right. At the same time, Madam Chair, we recognize that the use of even less than lethal force can have significant impacts on people's safety. It's prohibited for non-police use, and for the police it is and should be highly regulated. paul manly: Madam Chair, in 2012 the RCMP spent $14 million on 18 armoured personnel carriers. Will the government rein in the RCMP budget and end wasteful spending on militarizing our civilian police forces? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, it's a very important tradition that our Canadian police are not militarized. At the same time, we've seen a number of tragedies when police have responded to situations in which people were armed with weapons designed for soldiers to kill soldiers, and they've been used to kill police officers. The militarization of our society, so strongly promoted by some, is the direct consequence of the militarization of the police. As we remove these weapons from our society and prohibit them, we'll make it safer for everyone and we can then move away from such a model of policing. paul manly: Madam Chair, the government spent $4.5 billion to buy an old, leaky pipeline. How much is this spill going to cost Canadian taxpayers to clean up? How much contingency funding has been budgeted to repair the environmental destruction from spills? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I want to thank the honourable colleague for his question. He full well knows that the acquisition that we made with regard to the TMX initiative is a reflection of the fact that we want this initiative to move forward in a sustainable manner and in a manner that protects the environment. I'll continue to work with my colleagues to endeavour to make sure that we have the appropriate processes in place to protect the environment and at the same time create good-quality, middle-class jobs for Canadians. carol hughes): The honourable member for RosemontLa PetitePatrie, Mr.Boulerice, has the floor. alexandre boulerice (rosemontla petite-patrie, ndp): Thank you, MadamChair. In Montreal, the city and the police department have recognized this, and measures will be put in place. Although it spends $10million a day, we see no attempt to reform or change the RCMP. If the Prime Minister really wants to act, why is he delaying the action plan in response to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls? hon. bill blair: Let me assure this House and the member opposite that we're not dragging our feet. Indigenous people, black Canadians and other racialized people are far too often experiencing systemic racism and disparate outcomes through the criminal justice system. It's incumbent upon all of us who work within the criminal justice system to take the steps and actions necessary to produce more equitable outcomes. All police services, including the RCMP, must be committed to ensuring that the people they're sworn to serve and protect are always treated with dignity and respect. alexandre boulerice: MadamChair, why are the Liberals taking indigenous children to court to challenge the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling in their favour? hon. marc miller (minister of indigenous services): Madam Chair, as the honourable member knows full well, a number of cases are pending, and we are currently negotiating with the parties. We are making progress, and I would be delighted to tell the member and the House about it in response to a later question. alexandre boulerice: We've been asking questions about it for months, and as I see it, we should keep doing so. The Prime Minister's new pipeline, which taxpayers were forced to buy with their hard-earned money, has leaked. Some 190,000litres of oil spilled, and we can't even make the company pay for it because the Liberals bought the pipeline. Trans-Mountain, KeystoneXL and the resumption of gas exploration and development off the coast of Newfoundland and Labradorare these the projects the Liberals had in mind for their green recovery? hon. Our priority was to protect the health and safety of Canadians throughout the pandemic, especially when it comes to the environment. That's why environmental and climate change laws aimed at protecting the environment, human health and conservation will remain in force. Unions, associations, artists and creators have all taken part in public demonstrations recently to condemn the lack of a specific plan for the living arts, performing arts and festival sector. alexandre boulerice: Well, that wasn't at all what the artists and creators who were out demonstrating in the streets a few days ago thought. The CERB extension announced by the government only brings us to September, but the cultural community is expecting the worst in the fall. steven guilbeault: I'm not so sure those who were protesting last week had issues with our government, but we'd certainly be happy to speak with them. As for a long-term plan, we are currently consulting arts and culture stakeholders to contemplate together how the government can help the sector in response to the ongoing crisis. We are working on finding solutions, but until we have long-term solutions, we have seen to it that our artists and organizations have access to funding until September. carol hughes): The honourable member for BeauportLimoilou, Mrs.Vignola, has the floor. julie vignola (beauportlimoilou, bq): Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time with the member for Montcalm. According to the latest news, Seaspan Shipyards will be spending an additional $1.5billion to build two ships. anita anand (minister of public services and procurement): I'd like to thank the member for her question. Davie is certainly a strong and trusted partner that works very hard to help our government get results for Canadians. Building a new class of ships is highly complex, and it's not unusual for cost estimates to change throughout the procurement project. It's important to make sure additional funding is available for the joint support ships project to ensure the navy's vessels are delivered. In the beginning, eight years ago, the project was supposed to cost $2.6billion. Why haven't the ships been delivered yet? Why is Davie still not seen as a trusted partner? the acting chair (mrs. anita anand: Once again, I would point out that building a new class of ships is highly complex, and it's not unusual for the cost estimate to change for a procurement project as large as this one. carol hughes): It is now over to the honourable member for Montcalm, Mr.Thriault. luc thriault (montcalm, bq): Madam Chair, in Quebec, 12,000people have begun their training to work in residential and long-term care centres. The dedication of the members of the armed forces is paramount, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks. What does the army have to do right now that is more important than helping our caregivers save lives? hon. pablo rodriguez: Madam Chair, I'm glad my fellow member recognizes the fundamental role the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces have played and continue to play in residential and long-term care centres and many other areas in support of our seniors. luc thriault: We are short 12,000people, so if the Red Cross wants to help us, all the better. I repeat my question: What does the army have to do 10days from now that is more important if it's not to help caregivers save lives? hon. The people at the Canadian Red Cross are well-trained paid workers who can perform the same work in partnership with the members of the armed forces, who can stay in Quebec as well. Right now, we are working with the Quebec government and discussing how we can keep the measure in place until September15. What does the army have to do that is more important than helping caregivers save the lives of those who built Quebec? the acting chair (mrs. carol hughes): The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons is asked to keep his answer brief. pablo rodriguez: Madam Chair, the Government of Canada is there and will continue to be there to help the people who built Quebec. Madam Chair, on May 14 I asked the Minister of Agriculture when the Liberal government would put aside its usual campaign rhetoric and recognize the very detrimental impact the carbon tax is having on farmers across this country. Minister Bibeau proudly noted that according to their data, the average cost of the carbon tax per farm across Canada is $210 to $819. The fact is that the Liberal government's own Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated that at $25 per tonne, the cost for an 855-acre crop farm in Alberta is well over $6,000. When will this Liberal government come clean with Canadians and recognize the disastrous impact the carbon tax is having on Canada's critical agriculture and agri-food sector? hon. marie-claude bibeau (minister of agriculture and agri-food): Madam Chair, our pollution pricing policy is designed to grow a clean economy. Farm fuels and fuels from cardlock facilities are exempt, and there is a partial rebate for propane and natural gas used in commercial greenhouses. We will do a review of our pollution pricing system in 2020, focused on competitiveness issues in trade-exposed industries such as agriculture. It is also important to remember that this is about tackling climate change and that 100% of the revenues stay in the province. earl dreeshen: Madam Chair, Minister Bibeau keeps talking about wanting to protect Canadians' environment. Well, the truth is that Canada's farmers, ranchers and processors have for years demonstrated their ability to deliver meaningful reductions in emissions and to safeguard the environment through the adoption of new technologies, education and innovative management practices, but the government ignores these efforts. Will the minister at the very least admit to Canadians that Canadian farmers are unable to pass on the cost of the carbon tax to consumers and instead have to absorb those extra costs out of their own pockets? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Madam Chair, allow me to explain again our government's position on pollution pricing. Madam Chair, Minister Bibeau has repeatedly asked stakeholders to send her data about the impacts of the carbon tax on farmers, so this is exactly what they have been doing. The Atlantic Grains Council, the Grain Farmers of Ontario, Producteurs de grains du Qubec and the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association issued a joint statement at the beginning of this year in which they estimated that the cumulative indirect inflation of carbon tax on farm costs will be $14.50 an acre this year, with that cost escalating by more than double by 2022 to almost $30 an acre. Why does the Liberal government continue to ignore the facts presented to it and continue to misrepresent the truth to Canadians? hon. marie-claude bibeau: Madame Chair, I can assure you that we have paid close attention to all the information that has been provided to us and that our calculation was also based on this information provided by provinces and different stakeholders. Marie-Claude Bibeau:as well as the 2019 agricultural tax data to estimate the average cost of pollution pricing associated with grain drying at up to 0.4% of overall operating costs. Dreeshen, I am watching the time, and the minister is allowed to answer for the same amount of time that you used to ask the question<doc-sep>I've received apologies for absence from Siân Gwenllian, and I'm very pleased to welcome Helen Mary Jones, who is substituting for Siân today. Can I ask whether Members want to declare any interests, please? Can I just, then, place on record that I have got a son who was about to do A-levels, so is affected by the exam decision? We'll move on, then, to our substantive item today, which is an evidence session with the Welsh Government around the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on education in Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Minister for Education; Steve Davies, who is director of the education directorate; Huw Morris, who is the group director, skills, higher education and lifelong learning; and Rob Orford, who is the chief scientific adviser for health. We know that this is a really difficult and pressurised time for everyone, and we appreciate your attendance. As you know, it's not usually my practice to do that, but I think it is important today. COVID-19 coronavirus is one of the most significant issues that the Welsh Government and the people of Wales have dealt with in recent times. But I would like to assure you that our aim, and my aim, and my main concern as the education Minister is to protect all staff and pupils in our schools and other educational settings. Public health is clearly the priority here, but that does not change our belief that no child should miss out on any education, unless absolutely necessary. So, the decision to close all schools from tomorrow for statutory education provision was not taken lightly, but I believe it was necessary, given the advice and recommendations that we had received from a public health perspective and the situation that was developing on the ground. They will help support those most in need, including people involved in the immediate response to the coronavirus outbreak, and I'm working with my colleagues in the Cabinet, with Government officials and our partners in local government to develop and finalise these plans. The key areas that we're looking at are supporting and safeguarding the vulnerable and ensuring continuity of learning. I can confirm that all maintained schools in Wales already have access to a range of digital tools that can support distance learning through the world-class Hwb digital learning platform, including virtual classrooms and video-conferencing facilities. A guide on what tools are available and how schools can use them has been developed and is being promoted widely. Yesterday, I announced that, whilst there are no easy choices, we have agreed that the best way forward is not to proceed with the summer exam series. Learners due to sit these exams will be awarded a fair grade to recognise their work, drawing on a range of information that is available, and I will announce further details shortly, but I felt it necessary to give early certainty to students and to staff. I would like to put on record my thanks to everyone working in education settings for the hard work that they have put in over the last few months in dealing with the virus and ensuring that pupils have been able to continue to learn. We need to continue to do this work together, as we face the continuing challenges posed by the coronavirus. We'll go to questions from Members now, and I've got some questions from Dawn Bowden. Can I thank you, Kirsty, for your statement and the really difficult decisions that you've been having to make? You've already indicated in your statement this morning that these decisions are not taken lightly, and we understand that that is the case across Government. You've outlined a little bit further there in your statement to us this morning about the new purpose. I take from what you're saying that you haven't really developed that yet in terms of exactly what that is going to look like. Is there anything else you can tell us about that at the moment and how you might staff the schools in those particular areas? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Dawn. So, you're absolutely right, our priority now is to operationalise, with colleagues in local government and schools, a practical response. And I have to say, we're working to timescales that I would have hoped to have avoided, but given the fact that we're having to make these decisions quite quickly, I hope that you will understand that perhaps where we start on Monday might change when we have more time and more opportunities to develop programmes going forward. Steve will be able to give you more details of the practical work that has already been going on, but our expectation will be that schools will be playing an important part in providing safe and secure places for children of those on the front-line response to dealing with the coronavirus to attend, and work is already under way with local authorities and individual schools on what that will look like for the emergency situation on Monday. Our other priority is indeed free school meals, and, again, where we eventually end up might be a different place to where we are on Monday. Again, we're responding to the emergency situation that there will be families that were expecting a free school meal on Monday, and, again, individual schools and local authorities are developing those plans at pace to be able to provide an emergency response as we work out a longer term plan to deal with the situation. The same thing also goes for additional learning needs, and attending to the needs of that particular group of learners. I had the opportunity to meet with the First Minister and Andrew Morgan, the leader of the Welsh Local Government Association, yesterday to talk about what local government could do, and what they were already doing. Those plans in some places are already quite developed, and are now working at pace, but I hope you will understand that where we start on Monday is the emergency response, and that work will develop as we go forward. But, Steve, perhaps you could—? Because Steve was the one making all those phone calls and doing the practical operational stuff, rather than me. steve davies: In short, the new purpose is to meet the needs of particular groups of children and young people. In some cases, some of the response to supporting free school meals, in the short term in particular, we may use the schools as part of that, and I'm certain that will happen in some cases. Now, there is still work to be done on identifying exactly the categories of key workers, but I think it's really encouraging that in my discussions yesterday—I spoke with all 22 directors of education, and the examples we're picking up in their work with schools is they're already ahead of the curve in working with schools. They're vulnerable sometimes in terms of education other than at school, vulnerable in terms of mental health, and for those children, as well as having an experience that we want to be planned, some have compared it to a snow day, particularly on Monday, when you're putting something together in the short term, but it will not be a formal curriculum that those children would normally go through. So, the range of activities—some will be focused on educational activities, some will be cultural, some will be sporting, and that plan will be developed on the basis of the age range of children, which in some cases may go from extremely young children up to those at the age of 16 in our all-through schools, but there will be a planned set of activities to cater for those children. What we are doing currently—I have staff back at Cathays Park who are in touch and working with directors of education to ensure that schools over the next two days will have been able to identify, at least at the earlier stage, in terms of health workers, the type and numbers of people. There are already schools who have informed us, and local authorities, of their plans for these activities to be starting next week, which is quite amazing, actually, given where we are. But we are expecting, and we're writing to schools today, that during the course of next week, headteachers to be in schools, and with their staff, taking into consideration the health guidance as to which staff should or should not be in, and in that period from next Monday through the two-week period, to Easter, we expect staff to be both planning for delivery post Easter, but also, as I said, building on and reflecting the good practice that's already in place for schools that have engaged in activities, and I'm sure a number of them will be inviting and enabling those children to come in on Monday. So, Monday will be a challenge for some, and not all will be delivering it, but we will be working so that we can get as much as possible delivered for those groups over the next two weeks, and particularly to have resilient programmes post Easter for the groups of children in those three categories that I said. Can I just clarify one thing? One of the identified vulnerable groups would clearly be children on the at-risk register. kirsty williams am: In our discussions, we have asked local government to be working with the social services departments and individual schools to identify those children who may be in that situation. We know that, for some children, being at school is part of their safeguarding arrangements, and obviously we will need to be able to respond to those needs. steve davies: I wrote specifically yesterday to all directors of education to be assured that, for those children, the register is up to date and the plans are in place. I'm working with Albert Heaney my colleague, the director for social services, who is meeting with the 22 directors of social services today to look to ensure that we are joined up in ensuring none of these children fall through the gap. hefin david am: A very quick and simple question: how are you going to communicate this to parents? There's a bigger picture and it's changing all the time, as you said. The most helpful thing I've seen is that Public Health Wales have a single website with information regarding the wider issue of the virus. How will this then be cascaded to schools, because there's obviously a time lag? So, have you considered how this is going to be communicated directly to parents? kirsty williams am: We're using all of our platforms of communication to get these messages across. So, we're using the more informal methods of communication, but are relying on a systematic approach via individual directors and through to individual schools. We're looking, as quickly as we can, to have a frequently asked education questions page that we can update. It is impossible for the communications team here to be able to respond individually to every single person that is sending Facebook messages and sending tweets, so the best way we can do that is to collate the types of questions people are asking and then to be able to have a frequently updated question and answer page to try to respond to that. With regard to parents, for instance, we're aware of schools that have already sent a questionnaire out last night to parents saying, 'Do you consider yourself to be a key worker? Do you work in the NHS? Please let us know by tomorrow so we can put arrangements in place for your children.' So, schools are already taking the initiative and having those conversations with parents about what their needs will be. It won't be perfect by Monday, because we're working to such constrained timescales. We also have to think about systems that look at what might the epidemic do and have systems of resilience that may work next week, given the situation we find ourselves in with public health advice at the moment. Therefore, have we got a system that will be resilient in those circumstances? These are some of the challenges that we're having to grapple with. So, as I said, what happens on Monday might look very different to where we are if schools are still off in May. suzy davies am: Yes, just on this question of vulnerable children, I'm just wondering how much discretion teachers are going to have in including individual children who may not be obviously under social services' care or on a risk register or whatever. Teachers know their pupils and, very sensitively, they could include people who may not be obviously in need. kirsty williams am: We would absolutely respect the professional judgment of individual headteachers to be able to have those conversations with their directors. As you said, quite rightly, they are the individuals who know their children best and know which children, perhaps, will need this extra support. The second part of my question is: there were going to be Easter holidays anyway, weren't there? What was going to happen about free-school-meal children during that period? Has that gone out of the window now, the normal holiday provision for children? Because that's not there normally, is it, except in separate— kirsty williams am: We do find ourselves in a strange situation. My understanding is what we're trying to work to is that we would have ongoing provision and not to make some strange, 'You get this for two weeks, then you don't get it for two weeks, and then you're back in.' My understanding is, in England, that is what they're going to do. We're trying to create a system where it will be seamless and it will not necessarily matter that two of those weeks were formally holidays. It won't matter to those nurses and doctors who will need to be in work during those weeks. helen mary jones am: Just briefly, building on Suzy's question, one particular group of children and young people that I hope will be eligible to be included in the potentially vulnerable category is young carers. For some of them, they may not be able to come into school because the people they're caring for may have to be excluded because of their conditions. But I think that, for other young carers, coming to school is an absolute lifeline, because they're working at home. So, I don't know if it's appropriate for you to specifically mention those in discussions with local authorities, but it's a group of young people who, again, may not be vulnerable in other ways, but because of their caring responsibilities they may need school. And the other group—and this, I suppose, goes back to Suzy's point about teachers knowing their young people—is the children who may be living in situations where they're at risk of witnessing domestic abuse. Again, these may very well not be children who are in any formal contact with social services, but being at home may be really not a good place for them to be. So, again, I'd put in an appeal for that to be something that perhaps can be raised with schools. If a teacher is worried about what a child's circumstances are like at home, whether they can be, as you said, Kirsty, included as one of the—. They may not be formally identified, but if the teacher knows that they're at risk, or there is an instinct that they're at risk, they might be able to be included in children who are allowed to take advantage of this special provision you're making at this difficult time. We have to do that in the context of what is deliverable, and we also have to do that in the context of the public health advice that we are receiving as well. We know that the ability for school closures to make a contribution to that diminishes if we have significant children in school still. So, we will take these issues into consideration, but remembering this is part of an epidemic mitigation plan. This is a rapidly-evolving problem and the scale is something that we haven't seen in 100 years, and so we're having to evolve and iterate things as we go. We've all got a role to play, and schools certainly have a significant role to play in breaking those chains of transmission. We need to send a really clear message that you're all part of the solution, and the things that you do by distancing yourselves from your friends and your family are really important for us to get on top of this outbreak. helen mary jones am: I'm sure that that's true, but I'm sure that we wouldn't be wanting a child who's in a very pressured environment with perhaps a very difficult relationship between mum and dad—. janet finch-saunders am: Thank you, Chair, and good morning, Minister, and your team. Can I just put on record my thanks for all that you're having to endure at this moment? I think it's fair to say you have the support of Assembly Members and, indeed, our communities. Now, the question I have: if Cylch Meithrin have to close, where will they get money from to pay their staff? Because, currently, thankfully, there's support for businesses. lynne neagle am: Janet, we're not doing Cylch Meithrin at the moment; we are sticking with schools, as we discussed in advance. dawn bowden am: Can I just get some clarity, Steve, around what you were saying in terms of next week? Because I think the practical applications of this—and I understand that you don't know all of this yet, I understand that—the practical applications are what is coming to us, obviously, with constituents saying, 'Well, what's going to happen to that?' Just so that I can be clear, are you saying that, at this stage, every headteacher will be in school on Monday, as will all their staff? steve davies: Within the scope of the guidance in terms of their health, the expectation—and this will be conveyed in letters by the Minister today, to be made clear—is that they are closing for the majority of pupils, but our expectation within the guidance is that the headteacher with their staff will be coming in; for some to start the delivery of what we just described, but that will probably be small numbers, but more importantly to plan to ensure that, after the formal Easter period, which is school holidays, the schools are geared to cater for the range of pupils that we've been discussing. dawn bowden am: So, would you anticipate—again, I know this is all a bit 'if and when', and it depends on the changing nature of the advice, but from what you're saying, I think we can probably anticipate that, as we go forward, there will probably be fewer schools opening and operable—that we may be moving those children on to fewer sites. So, we already know that one of our local authorities already has identified a strategic pattern of schools that they will want to operate in this way. That local authority has already chosen those locations, and is already having communications with how they will then staff those centres. That, I expect, in the longer term, will be the nature of the provision that we will get to. The local authorities are best placed to understand what is the best, pragmatic use of the resources that they have available; and of course those resources, primarily, are human beings. So, we've talked a lot this morning in the context of teaching staff, teaching assistants, but we're also having discussions with local authorities, and I met with the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services this week, to look at deploying youth workers, to look to be deploying other staff that the local authority may employ, like sports development officers. Welsh Government will be talking with a range of our partners who perhaps their normal activities can't continue at the moment, but actually have personnel who want to add to this effort, who want to be able to be part of a provision going forward in the longer term, to be able to provide a great place for children to be. Let's think about it, in these worst of times, we're asking parents to leave their children so that they can go and do essential work, and some of that essential work is putting themselves at risk, potentially. And we want to give those parents confidence that, when they leave their child with us, that child will receive something really worthwhile, and they can direct all of their attention to doing their job. Janet, have you got a supplementary on schools now, not on early years settings? janet finch-saunders am: I lost the signal before, so it's a little bit confusing at this end, so bear with me. Just in terms of the closure of schools, I have been asked by teachers what does new purpose—you may have covered it, but bear in mind [Inaudible.]—mean in practice. And also, they're already asking what will next—? I know you said earlier that next week could look and probably will look significantly different than this week, but what can they expect to be happening next week in terms of this new purpose work? lynne neagle am: We've covered that, Janet. kirsty williams am: First of all, Janet, I just want to say thank you very much for your kind comments. lynne neagle am: I think you're having trouble hearing us, aren't you, so I think—? janet finch-saunders am: No, I heard that loud and clear. lynne neagle am: But I think you missed the earlier comments, when we went into some detail on the new purpose of schools. dawn bowden am: Just in relation to special schools and how they will fit into this new purpose arrangement. We know, again, that some of these children are our most vulnerable and they are some of our most pressurised families. We'll be having discussions about what arrangements can be made for those children within their own usual settings. Can I give a shout out to the work of Rhondda Cynon Taf in this regard, who are already doing some excellent work with regard to how they can keep in touch with their children who usually would attend their special schools. steve davies: I think special schools have already been hit by this challenge, because a significant proportion of their children, because of their conditions, have not been coming to school, they've been isolated. But the principle we've used there is, actually, even if it's a minority of children who go to those schools and are vulnerable, they deserve and need that support through the school. But similarly, even in special schools, there will be children whose parents will be key workers, so we would expect them to apply that same principle. Just quickly in response to the earlier question, while we may bring some groups of children into separate schools, we’ll have to continue with the principle of keeping social distance and any provision for a child in a special school in a different setting would be unlikely, given the nature of the special school, so we would look to cater for that within the original school. It’s likely, because I know it has already happened, that some schools might actually close before Monday. Are you quite happy that headteachers still have the discretion to do that, if they feel that’s the right thing to do? kirsty williams am: In this situation, the discretion of the head still remains. As I said, we will be communicating with all schools today about our expectations, if at all possible, to have schools open for staff to do some of this planning and to be able to respond to these priority needs that we've just talked about. steve davies: The rationale of headteachers for closing schools up to now has been that they can't cope with the safety of the children. I think, moving forward, it's unlikely that that would be a rationale that headteachers would want to use for not engaging and planning for the future. dawn bowden am: We're only talking about one more day, now, anyway, aren't we? So, just in terms of confirmed cases in schools, is your view at this stage that, if there is a confirmed case in a school, once that school has been deep-cleaned, it can reopen again? kirsty williams am: If we had a confirmed case in a school, then all the usual mechanisms arranged by Public Health Wales would kick in at that point. I know that kind of crosses over into somebody else's portfolio as well, but I think we know that. Certainly what I've seen, and I'm sure this is true elsewhere as well, we've seen nurseries closing down because the parents are actually taking the children out of those nurseries. I've got one in particular, there are kids from the ages of 6 to 12 years in there, and the parents are taking them out. They've got 30 staff there, catering for 200 children and no children to care for and the organisation, at this stage, is unable to claim on their insurance for the ongoing payment of those staff wages. Is there any advice that we can give to people in that situation at this stage? kirsty williams am: Sure. As you say, many of these settings are businesses—people's businesses and they play a hugely important role and it's a very worrying time for them. We have said that we will continue to pay for childcare, delivered under the childcare offer even when a child is unable, or a parent is unwilling, to take up that place. So, if that setting is receiving a childcare payment from the Welsh Government as part of our childcare offer, that will be paid, regardless of whether that child attends or not. And I know that we're also working with local authorities to ensure a similar position on Flying Start childcare and early education. It's also important that childcare settings will be able to apply for the various packages of support that are being made available by my colleague, Ken Skates. hefin david am: Yes, I'd just like to turn that around from the parents' point of view. With schools closing, there are a lot of parents then losing 10 hours of free childcare, but from a settings point of view, they'll continue to be able to receive, for the time being, the nursery care. kirsty williams am: Yes, so the decision that has been taken by my colleague, Julie Morgan, is that settings should stay open at the moment unless public health changes. Again, the issue is that we know that that childcare is vital to many families, especially—and we're particularly concerned about those individuals who are trying to help us overcome and solve these problems. If you have any specific questions about that, we'll be happy to take them back to Julie Morgan. janet finch-saunders am: Is this the Cylch question? lynne neagle am: Yes, please. Yes, just basically, Cylch Meithrin, there are concerns—[Interruption.] lynne neagle am: We've lost Janet. kirsty williams am: I think if the issue is about funding for Cylch Meithrin, these are not normal circumstances. As a Welsh Government, we will take every step to provide continuity of funding, if at all possible. We will overcome this, and when we overcome this situation we find ourselves in, we will need those childcare settings, we will need those private businesses and we will need our Cylch Meithrin to be there to respond and to be able to go on doing the job that they usually do for us. And if there is any way that we can, as a Government, ensure that that happens by carrying on funding things, even if they are not able to run, all usual—[Inaudible.]— around service-level agreements are off. [Laughter.] But, you know, we will not undermine businesses and voluntary provision like Cylch by withdrawing Welsh Government funding. lynne neagle am: If we can move on to talk about exams, obviously you made the announcement yesterday. I completely understand that everything is a very fast-moving situation, but, as you know, there are a lot of questions that people have about young people who've put a lot of work in. Are you able to tell us any more today? In particular, have you got any idea about timescales now for setting out what the approach will be to handling the lack of summer exams? kirsty williams am: Yes, it is a devastating decision to have to have been taken, but I have done so on the very, very clear and unambiguous advice from Qualifications Wales. What was most important to them was that I made an early decision and I did not equivocate on what would happen for the exams. I was able to make an informal decision at that meeting, and then, of course, there is a formal process that we have to go through. That, now, allows Qualifications Wales and the exam board to operationalise that decision, and they will be communicating with schools as quickly as possible about what schools will need to do to ensure that the systems that they will now put in place can work. We are trying, as far as we can, as I understand it, to be able to mirror as closely as possible the usual results day, for instance. It might not be possible, because, of course, we're dealing with a situation that requires human beings to be involved in it, and those human beings could find themselves unwell. So, our best attempts will be to maintain the normal rhythm of an exams day in August, but that has to be caveated by the fact that we're dealing with difficult circumstances. But, the WJEC and Qualifications Wales will be making urgent communications to exam centres to explain what will need to happen next. janet finch-saunders am: Yes, I think I raised it yesterday, Kirsty, but you were receiving loads of questions. I'd just ask for some further clarification about coursework, because only 30 per cent of that is done. Years 11 and 13, typically, in my case they're what's been raised with me—do you have any advice for them? kirsty williams am: Okay, so, all exams are cancelled, but year 11 and year 13 will be given a grade—I think that's a distinction that people need to be aware of. That is because those years and those grades are gateway qualifications, and they are points of movement in the education system. So, it's really important for those students that they are not disadvantaged in any way by not being able to receive a grade that helps them to make a decision as a qualifying step into what they will do next, whether that be university, whether that be a degree apprenticeship or whether that be going into sixth form, into a college, into an apprenticeship or into some work-based learning opportunities. That's why we have to focus on those children, because for them, it is absolutely critical that we do. We are at an advantage in Wales, can I say? Because of the nature of our examination system, those students already have a lot of externally assessed work that we can use as a basis to move forward on. Our year 11s, if they're doing triple science, they've already done 40 per cent of their paper, so we're very fortunate. Because of the structures that we have got in our qualification system, there is already lots and lots of externally-verified work that we can use, alongside, potentially, teacher evaluation of students as well. What will also be important is that these children have confidence in those qualifications, and so we will be looking at a modulated arrangement within Wales, and I know that Qualifications Wales are discussing with their counterparts across the UK a modulated system across the UK. So, actually, we can make sure that our standards are maintained by actually having that modulation across the UK. So, we know that those children never have to worry about the rigour that has gone into determining that grade. You'll know that the National Union of Students has suggested that black and minority ethnic children and children from the working class, on the whole, don't do as well, in terms of their assessment by their own teachers. We also know, of course, that boys tend to do better in exams, and girls tend to do better at coursework, for whatever reason that is. So, just to ask you at this early stage to build in those considerations around potential unconscious bias into that overall system that you're talking about. And, of course, you are right to say that, because we have got some elements of external moderation here, those factors may be less for us in Wales than they might for colleagues in England. kirsty williams am: Yes, I think we are starting at a different base, thank goodness. As I said, students will have done unit 1 papers last year if they're GCSE students. I have every confidence that they and the WJEC will come up with a very comprehensive way of establishing those grades, but I have to say, in some ways, I have to step back now, because you would not expect me, in normal circumstances, to dictate to the WJEC how much percentage goes for that, and how much percentage is allocated for that; that would not be appropriate for a Minister. My job is to make the decision on the examinations on the basis of having confidence that what can be put in place is fair and is equitable, and I have confidence that that will be the case. One is, obviously, pupils are being asked to work at home as well now, some of whom will be doing GCSE and A-level courses. So, there's just a question, generally, from me— because we're encouraging these kids to carry on working—how that will be accommodated by Qualifications Wales, I guess, in this modulation process. It may be that your at-home work will be of a higher standard or a lower standard than a teacher would be expecting. Secondly, you mentioned the AS-levels, of course, as being of value at the moment, but we've got people in Year 12 who now won't be doing their ASs. Is there any steer at this stage about what they will be expected to do? Will they be doing two sets of exams next year, for example? Or is AS just off the table? In which case, how are the A2s going to be calculated in due course? And then, finally from me, we do have some vocational qualifications that are up for examination as well—your BTECs, and I think it's the Association of Accounting Technicians, which is a lot of computer-based learning—which is due to be examined within three weeks. I appreciate that you may not have the answer just at the moment, but are they off as well is the question, I guess? kirsty williams am: With regard to AS-levels—no final decision has been made for exactly how those students will be treated. There are a range of options that could be used, but again, we will want to be thinking about student well-being, fairness and equity in that regard, and I will update Members as soon as I have received definitive advice from Qualifications Wales around that, and that hasn't happened yet. With regard to other types of qualifications, as you will be aware, the vast majority of BTECs is a modular, continually-assessed piece of work, and we would have every expectation that BTECs will be able to be awarded, but clearly, those conversations are with awarding bodies—they tend to be UK awarding bodies, rather then necessarily our WJEC exam board—and those conversations are ongoing. But I have every expectation that those qualifications will be awarded and, of course, because of their nature there's even more evidence of continued assessment. Huw, I don't know if there's anything else that you would like to add about those types of qualifications. I don't have a definitive answer for the ATT qualification, but we can look into that and come back to you. suzy davies am: Well, I've just had a constituent ask, so that would be very helpful. suzy davies am: —is that going to count towards the assessments, overall assessments? kirsty williams am: Well, potentially, as I said. What will be absolutely necessary is that Qualifications Wales and the WJEC will be able to give absolute clarity and simplicity around how those grades will be arrived at, because parents, teachers and students will want to know that, and my expectation is on them to be able to clearly communicate what elements will and will not be taken into consideration when awarding those grades. lynne neagle am: And, just before we move on, have the universities across the UK indicated that they are content with this approach going forward—content to accept students on this basis? kirsty williams am: Certainly. There have been discussions with universities and UCAS, of course, that this also has a bearing on. And the views of university and how university terms might be impacted is one of the ways and one of the reasons that we've factored in to making these decisions. Those discussions with universities are ongoing, aren't they, Huw? huw morris: Yes. So, we've been in regular conversation with Universities Wales and through them with Universities UK and we've received every indication that the approach that's been adopted here has been welcomed by the institutions. Those conversations will continue as we work through the practicalities of how the gradings that are awarded are going to feed through into university admissions decisions and enrolment. Well, we've got some questions now from Suzy on the potential closures of colleges and universities. I appreciate you've already indicated there are lots of ongoing conversations, but my understanding is whether colleges or universities close is pretty much still at their own discretion. We're going to be asking some questions on emergency legislation shortly, which may impact on the answer you can give today, but what sort of conversations are you having with FE and HE at the moment about how they decide? kirsty williams am: Well, you're absolutely right. As we often say in this committee, universities are autonomous institutions—a status that they guard jealously and we would never want to question. Universities have been making the decision to move as much of their learning online as they possibly can and we continue to have conversations with them. Colleges are in a similar position, looking to do as much as they can to be able to provide continuity of learning via distance learning methods, and the Bill, potentially, does give us more powers of intervention in both the FE and the HE sector. suzy davies am: I might ask you about that in a minute, because I don't even know what the Bill says yet. kirsty williams am: Huw, I don't know if there's anything you want to add. huw morris: No—just to confirm what's been said and also to add in that independent training providers, similarly autonomous, like colleges and universities, have been moving in the same direction. We've been very impressed with the maturity and forward-planning that's been adopted by all of those institutions and their representative bodies. We've got consistency in the approach and a common desire, and investment in moving towards online support for students. Certainly, colleges have indicated, as with schools, that, for the most vulnerable learners, they'll have something in place that might permit attendance on an individual basis. huw morris: That's my understanding, yes, and, again, we've been in regular conversation with them about that. My understanding is that they're going to spend the next week working through the detail of how that will work for the institutions. You indicated that any Welsh Government support's going to stay, whatever the circumstances are—in your portfolio. helen mary jones am: Just further to EMA, of course, at the moment, that has an attendance qualification, doesn't it? And you don't get your EMA if you don't turn up. Should we take from your last answer that that attendance qualification doesn't apply anymore? kirsty williams am: Yes. They can't turn up if the institution is not open, and that's not their fault. helen mary jones am: No, but that is something that's been a worry, so that's really encouraging to hear. Thinking about students in higher education, can you give an assurance that student maintenance payments will continue as normal? Is that the intention? kirsty williams am: Yes. And have you given any special ministerial instruction to Student Finance Wales on processing applications for support or changes of circumstances, or is that something that's kind of ongoing at the moment? kirsty williams am: Those conversations are ongoing with the Student Loans Company. Individual student circumstances could well change and our expectation would be that the Student Loans Company would respond to that. All I would say is, just to remind people: people who work for the Student Loans Company are no more able to resist this disease than anybody else. There will undoubtedly in some cases be really practical challenges to service delivery, simply because organisations could be losing staff because of illness or the need to self-isolate or because they are reacting to social-distancing messages from the Government. So, I think we just need to bear that in mind: that these organisations are doing their best, but, if they are badly affected by staff numbers being off because of the virus, then I hope people will give them due consideration. helen mary jones am: Yes, that makes sense, of course, because we've been told that universities won't be able to entirely close, because there will be students who can't go home— kirsty williams am: It is their home. What discussions have you been having with the sector to make sure that those students' basic needs are met, that there's still food, shelter, whatever they need? kirsty williams am: Well, obviously, universities have a duty of care to those students that find themselves in those circumstances, and every conversation that Huw's been having would suggest that universities are well aware of their need to do that. huw morris: We instituted a monitoring process very early on in the onset of the disease, not least because a number of institutions have campuses and activities in China and other parts of south-east Asia. And so, as the disease has progressed, we've seen lessons being learned from the support for students who are in isolation coming from there to the UK, and I am assured that the universities here in Wales have got processes in place that support those learners. And on this specifically—last question from me— have you considered whether students might need to be refunded some of their tuition fees, should the academic year not be completed? huw morris: So, as the institutions move more and more of their material and some of their assessment online, clearly, there are lessons that will need to be taken on board. There are established quality assurance and enhancement procedures in institutions to enable the tutors and other supporters to make sure that that material meets their needs. There are appeals mechanisms and feedback mechanisms through the students union and through course committees and other things within institutions to make sure that any concerns or incomplete work are addressed. Failing those institutional mechanisms, there is a UK-wide system through the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for students to take forward any concerns that they have. So, we're confident that that system will be robust and will make sure that the students are getting a course of learning that meets their needs. But thinking just a little bit more broadly about the mental health and well-being of staff and learners across a range of educational settings, or, indeed, young people who can't access educational settings, what considerations are you giving to how that mental health and well-being might be supported through what is an incredibly difficult time for everyone? kirsty williams am: Yes, that is correct. So, our expectation would be that during a prolonged period of closure—which I think, if we're honest, we have to acknowledge is what we're looking at—we would expect school staff—well-being staff, for instance in school—to be doing check-ins—phone check-ins, potentially, or FaceTime check-ins, with students, just to keep in touch with them as we go forward. We'll be looking to promote amongst young people a range of online facilities that are available—so, for instance, Meic website—so, looking to use a variety of platforms. I'm concerned, of course, that for some children their access to their counsellor is via their school. We know that, and we're just double checking the capacity of online counselling that already exists—online counselling tools that children already use because they don't want to go to the counsellor in the school and be seen in the school corridor going to the counsellor. They're already using those online methods and we expect to be able to continue, as far as possible, those kinds of mechanisms where children can have their mental health needs and their questions answered, and their worries. One of the reasons, again, that we wanted to keep schools going as long as possible—and teachers have been working so hard to do that—is because that routine of going into school and that normality is one that we've needed and wanted to maintain. Children will have worries about their own health; they'll have worries about the health of their parents and their grandparents; they will be consuming potentially media and news stories that have empty supermarket shelves. So, we need to understand, and I think we will also have to recognise, that this support will have to be ongoing once we're back to normal, and we will have to continue to look to support children in the longer term who will have lived through this experience. They are incredibly resilient, and they have been the champions of some of our public health messages. They are so much better and so much more compliant on the whole 'washing your hands' and things like that than even adults have been. So, they are incredibly resilient, but we also have to recognise that it can be a really worrying time for them. helen mary jones am: Can I just—? Just a supplementary to that—you've mentioned already, Kirsty, the importance of youth services, and, particularly thinking voluntarily youth services, you've given the commitment, when were talking about Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin earlier, that services that are part-funded by grants through the Welsh Government, for example, thinking of the national youth voluntary service—will those be able to be maintained even if settings have had to be shut as well? Obviously, local authorities will have to make their own decisions about whether youth settings are kept open, but, in terms of the direct support from Welsh Government, can organisations that receive it rely on that through this time? kirsty williams am: No formal decision has been made, but if people are in receipt of a Government grant from my department to run a service and that service can no longer run because of the public— helen mary jones am: Because it's not safe. kirsty williams am: —because it's not safe to do so, I do not foresee that we will be turning around and saying, 'We'll have our money back, thank you very much.' lynne neagle am: Okay, thank you. The normal rules of engagement have to change and, those organisations, we'll need them to be providing youth services for children when we are back to normal, and we wouldn't want to do anything that would undermine their ability to do that. When we're trying to maintain services for vulnerable children and for front-line staff children, they have a valuable role to play and I know that local government and the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services are already in discussion about how youth services—. Those traditional youth clubs, because of austerity, are not necessarily there anymore, so they are well used to being out and about and doing outreach work, and they will have an important part to play in the services that we talked about earlier. Hefin, briefly, and then we're going to take one final question from Suzy on emergency legislation. I'll declare an interest as a parent of a child with additional learning needs, although the question I'm about to ask doesn't reflect her interests. Additional learning needs pupils who are waiting outcomes of referrals—if they're currently waiting an outcome of a referral, will that process will be suspended or will it continue as normal? And, if it is suspended, will it pick up where it left off from this point? kirsty williams am: I think we have to recognise that the ability to deliver business as usual has been massively compromised. I'm sure people will try and continue to do their normal activities and their normal jobs, but that might not be possible. I don't want to give you any false assurance if, actually, the intelligence on the ground is that that simply will not be able to happen. But we don't— hefin david am: Can we have a clear line on that? kirsty williams am: We don't want to jeopardise anybody, but as I said, some of the normal services are simply not available as everybody turns their attention to trying to respond to the pandemic. Final question—because I know that the Minister's got a lot of things that she needs to get on with—from Suzy on emergency legislation. suzy davies am: I'm not going to ask you if you'll use any powers you get under the emergency legislation, but are you able to give us some indication of what they might be? kirsty williams am: Sure. For instance, the Bill will provide Welsh Ministers with powers to temporarily close schools or other educational institutions, childcare premises; powers to give temporary continuity direction—so, actually, the other way around, force things to be open—and to be able to direct resources. So, that includes, as I said, I could direct something to stay open if that institution was trying to close down. The powers also give flexibility to maybe be able to direct staff to other institutions that they would not normally work in, if that was part of our resilience needs. We'd also be looking at, for instance, relaxing requirements around ratios in childcare settings, or we might be wanting to do things around food. If there is a continuing role for schools in providing food, we might have to be a bit more flexible about what that might look like. So, those kinds of flexibilities—to be able to suspend things, direct things—that we would not normally have in normal circumstances. And just to finish this one off—you may not be able to answer this one, in all fairness—in those situations where it's the Government who says 'no' to various things, does that then help people in the situation of Dawn's nursery, and insurance claims suddenly become more likely? kirsty williams am: I'm not an expert on insurance, and I don't know if anybody here can help me. But what my understanding is, is that even where Government has given a direction that does not necessarily mean that you will be covered by your insurance. What we're finding in the private sector is that insurance companies are not paying out, because even when a Government has directed it, they do not regard this as a disruption to business. kirsty williams am: It's not my area of expertise, but from what I understand from discussions around the Cabinet table, this is particularly problematic. Let me give you an example about how we've been trying to overcome some of this—it feels like an awfully long time ago now— you'll be aware that we gave directions earlier around cancellation of school trips abroad. Trying to make sure that that direction came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, rather than the Department for Education was a real battle, because again there were fears that, unless that advice came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, insurance would not kick in, and that was a two-day discussion. kirsty williams am: So, these are the kinds of things that we're grappling with. But, as I said, thinking about it, that was only last week, but it feels like an aeon ago. suzy davies am: I'm not holding you to that, but it helps us manage the questions we get asked. kirsty williams am: Yes, but as I said, insurance is not my area of expertise. Can I thank you for attending this morning, and your officials? We do recognise what an incredibly challenging time this is, and we'd like to place on record our thanks to all of you for the work that you're doing to try and see us through this crisis. Item 3, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting

The government received forecasts indicating that Cardiff University, as an example, would have significant cash balances in the short term, but investing was restricted and not a long-term solution for financial stress. The biggest problem was the lack of income growth, but fortunately, the universities were not likely to suffer losses. The impact of university terms on admissions decisions and enrollment was considered in the decision-making process, and ongoing discussions with universities were taking place. The government's plan to reduce rent for businesses during the pandemic was not effective, as few people accepted the government's assistance. However, Mona Fortier promised to monitor and follow up with those affected and pay more attention to the CMHC support program. Dawn Bowden AM highlighted the investment in the twenty-first century schools program and emphasized the importance of ensuring that community sport infrastructure in new schools is accessible to the wider public. She also recommended making a recommendation to Dr. Frank Atherton regarding sports infrastructure.

Question: Summarize the key points discussed in the last meeting regarding the presentation by the Industrial Designer, including the industrial components, design, and quotation of the product. Article: project manager: So who has the fir do you ha Anna do you have your presentation ready ? marketing: I have a presentation , I'm just making this industrial designer: Yeah I think yeah the Matthew it is it's important that Matthew yeah is here project manager: Okay . Ah industrial designer: because it's really a a team project with a team project manager: there is Matthew . industrial designer: user interface: So project manager: So did you manage user interface: Yeah I sent you the slides , you didn't see them ? project manager: Oh yes I see him , good yes . Okay so this is just a presentation on the trends that we're gonna use to make the product stand out from the rest of the products out there at the moment . can I just put this on ? So we have to work out a way what we can do with our product to make it stand out and make it so people wanna buy it . We basically used some focus group surveys which I went through with you last time , the main results of that , and some research on the current design and fashion trends that are out there at the moment , industrial designer: marketing: and as part of this The important aspects that came out were things that we've already discussed really . Most people find remote controls boring at the moment , we need to have something that looks interesting , that looks exciting , that will stand out . That was twice as i important as the next item on here which is that it has to be technologically innovative has to have something else , apart from just the look of it . Third on the list , and again innovative was twice as important as this last aspect , it has to be easy to use . So they have to be able to be able to look at it and have some intuitive idea of how to use it . This is basically talking about just the the feel of it , so probably not the smell of it , but the bright colours , eye-catching , really bold designs , and a spongy feel . marketing: I had a talk to the design people about this , but having a remote that's tactile , that feels different , that would be really cool . industrial designer: So can you repeat and be more precise about what you just said ? project manager: Spongy feel ? industrial designer: about the feeling yeah yo marketing: Well user interface: You can marketing: ma make it not necessar sp spongy is the current thing . Spongy is the current texture , but basically there are no reports no remotes at the moment which are spongy or tactile at all , so if we make it like maybe furry or soft or something , that'll be something that sets it apart , industrial designer: Okay . marketing: So as far as the design goes , the very most important aspect was the design , to the customers . So going with the fruit and vegetable idea , we've got the bright colours , so makes it stand out , the oranges and the the bright yellows and the florescent colours , part of the fruit and vegetables . Going back to the idea of taking inspiration from mobile phones , they've all got those a lot of them have the changeable covers , so they can choose what colour the outside is . marketing: So if it's part of the the changeable covers then may maybe they can choose a different texture , a spongy one or a soft one or something like that . So they can choose it li as they want to to maybe to fit in with their decor in their living room , or just what they like , their sports team or whatever . marketing: and yeah , still taking the inspiration from the mobile phone design so functionality , the way the mobile phones work , the way the keypad looks . People put a lot of thought into that so we can leverage off that , and we can start using some of their ideas . we talked about having a way of finding a remote control if it's been lost , that's one thing we could look at . There are other aspects like L_C_D_ screens and speech recognition which weren't I don't think , in my personal opinion , gonna be worth the extra expense and the extra effort that will go into them . I had no real specific ideas for this , maybe we just , the basic idea of having your core functions big and at the top maybe , by themselves , project manager: . Yes well marketing: and then project manager: maybe Matthew can can give some more information on the marketing: yeah user interface: Yeah . marketing: and then th th the finer details of buttons you don't use as much either hidden away or completely separate . marketing: So does anyone have any comments or ideas on that ? I think you project manager: Maybe we yes well we maybe can decide later on the l the the look and feel of I've it was a good idea maybe to to industrial designer: To let the people choose , you mean ? project manager: Yes the the the there are changeable covers , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: but on the other hand I I don't know whether my superiors would be so glad with it because you have to introduce a complete new l line of of supplies marketing: . project manager: it would be very complicated organisational industrial designer: marketing: Well we're selling so many units of this . This is gonna be a mass marketed product , we can afford to have two or three different designs at least . industrial designer: Sure that fits the project manager: Yes and of course it will be a we we get a if it works we can get after-sales marketing: . project manager: That's a very good idea And then maybe we can go a th Matthew's presentation because user interface: Yeah marketing: user interface: s project manager: the user interface: then we could discuss later like we can put all ideas together . project manager: because you ma might have some some information on the the easy to use , industrial designer: Yeah yeah I agree . user interface: so Okay so m so then the the idea of having a remote is generally you have different keys and different structures , different forms , and they could be like buttons and they could be of a varying sizes if you want to to basically emphasize a particular key more than the other , and maybe like you can have different colours for example having the r red for the on off switching on and off the button . user interface: So what I have found was that currently the they are mostly that the T_V_ , V_C_R_ , music system operated ones actually , and they are very specific to each other , but there are some common keys for example if you want to follow the V_C_R_ and if you want to follow the g s some soundtrack on the w w see they have the common thing actually you can have marketing: . user interface: and There is also a speech recognition to store channel information , names , like You can basically if you have a multiple functionality , say T_V_ , V_C_R_ or something I say it to the T_V_ and the T_V_ , and you can programme the keys if you want to , certain keys are even the channel information . I like the idea though of having speech recognition for like the n the name of a channel like B_B_C_ , rather than having to remember the the number of it on the keypad . user interface: Yeah yeah so you you you can just because as more and more channels come then you have more and more problems to remember the v v exact channel numbers ex exactly , industrial designer: . user interface: even if you arrange it by however you arrange it , you still have the problem to remember exactly which channel you want to marketing: . industrial designer: So what functionalities do you suggest for that ? For facing this problem ? user interface: So it it it's like it limited one . In the present market I saw it that says something like they are looking for eighty word thing , eighty word , marketing: Basically you want you don't want to store all the channels in the remote control , marketing: . user interface: And basically it depends like the remote with L_C_D_ display for browsing because you have multiple functionalities for example you are watching a movie , and you are having a universal remote control and you want to you don't know really which functionality is now , so I am using the T_V_ so every time I use it , it could be like , for example I can use a simple toggle switch , and a display , so I press it so the display says , okay , I'm in T_V_ or D_V_D_ or whatever it is , instead of having three keys separately for four keys , marketing: And well there can be children friendly where you can programme your remote so that they they are not allowed to browse certain channels which you can block them , and you can operate them . user interface: I personally would look at things like having a u universal remote , is is a good idea , like instead of having unusual ones for all of them you can think of having , with multiple functionality possibly with speech recognition . user interface: I got a mail from the the coffee machine interface unit that they have integrated the s speech recognition into a into the coffee machine , industrial designer: marketing: b user interface: and so if you say hello coffee machine , it say hi Joe , or something like that , you know , and marketing: But a coffee machine , there's not too many words they'd be using with that it's a it's a small vocabulary . user interface: Yeah you you won't be using it , so it's a limited vocabulary thing , and very isolated word marketing: . user interface: and it's it is interesting , and basically storing the channel through voice or other ways of programming your keys , on the display for the browsing marketing: . user interface: which is again and maybe having something like a blinking thing , like it could indicate you're it it could indicate what is cal like the whether you you have enough battery in your in your remote , the blinking . user interface: At the same time , if it's a dark room , it can be used to locate the remote also marketing: user interface: or industrial designer: And you want okay for coming back to one point marketing: Two thirty five supposed to finish . industrial designer: y you want to let the user to programming the keys ? Some of them ? user interface: Yeah you can let them to do that . industrial designer: And isn't that too difficult for the we want w I don't know if we still want the R_C_ to be easy to use , marketing: . user interface: N no but the if you give it d depends on the easiness like the user how much effort he can put . user interface: Like for example I would like to store in certain way , so if you want to give the full freedom to the user marketing: . marketing: You can have it so it's easy they can pick it up and use it straight away without doing anythi without customizing it , industrial designer: A standard . project manager: maybe you can give a hand to us because I I'm not sure whether that that we can implement that for twelve Euro and fifty cents . project manager: I'm sorry to have Every time I have to come down on this price again marketing: . project manager: but it's it's it's the real We have to consider it . project manager: do we think these ideas an and my sp speech recognition , maybe it's possible for for twelve Euro but then then it will be at cost of other functionality we might implement like the the the the furry case of the marketing: . industrial designer: - yeah like I would say that for programming keys , you said , it could be easily done within the the package of twel twelve Euros , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: but for the A_S_R_ system , I'm not sure if it's feasible to have this user interface: We well we can still look at we can talk with the coffee unit industrial designer: We user interface: and you can check how much how much they industrial designer: Exactly yeah i if if it's a low vocabulary it's already implemented , user interface: yeah yeah marketing: . user interface: Maybe we can come we we can talk to them , and we can come with that , project manager: . user interface: And also well you can think of having since you have a you know something maybe if you added little bit of display , you might need the to che keep checking the battery , so you really need a some kind of indicator , marketing: . user interface: so it could be a blinking option of L_E_D_ project manager: . marketing: I like the idea too of being able to use the remote in the dark , project manager: . user interface: So marketing: so either having the buttons so you can feel the difference between them or if they if they light up or something . user interface: No actually i if i it is like you know it tells you , it can be for two purposes , marketing: . user interface: like if you have an L_C_D_ display and all those things it's not going to be the standard remote , marketing: . user interface: which is having which need just six six volt th sorry three volts of D_C_ . user interface: It may need more actually , so y you you may need to check your battery usage it and then you need that , some functionality to indicate the battery limit . user interface: And then if the battery limit is indicated , if it could be ind indicated through a blinking something industrial designer: It's true . user interface: and it can change the colour depending on your how much is the battery , well that is good enough to even locate even if you want to . user interface: Yeah so industrial designer: I don't know how if if I have time to talk about the project manager: yes I would user interface: You you have time some more ? Yep . So what I'm gonna present here is very yeah basic knowledge about the all the the components that are inside a a R_C_ a remote control , and how is it manufactured h what is the process , just to explain you . industrial designer: So the method is ther there is a a set of components in a in a remote control like , and what cost the the components in themself do not cost a lot but the the way to assemble everything costs obviously , and I will show you my preferences at the end . So there are two different types of Two different ways of using the the components for making a a remote control . industrial designer: the basic way is to use a an integrated circuit and some transistors with an that aims at communicating the message and to to send the message to the to the led that will transmit to the receiver . And yeah the other components and the circuit board buttons , infrared , led , etcetera , for the components . So you finding , just to say that the chip can detect when a key is pressed , and then it translate to the key , to a sequence , something like morse code , as you know , with a different sequence for each key , project manager: industrial designer: and that's , with the components we will use , we will have different messages , different sequences , and the chips sends that signal signal to the transistor that amplify to make it stronger . And so I think for our design we want some b programmable you know V_ V_L_S_I_ or F_P_G_A_ high technology , user interface: Yeah industrial designer: and this is important , and also we'll use yeah like in any high-tech devices a chip of fi fibreglass to them and connect them . industrial designer: So my personal design we need to find a solution what what is the material of the cover we want to use . industrial designer: or you said that yeah you had some ideas like fruit , veg or project manager: Well well industrial designer: I dunno . marketing: project manager: m m maybe m maybe we can give the the the case a very normal a v very normal case but , with the changeable covers to fancy it up . project manager: So like a normal cheap plastic case which can be covered up in , for instance , a wooden case . So they also emailed me that they have available a bunch of different buttons , a scroll wheels , integrated push buttons s such as a computer mouse . And very cheap L_C_D_s , so liquid crystal displays , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: so I'm wondering , I think we might be able to integrate L_C_D_ into our R_C_ . industrial designer: So we have to know that the push button requires a simple chip , but the scroll wheel and that kind of higher high-tech stuff needs more money which is a higher price range alright . And the display requires an advanced chip , which in turns is more expensive than the regular chip , but I think with twelve Euros and if it's made for four million items , then I think w we could be able to handle that . industrial designer: So to to sum up we need yeah so I I just said that the components the list of components has to be yeah listed and and assembly is a an important process that has to be taken into account . And for the designing of the cove cover layout then it's better to to to maybe see that with the the U_R_ exp U_R_I_ Expert user interface: Sorry . user interface: Yeah so industrial designer: right ? user interface: of course for example I wanted to know like if you want to have a a fo if you want to have the L_C_D_ display over there , industrial designer: Yes . user interface: or if you want to store a programmes with a keys What kind of things you'll need inside your thin inside W wh what industrial designer: Yeah it's kind of simple pro progra programmable device , and we have to insert . industrial designer: I think we could insert one that could underlie several functions user interface: Okay so industrial designer: of user interface: in that case you can even look at the technology what the mobile phone is trying to use with the card . How f cost effective it would be to put that car chip into it and do the programmable things . project manager: so I understand when we want a display we need a expensive chip , but when we want a scrolling wheel w we also need the expensive chip , so can we use same chip , so with one expensive chip we can implement several complicated or advanced features . industrial designer: we could have one main chip that could handle , it's called F_P_G_A_ chip , that could handle both like scrolling wheels as well as L_C_D_ project manager: project manager: when the more expensive chip you mentioned there is is possible in the in the given budget , maybe we should go for for the more expensive chip , so all features which you mentioned can be implemented based on the same chip . user interface: D well project manager: Do you think that's feasible ? user interface: Well I don't know if it'll fit into our cost of twelve point five Euro you know . user interface: Is it possible to fit in to that ? industrial designer: Yeah also thinking , I think both if we had a budget of twenty twenty Euros , it will be okay , user interface: Sorry . Actually do maybe two designs and then cost them out and see which one is gonna fit in our budget better . project manager: wh when you make a a design ca you can next meeting you can give an quite an exact cost price . user interface: Yeah that's that's something which I wanted to ask you also , like what will be the each individually the cost of it . For example if f if you want to put wood I wouldn't suggest for wood industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: 'cause it's I think it's m much easier to use a plastic or a rubber rather than wood . user interface: It will be much ch much expensive th though it's the most natural thing , but project manager: Yes but I can I think I think we can just use more cheap plastic for a kind of basic edition , and then people can fancy it up with with more expensive materials marketing: . user interface: it's Yeah we we can give a preference to them , but it is but with plastic or the rubber or whatever it is it's much better with that rather than going for project manager: Do do you agree ? marketing: yeah sure . industrial designer: Yeah but i it's a detailed yeah yeah plastic versus wood , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and we need maybe to centre our description on the the really the what buttons what functionality we want to offer to the user , and maybe with graphs or I don't know user interface: Yeah . So Let let's say next meeting w you produce two designs , one one one less advanced and one more advanced and with the cost price . project manager: which can be later fancied up with with addit additional , how do you call them , these like like mobile telephones you can put a cover over it . Smooth keys with bigger s So that you know The the problem most of the time we've seen , the keys is that it's small , project manager: . user interface: and every time we have to be very but if i the if we if we go to a different ways of designing those keys , then you can merge them together marketing: So is there any of these that you're looking at particularly user interface: to marketing: or is this just ideas ? user interface: Oh you can actually , for example , if you see , they are they are they are quite small over here , marketing: user interface: and now you can , for example , as I was if you make them big , it may change the look of the thing also to the people . user interface: At the same time , it is m more like it would be more interesting for people who are having this R_S_I_ and all problem . user interface: big keys may better for them actually and marketing: You see ? industrial designer: I agree yeah , marketing: Yeah . marketing: one I've had before , a r r remote control we have at home is one that's actually got a cover on the bottom user interface: Yeah . marketing: so the bottom bit is just , covers half the keys most of the time , and then you can slide the cover back to get to the the more advanced keys . project manager: w but then you have still have when you don't use it you have such a a an extent of your remote control marketing: . So maybe it's possible , I don't know whether you can can indicate this , that you can elsewhere open your remote control and on the inside are buttons you don't use that much . industrial designer: That's what you mean ? project manager: Yes I I th that's what user interface: Yeah . marketing: Can we have can we think about maybe having a a non-recta non non-rectangular one , so with not just the straight little box industrial designer: Yeah I like also this one . industrial designer: Yeah , the point is w maybe we need to also to make a decision on how how how big we want to be and how many buttons like n we should dec decide numbers or marketing: 'kay . Is this for the next meeting though ? user interface: We should make a marketing: I think we might be out of time out of time for this meeting . user interface: Yeah that yeah next meeting we should be project manager: Ju just make two designs , industrial designer: Okay . So is this is there anything else I need to do from a marketing point of view for the next meeting ? project manager: yes I come to that user interface: Maybe it would be interesting if you could look for the cost inventories of other devices , if you're using speech recognition or something like that . project manager: Yes well m maybe , I don't know whether that's possible , marketing: . marketing: Okay well is this me designing a way to evaluate it so Thinking about how to set up test groups and things ? project manager: I don't know whether that's possible in the given time marketing: . project manager: So you two will be together w working on a o on two prototypes industrial designer: Exactly . user interface: One for like cost and the one with like higher-end industrial designer: Two ? project manager: I industrial designer: Okay . project manager: and then user interface: so that then we can be easily comparing them industrial designer: Yeah project manager: . user interface: or you know find a compromise between both of them , industrial designer: and find maybe a compromise <doc-sep>marketing: Hello project manager: like before we I have to redo the meetings from n th the minutes from the last meeting marketing: it was discussed in the last meeting which was opened by the presentation from the interface designer that looks would be very important on this new remote user interface: Designer . It should have nine channel buttons , a next button , volume buttons , subtitle buttons , switch to control features , colour contrast , sharpness etcetera . speech recognition is one of her very f favourite personal features she would like see d d to be integrated in this in this new remote . user interface: project manager: marketing: And she was challenged on that point project manager: that's right . industrial designer: project manager: But her very f personal favourite really she , she would very much like to see a speech recogniser integrated in this remote . She would like a special case made out of plastic that is very strong , not using any harmful materials , should be recyclable and should be colourful . technically this thing would also have a resistor and a capacitor , diode transistor , resonator , and if possible a rechargeable battery . And how it would works , you press the button , the chip is morse morse code related relays the to the generat to the generator amplification and the circuit board is very inexpensive to build and so she thinks this is a great feature to to to consider . project manager: She would like this whole thing should be push buttons with a simple chip scrolling method is more expensive and not that practical anymore . The marketing expert who has to finally come up with to to to market this product has been watching the competition , has done some research on the internet and also has used h her personal observations to come up with the fact that such a remote sh should be small , easy to use and it should be eye catching . From her point of view of course one of the most important facts is that we should get to market before our competition does . To do that maybe one or two features should be developed on which we could dwell on or in other words on which our campaign could be built on . And the decision that we took last time was that the special feature we would like to see is a speech recogniser , the energy should be battery should be on a chip , should be trendy design , compact and strong , and should have buttons . industrial designer: and it's it's blue in colour bright and it has yellow buttons and all the different colour buttons marketing: industrial designer: and also i it it will be easily fit into into the hands and you can access all the buttons easily . marketing: You used to have all the buttons user interface: industrial designer: yeah and the material which we are going to use for the case is plastic and w which which is s strong and also for the the material is plastic and for the buttons it is s soft rubber and als marketing: Oh that's good , industrial designer: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah because you'll be touching the buttons more so it is soft when you touch it . industrial designer: And then for the for the led , for the light emitting diode it is a fluorescent green marketing: Now these features includes the s signal emitting signal it's the led or L_E_D_ the infrared . user interface: we have included a button which is fluorescent green colour and this is the menu button which will control the colour , sharpness , brightness marketing: Now this button is an elongated shaped button and this is slightly flexible so if it is turned towards the right it will take to the previous channel , if it is turned towards the right it will take to the next channel . marketing: The next channel in the numeric pattern , or user interface: No , swapping is if if example you're you're watching the second channel and then you go to the tenth channel and if you want to go back to the second channel you can swap , this button . user interface: And at the end , it this remote has inbuilt voice recogniser which c which will recognise the user's voice and then it'll act accordingly . user interface: give her suggestion whether it'll be sellable or it'll be cost effective . industrial designer: marketing: Okay , well what what I really like a lot about it is that you can reach the whole thing with one thumb , user interface: Yes , yes . marketing: that you can really hold it in one h you don't need two hands industrial designer: marketing: and it's easily reachable even for somebody with a small hand , yeah ? project manager: Yes the buttons are all raised , right ? marketing: The buttons are all raised project manager: Are raised , marketing: and if you hold it in the centre of your hand you can even reach it over here so you don't have to turn it around , turn it upside down , move it up , up and down , project manager: Right . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: and I like the idea that the on-off button is in a really prominent place . project manager: Yes , and it sort of sticks up so that you really marketing: Yeah , that's great . project manager: you don't have to g first go like oh yeah here it's on and yeah , the these buttons around here are the mute user interface: No , these the front buttons which are here , are the mute buttons . project manager: So if you're left-handed or right-handed it doesn't matter . marketing: And this brings the menu up on the screen ? user interface: Pardon me ? This is the menu yes , yes . marketing: This brings the menu up on the screen and the orange ones are user interface: A the the these these two are th to increase or decrease the volumes , marketing: Okay . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: Okay and now I'm supposed to project manager: Well , I have one question marketing: yeah . project manager: will there be anything written on the buttons , like that people know , or they have to learn that from a piece of paper which button does what ? user interface: Yes , it will have these buttons will have the numbers and all the rest of the buttons will have symbols . project manager: Will have symbols so that that that the user really knows you know and doesn't have to first learn it user interface: Yes , which can be easily recognised . marketing: Good point because we need the symbols 'cause we're going into an international market we can't have anything that's language dependent . But anyway it would ha i i i it has to have some kind of of symbols , text or something so that people kn industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Text that we can have on the case itself , project manager: That's right . user interface: And and one more feature is we we have a holder for this remote which is an oyster shape . marketing: Well you know I think we could do something really funny with this too because the snail is known to be slow industrial designer: marketing: and we could have some sort of little comic effect on our marketing about how this is a rapid snail or something like that user interface: project manager: Now what , what are our special features for the marketing ? marketing: So project manager: That's really the voice recognition that's really unusual marketing: I think voice recognition is our big selling point industrial designer: . project manager: And then , and then the other thing would basically be sh shape or practicality of use . marketing: So I think we have to play with the image , play with the snail image play with the visual and then the voice recognition . project manager: Okay , now having said that marketing: I'm supposed to make a little presentation , aren't I ? project manager: No , now this was our evaluation criteria which we just have done . marketing: Ah , but in my instructions I think it said I was supposed to go to the board and do something . marketing: Can you just fill it in in the yellow boxes ? Or project manager: Oh , okay yeah , okay , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: electronics , simple chip on print ? Is that's what we're using ? user interface: Yes . project manager: but , yes but industrial designer: I think that is f for rubbers that is yeah case material . project manager: That's just for the case material , user interface: Is this for the case ? Yes . project manager: so special colours though , we having that , marketing: Oh okay , the - , ' kay . marketing: 'cause we didn't put the clock in it after all , right ? project manager: No . project manager: button supplement special colour ? user interface: Speci Yes project manager: Special form ? user interface: Yes d we do have special form . user interface: One two three four five six seven eight nine project manager: ? industrial designer: Maybe it is it just n project manager: Eight , eight point two . marketing: Okay , well obviously my method for s m the marketing of this thing is first to ask the big question , will it sell ? And I think we should show this prototype to people from various age and socio-economic groups and see about any fine tuning that maybe little things we haven't thought of . marketing: We can't accept every suggestion of course , but maybe we just need to get a few . marketing: And show the the prototype to consumer research groups , we don't s want somebody to suddenly come to us and tell us that this button is toxic and you know some child will swallow it and then we won't sell any . marketing: And then after that we just have to go with our best intuition and you know we like it , we think it's good , we're gonna get behind it and sell it . Okay , now the things that I was thinking and th my wish list has really been realised in this prototype . I wanted the shape to be biomorphic , I didn't want anything with angles and all square , I wanted it to be comfy and roundy so we we've got that . We wanted the feel to be as soft as possible , we'll have the soft buttons industrial designer: marketing: and the way this is shaped , even though it's gonna be hard plastic , it feels good in your hand so that's nice . And functionality I put last on my list because people aren't going to use it before they buy it . industrial designer: marketing: So paradoxically the other features , in other words , the look , the feel and the shape , that's what people are gonna get in the store . marketing: They don't have a television in the store , they can't play with it . The size is small and th these points are in the importance for the , for the marketing , these aren't i in how I feel . I think that it's I think that it's plenty small enough to sell but I think we're sort of right the scale is one to seven . And then functionality I think you did a really good job on functionality , obviously we could have ad added different functions but then we'd disturb something else so I would say that we got to a five out of seven on on functionality . marketing: So I think that basically we've got a great product and we can get off and running with it . project manager: And I don't know how we can evaluate that or how we can include that , too . marketing: Well , we had what , eight eight euros twenty as our cost ? project manager: Eight , eight twenty , yes . industrial designer: Eight twenty so marketing: And so we've got we've still got four euros to go to spend . industrial designer: We have four euros , yeah project manager: maximum we have another four point three euros four thirty . Well that's project manager: But we have no way of presenting that to management as you know as a f finished , as a finished product and saying okay with the voice recogniser that costs so much . marketing: Well as we know in today's technic technological world you can do just about anything at any price , the the the problem is quality . project manager: I'm sorry to interrupt then but I just recog I just remembered that there was no that that was not included that there was no room for any special features , okay ? industrial designer: Included , yeah . You wanna go to this next slide , marketing expert ? marketing: well I isn't this my last slide ? project manager: I dunno . and we're supposed to talk about those things as a team now , so if you put my last slide back up there . project manager: Why ? Wh why you need that up ? marketing: ? Well because I can't remember what I put on there . Okay user interface: marketing: you're the designer , of course you wanna give it a one . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: and then how about how we doing on colour ? project manager: Colour I marketing: Colour , I gave it a one . marketing: Okay , I gave it a three , two , user interface: I'll give three . marketing: And the next is functionality where I I admit I was a little hard on our team here , but project manager: Well it's also you can't really try it out the other things you have have more is are more tangible so from that point of view marketing: Yeah . the functionality's the only place where maybe we have to think about m m maybe , heaven forbid , having another meeting . marketing: But otherwise I think we're we're ready to go to go with this product . Anybody else have any other comments or any other things that we feel we should evaluate ? project manager: . Is there more room for creativity or are we absolutely happy ? user interface: We can always improve , yes . I think they are quite big , so I think I we can just have small buttons and more buttons in that case . Well then again if we're gonna do the speech recognition thing we're gon there gonna be some buttons that are gonna have to be added for that for the recording of the the speech . marketing: So that that's where we're gonna have to do maybe we can eliminate one of the mute buttons , instead of having two mute buttons . marketing: and a couple of other th maybe comp consolidate some of the usage an and see what we can do with that . project manager: Y al always bearing in mind that right now we are of course well within the budget industrial designer: user interface: And maybe project manager: and that we still you know we probably can't , with this particular item , we probably can't just add a whole lot of more things . project manager: we need you know we need to leave space money-wise for the voice recogniser . project manager: So th the question really is how do we feel with the project process ? , are we happy with the creativity that has passed here or we're not happy with the new product we created or that was created ? I think personally I think I'm pretty happy . marketing: I'm pretty happy with it too , yeah , project manager: an industrial designer: Even I'm happy . project manager: and then the next question is are we happy with the leadership of this project ? marketing: I think you've done a good job , Miss leader . project manager: And I think team work I think was very very good , I think we really industrial designer: project manager: And I think we are we happy with the means we used ? We used whiteboard , we didn't use digital p well digital pens I guess are these things . marketing: Yeah maybe we could've used the whiteboard a little bit more , yeah , user interface: Whiteboard more , yes , yes . , it's maybe not in the best position in the room you know like sometimes it's positioned so that it's much better visible for everybody and I think from that point of view we sort of ignored it a little bit . project manager: I think we we did , in more than one respect and so I think we did very well here . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: project manager: So I I thank you all very much . project manager: I always get it on here , but getting it off is industrial designer: Do we do we have some time left ? you have user interface: They say it's forty minutes . project manager: Ah yes we have time later marketing: But we we were told we could end the final meeting at any time , whenever we felt we were finished . marketing: It'll take me the rest of the time to get my microphone out from my necklace <doc-sep>project manager: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: - So , ready ? user interface: 'Kay marketing: No not really Just project manager: marketing: Crap . user interface: marketing: 'Kay , so whe where is the remote control ? project manager: So , we are user interface: Where ? marketing: user interface: It's here . project manager: So I will still play the role of the secretary , and we'll have first the project presentation by our User Interface Designer , David Jordan , user interface: Okay . project manager: So we'll have to evaluate the your proposed remote control , user interface: 'Kay . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: And in case if we're we all agree on the fabrica of building of this remote control , we'll evaluate the production . industrial designer: project manager: So maybe I will let the our two designers talk about so their user interface: I have slides . project manager: user interface: It's looks like some mushroom , so we call it mushroom design . project manager: Genetically modified mushroom I will say , but user interface: Next a mo marketing: Yeah . In the traditional key traditional controller use button to to select the channel but now we have a s circle , so we can turn this ball to t to select channel . this sta this triangle base is very stable , so so it's it's it's unlikely you cannot found it . So it's v , you can put it in the table so you can turn the the ball to cha to select the channel and there's some cute button . You c can can you can see the the shape of the buttons n is a mushroom , so project manager: Everything's mushroom . industrial designer: Yeah but it's not like really mushroom because you have you know like lemon shape , you know , centre is yellow and t d user interface: Yeah project manager: Okay . user interface: Yeah , th that's why if you put it in the table , be careful , somebody will eat it . project manager: industrial designer: I don't think I hope nobody will eat it You know , to integrate the fruit aspect , you know the the in project manager: Oh . Inspira inspiration is industrial designer: And inspired colour project manager: industrial designer: and and very sophisticated material , so . project manager: industrial designer: So what we w what I can add is that , you know he talk about what is outside , so what is inside is what we dis what we talked before about , you know , the chip , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: it is a low level chip , and user interface: So we cut it to see . industrial designer: You know wi the low level chips inside and you know the L_C_D_ button and the i user interface: Okay . Here ? project manager: And where is the solar solar cell ? user interface: marketing: But we say we sa we said solar . project manager: Where is the solar cell ? industrial designer: In fact this this this this is a kind of you know revolutionary solar receptor that we can put outside and project manager: Oh . Do you think it won't be It won't cris increase the price ? user interface: Okay marketing: industrial designer: I don't think so , project manager: Okay , we'll see after . So project manager: so , mister money , what's your opinion according to this remote control ? marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: we gonna try to measure how good it is instead of just talking about project manager: industrial designer: marketing: we had three keys key points to for this remote control design , user interface: marketing: and first one was project manager: marketing: So w we'll try to judge this feature with a one to seven scale , one being no , I think . marketing: Do we have a fancy look and feel , according to you ? user interface: Yeah , I think so . user interface: Yeah , the shape is unique , and the colour marketing: I'll agree it's unique , but is it really industrial designer: Is it really fancy ? user interface: So it depend on how d do you define fancy . user interface: industrial designer: But it's you have the lemon aspect of this th this this thing . user interface: project manager: Maybe if you change if you take the buttons out , and maybe do things like that industrial designer: Do Don't do that , please . marketing: I dunno where the lemon is , but industrial designer: I it's it's i this shape is a lemon like , so user interface: marketing: it's not obvious . user interface: marketing: If industrial designer: Because i marketing: I dunno , maybe improving the texture of like having it less smooth or project manager: Yeah . project manager: And you know , you have the finger here , with the buttons ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: What's the use for that ? industrial designer: I have no idea , so . If you want to turn the ball , it's very it's very convenient for you to to to turn the ball to change the channel . project manager: industrial designer: I have no idea what project manager: And where is the voice recognition ? marketing: Okay . user interface: This is microphone array marketing: First one is we have to judge the fancy look and feel . Is it better like that ? marketing: project manager: Looks okay , industrial designer: So we can we can say t user interface: project manager: let's say it's a pineapple now . industrial designer: The colour , is the colour acceptable ? marketing: No , the colour is okay , that's fine . marketing: it's project manager: It looks like a marketing: but I would say there is more too much red . industrial designer: It's too much red ? marketing: if industrial designer: In the basement ? project manager: It looks like a pineapple with cherry on top . So , from one to seven ? industrial designer: I will give I will project manager: Seven is the ma the maximum ? industrial designer: I'll gi marketing: No , seven is false and one is true . marketing: Then let me industrial designer: What other marketing: The other criterion is is it technologically technologically in innovative . industrial designer: Is it easy to use ? project manager: Feasible ? You said previously that you there's microphone inside an industrial designer: Ye Embedded . project manager: and you have the there's the technology inside that recognise simple vocal comments ? user interface: Yeah , yeah . project manager: And you can turn it so maybe it's techno technologically innov innovative ? user interface: So you can capture voice yeah , you c industrial designer: Oh yeah , yeah . industrial designer: And I think you you've never seen a rou a round remote control , so it is I marketing: Yeah bu but when you say technologically it's more I dunno , in the core , or single . industrial designer: I think technically it's acceptable , so project manager: Maybe two ? industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: So using the same scale , two ? project manager: Two ? I would say two industrial designer: Two , yeah , two . project manager: It's better like that , isn't it ? user interface: marketing: Now maybe the most critical one . industrial designer: Most marketing: L last one w I would like to judge is is it easy to use ? industrial designer: Eh , for th the vocal command yes , it's might be easy . marketing: Yeah but this this turning can you can you just re explain me the project manager: industrial designer: As a principle . Yeah but how how intuitive is it to turn things to change channels ? user interface: You just tu turn d d industrial designer: I think maybe if you he project manager: Oh , ok I understand . marketing: Like if you want to go from user interface: project manager: You take take the remote , so industrial designer: If you hear some click project manager: and you can turn like that to change the channel ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: Yeah but imagine you y project manager: I think it's quite easy to so s zapping , but maybe it will be too fast . user interface: marketing: Yeah I'm I'm no I'm not definitely convinced it's it's the best way to if you wanna jump from , I dunno , one to twenty ? industrial designer: Oh yeah , that's difficult . marketing: How can you go directly to twenty , for example ? user interface: No , no , no . industrial designer: Yeah but y how you need to know I marketing: But if you're fro from two ? user interface: I if if this is a channel one . industrial designer: And you you can marketing: Yeah ju just imagine you have fifty fifty channels project manager: Oh yeah . user interface: So you got how many degree you you it project manager: Yeah but y but you have to go through all the channels if you want to go industrial designer: I think you can if you have a scale , so user interface: No no , you don't have to y no it's when you when you stop t when you stop , the the turn , project manager: How d how do you know this angle is th is the correct one ? user interface: It's it's very easy , because you kn you know how many channel are there in the marketing: So you you count one degree , two degrees , no . You can say fifty and fifty it's okay , so marketing: Yeah voc vocal command is okay . But w we've said previously that maybe it's not going to be th l the main user interface: There's also a number , you know . project manager: Yeah , but when you're zapping you're changing from one channel to the other , so you're passing through all the channels . So , when you say I want to go to the channel number twenty that's you've decided to go to channel twenty , so you can say channel twenty , or channel four , because you really want to go on this channel . project manager: But if you really want to to do zapping you you don't really know what you want to do , you can turn it . project manager: Just go through all the channels and maybe stop if there is something interesting ? industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: And but I'd user interface: And also you can , if you i project manager: yeah , what's what's this cherry ? user interface: You ca you can turn this . industrial designer: S But I di I didn't see where the t f the turn off t turn on turn off button so much activates user interface: This is from one channel to industrial designer: maybe one of the user interface: Yeah . project manager: marketing: Yeah , but it has to be on to recognise fas industrial designer: project manager: Most of the time you have the yeah it's a sleeping remote control . industrial designer: Easy to use , it's very relative but three it's fine , I think , it's reasonable three . marketing: So reasonably , is four , is one ? industrial designer: Three f three for me , it's o it's okay . user interface: project manager: And what's your opinion ? industrial designer: Will you give four ? marketing: we wouldn't say , those are sort of agreed but this one would be more five to me . industrial designer: Five ? Yeah , so maybe if user interface: w w what do y what you compare with traditional tr traditional controller ? marketing: Yeah . If you use traditional controller you have to put a button , but now you don't have to put button , you have you just turn the turn the ball . industrial designer: Yeah but y you know user interface: There's two kind of balls , marketing: So you have user interface: the smaller the the the so you can c you can c you can control the scale . user interface: But in the traditional controller , how do how can you control the scale ? marketing: by pushing zero after after the first one . user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: And that's user interface: yeah , yeah , y you you can do it , but you can also do it in the b if you you do not wa if you do not want to browsing all the channel you can just p there's also a button here . user interface: Yeah , this function is just for your browsing , from one channel to th the next one , the next s sn s , the th the third one . project manager: Previously you said that turning this was the fine marketing: Yeah , if you're changing your mind . user interface: there's different scale , so you can you can choose how much do you want to sc marketing: Okay . marketing: Yeah but then when you turn turn it project manager: Oh user interface: project manager: Yeah , no no , no . You know tha that's the weak point , user interface: You use your y marketing: because with a traditional one you just have one hand . project manager: Yeah , but nobody would be able to take it in the pocket and bring it in the kitchen and say I've lost the remote control . project manager: industrial designer: it's the next prototype , maybe we cou user interface: Okay okay , okay . project manager: marketing: Okay , so industrial designer: It need maybe some wo further work , but it's marketing: Yeah , especially on the easy to use industrial designer: Yeah , s yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , b I think project manager: But I d m I think that it will be good to do some more work to transform this into a pineapple . So as we all agree to accept , under certain conditions , the prototype , we'll have look to the final sh financial view . As I said in the first meeting we need to have so a remote control that would cost not more than twelve and point fifty Euros . project manager: And if not if it's not the case y you would have to redesign it . project manager: So , just have a look at the okay here is the Excel sheet , so industrial designer: project manager: so it has the energy source . project manager: Kinetic , we don't have it , I suppose , industrial designer: No , project manager: but we have solar cells . project manager: how many do y do you need , solar cells ? Do you think one would be enough , or such as as number of branches ? industrial designer: I think in each ball you have three project manager: Three ? industrial designer: three yeah , three , yeah . Single simple chip on print ? Just one would be necessary ? industrial designer: S s simple , simple , yeah . industrial designer: Is it marketing: industrial designer: Is sh it marketing: So we are all already nineteen . project manager: Okay , user interface: project manager: just keep on going , just to have an idea . industrial designer: Is Yes a wooden pl I and that's project manager: Well industrial designer: There's no wood , so plastic just only , I think . project manager: yeah , but what what about case ? Uncurved , flat , single curved , double curved . project manager: wood ? industrial designer: But it's yeah , a a rubber marketing: Rather four buttons . industrial designer: Y you tu you turn you turn it , so user interface: No no no , it Okay . project manager: Yeah , maybe two scroll wheel , as we have the coarse coarse to fine scroll wheel . project manager: I think we s if we keep on adding things industrial designer: It's okay . project manager: so we have to marketing: Yeah w one of the m key point is solar cells . project manager: Maybe if w t if suppose if we change and we g put just one ? marketing: Yeah . marketing: just imagine we have industrial designer: So user interface: We have to delete the the sample sensor , I think . project manager: no ? marketing: Yeah but this one one of the feature we were not really user interface: Yeah it's the one it's project manager: Okay . industrial designer: Because it seems that this can be marketing: Yeah , if project manager: Or it would be better . project manager: So , do we need special colour ? marketing: Yeah , that's one of the requirement . user interface: We we can we can we c marketing: We could turn we could turn everything in either yellow or black . project manager: I think so we need if we try to have a kind of industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , one . project manager: So if we have all integrated i in the scroll wheel and push button , it's industrial designer: One . I can remove maybe f you have five with push buttons , so we can just , I dunno , try to modify some of them to have yeah . marketing: Okay , so what's the bottleneck ? user interface: How about we change the sale ? marketing: Double curved . user interface: marketing: project manager: I think there's a problem with the push push button . project manager: So yeah , you will have marketing: So we have one button , industrial designer: One s one scroll wheel , so marketing: one wheel . It think we we've done good job , as the cost is user interface: Cou could we have look project manager: twelve fifty e user interface: Could we have look at the p the the prod the p the cost ? marketing: Yeah y actually it's wrong . user interface: Wha what industrial designer: It's fine , twelve fifty user interface: yeah . industrial designer: The solar cells , r is i is it ? user interface: Yeah , I think it's not t t project manager: I think , yeah . But it would i be interesting for our marketing team , to make a lot of advertisement concerning these solar cells to be industrial designer: Yeah , to be able to si to sell it . marketing: That's nice argument , industrial designer: Yeah , with mi marketing: but if it's it's still four our of twelve . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: So it's easy to use and powerful , as the remote control a has only one button . industrial designer: We've done it with it is under the if it was low , high or so . project manager: Now industrial designer: So So what are we going to do with this project evaluation ? project manager: So marketing: Well I think we have just have to discuss if industrial designer: Okay , okay , it's fine . project manager: Yeah ? Was it a nice way to create your remote control ? industrial designer: user interface: Yeah , it's it's good , to to create a control instead of a computer . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah , I think I find it really funny and amazing and interesting to go through all the process to from the beginning to the end . project manager: And for the marketing guy ? marketing: tha that was good but we should have more brainstorming like meetings , maybe . project manager: And new ideas about new products , maybe , wi which would be fashion and and yellow . I think you can think about a yellow T_V_ now after a fruit T_V_ or I dunno . user interface: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: It can be an interesting I don't know project manager: Yes , just lemon . user interface: Yeah , but y you know the traditional T_V_ it's industrial designer: It's flat , user interface: Yeah yeah it's flat , project manager: Squared ? user interface: yeah the shape is very boring . user interface: Could we come up with new T_V_ with such as this kind of T_V_ ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: So you can you have base , triangle base so you the T_V_ you can marketing: project manager: Ah , the lemon T_V_ with the pineapple remote control . industrial designer: But I think it's good to follow the f flow and you know make it now and after , you know , if the people change their mind you change also the product . marketing: If you have a lemon lemon T_V_ for industrial designer: We can think about T_V_ with you know where you can change you know the aspects o like for the cell phones , you know . industrial designer: Yeah , you customise it every ti so every ti if people change , you just change the appearance , and y y you can keep user interface: marketing: Yeah , yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , you can keep the global appearan project manager: Yeah , and following industrial designer: The mood of persons , the fashions project manager: . project manager: It's interesting , maybe we can create a a line of T_V_ with a a tr industrial designer: We int Yeah , T_V_ , yeah . A T_V_ for autumn and a T_V_ for winter , you know , so it's user interface: Yeah . project manager: So user interface: marketing: industrial designer: project manager: do you think you can celebrate your creation ? user interface: And you can celebrate your leadership . marketing: Yeah , I think it's project manager: It's maybe a little bit expensive . industrial designer: Wh really ? project manager: industrial designer: It should be it should be fine , you know , actually . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: I I think I like the the colour a the colour are very good , so actually so project manager: But don't put sugar in it , it's not working . industrial designer: I p is th y project manager: Yeah , but the colour , I think the colour is more is most important , industrial designer: the the yellow ball thing that marketing: project manager: because I I don't think you have ever seen something like that before for a remote control . It's yeah but it I don't think it's such a problem just putting the logo somewhere . industrial designer: f like y we can we can put some double R_ project manager: Yeah , but we decided to have something yellow and red , for the costs . project manager: So maybe we can just integrate it on th on one side , the double R_ . project manager: So we have the logo , we have the colour , and we have the fashion in electronics , user interface: So we have to give a project manager: so we have the slogan too . project manager: Yeah industrial designer: project manager: th no , it's the it's the pineapple control remote control . industrial designer: Oh unid unidentified remote control , so marketing: It's more appropriate , somehow . I can hel I will try versions so to see how easy easy to manage user interface: Okay . Yeah you told me you h you d you d you lost your control your T_V_ industrial designer: Yeah I always lose my Yeah , so so i if it is a universal one I can use it with my T_V_ , so it would be user interface: so you need to buy one . project manager: One thing I like is the shape , because you know it's not like the the remote controls you can put in your pocket , on in your jacket . industrial designer: it's will enlight your house , your home and your T_V_ , so . user interface: project manager: I think it it would be interesting to just to see if we can if people will buy this one , and maybe add some features to it after yeah . No ? project manager: So I think we have finished the designing and the evaluation of our remote control industrial designer: Okay <doc-sep>project manager: So I will again do the secretary part we will have three presentation first the industrial design , first Rama then Mark and then Sammy . project manager: we have to take a decision on the control remote control concepts and we have forty minutes . project manager: So what we want to the decision we want to take on this meeting are on the first on the component concept , so what kind of energy we use what kind of chip on print and one ki kind of case . And at the end Sammy will give a trend watching on what he's he's been doing . So we're to mainly design f mainly need to know which components we'll use for energy , and the material and interface . First one , we can use simple battery , or we can use traditional solar cells or and the material we can have plastic , rubber which is good for this R_S_A_ marketing: Ah . industrial designer: and then titanium , which can be which have very good look an and then interface we're to use push buttons or liquid crystal d L_C_D_ display . So , as we discussed before , we need to we would like to have some speech recognition s chip in our remote control . Still we are looking for possible technical specifications and how w easy we can do and within our pri range , like we're to in our twelve Euros or around that . So we are looking for simple devices or simple technology to do the location of remote control in a room or in a house . So we would like to propose battery instead of solar cells and it would be problematic to have enough energy with the solar cells marketing: And also we want to go for titanium design instead of rubber or and well the problem is with this design we found that we can't use double-curved shapes . user interface: Why ? industrial designer: it's I think in manufacturing I guess it's problematic . So , we want to go for simple push buttons because it need a simple chip and it's really lesser re really less expensive compared to L_C_D_ marketing: industrial designer: which are which needs advanced chip technology and it's more expensive , user interface: industrial designer: since we want to put some other features such as speech recognition marketing: industrial designer: we want to reduce cost . project manager: I want to know why it b just sorry but for the point before why not the rubber , if it is something that it seems to be light . industrial designer: And also like in if you put a it's be difficult to do all the moulding of buttons and these things project manager: Okay . user interface: W we can use something like you know the whole body's titanium but there are some rubber or I dunno some rubber parts like industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: like this ? project manager: Yes so user interface: to make it feel better and to you know industrial designer: Like in cell phones recently project manager: -huh . industrial designer: And this push buttons project manager: yeah so industrial designer: we we would like to use push buttons instead of L_C_D_s and so we want to mo we're we want to put speech recognition so we want to reduce price on this technology and so that we can have enough space or enough money project manager: Okay , s so simple button and speech recognition for the more complicated . industrial designer: for S S marketing: Speech industrial designer: Y yeah we have simple buttons and speech recognition technology , user interface: user interface: Okay , and still we have industrial designer: so user interface: can we still include the L_ L_S_D_ display ? marketing: L_C_D_ . industrial designer: l marketing: Seems not , it's either L_C_D_ or push-button . industrial designer: So user interface: No , industrial designer: it's like a user interface: it's not gonna be a t no touchable but still like a source of information or source for menus . industrial designer: Yeah maybe maybe we can see depending on how we'll come up with our full design then if we have enough money or like for and user interface: Okay , so let's try it , let's t industrial designer: because the speech recognition technology will take at least five Euros or or something so we want to reduce the cost on display marketing: The L_C_D_ would industrial designer: or this inter marketing: The display would only be display and not touch sensitive you mean . user interface: Yeah , yeah , it's it's not gonna be a touch pad , just a display for giving you information . Yeah , we're to go for li and now I think we have many options in the market so we can go for small nickel or alkaline batteries marketing: Okay . marketing: So this device on n that can be used for speech recognition could also be used for just the finding it basically , instead of clapping why not just be ask . industrial designer: Yeah , that's then the the one thing we want to know is like because remote control is used for like in the household so it it it will be it m maybe at least five , six people want to use it so so how to how to define our re speech recognition marketing: If we're going for more speaker independent then it would be like again cumbersome and we need really m more technology project manager: Okay , industrial designer: and so project manager: for the location . industrial designer: Yeah , if if everybody in the house n to locate then we're to go for some speaker independent technology or something . So let's now go to the you don't have more question ? industrial designer: marketing: No , it's okay . user interface: But still L_S_D_'s already quite nice , marketing: L_C_D_ . user interface: L_C_ marketing: L_S_D_ is something else , industrial designer: marketing: and it's quite nice as well . user interface: have a look at this project manager: industrial designer: user interface: no it's yeah . Generally I developed quite a broad concept not only for the interface , but for possible instruction or user's manual and all the complex things that come together with your T_V_ and remote controls . We got our perfect remote control with a lot of buttons marketing: user interface: and we got explanation for every button industrial designer: user interface: and you can use your time and it will take i some days to learn all this buttons and the L_C_D_ is going to be somewhere here and go back button , I don't know really where it is , maybe one of this buttons , and power on and off I I don't remember project manager: . industrial designer: marketing: user interface: so it it it should be maybe this button is power on and off ? Or no ? I can see nothing . industrial designer: user interface: And it's got just few buttons , quite low looking , and all this stuff we already we already discussed . marketing: Do you think it can come in several colours ? user interface: And everyone's gonna be satisfied . marketing: Or did the user interface: I would make a backlight of the L_C_D_ screen with different colours . marketing: Yeah , well they like something which is user interface: Okay , so let's remember there's a Nokia phone which changeable panels . marketing: yeah , okay , user interface: Do you like it ? marketing: so that would be the option . I don't know I don't have a Nokia phone , project manager: industrial designer: But it's marketing: but I don't use that but again , I might user interface: That's why you don't have it . marketing: bu but project manager: industrial designer: But it would be expensive , no ? If you use colour L_C_D_ . industrial designer: Maybe we can just if users want more colours they can pay more money to get this the shapes and they can have different assembly . industrial designer: So users have different they have their own interests , colour interests and so project manager: So ? user interface: project manager: you you propose something with option i that increase the price if we if you want o more colours on L_C_D_ , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Okay , what there's one more decisi one more solution in fact , 'cause there are some some paints that can change colour according to where they are , like they can reflect different colours depending on what is around , like what colour is around , and depending on the temperature , industrial designer: Lights , yeah . project manager: But it can be in maybe in an a gradable version , user interface: - , - , project manager: but industrial designer: Yeah . Those for which the remote control is is to be something useful I'm going to talk about this later but and those for which is something that that that is specific to them so it it's like a signature . project manager: Okay marketing: project manager: and you think that we don't have to make to make them pay more because of o or this is industrial designer: marketing: I think I think they would be ready p ready to pay more for that . project manager: so i it's not a s base service industrial designer: marketing: No no . industrial designer: But those people will be really few , no ? So like we can those marketing: The the young people the young people want to be different from their friends . project manager: maybe that's if that it's a selling point maybe it has to be the base . But you know if you want to be different you just take your remote control with you all the time . user interface: Anyone has their remote controls here ? marketing: Oh , you don't ? Yeah . You don't have your remo user interface: No ? industrial designer: marketing: Wh you you know like for instance take the iPod . marketing: It has this distinctive look and feel and look which people seems to like user interface: Okay . marketing: just because it's a colour that we don't usually see in a remote control . Hand light , marketing: glow in the dark , industrial designer: project manager: user interface: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah marketing: so industrial designer: maybe like the infrared like we can put some radium chips or something marketing: user interface: user interface: but how smart should it be to not to complicate things too much ? project manager: user interface: And industrial designer: user interface: I dunno marketing: user interface: that's a question to you and to to marketing: Well so I heard that it seems that speech recognition is something that can be done so that's the smartness of the thing . marketing: Currently we don't have guns with speech recognition or beer cans with speech recognition industrial designer: marketing: but we may have remote controls with speech recognition . Are are you saying here that the remote controls should be aware of who is using it ? So for instance the young guy would not be able to use it because his father doesn't want . industrial designer: that that could be feasible I guess , like So since we have we want to do some speaker dependent speech recognition so we can use marketing: Okay . marketing: But for instance th I I'm thinking about the other particularity that the the remote control could have . S since it it knows who is using it , it might also record the kind of channels you are u more often using and levels of volumes that you're more often things like that industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: and provide you ways of using them , I dunno , somehow , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: but industrial designer: it's marketing: that might also be a good sales pitch again . Okay , so I'm going to talk about trends and I hope this can help us to to understand l how we should design our remote control . So first maybe just a small recap on how how do we watch trends so it's not so simple you might think that it's easy but it's not so simple . Anyway these days the best source of information is the web as you know , so have to to go often on the web and look at what the others are doing , and ask real people who are using real remote controls every day or any other tool that is similar to a remote control which basically is a small device that people have with them , always , like a phone . Of course those tha d who are watching the trends are also have also to be inspired because in fact they're not only watching the trends , they're inventing it , they're creating the trend . This is more risky because you're not following the trend , project manager: marketing: you try to invent it , which means either you succeed and you make a lot of money or you don't and you're out of business . to be to be quick there's a lot of words here but basically there are in in the market of of remote controls there are three aspects that we should very pay much attention to . The first one , which seems to be the most important one , is that it has to be fancy , it has to have a fancy look and feel . Strangely enough it's more important to be fancy than to be wi and now that's the second thing it has to be , it has to be technologically i innovative , industrial designer: marketing: it has to be new with some of new technology inside and and this is also more important than the last thing which we w may think that would have been the most important , which is that it should be easy to use and it should be easy to use as a remote control . So as you see it first have to be very nice , s something that people are proud of that i they can be id identified with and and then something that contains very novel stuff that they can talk about with their friends , huh , mine has this and not yours . And finally of course it has to be useful as a remote control but it seems that it's not so important that it's useful as a remote control . If we look back and not look at only remote controls I think it's important to see that the trends are quite the same in many areas so currently the the trends that we see in l in l big cities like Paris and Milan , well , it seems that this year things should have a fruit and vegetable way of of look or feel project manager: industrial designer: marketing: or so . And if we co we compare to last year , now it has to be spongy , industrial designer: . Well project manager: industrial designer: Yeah marketing: this so so I think i industrial designer: kind of maybe marketing: When we were talking about rubber , industrial designer: Yeah it marketing: I think the rubber aspect might be important because it's what is probably more feasible in terms of sponginess . marketing: So project manager: It seems to be marketing: Think more of something in the colours of like fruit and vegetables and spongy , industrial designer: Fruit . Even shape ? marketing: as a even in the shape it has to be more round and more look natural somehow . marketing: So that's what people seem to yeah i I know it's quite far from what you thought project manager: Sorry . industrial designer: marketing: but that's that's fashion and project manager: industrial designer: user interface: Okay . project manager: you have questions ? industrial designer: So these abilities are mainly ad addressed by young people ? Or it's marketing: These I'm sorry . industrial designer: This you you so did you marketing: Yeah , yeah we have people listening to the trends everywhere in the world , of course , industrial designer: Where ? Oh . marketing: as you know our company is quite big and so I'm just asking them what are the current trends according to them when they go in the stores and when they ask their friends industrial designer: It's not from . marketing: The what we industrial designer: Yeah but some materials n they're to be they're to be something like solid like they can't be really spongy marketing: Sure . marketing: We have to I think we have to have the look of fruit and vegetables industrial designer: yeah , yeah sponge , yeah yeah at least that's marketing: but we still have to put our chips inside , so of course . We can have t colours or this shape marketing: Yeah , I think in the colours and in the the kind of material . industrial designer: or at least marketing: If if it's something like rubber made or I think it it's also going to be good . now you have to go straight on this individual action which i which are for Rama wil design , industrial designer: Look and feel de project manager: Mark the user interface design , and Sammy the product evaluation . industrial designer: So , can we highlight the specific features of our project manager: Yeah you're right , you have to industrial designer: yeah , so so we want the speech recogniser and we want some kind of buttons and we want some themes like fruits or vegetables , project manager: So industrial designer: that's project manager: you say s industrial designer: we want to follow general trend . industrial designer: So , do you think marketing: No , we don't have to , user interface: So we have to for project manager: No . marketing: industrial designer: So what about location and these things , people are really interesting on those features ? Or they really like They more want these fancy features marketing: I think i industrial designer: like marketing: yeah i it's again in this what I said first it has to be fancy so I think if nobody else pro provides currently a remote control with that kind of stuff and if we can provide it I think it's a good sell for us project manager: Do we take titanium smelling like fruit , or do we make spongy fruity-like marketing: industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: industrial designer: yeah at least like we can make banana or project manager: Don't you say that you cannot do double shape curved shape user interface: But Doub double-curved . industrial designer: and and s we're to see the whether rubber is expensive user interface: Okay , okay . industrial designer: we have only the plastic or the the chippy yeah fibre chips or user interface: We'll see . I I really don't like this modelling clay 'cause you know it makes some for for industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: So still we want to keep L_C_D_ ? Or project manager: I think it's what we say , that we have an an L_C_D_ with information . marketing: The thing is that if we want to have as he says if we want to have a small number of buttons we need to have a kind of output that says currently what their actions are . industrial designer: and we just stick with two batteries so it's not any solar or marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: yeah yeah j yeah , marketing: Classical , we stay classical in that we don't reinvent the wheel . marketing: Anyway it's very in general I think people change T_V_ more often than batteries of their remote control

The team discussed the design of a recyclable and colorful plastic case for the remote, aiming to avoid harmful materials. They proposed including components such as a resistor, capacitor, diode transistor, resonator, and a rechargeable battery if possible. The remote should also have a sophisticated, temperature-resistant, and inexpensive integrated circuit board, as well as a timer or alarm. Morse code would be used for communication with the generator after pressing buttons, and push buttons were preferred over a scroll wheel for practicality and cost-effectiveness. The industrial designer presented options for energy, material, and interface, ultimately favoring a traditional battery, titanium, and simple push buttons to allocate more funds for speech recognition. The user interface designer suggested incorporating an LCD display for output, which was considered. The group also discussed ways to help users locate their controllers. The final decision was to have a low-level chip, a single button with an LCD, a scroll wheel with a push button, a base with a battery, and a plastic construction to keep costs within the budget of 12.5 Euros. They also brainstormed ideas for future products, such as a collection of electronic devices inspired by fruits or a customizable TV that follows trends and people's moods. The user interface designer advocated for a universal controller with speech recognition to store channel information, allowing users to simply say the name of a channel instead of remembering the exact number. They also considered incorporating a blinking feature as a battery alarm and indicator of the controller's location. Child-friendliness was another important aspect, with the ability to program the remote to restrict access to certain channels. The proposed components included an integrated circuit, transistors, buttons, scroll wheels, infrared, LED, LCD, and an advanced chip.

Question: What were the problems and instructions encountered by the transcribers during the transcription process? Article: Two items , which was , digits and possibly stuff on on , forced alignment , which Jane said that Liz and Andreas had in information on , professor b: grad e: but they didn't , phd f: OK , so there 's digits , alignments , and , I guess the other thing , which I came unprepared for , is , to dis s s see if there 's anything anybody wants to discuss about the Saturday meeting . Yeah , it was grad e: Yeah , it 's forced alignment of people 's schedules . professor b: With with whatever it was , a month and a half or something ahead of time , the only time we could find in common roughly in common , was on a Saturday . postdoc c: Have Have we thought about having a conference call to include him in more of in more of the meeting ? I , I don't know , if we had the if we had the telephone on the table professor b: No . phd f: No , actually I I have to I have to shuttle kids from various places to various other places . And I don't have and I don't , have a cell phone phd d: A cell phone ? phd f: so I can't be having a conference call while driving . phd f: professor b: So we have to equip him with a with a with a head - mounted , cell phone grad e: Ye - we and we 'd have to force you to read lots and lots of digits , professor b: and grad e: so it could get real real car noise . phd f: I let , my five - year - old have a try at the digits , eh . , did everyone get the results or shall I go over them again ? that it was basically the only thing that was even slightly surprising was that the lapel did so well . , and in retrospect that 's not as surprising as maybe i it shouldn't have been as surprising as I as as I felt it was . And as Morgan pointed out , that there are actually some advantages to it in terms of breath noises and clothes rustling if no one else is talking . professor b: Well , it 's Yeah , sort of the bre the breath noises and the mouth clicks and so forth like that , the lapel 's gonna be better on . professor b: The lapel is typically worse on the on clothes rustling , but if no one 's rustling their clothes , grad e: Right . , a lot of people are just sort of leaning over and reading the digits , professor b: it 's it 's grad e: so it 's it 's a very different task than sort of the natural . grad g: Probably the fact that it picks up other people 's speakers other people 's talking is an indication of that it the fact it is a good microphone . phd f: D do the lapel mikes have any directionality to them ? professor b: There typically don't , no . phd f: Because I I suppose you could make some that have sort of that you have to orient towards your mouth , grad e: They have a little bit , phd f: and then it would grad e: but they 're not noise - cancelling . professor b: And th it 's and because you don't know how people are gonna put them on , you know . So , also , Andreas , on that one the the back part of it should be right against your head . professor b: and and it was , there the point of interest to the group was primarily that , the , the system that we had that was based on H T K , that 's used by , you know , all the participants in Aurora , was so much worse than the than the S R grad e: Everybody . professor b: And the interesting thing is that even though , yes , it 's a digits task and that 's a relatively small number of words and there 's a bunch of digits that you train on , it 's just not as good as having a a l very large amount of data and training up a a a nice good big . phd f: And we know Di - did I send you some results without adaptation ? grad e: No . grad e: Or if you did , I didn't include them , cuz it was professor b: So phd f: Yeah , I think I did , actually . A a a couple percent or some Well , I don't know it Overall , I I don't remember , but there was there was a significant , loss or win from adaptation with with adaptation . And then there was a very small like point one percent on the natives , win from doing , you know , adaptation to the recognition hypotheses . And I tried both means adaptation and means and variances , and the variances added another or subtracted another point one percent . professor b: But I think one thing is that , I would presume Hav - Have you ever t Have you ever tried this exact same recognizer out on the actual TI - digits test set ? phd f: This exact same recognizer ? No . Cuz my my cuz my sense , phd f: But but , I have , people people at SRI are actually working on digits . phd f: I could and they are using a system that 's , you know , h is actually trained on digits , but h h otherwise uses the same , you know , decoder , the same , training methods , and so forth , professor b: professor b: Yeah , bu although I 'd be I think it 'd be interesting to just take this exact actual system so that these numbers were comparable phd f: Cuz our sense from the other from the Aurora , task is that grad e: And try it with TI - digits ? phd f: professor b: cuz we were getting sub one percent numbers on TI - digits also with the tandem thing . professor b: One is , yeah , the SRI system is a lot better than the HTK phd f: . professor b: but the other is that , the digits recorded here in this room with these close mikes , i , are actually a lot harder than the studio - recording TI - digits . I think , you know , one reason for that , might be that there 's still even though it 's close - talking , there still is some noise and some room acoustics . professor b: And another might be that , I 'd I would presume that in the studio , situation recording read speech that if somebody did something a little funny or n pronounced something a little funny or made a little that they didn't include it , grad e: They didn't include it . grad e: Whereas , I took out the ones that I noticed that were blatant that were correctable . grad e: And then there was another one where Jose couldn't tell whether I couldn't tell whether he was saying zero or six . grad e: You know , so I just e edited out the first , i , word of the utterance . , so there 's a little bit of correction but it 's definitely not as clean as TI - digits . grad e: Right ? So it would probably do even a little better still on the SRI system , but we could give it a try . But remember , we 're using a telephone bandwidth front - end here , on this , on this SRI system , so , I was I thought that maybe that 's actually a good thing because it it gets rid of some of the , the noises , you know , in the the below and above the , the , you know , speech bandwidth professor b: phd f: and , I suspect that to get sort of the last bit out of these higher - quality recordings you would have to in fact , use models that , were trained on wider - band data . And of course we can't do that or grad e: Wha - what 's TI - digits ? I thought t professor b: It 's wide - band , yeah . It 's in in fact , we looked it up grad e: It is wide - band . grad e: I couldn't remember whether that was TI - digits or one of the other digit tasks . professor b: See w grad e: So , Morgan , you 're getting a little breath noise . phd f: Now , eh , does grad e: You might wanna move the mike down a little bit . phd f: one one issue one issue with with that is that , the system has this , notion of a speaker to which is used in adaptation , variance norm , you know , both in , mean and variance normalization and also in the VTL estimation . phd f: Do y ? Is ? So does so th so does does , the TI - digits database have speakers that are known ? grad e: Yep . phd f: And is there is there enough data or a comparable comparable amount of data to to what we have in our recordings here ? grad e: That I don't know . professor b: Well , the other thing would be to do it without the adaptation and compare to these numbers without the adaptation . , but I 'm not so much worried about the adaptation , actually , than than the , the , VTL estimation . phd f: If you have only one utterance per speaker you might actually screw up on estimating the the warping , factor . But it 's not the amount of speakers , it 's the num it 's the amount of data per speaker . phd f: So grad e: So , although I I sort of know how to run it , there are a little a f few details here and there that I 'll have to dig out . phd f: And there 's a there 's a script and that is actually all in one script . So there 's this one script that parses waveform names and extracts things like the , speaker , ID or something that can stand in as a speaker ID . So , we might have to modify that script to recognize the , speakers , in the in the , TI - digits database . And that , phd f: Or you can fake you can fake names for these waveforms that resemble the names that we use here for the for the meetings . phd f: That would be the , sort of probably the safest way to do grad e: I might have to do that anyway to to do because we may have to do an extract to get the amount of data per speaker about right . grad e: The other thing is , isn't TI - digits isolated digits ? phd f: Right . grad e: Or is that another one ? I 'm I looked through a bunch of the digits t corp corpora , and now they 're all blurring . phd f: By the way , I think we can improve these numbers if we care to compr improve them by , not starting with the Switchboard models but by taking the Switchboard models and doing supervised adaptation on a small amount of digit data collected in this setting . phd f: Because that would adapt your models to the room acoustics and f for the far - field microphones , you know , to the noise . And then you use those adapted models , which are not speaker adapted but sort of acous you know , channel adapted grad e: Channel adapted . But the thing is , w when you it depends whether you 're ju were just using this as a a starter task for you know , to get things going for conversational or if we 're really interested i in connected digits . And for for connected digits over the telephone you don't actually want to put a whole lot of effort into adaptation phd f: Well , I don't know . You don't don't , postdoc c: This is this that one 's better . phd f: but , you know , I , my impression was that you were actually interested in the far - field microphone , problem , . phd f: Right ? Then , eh because you you don't have any postdoc c: Yeah . phd f: That 's where the most m acoustic mismatch is between the currently used models and the the r the set up here . professor b: I I guess I 'm saying I don't know if we 'd want to do that as the as phd d: Other way . postdoc c: If you have a strong fe if you have a strong preference , you could use this . At any rate , I don't know if w postdoc c: I don't know . phd f: It is ? professor b: I don't know if we wanna use that as the postdoc c: Yeah . phd f: I I postdoc c: and then you have to scr phd f: I I already adjusted this a number of times . phd f: I I grad e: Yeah , I think these mikes are not working as well as I would like . phd f: can't quite seem to Yeah , I think this contraption around your head is not working so well . Anyway , what I was saying is that I I think I probably wouldn't want to see that as sort of like the norm , that we compared all things to . The other thing that that , of course , what Barry was looking at was was just that , the near versus far . professor b: But , I think even even if there was , only a factor of two or something , like I was saying in the email , I think that 's that 's a big factor . professor b: N grad e: Liz , you could also just use the other mike if you 're having problems with that one . We we we think that this has spikes on it , phd a: It 's this thing 's This is too big for my head . postdoc c: so it 's not as good acoustically , phd f: Yeah , basically your ears are too big . So , it doesn't you know , it 's sit phd f: postdoc c: Well , if you 'd rather have this one then it 's phd a: OK . grad e: So the To get that , pivoted this way , it pivots like this . grad e: So if it doesn't bounce around too much , that 's actually good placement . I know what I was go w phd f: What k u By the way , wh what factor of two did you ? professor b: Oh , no , no . phd f: professor b: It 's tha that that we were saying , you know , well is how much worse is far than near , you know . professor b: And it depends on which one you 're looking at , phd f: That factor of two . I I know what I was thinking was that maybe , i i we could actually t t try at least looking at , some of the the large vocabulary speech from a far microphone , at least from the good one . professor b: before I thought we 'd get , you know , a hundred and fifty percent error or something , but if if , if we 're getting thirty - five , forty percent or something , u phd f: phd a: Actually if you run , though , on a close - talking mike over the whole meeting , during all those silences , you get , like , four hundred percent word error . But I 'm saying if you do the same kind of limited thing as people have done in Switchboard evaluations or as a phd a: Yeah . Where you know who the speaker is and there 's no overlap ? And you do just the far - field for those regions ? professor b: Yeah . Right ? grad e: Could we do exactly the same thing that we 're doing now , but do it with a far - field mike ? professor b: Yeah , do it with one of on grad e: Cuz we extract the times from the near - field mike , but you use the acoustics from the far - field mike . There 's , You can use times where that person is talking only from the transcripts but the segmentations were were synchronized . Or you can do a forced alignment on the close - talking to determine that , the you know , within this segment , these really were the times that this person was talking and elsewhere in the segment other people are overlapping and just front - end those pieces . Or you can run it on the whole data , which is which is , you know , a professor b: But but but how did we get the how did we determine the links , that we 're testing on in the stuff we reported ? phd a: In the H L T paper we took segments that are channel time - aligned , which is now h being changed in the transcription process , which is good , and we took cases where the transcribers said there was only one person talking here , because no one else had time any words in that segment and called that " non - overlap " . professor b: But anyway so I think that we should try it once with the same conditions that were used to create those , and in those same segments just use one of the P Z phd a: Right . professor b: And then , you know , the thing is if we were getting , what , thirty - five , forty percent , something like that on on that particular set , does it go to seventy or eighty ? phd a: Right . professor b: Or , does it use up so much memory we can't decode it ? phd a: It might also depend on which speaker th it is and how close they are to the PZM ? professor b: phd a: I don't know how different they are from each other . So we would then use that one , too , grad e: So phd f: Oh , OK . phd a: or ? professor b: You know , it 's so i but I would I 'd pick that one . It 'll be less good for some people than for other , but I I 'd like to see it on the same exact same data set that that we did the other thing on . grad e: Actually I sh actually should 've picked a different one , professor b: Right ? grad e: because that could be why the PDA is worse . professor b: But the other is , it 's very , even though there 's I 'm sure the f f the the SRI , front - end has some kind of pre - emphasis , it 's it 's , still , th it 's picking up lots of low - frequency energy . professor b: So , even discriminating against it , I 'm sure some of it 's getting through . When you listen to it , the PZM and the PDA Yeah , th the PDA has higher sound floor but not by a lot . grad e: Th - we wanted them to be to be typical of what would be in a PDA . professor b: But , the thing is people use those little mikes for everything because they 're really not bad . professor b: if you 're not doing something ridiculous like feeding it to a speech recognizer , they they they you know , you can hear the sou hear the sounds just fine . professor b: You know , it 's They , i it 's more or less the same principles as these other mikes are built under , it 's just that there 's less quality control . So like I said , the front - end guys are very much interested in in this is as as well and phd f: So so , but where is this now ? , what 's where do we go from here ? grad e: Yeah . phd f: we so we have a we have a a system that works pretty well but it 's not , you know , the system that people here are used to using to working with . professor b: Well , I think what we wanna do is we want to eh , phd f: So what what do we do now ? professor b: and we 've talked about this in other contexts we want to have the ability to feed it different features . professor b: And then , from the point of view of the front - end research , it would be s , substituting for HTK . And then if we can feed it different features , then we can try all the different things that we 're trying there . professor b: And then , also Dave is is thinking about using the data in different ways , to , explicitly work on reverberation phd f: So so the key thing that 's missing here is basically the ability to feed , you know , other features i into the recognizer professor b: Right . And , es I don't know when Chuck will be back but that 's exactly what he he 's gonna professor b: H h He 's he 's sort of back , but he drove for fourteen hours an and wasn't gonna make it in today . phd f: It 's , the the front - end is f i tha that 's in the SRI recognizer is very nice in that it does a lot of things on the fly but it unfortunately is not designed and , like the , ICSI system is , where you can feed it from a pipeline of of the command . So , the what that means probably for the foreseeable future is that you have to , dump out , you know , if you want to use some new features , you have to dump them into individual files and give those files to the recognizer . So , although you you can pipe it as well , we tend to do it that way because that way you can concentrate on one block and not keep re - doing it over and over . So I 've I grad e: So tha that 's exactly what the P - file is for . phd f: Yeah , the the the cumbersome thing is is , is that you actually have to dump out little little files . phd a: phd f: So for each segment that you want to recognize you have to dump out a separate file . phd f: Just like i th like th as if there were these waveform segments , but instead you have sort of feature file segments . So the s the the next thing we had on the agenda was something about alignments ? phd a: Oh . Yes , we have I don't know , did you wanna talk about it , or ? I can give a I was just telling this to Jane and and W we we were able to get some definite improvement on the forced alignments by looking at them first and then realizing the kinds of errors that were occurring and , some of the errors occurring very frequently are just things like the first word being moved to as early as possible in the recognition , which is a , I think was both a a pruning problem and possibly a problem with needing constraints on word locations . We tried saying I don't know , I got this whacky idea that just from looking at the data , that when people talk their words are usually chunked together . They 're might say one word and then another word far away if they were doing just backchannels ? But in general , if there 's , like , five or six words and one word 's far away from it , that 's probably wrong on average . And we had lowered that we had used tighter pruning after Liz ran some experiments showing that , you know , it runs slower and there 's no real difference in phd a: Actually it was better with slightly better or about th grad e: No gain . phd a: It 's probably cuz the recognition 's just bad en at a point where it 's bad enough that that you don't lose anything . , but it turned out for for to get accurate alignments it was really important to open up the pruning significantly . phd f: because otherwise it would sort of do greedy alignment , in regions where there was no real speech yet from the foreground speaker . phd f: so that was one big factor that helped improve things and then the other thing was that , you know , as Liz said the we f enforce the fact that , the foreground speech has to be continuous . , yeah , it isn't always true , and I think what we really want is some clever way to do this , where , you know , from the data or from maybe some hand - corrected alignments from transcribers that things like words that do occur just by themselves a alone , like backchannels or something that we did allow to have background speech around it phd d: Yeah . And , we basically also made noise models for the different sort of grouped some of the mouth noises together . And we also There was some neat or , interesting cases , like there 's one meeting where , Jose 's giving a presentation and he 's talking about , the word " mixed signal " and someone didn't understand , that you were saying " mixed " I think , Morgan . phd a: And the next turn was a lot of people saying " mixed " , like " he means mixed signal " or " I think it 's mixed " . phd h: Sh phd a: And Chuck 's on the lapel here , and he also says " mixed " but it 's at the last one , and of course the aligner th aligns it everywhere else to everybody else 's " mixed " , phd h: Yeah . So there 's I think there 's some issues about u We probably want to adapt at least the foreground speaker . But , I guess Andreas tried adapting both the foreground and a background generic speaker , and that 's actually a little bit of a f funky model . Like , it gives you some weird alignments , just because often the background speakers match better to the foreground than the foreground speaker . phd a: especially when you get lots of the same words , occurring in the phd f: Well , the I I think you can do better by , cloning so we have a reject phone . And you and what we wanted to try with you know , once we have this paper written and have a little more time , t cloning that reject model and then one copy of it would be adapted to the foreground speaker to capture the rejects in the foreground , like fragments and stuff , and the other copy would be adapted to the background speaker . , in general we actually phd f: And phd a: Right now the words like partial words are reject models and you normally allow those to match to any word . phd a: But then the background speech was also a reject model , and so this constraint of not allowing rejects in between you know , it needs to differentiate between the two . phd a: And another one is turns , like people starting with " well I think " and someone else is " well how about " . So the word " well " is in this in this segment multiple times , and as soon as it occurs usually the aligner will try to align it to the first person who says it . But then that constraint of sort of , proximity constraint will push it over to the person who really said it in general . grad e: Is the proximity constraint a hard constraint , or did you do some sort of probabilistic weighting distance , or ? phd f: We we didn't phd a: Right now it 's a kluge . We it 's straightforward to actually just have a a penalty that doesn't completely disallows it but discourages it . But , we just didn't have time to play with , you know , tuning yet another yet another parameter . phd f: And really the reason we can't do it is just that we don't have a we don't have ground truth for these . So , we would need a hand - marked , word - level alignments or at least sort of the boundaries of the speech betw you know , between the speakers . , and then use that as a reference and tune the parameters of the of the model , to op to get the best performance . professor b: G given I , I wa I wa I was gonna ask you anyway , how you assessed that things were better . phd a: Oh , it was painful because the thing is , you know the alignments share a lot in common , so And you 're yo you 're looking at these segments where there 's a lot of speech . phd a: that if you look at the individual segments from just one person you don't see a lot of words , phd h: Ju professor b: Yeah . phd a: And so the reject is also mapping and pauses So I looked at them all in Waves and just lined up all the alignments , and , at first it sort of looked like a mess and then the more I looked at it , I thought " OK , well it 's moving these words leftward and " You know , it wasn't that bad . So But , I don't , you know , have time to l to look at all of them and it would be really useful to have , like , a a transcriber who could use Waves , just mark , like , the beginning and end of the foreground speaker 's real words like , the beginning of the first word , the end of the last word and then we could , you know , do some adjustments . I have to ask you something , is i does it have to be Waves ? Because if we could benefit from what you did , incorporate that into the present transcripts , that would help . postdoc c: And then , the other thing is , I believe that I did hand So . One of these transcripts was gone over by a transcriber and then I hand - marked it myself so that we do have , the beginning and ending of individual utterances . And also I went back to the original one that I first transcribed and and did it w , w , utterance by utterance for that particular one . So I think you do have if that 's a sufficient unit , I think that you do have hand - marking for that . I used it in Transcriber phd f: U postdoc c: and it 's it 's in the phd a: well , Jane and I were just in terms of the tool , talking about this . You know , interface - wise if you 're looking at speech , you wanna be able to know really where the words are . And so , we can give you some examples of sort of what this output looks like , postdoc c: Yeah , that 's right . Middle of the word , or phd a: and see if you can in maybe incorporate it into the Transcriber tool some way , or postdoc c: Well , I th I 'm thinking just ch e e incorporating it into the representation . postdoc c: if it 's if it 's phd a: You mean like Yeah , word start insights . postdoc c: if you have start points , if you have , like , time tags , phd a: Right . Isn't that what what you ? Well , see , Adam would be phd f: Yeah , whatever you use . phd f: we convert it to this format that the , NIST scoring tool unders , CTM . And and then that 's the that 's what the grad e: I think Transcriber , outputs CTM . phd a: So , postdoc c: It seems like she if she 's g if she 's moving time marks around , phd f: Right . postdoc c: since our representation in Transcriber uses time marks , it seems like there should be some way of of using that benefitting from that . phd a: Yeah , it wou the advantage would just be that when you brought up a bin you would be able if you were zoomed in enough in Transcriber to see all the words , professor b: phd a: you would be able to , like , have the words sort of located in time , if you wanted to do that . professor b: So so if we e e even just had a a It sounds like w we we almost do . phd a: You mean on on the hand - marked , So we we only r hav I only looked at actually alignments from one meeting that we chose , professor b: Yeah . phd a: Not randomly phd f: We knew we knew that it had these insertion errors from phd a: It had sort of average recognition performance in a bunch of speakers phd f: Yeah . phd a: That Yeah , actually it wasn't the new new , it was the medium new . grad g: You did you adjust the the utterance times , for each channel ? postdoc c: Yes . And furthermore , I found that there were a certain number where not not a lot , but several times I actually moved an utterance from Adam 's channel to Dan 's or from Dan 's to Adam 's . So there was some speaker identif And the reason was because I transcribed that at a point before , before we had the multiple audio available f so I couldn't switch between the audio . I I transcribed it off of the mixed channel entirely , which meant in overlaps , I was at a at a terrific disadvantage . And finally I did it using the speakers of my , of you know , off the CPU on my on my machine cuz I didn't have a headphone . postdoc c: So it @ @ , like , Yeah , I , i in retrospect it would 've been good to ha have got I should 've gotten a headphone . But in any case , thi this is this was transcribed in a in a , less optimal way than than the ones that came after it , and I was able to you know , an and this meant that there were some speaker identif identifications which were changes . grad g: Is that what you 're referring to ? , cuz there 's this one instance when , for example , you 're running down the stairs . It 's a Yeah , I 've I 've I 'm very well acquainted with this meeting . grad g: Yeah , I can s phd a: " And then she said , and then he said . grad g: Is that what you 're talking about ? Or were there mislabellings as far as , like , the a Adam was ? postdoc c: That was fixed , before i i i I think I I think I understood that pretty grad g: Yeah . Yeah , no , tha that That I think went away a couple of versions ago , grad g: Yeah . So , with under , listening to the mixed channel , there were times when , as surprising as that is , I got Adam 's voice confused with Dan 's and vice versa grad g: OK . The other thing that was w interesting to me was that I picked up a lot of , backchannels which were hidden in the mixed signal , phd a: Right . But the other thing that I I hadn't thought about this , but I thou I wanted to raise this when you were , with respect to also a strategy which might help with the alignments potentially , but that 's When I was looking at these backchannels , they were turning up usually very often in w well , I won't say " usually " but anyway , very often , I picked them up in a channel w which was the person who had asked a question . S so , like , someone says " an and have you done the so - and - so ? " And then there would be backchannels , but it would be the person who asked the question . postdoc c: i it wouldn't be perfect , but but it does seem more natural to give a backchannel when when you 're somehow involved in the topic , phd a: No , that 's really interesting . postdoc c: and the most natural way is for you to have initiated the topic by asking a question . I think it 's actually I think what 's going on is backchannelling is something that happens in two - party conversations . phd f: And if you ask someone a question , you essentially initiating a little two - party conversation . phd a: Well , actu Yeah , when we looked at this postdoc c: Exactly . phd f: So then you 're so and then you 're expected to backchannel because the person is addressing you directly and not everybody . postdoc c: But in addition , you know , if someone has done this analysis himself and isn't involved in the dyad , but they might also give backchannels to verify what what the answer is that this that the the answerer 's given professor b: H phd a: Right . professor b: I tell you , I say I say " - huh " a lot , phd a: It 's postdoc c: There you go . phd a: Well , but it 's interesting cuz , professor b: while people are talking to each other . phd a: just from We were looking at word frequency lists to try to find the cases that we would allow to have the reject words in between in doing the alignment . phd a: And " - huh " is not as frequent as it sort of would be in Switchboard , if you looked at just a word frequency list of one - word short utterances . And so I was thinking thi it 's not like you 're being encouraged by everybody else to keep talking in the meeting . And , that 's all , I I 'll stop there , cuz I I think what you say makes a lot of sense . And that would phd a: But it was sort of postdoc c: Well , an And what you say is the is the re , o other side of this , which is that , you know , so th there are lots of channels where you don't have these backchannels , w when a question has been asked and and these phd a: Right . phd a: even if you consider every other person altogether one person in the meeting , but we 'll find out anyway . We were I guess the other thing we 're we 're I should say is that we 're gonna , try compare this type of overlap analysis to Switchboard , where phd f: And phd a: and CallHome , where we have both sides , so that we can try to answer this question of , you know , is there really more overlap in meetings or is it just because we don't have the other channel in Switchboard professor b: y y you folks have probably already told me , but were were you intending to do a Eurospeech submission , or ? phd a: you mean the one due tomorrow ? professor b: Yeah . Well , we 're still , like , writing the scripts for doing the research , and we will Yes , we 're gonna try . phd a: And I was telling Don , do not take this as an example of how people should work . professor b: Do as I say , grad g: That 's r phd a: So , we will try . phd a: It 'll probably be a little late , grad e: Well phd a: but I 'm gonna try it . phd a: Well , I 'm no We may be in the same position , and I figured we 'll try , because that 'll at least get us to the point where we have We have this really nice database format that Andreas and I were working out that It it 's not very fancy . It 's just a ASCII line by line format , but it does give you information phd f: It 's the it 's the spurt format . I was trying to find what 's a word for a continuous region with pauses around it ? postdoc c: . professor b: And that 's , I I was using that for a while when I was doing the rate of speech stuff , phd a: I would jus professor b: because I because I looked up in some books and I found OK , I wanna find a spurt in which phd a: Ah , right ! It 's just , like , defined by the acoustics . professor b: and an because cuz it 's another question about how many pauses they put in between them . professor b: But how fast do they do the words within the spurt ? phd a: Right . phd a: Well , that 's what we were calling spurt , grad e: It 's gonna grad g: you know " Burst " also ? grad e: Burst . grad g: Isn't " burst " is used also ? phd a: so grad e: Spurt has the horrible name overloading with other with hardware at ICSI . phd a: Well , well , Chafe had this wor I think it was Chafe , or somebody had a the word " spurt " originally , professor b: But but that just phd h: Here @ @ phd a: and so I But tha that 's good to know . postdoc c: Actually phd a: Was thi it 's Chafe ? postdoc c: Well , see , I know S Sue wrote about spurts of development . phd f: So maybe we should talk phd a: Maybe it was Sue ? Y postdoc c: But , in any case , I think it 's a good term , phd a: So we have spurts and we have spurt - ify dot shell and spurt - ify professor b: Yeah . postdoc c: I know I know Ch - Chafe dealt with phd f: So s grad g: That 's cool . postdoc c: But maybe he speaks about spurts as well phd f: We postdoc c: and I just don't know . phd f: So what we 're doing , this this is just maybe someone has s some some ideas about how to do it better , grad g: Mmm . We 're from each alignment we 're producing , one of these CTM files , postdoc c: Great . phd f: which essentially has it 's just a linear sequence of words with the begin times for every word and the duration . Right ? phd f: And and and of course phd a: It 's just phd f: Right . Third column is the , start times of the words and the fourth column is the duration of the words . Then we have a messy alignment process where we actually insert into the sequence of words the , tags for , like , where where sentence ends of sentence , question marks , various other things . phd a: So , Don sort of , propagated the punctuation from the original transcriber phd f: Right . phd a: so whether it was , like , question mark or period or , you know , comma and things like that , and we kept the and disfluency dashes , kept those in because we sort of wanna know where those are relative to the spurt overlaps phd f: phd a: sp overlaps , phd f: So so those are actually sort of retro - fitted into the time alignment . phd a: or phd f: And then we merge all the alignments from the various channels and we sort them by time . So you you id identify by some criterion , which is pause length you identify the beginnings and ends of these spurts , and you put another set of tags in there to keep those straight . phd f: And then you merge everything in terms of , you know , linearizing the sequence based on the time marks . And then you extract the individual channels again , but this time you know where the other people start and end talking you know , where their spurts start and end . So , you you basically have everything sort of lined up and in a form where you can look at the individual speakers and how their speech relates to the other speakers ' speech . phd a: I think that 's actually really u useful also phd f: And phd a: because even if you weren't studying overlaps , if you wanna get a transcription for the far - field mikes , how are you gonna know which words from which speakers occurred at which times relative to each other ? You have to be able to get a transcript like like this anyway , just for doing far - field recognition . phd a: I thi it 's just an issue we haven't dealt with before , how you time - align things that are overlapping anyway . phd f: So phd a: i I never thought about it before , grad e: Well phd f: And and we phd a: but grad e: Y yes . phd f: In grad e: s when I came up with the original data suggested data format based on the transcription graph , there 's capability of doing that sort of thing in there . Well , this is this is just phd a: Yeah , this is like a poor man 's ver formatting version . It 's like there 're twelve different scripts which you run and then at the end you have what you want . All we care about is whether that there 's a certain word was overlapped by someone else 's word . So you sort of at that point , you discretize things into just having overlap or no overlap . phd f: But if you wanted to do a more fine - grained analysis and say , you know , how far into the word is the overlap , you could do that . phd f: It 's just it 'll just require more phd a: Just sort of huge . phd f: you know , slightly different postdoc c: What 's interesting is it 's exactly what , i in discussing with , Sue about this , phd a: Yeah . postdoc c: she , i i i indicated that that you know , that 's very important for overlap analysis . phd a: and also I think as a human , like , I don't always hear these in the actual order that they occur . So I can have two foreground speakers , you know , Morgan an and , Adam and Jane could all be talking , and I could align each of them to be starting their utterance at the correct time , and then look where they are relative to each other , and that 's not really what I heard . postdoc c: This is This is Bever 's Bever 's effect , phd a: Y Yeah . postdoc c: when where In psy ps psycho - linguistics you have these experiments where people have perceptual biases a as to what they hear , phd a: It 's sort of Yeah , you sort of move things around until you get to a low information point postdoc c: that that Not the best phd a: and yo then you can bring in the other person . So it 's actually not even possible , I think , for any person to listen to a mixed signal , even equalize , and make sure that they have all the words in the right order . , and the good thing is that we have It 's sort of a beginning of what Don can use to link the prosodic features from each file to each other . phd f: Plus , mayb phd h: ? phd a: We - I ju Otherwise we won't get the work done on our deadline . Maybe , you know , you could you could look at this format and see if you find anything interesting . professor b: No , it 's that 's the good thing about these pape paper deadlines and , you know , class projects , and and things like that , postdoc c: Well , what I 'm thinking is phd f: Yeah . postdoc c: Well , my phd f: Well th th the other thing that that that yo that you usually don't tell your graduate students is that these deadlines are actually not that , you know , strictly enforced , professor b: because you you really get g phd a: Forces you to do the work . phd f: because the professor b: Oh , now it 's out in the public , this this this secret information . postdoc c: I think we can ha phd f: bec b Nah phd a: So grad e: No . phd f: Well That 's another issue , professor b: By th by the way , this is totally unfair , you may you may feel , phd f: but professor b: but the the , the morning meeting folks actually have an an extra month or so . The Aurora there 's a special Aurora phd a: phd f: When professor b: There 's a special Aurora session phd a: Oh . professor b: and the Aurora pe people involved in Aurora have till Ma - , early May or something to turn in their paper . phd a: Oh , well maybe we 'll submit to s Actually phd f: Well , then you can just Maybe you can submit the digits paper on e for the Aurora session . professor b: It 's it 's not the Aurora , it it 's it 's actually the Aurora task . phd f: But but the people , a a paper that is not on Aurora would probably be more interesting at that point phd a: Maybe they 'll phd f: because everybody 's so sick and tired of the Aurora task . If you if you have it 's to if you discuss some relation to the Aurora task , like if you use the same professor b: This is not the Aurora task . So they just do a little grep for phd a: Do , d d Do not do not we are not setting a good example . Well , a relation other than negation , maybe , phd a: This is not a phd f: . phd a: But the good thing is this does grad e: Well , I I don't know . , you could you could do a paper on what 's wrong with the Aurora task by comparing it to other ways of doing it . phd f: How well does an Aurora system do on on you know , on digits collected in a in this environment ? phd h: grad e: Different way . professor b: you know , the people who were involved in the the only people who are allowed to test on that are people who who made it above a certain threshold in the first round , phd f: professor b: w in ninety - nine and it 's it 's sort of a it 's not like a phd f: Well , that 's maybe why they don't f know that they have a crummy system . professor b: Oh , you don't like HTK ? phd f: If they phd h: Yeah . phd f: I don't h I don't have any stock in HTK or Entropic or anything . , this it it 's the HTK that is trained on a very limited amount of data . phd f: But so , if you But maybe you should , you know , consider more using more data , or professor b: Oh , yeah . And they i i phd f: If yo if you sort of hermetically stay within one task and don't look left and right , then you 're gonna grad e: But they they had professor b: i But grad e: They had something very specific in mind when they designed it . grad e: And so so you can you can argue about maybe that wasn't the right thing to do , but , you know , they they they had something specific . professor b: But , one of the reasons I have Chuck 's messing around with with the back - end that you 're not supposed to touch , for the evaluations , yes , we 'll run a version that hasn't been touched . professor b: But , one of the reasons I have him messing around with that , because I think it 's sort of an open question that we don't know the answer to . People always say very glibly that i if you s show improvement on a bad system , that doesn't mean anything , cuz it may not be show , because , you know , it doesn't tell you anything about the good system . You know , that if some peopl If you 're actually are getting at something that has some conceptual substance to it , it will port . professor b: And in fact , most methods that people now use were originally tried with something that was not their absolute best system at some level . If we 're getting three percent error on , u , English , nati native speakers , using the Aurora system , and we do some improvements and bring it from three to two , do those same improvements bring , th you know , the SRI system from one point three to you know , to point eight ? phd f: . professor b: You know , that 's that 's pretty solid , on the segmentation stuff . And the Aurora folks here will will definitely get something in on Aurora , phd d: which is not phd f: Actually this this , So , there 's another paper . phd f: And he tested it mostly on digits because it 's sort of a you know , it doesn't take weeks to train it . And got some very impressive results , with , you know , discriminative , Gaussian training . , you know , like , error rates go from I don't know , in very noisy environment , like from , I for now I OK , now I have the order of magnit I 'm not sure about the order of magnitude . Was it like from ten percent to eight percent or from e e you know , point you know , from one percent to point eight percent ? professor b: H i it got it got better . I think the only thing we had left was unless somebody else Well , there 's a couple things . , one is anything that , anybody has to say about Saturday ? Anything we should do in prep for Saturday ? I guess everybody knows about , u , Mari was asking was trying to come up with something like an agenda and we 're sort of fitting around people 's times a bit . But , clearly when we actually get here we 'll move things around this , as we need to , but so you can't absolutely count on it . professor b: I think this is phd f: Are we recording it ? phd a: We won't have enough microphones , professor b: phd a: but professor b: u No . professor b: We won we wanna , they 're there 's gonna be , Jeff , Katrin , Mari and two students . professor b: And Brian 's coming , phd f: But you know th professor b: so that 's six . phd a: We don't even have enough channel professor b: Well phd f: Because it would be a different kind of meeting , phd d: Yeah . phd f: that 's what I 'm professor b: Well phd f: But phd h: Yeah . professor b: I hadn't really thought of it , phd f: Maybe just maybe not the whole day professor b: but phd f: but just , you know , maybe some , professor b: Maybe part of it . phd a: That 's their initiation into our professor b: Any phd a: w grad e: Into our our our cult . phd a: Yeah , our Yeah , our phd f: Maybe the sections that are not right afte you know , after lunch when everybody 's still munching and phd a: So can you send out a schedule once you know it , jus ? professor b: OK . phd a: There 's a res Is it changed now , or ? professor b: But I hadn't heard back from Mari after I I u u , brought up the point abou about Andreas 's schedule . professor b: So , I 'll make a postdoc c: I 'm looking forward to seeing your representation . That 'd be , phd a: And w we should get the two meetings from y postdoc c: I 'd like to see that . phd a: I know about the first meeting , but the other one that you did , the NSA one , which we hadn't done cuz we weren't running recognition on it , because the non - native speaker postdoc c: phd f: The , th the other good thing about the alignments is that , it 's not always the machine 's fault if it doesn't work . phd f: You can find , problems with with the transcripts , you know , grad e: Oh . phd a: Tha - There are some cases like where the the wrong speaker , these ca Not a lot , but where the the wrong person the the speech is addre attached to the wrong speaker phd f: But phd a: and you can tell that when you run it . phd a: So these are from the early transcriptions that people did on the mixed signals , like what you have . It also raises the possibility of , using that kind of representation , I don't know , this 'd be something we 'd wanna check , but maybe using that representation for data entry and then displaying it on the channelized , representation , cuz it I think that the , my my preference in terms of , like , looking at the data is to see it in this kind of musical score format . phd a: Yeah , if you can get it to postdoc c: And and but , this if this is a better interface for making these kinds of , you know , lo clos local changes , then that 'd be fine , too . Th - the other thing I had actually was , I I didn't realize this till today , but , this is , Jose 's last day . phd f: Oh ! grad e: You 're not gonna be here tomorrow ? phd h: My my last meeting about meetings . phd d: The last meeting meeting ? phd h: Because , eh , I leave , eh , the next Sunday . phd h: And I I would like to to to say thank you very much , eh , to all people in the group and at ICSI , phd f: And I 'm sorry by the result of overlapping , because , eh , I haven't good results , eh , yet but , eh , I I pretend to to continuing out to Spain , eh , during the the following months , professor b: - huh . phd h: eh , because I have , eh , another ideas but , eh , I haven't enough time to to with six months it 's not enough to to to research , grad e: Yep . phd h: eh , and e i , if , eh , the topic is , eh , so difficult , in my opinion , there isn't professor b: Yeah . Maybe somebody else will come along and will be , interested in working on it and could start off from where you are also , you know . But , eh , I I will try to recommend , eh , at , eh , the Spanish government but , eh , the following @ @ scholarship , eh , eh , eh , will be here more time , because eh , i in my opinion is is better , eh , for us to to spend more time here and to work more time i i in a topic . You e you have , eh you are lucky , and you you find a solution in in in some few tim , months , eh ? OK . Eh , I I bring the chocolate , eh , to to tear , with with you , phd a: Oh . I I hope if you need , eh , something , eh , from us in the future , I I will be at Spain , to you help , . I guess , unless somebody has something else , we 'll read read our digits grad e: Digits ? professor b: and we 'll get our phd d: . professor b: get our last bit of , Jose 's Jose Jose 's digit phd d: Oops . grad e: Are we gonna do them simultaneously or ? phd h: You eh professor b: I 'm sorry ? phd h: Ye - ye you prefer , eh , to eat , eh , chocolate , eh , at the coffee break , eh , at the ? Or you prefer now , before after ? postdoc c: Well , we have a time phd f: No , we prefer to keep it for ourselves . grad e: Well , we 've gotta wait until after di after we take the mikes off . grad e: So are we gonna do digits simultaneously phd a: You This is our reward if we do our digi professor b: Well ? Yeah . phd h: I I think , eh , it 's enough , eh , for more peopl for more people after . professor b: We 're gonna we 're gonna do digits at the same phd a: Oh . professor b: Alright , so in the interest of getting to the phd a: We could do digits while other people eat . grad e: It 's just the rest of the digits the rest of the digits are very clean , professor b: She is serious . phd d: Yeah ! grad e: without a lot of background noise , phd a: And it You have to write down , like , while y what you 're what ch chocolate you 're eating grad e: so I 'm just not sure phd a: cuz they might make different sounds , like n nuts chocolate with nuts , chocolate without nuts . professor b: Actually actually kind of careful cuz I have a strong allergy to nuts , so I have to sort of figure out one without th phd a: That w Oh , yeah , they they might . phd a: This is You know , this is a different kind of speech , professor b: Well phd h: Take take several . professor b: Well well , why don't we ? He he 's worried about a ticket . phd a: You laughed at me , too , the first time I sa said professor b: I did , phd a: You really shouldn't , te professor b: and now I love it so much . grad e: OK , everyone ready ? phd a: You have to sort of , Jose , if you haven't done this , you have to plug your ears while you 're t talking professor b: W wait wait a minute wait a minute . Oh , you 've done this one before ? postdoc c: Hey , you 've done this before . phd d: That 's phd a: Together ? postdoc c: You 've read digits together with us , haven't you , at the same time ? phd a: I 'm not we we Oh , and you haven't done this either . phd a: I the first time is traumatic , professor b: We phd a: but professor b: Y Yeah , bu postdoc c: Oh , and the groupings are important , phd h: Mmm . So , phd f: You mean that the the grouping is supposed to be synchronized ? professor b: No , no . phd f: No ? phd a: We - we 'll give everybody the same sheet phd f: It 's like a like a Greek like a Greek choir ? phd a: but they say different phd f: You know ? professor b: Yes . OK , why don't we go ? , one two three Go ! postdoc c: OK . grad e: Did you read it twice or what ? phd a: He 's try No , he 's trying to get good recognition performance <doc-sep>grad b: We didn't crash we 're not crashing anymore phd c: One , two , three , four , f grad b: and it really bothers me . phd c: Yeah ? professor a: Oh ! Well maybe it 's just , you know , how many t u u u u how many times you crash in a day . phd g: Or maybe it 's once you 've done enough meetings it won't crash on you anymore . professor a: Do we have an agenda ? Liz Liz and Andreas can't sh can't , can't come . phd g: Did they send , the messages to you about the meeting today ? grad b: I have no idea but I just got it a few minutes ago . grad b: So , does anyone have any a agenda items other than me ? I actually have one more also which is to talk about the digits . professor a: right , so so I I was just gonna talk briefly about the NSF ITR . professor a: and then , you have postdoc f: Can w professor a: I won't say much , but , but then , you said wanna talk about digits ? grad b: I have a short thing about digits and then I wanna talk a little bit about naming conventions , although it 's unclear whether this is the right place to talk about it . So maybe just talk about it very briefly and take the details to the people who for whom it 's relevant . I 've been but but , well professor a: Well if we Yeah , we shouldn't add things in just to add things in . grad b: So the only thing I wanna say about digits is , we are pretty much done with the first test set . There are probably forms here and there that are marked as having been read that weren't really read . So I won't really know until I go through all the transcriber forms and extract out pieces that are in error . The first is what should we do about digits that were misread ? My opinion is , we should just throw them out completely , and have them read again by someone else . grad b: so it it 's perfectly fine to put a a group together again of errors and have them re - read , just to finish out the test set . postdoc f: Oh ! By throw them out completely ? grad b: the other thing you could do is change the transcript to match what they really said . I know I 've done it , where I say say a grad b: What the transcribers did with that is if they did a correction , and they eventually did read the right string , you extract the right string . phd g: Oh , you 're talking about where they completely read the wrong string and didn't correct it ? phd e: Yeah . grad b: So so postdoc f: Well , and s and you 're talking string - wise , you 're not talking about the entire page ? grad b: Correct . grad b: And so the the two options are change the transcript to match what they really said , but then but then the transcript isn't the Aurora test set anymore . phd g: Well how many are how how often does that happen ? grad b: Mmm , five or six times . professor a: Yeah , it 's five or six times out of thousands ? phd c: Yeah . phd g: Yeah , it 's professor a: Yeah , I would , tak do the easy way , phd g: Yeah . professor a: It it 's kinda nice , wh who knows what studies people will be doing on on speaker - dependent things phd c: Mmm . phd g: So you , how many digits have been transcribed now ? grad b: Four thousand lines . phd g: Four thousand lines ? grad b: I didn't I didn't compute the average . grad b: And , Jane , I do have a set of forms which I think you have copies of somewhere . grad b: Yeah , I was just wond I thought I had had all of them back from you . And then the other thing is that , the forms in front of us here that we 're gonna read later , were suggested by Liz postdoc f: No , not yet . And so , I just wanted people to , take a quick look at the instructions phd c: grad b: and the way it wa worked and see if it makes sense and if anyone has any comments on it . Although we could switch it back and tell them always to say " zero " or always to say " O " . professor a: that 's the only thought I have because if you t start talking about these , you know u tr She 's trying to get at natural groupings , but it there 's there 's nothing natural about reading numbers this way . grad b: But , the other problem we were thinking about is if you just put the numerals , they might say forty - three instead of four three . , you can With when you space them out they don't look like , forty - three anymore . grad b: and she felt that it 's very , very natural to do that sort of chunking . it 's a it 's a it 's an interesting problem , we 've done stuff with numbers before , and yeah sometimes people If you say s " three nine eight one " sometimes people will say " thirty - nine eighty - one " or " three hundred three hundred eighty - nine one " , or I don't think they 'd say that , phd c: Yeah . professor a: but but th grad b: Not very frequently professor a: no grad b: but , they certainly could . grad b: and , since this was something that Liz asked for specifically , I think we need to defer to her . Well , we 're probably gonna be collecting meetings for a while and if we decide we still wanna do some digits later we might be able to do some different ver different versions , grad b: Do something different , professor a: but this is the next suggestion , grad b: yeah . OK , so e l I guess , let me , get my my short thing out about the NSF . , I I sent to what I thought we had , in some previous mail , as the right joint thing to send to , which was " M MTG RCDR hyphen joint " . professor a: But then I got some sort of funny mail saying that the moderator was going to grad b: It 's That 's because they set the one up at UW postdoc f: grad b: that 's not on our side , that 's on the U - dub side . grad b: And , I have no idea whether it actually ever goes to anyone so you might just wanna mail to Mari professor a: No no , th I got I got , little excited notes from Mari and Jeff and so on , grad b: and professor a: so it 's grad b: OK , good . grad b: Cuz I had sent one earlier Actually the same thing happened to me I had sent one earlier . The message says , " You 'll be informed " and then I was never informed but I got replies from people indicating that they had gotten it , so . Well , anyway , I guess everybody here Are y are you are on that list , right ? So you got the note ? phd g: professor a: so this was , a , proposal that we put in before on on more more higher level , issues in meetings , from I guess higher level from my point of view . , and , meeting mappings , and , so is i for it was a proposal for the ITR program , Information Technology Research program 's part of National Science Foundation . They 're they 're a lot of them are some of them anyway , are larger larger grants than the usual , small NSF grants , and . So , they 're very competitive , and they have a first phase where you put in pre - proposals , and we we , got through that . grad b: When 's when 's the full proposal due ? professor a: I think April ninth , or something . And they said end of business day you could check on the reviewer forms , phd g: u grad b: is that phd g: Tomorrow . grad b: I guess that 's a good thing cuz that way I got my papers done early . phd g: It would be interesting professor a: So that 's amazing you showed up at this meeting ! grad b: It is . My favorite is was when when when one reviewer says , " you know , this should be far more detailed " , and the nex the next reviewer says , " you know , there 's way too much detail " . Or " this is way too general " , and the other reviewer says , " this is way too specific " . Is that right ? That they didn't reject a lot of the pre - proposals ? professor a: Do you know anything about the numbers ? grad b: No . phd g: Gary Strong 's professor a: I phd g: there was a sentence at the end of one of his paragraphs phd e: Yeah . He said the next phase 'll be very , competitive phd e: Very very , phd g: because we didn't want to weed out much in the first phase . professor a: So , you know , maybe they didn't r weed out as much as usual , but it 's it 's usually a pretty But it Yeah . It 's it 's certainly not I 'm sure that it 's not down to one in two or something of what 's left . professor a: I 'm sure it 's , you know grad b: How how many awards are there , do you know ? professor a: Well there 's different numbers of w awards for different size They have three size grants . This one there 's , See the small ones are less than five hundred thousand total over three years and that they have a fair number of them . , and the large ones are , boy , I forget , I think , more than , more than a million and a half , more than two million or something like that . But , I don't remember , but it 's pr probably along the li I I could be wrong on this yeah , but probably along the lines of fifteen or that they 'll fund , or twenty . when they Do you do you know how many they funded when they f in in Chuck 's , that he got last year ? phd g: I don't I don't know . grad b: I thought it was smaller , that it was like four or five , wasn't it ? professor a: Well they fund phd g: I I 'm professor a: they phd g: I don't remember . professor a: and this time they came up with a middle one , so it 'll there 'll be more of them that they fund than of the big . phd g: If we end up getting this , what will it mean to ICSI in terms of , w wh where will the money go to , what would we be doing with it ? professor a: . professor a: You know , it i None of it will go for those yachts that we 've talking about . phd g: Dang ! professor a: well , no , it 's u It phd g: It 's just for the research to continue the research on the Meeting Recorder stuff ? professor a: It 's extending the research , right ? Because the other phd g: Yeah . grad b: Yeah it 's go higher level stuff than we 've been talking about for Meeting Recorder . Yeah the other things that we have , been working on with , the c with Communicator , especially with the newer things with the more acoustically - oriented things are are are are lower level . And , this is dealing with , mapping on the level of of , the conversation of mapping the conversations phd g: So it 's all it 's all stuff that none none of us are doing right now , or none of us are funded for , so it 's so it 's it would be new . phd g: So assuming everybody 's completely busy now , it means we 're gonna hafta , hire more students , or , something ? professor a: Well there 's evenings , and there 's weekends , and . Yeah , there there would be there would be new hires , and and there there would be expansion , but , also , there 's always for everybody there 's there 's always things that are dropping off , grants that are ending , or other things that are ending , so , phd g: Right . professor a: But but there definitely would be new new new , students , phd g: I see . grad b: Are there any students in your class who are expressing interest ? professor a: not clear yet . professor a: we got we have yeah , two of them are two in the c There 're two in the class already here , and then and and , then there 's a third who 's doing a project here , who , But he he he won't be in the country that long , grad b: professor a: Actually there is one other guy who 's looking that that 's that guy , Jeremy ? I think . professor a: Anyway , yeah that 's that 's all I was gonna say is that that that 's you know , that 's nice and we 're sorta preceding to the next step , and , it 'll mean some more work , you know , in in March in getting the proposal out , and then , it 's , you know We 'll see what happens . It just , we 've been cutting up sound files , in for ba both digits and for , doing recognition . And Liz had some suggestions on naming and it just brought up the whole issue that hasn't really been resolved about naming . So , one thing she would like to have is for all the names to be the same length so that sorting is easier . grad b: same number of characters so that when you 're sorting filenames you can easily extract out bits and pieces that you want . And I don't think we have so many meetings that that 's a big deal just to change the names . So that means , instead of calling it " MR one " , " MR two " , you 'd call it " MRM zero zero one " , " MRM zero zero two " , things like that . postdoc f: But , you know , when you , do things like that you can always as long as you have , you can always search from the beginning or the end of the string . postdoc f: You know , so " zero zero two " grad b: Alright , postdoc f: Yeah . grad b: so we we have th we 're gonna have the speaker ID , the session , information on the microphones , postdoc f: Yeah , well , your example was really grad b: information on the speak on the channels and all that . postdoc f: i grad b: And so if each one of those is a fixed length , the sorting becomes a lot easier . So like , the NSA meeting lengths , all filenames are gonna be the same length as the Meeting Recorder meeting names ? grad b: Yep . And as I said , the it 's we just don't have that many that that 's a big deal . grad b: And so , at some point we have to sort of take a few days off , let the transcribers have a few days off , make sure no one 's touching the data and reorganize the file structures . postdoc f: I I would think though that the transcribe the transcripts themselves wouldn't need to have such lengthy names . postdoc f: So , you 're dealing with a different domain there , and with start and end times and all that , and channels and stuff , grad b: Right . So the only thing that would change with that is just the directory names , postdoc f: so , it 's a different set . grad b: So for for m the meetings we were thinking about three letters and three numbers for meeting I Ds . , for speakers , M or F and then three numbers , For , and , that also brings up the point that we have to start assembling a speaker database so that we get those links back and forth and keep it consistent . We want some way of specifying , more than looking in the " key " file , what channel and what mike . grad b: that 's gonna become especially important once we start changing the microphone set - up . We have some new microphones that I 'd like to start trying out , once I test them . professor a: since we have such a short agenda list I guess I wi I will ask how how are the transcriptions going ? Yeah . postdoc f: The the news is that I 've I s So in s So I 've switched to Start my new sentence . I I switched to doing the channel - by - channel transcriptions to provide , the , tighter time bins for partly for use in Thilo 's work and also it 's of relevance to other people in the project . And , I discovered in the process a couple of of interesting things , which , one of them is that , it seems that there are time lags involved in doing this , using an interface that has so much more complexity to it . And I and I wanted to maybe ask , Chuck to help me with some of the questions of efficiency . Maybe I was thinking maybe the best way to do this in the long run may be to give them single channel parts and then piece them together later . , so it 's like , I I know that I can take them apart and put them together and I 'll end up with the representation which is where the real power of that interface is . postdoc f: And it may be that it 's faster to transcribe a channel at a time with only one , sound file and one , set of of , utterances to check through . I thought that that one of the reason we thought we were so much faster than than , the the other transcription , thing was that that we were using the mixed file . But , with the mixed , when you have an overlap , you only have a a choice of one start and end time for that entire overlap , which means that you 're not tightly , tuning the individual parts th of that overlap by different speakers . postdoc f: So someone may have only said two words in that entire big chunk of overlap . postdoc f: And for purposes of of , things like well , so things like training the speech - nonspeech segmentation thing . postdoc f: And w and w and , you know , is a It would be wonderful if , it 's possible then to use that algorithm to more tightly tie in all the channels after that but , you know , I 've th the So , I I don't know exactly where that 's going at this point . But m I was experimenting with doing this by hand and I really do think that it 's wise that we 've had them start the way we have with , m y working off the mixed signal , having the interface that doesn't require them to do the ti , the time bins for every single channel at a t , through the entire interaction . postdoc f: I did discover a couple other things by doing this though , and one of them is that , once in a while a backchannel will be overlooked by the transcriber . postdoc f: because when it 's a b backchannel could well happen in a very densely populated overlap . And if we 're gonna study types of overlaps , which is what I wanna do , an analysis of that , then that really does require listening to every single channel all the way through the entire length for all the different speakers . Now , for only four speakers , that 's not gonna be too much time , but if it 's nine speakers , then that i that is more time . So it 's li you know , kind of wondering And I think again it 's like this it 's really valuable that Thilo 's working on the speech - nonspeech segmentation because maybe , we can close in on that wi without having to actually go to the time that it would take to listen to every single channel from start to finish through every single meeting . especially if they 're really short and they 're not very loud and so it it can it it will always happen that also the automatic s detection system will miss some of them , so . Well so then then , maybe the answer is to , listen especially densely in places of overlap , phd e: Yeah . postdoc f: just so that they 're they 're not being overlooked because of that , and count on accuracy during the sparser phases . postdoc f: Cuz there are large s spaces of the That 's a good point . I I think it 's really interesting data to work with , I have to say , it 's very enjoyable . , you 're you 're you 're still in the midst of what you 're doing from what you described last time , I assume , phd c: Is true . postdoc f: professor a: and phd c: I haven't results , eh , yet professor a: Yeah . phd c: but , eh , I I 'm continue working with the mixed signal now , after the the last experience . phd c: And and I 'm tried to to , adjust the to to improve , eh , an harmonicity , eh , detector that , eh , I I implement . phd c: But I have problem because , eh , I get , eh , eh , very much harmonics now . phd c: harmonic possi possible harmonics , eh , and now I 'm I 'm I 'm trying to to find , eh , some kind of a , of h of help , eh , using the energy to to distinguish between possible harmonics , and and other fre frequency peaks , that , eh , corres not harmonics . And , eh , I have to to talk with y with you , with the group , eh , about the instantaneous frequency , because I have , eh , an algorithm , and , I get , mmm , eh , t t results similar results , like , eh , the paper , eh , that I I am following . But , eh , the the rules , eh , that , eh , people used in the paper to to distinguish the harmonics , is doesn't work well . phd c: And I I I I not sure that i eh , the the way o to ob the way to obtain the the instantaneous frequency is right , or it 's it 's not right . If if if , If I don't have enough time and y you wanna discuss with someone else some someone else besides us that you might want to talk to , might be Stephane . phd c: and , professor a: Yeah , but phd c: they nnn they they they didn't phd e: I 'm not too experienced with harmonics professor a: I see . phd c: they think that the experience is not enough to phd e: and phd g: Is is this the algorithm where you hypothesize a fundamental , and then get the energy for all the harmonics of that fundamental ? phd c: No , no it 's No No . phd g: And then hypothesize a new fundamental and get the energy professor a: Yeah , that 's wh phd c: No . phd c: And The algorithm said that , eh , if you if you change the the the , eh , nnn the X - the frequency " X " , eh , using the in the instantaneous frequency , you can find , eh , how , eh , in several frequencies that proba probably the the harmonics , eh , professor a: - huh . phd c: the errors of peaks the frequency peaks , eh , eh , move around these , eh eh frequency harmonic the frequency of the harmonic . And , eh , if you if you compare the the instantaneous frequency , eh , of the of the , eh , continuous , eh , eh , filters , that , eh that , eh , they used eh , to to to get , eh , the the instantaneous frequency , professor a: phd c: it probably too , you can find , eh , that the instantaneous frequency for the continuous , eh , eh the output of the continuous filters are very near . phd c: And professor a: It 's it 's it 's I haven't worked with that either so I 'm not sure The way the simple - minded way I suggested was what Chuck was just saying , is that you could make a a sieve . professor a: Let 's let 's hypothesize that it 's this frequency or that frequency , and and , maybe you maybe you could use some other cute methods to , short cut it by by , making some guesses , phd c: Yeah . professor a: but but , I would , you could make some guesses from , from the auto - correlation or something but but then , given those guesses , try , only looking at the energy at multiples of the of that frequency , and and see how much of the take the one that 's maximum . phd g: Do you hafta do some kind of , low - pass filter before you do that ? phd c: I don't use . phd g: Or phd c: But , I I know many people use , eh , low - pass filter to to to get , eh , the pitch . phd g: But i But the harmonics are gonna be , I don't know what the right word is . , they 're gonna be dampened by the , vocal tract , right ? The response of the vocal tract . professor a: Yeah ? phd c: Yeah ? phd g: And so just looking at the energy on those at the harmonics , is that gonna ? professor a: Well so the thing is that the This is for , a , phd g: I m what you 'd like to do is get rid of the effect of the vocal tract . professor a: But , but I but but I don't know that you need to grad b: Open wide ! professor a: but I don't need you know if you need to get rid of it . that 'd that 'd be nice but I don't know if it 's ess if it 's essential . , cuz I think the main thing is that , you 're trying phd g: - huh . professor a: wha what are you doing this for ? You 're trying distinguish between the case where there is , where where there are more than , where there 's more than one speaker and the case where there 's only one speaker . professor a: So if there 's more than one speaker , yeah I guess you could I guess yeah you 're so you 're not distinguished between voiced and unvoiced , so so , i if you don't if you don't care about that phd c: Yeah . professor a: See , if you also wanna just determine if you also wanna determine whether it 's unvoiced , then I think you want to look look at high frequencies also , because the f the fact that there 's more energy in the high frequencies is gonna be an ob sort of obvious cue that it 's unvoiced . professor a: But , i i i i but , other than that I guess as far as the one person versus two persons , it would be primarily a low frequency phenomenon . And if you looked at the low frequencies , yes the higher frequencies are gonna there 's gonna be a spectral slope . that 's that 's w phd c: I will prepare for the next week eh , all my results about the harmonicity and will will try to come in and to discuss here , because , eh , I haven't enough feeling to to u many time to to understand what happened with the with , eh , so many peaks , eh , eh , and I I see the harmonics there many time but , eh , there are a lot of peaks , eh , that , eh , they are not harmonics . phd c: I have to discover what what is the the w the best way to to to c to use them professor a: Well , but yeah I don't think you can you 're not gonna be able to look at every frame , so I I I really I I really thought that the best way to do it , and I 'm speaking with no experience on this particular point , but , my impression was that the best way to do it was however you You 've used instantaneous frequency , whatever . However you 've come up you with your candidates , you wanna see how much of the energy is in that phd c: Yeah . And , if it 's voiced , I guess so so y I think maybe you do need a voiced - unvoiced determination too . professor a: and the , e the fraction of the energy that 's in the harmonic sequence that you 're looking at is relatively low , then it should be then it 's more likely to be an overlap . This this is the idea the idea I I I had to to compare the the ratio of the the energy of the harmonics with the eh , with the , eh , total energy in the spectrum and try to get a ratio to to distinguish between overlapping and speech . professor a: But you 're looking a y you 're looking at Let 's take a second with this . , you 're looking at f at the phase derivative , in in , what domain ? this is this is in in in in bands ? Or or phd c: No , no , no . professor a: Just just overall phd c: It 's a it 's a o i w the band the band is , eh , from zero to to four kilohertz . And I I ot I professor a: And you just take the instantaneous frequency ? phd c: Yeah . to FFT to to obtain the or to study the harmonics from from the spectrum directly , professor a: Yeah . And another another algorithm I have is the in the instantaneous frequency , based on on on the FFT to to to calculate the the phase derivate in the time . phd c: But , eh , in m i in my opinion the the the instantaneous frequency , the the the behavior , eh , was th it was very interesting . Because I I saw eh , how the spectrum concentrate , eh , professor a: Oh ! phd c: around the the harmonic . But then when I apply the the rule , eh , of the in the the instantaneous frequency of the ne of the continuous filter in the the near filter , the the rule that , eh , people propose in the paper doesn't work . professor a: But the instantaneous frequency , wouldn't that give you something more like the central frequency of the you know , of the where most of the energy is ? , I think if you Does i does it Why would it correspond to pitch ? phd c: Yeah . phd c: When first I I calculate , eh , using the FFT , postdoc f: Di - digital camera . professor a: Oh , so you scale you s you do a a scaling along that axis according to instantaneous phd c: I use Yeah . phd c: eh , when i I I use these these frequency , eh , the range is different , and the resolution is different . phd c: But , eh , they used , eh , a rule , eh , based in the in the because to to calculate the instantaneous frequency , they use a Hanning window . phd c: And , they said that , eh , if these peak are , eh , harmonics , the f instantaneous frequency , of the contiguous , eh w eh eh , filters are very near , or have to be very near . But , eh , phh ! I don't I I I I don I I and I don't know what is the what is the distance . And I tried to to put different distance , eh , to put difference , eh eh , length of the window , eh , different front sieve , Pfff ! and I I not sure what happened . I 'll probably gonna hafta look at the paper , but which I 'm not gonna have time to do in the next few days , but but I 'm I 'm curious about it . postdoc f: I I did i it did occur to me that this is , the return to the transcription , that there 's one third thing I wanted to to ex raise as a to as an issue which is , how to handle breaths . So , I wanted to raise the question of whether people in speech recognition want to know where the breaths are . And the reason I ask the question is , aside from the fact that they 're obviously very time - consuming to encode , the fact that there was some I had the indication from Dan Ellis in the email that I sent to you , phd e: Yeah . postdoc f: and you know about , that in principle we might be able to , handle breaths by accessi by using cross - talk from the other things , be able that in principle , maybe we could get rid of them , so maybe And I was I I don't know , we had this an and I didn't couldn't get back to you , phd e: Yeah . postdoc f: but the question of whether it 'd be possible to eliminate them from the audio signal , which would be the ideal situation , professor a: I don't know think it 'd be ideal . professor a: We - See , we 're we 're dealing with real speech and we 're trying to have it be as real as possible phd e: Yeah . postdoc f: Well , except that these are really truly , ther there 's a segment in o the one I did n the first one that I did for i for this , phd e: Yeah . postdoc f: where truly w we 're hearing you breathing like as if we 're you 're in our ear , you know , and it 's like it 's like professor a: Yeah . postdoc f: I y i , breath is natural , but not professor a: It is but it is if you record it . postdoc f: Except that we 're we 're trying to mimic Oh , I see what you 're saying . grad b: The P D A might not have to , phd e: No i grad b: but more people than just PDA users are interested in this corpus . grad b: So so mean you 're right postdoc f: OK , then the then I have two questions . grad b: we could remove it , postdoc f: Yeah ? grad b: but I I think we don't wanna w remove it from the corpus , in terms of delivering it because the people will want it in there . If if it gets in the way of what somebody is doing with it then you might wanna have some method which will allow you to block it , but you it 's real data . You don't wanna b but you don't postdoc f: OK , well professor a: If s you know , if there 's a little bit of noise out there , and somebody is is talking about something they 're doing , that 's part of what we accept as part of a real meeting , even And we have the f the the the fan and the in the projector up there , and , this is it 's this is actual stuff that we we wanna work with . postdoc f: because i it basically has a i it shows very clearly the contrast between , speech recognition research and discourse research because in in discourse and linguistic research , what counts is what 's communit communicative . postdoc f: And breath , you know , everyone breathes , they breathe all the time . postdoc f: and the idea is that the transcripts will that get stored as a master there 'll be a master transcript which has in it everything that 's needed for both of these uses . postdoc f: And the one that 's used for speech recognition will be processed via scripts . Discourse side will have this this side over he the we we 'll have a s ch Sorry , not being very fluent here . But , this the discourse side will have a script which will stri strip away the things which are non - communicative . So then the then let 's let 's think about the practicalities of how we get to that master copy with reference to breaths . So what I would r r what I would wonder is would it be possible to encode those automatically ? Could we get a breath detector ? grad b: Oh , just to save the transcribers time . postdoc f: and just simply the keystrokes it takes to negotiate , to put the boundaries in , to to type it in , i it 's just a huge amount of time . postdoc f: And you wanna be sure it 's used , and you wanna be sure it 's done as efficiently as possible , and if it can be done automatically , that would be ideal . professor a: what if you put it in but didn't put the boundaries ? postdoc f: Well , but professor a: So you just know it 's between these other things , postdoc f: Well , OK . So now there 's there 's another another possibility professor a: right ? postdoc f: which is , the time boundaries could mark off words from nonwords . professor a: Yeah I 'm think if it 's too if it 's too hard for us to annotate the breaths per se , we are gonna be building up models for these things and these things are somewhat self - aligning , so if so , we i i if we say there is some kind of a thing which we call a " breath " or a " breath - in " or " breath - out " , the models will learn that sort of thing . , so but you but you do want them to point them at some region where where the breaths really are . But that would maybe include a pause as well , phd g: Well , there 's a there 's postdoc f: and that wouldn't be a problem to have it , pause plus breath plus laugh plus sneeze ? professor a: Yeah , i You know there is there 's this dynamic tension between between marking absolutely everything , as you know , and and and marking just a little bit and counting on the statistical methods . But if there seems to be a lot of effort for a small amount of reward in some area , and this might be one like this Although I I I 'd be interested to h get get input from Liz and Andreas on this to see if they Cuz they 've - they 've got lots of experience with the breaths in in , their transcripts . grad b: They have lots of experience with breathing ? phd g: I professor a: Actually Well , yes they do , but we we can handle that without them here . But but but , you were gonna say something about phd g: Yeah , I I think , one possible way that we could handle it is that , you know , as the transcribers are going through , and if they get a hunk of speech that they 're gonna transcribe , u th they 're gonna transcribe it because there 's words in there or whatnot . But if there 's a big hunk of speech , let 's say on Morgan 's mike where he 's not talking at all , don't don't worry about that . phd g: So what we 're saying is , there 's no guarantee that , So for the chunks that are transcribed , everything 's transcribed . So you just somebody can't rely on that data and say " that 's perfectly clean data " . do you see what I 'm saying ? postdoc f: Yeah , you 're saying it 's uncharted territory . phd g: So I would say don't tell them to transcribe anything that 's outside of a grouping of words . phd e: Yeah , and that 's that that quite co corresponds to the way I I try to train the speech - nonspeech detector , as I really try to not to detect those breaths which are not within a speech chunk but with which are just in in a silence region . phd e: And they so they hopefully won't be marked in in those channel - specific files . professor a: u I I wanted to comment a little more just for clarification about this business about the different purposes . professor a: See , in a in a way this is a really key point , that for speech recognition , research , e a it 's not just a minor part . In fact , the I think I would say the core thing that we 're trying to do is to recognize the actual , meaningful components in the midst of other things that are not meaningful . So it 's critical it 's not just incidental it 's critical for us to get these other components that are not meaningful . professor a: if we had only linguistically - relevant things if if we only had changes in the spectrum that were associated with words , with different spectral components , and , we we didn't have noise , we didn't have convolutional errors , we didn't have extraneous , behaviors , and so forth , and moving your head and all these sorts of things , then , actually speech recognition i i isn't that bad right now . professor a: The the the reason we still complain about it is because is when when you have more realistic conditions then then things fall apart . I guess , I , what I was wondering is what what at what level does the breathing aspect enter into the problem ? Because if it were likely that a PDA would be able to be built which would get rid of the breathing , so it wouldn't even have to be processed at thi at this computational le well , let me see , it 'd have to be computationally processed to get rid of it , but if there were , like likely on the frontier , a good breath extractor then , and then you 'd have to professor a: But that 's a research question , you know ? And so postdoc f: Yeah , well , see and that 's what I wouldn't know . so so the thing is it 's it right now it 's just raw d it 's just data that we 're collecting , and so we don't wanna presuppose that people will be able to get rid of particular degradations because that 's actually the research that we 're trying to feed . So , you know , an and maybe maybe in five years it 'll work really well , postdoc f: OK . professor a: and and it 'll only mess - up ten percent of the time , but then we would still want to account for that ten percent , so . postdoc f: I guess there 's another aspect which is that as we 've improved our microphone technique , we have a lot less breath in the in the more recent , recordings , so it 's in a way it 's an artifact that there 's so much on the on the earlier ones . phd g: One of the , just to add to this one of the ways that we will be able to get rid of breath is by having models for them . phd g: And so in order to build the model you need to have some amount of it marked , so that you know where the boundaries are . phd g: So , I don't think we need to worry a lot about breaths that are happening outside of a , you know , conversation . We don't have to go and search for them to to mark them at all , but , if they 're there while they 're transcribing some hunk of words , I 'd say put them in if possible . postdoc f: OK , and it 's also the fact that they differ a lot from one channel to the other because of the way the microphone 's adjusted

The transcribers occasionally made mistakes in identifying speakers and missed subtle backchannels in the mixed signal. It was decided that audible breaths should only be coded within a group of words and not outside regions of continuous speech. However, it was recognized that audible breaths are an important aspect of recorded speech and should not be removed from the corpus. Speaker mn005 will present his findings on detecting speaker overlap in the next meeting. In densely populated sections of speaker overlap, transcribers are likely to overlook backchannels, which also poses a challenge for automatic speech and non-speech detection. Speaker mn014 highlighted the issue of short and not loud enough backchannels being overlooked. Speaker mn005 also faced difficulties in distinguishing between possible harmonics and other frequency peaks, as well as creating an algorithm for obtaining instantaneous frequency. The encoding of all audible breaths was deemed too time-consuming.

Question: What was the final decision regarding the name, color, and logo of the product, based on the group's discussion and decision-making process? Article: user interface: project manager: and , I'll be taking minutes on this one , and Being hooked up to the PowerPoint for this meeting isn't very necessary for myself , because it'll be more about , what you guys are bringing to the meeting today . 'Cause I was too busy carried away doing my own thing , marketing: industrial designer: which is not obviously not a very good part of a team-working thing . industrial designer: so I was looking at how we're going to go about the working design , and what we actually need to do , and what the remote control needs to do . And it needs to allow a person to have a portable desi device , so they can control the television from wherever they are . , from , on a functional side of things , we found out that wh from our previous meeting , we decided that there're certain points that will make our product unique . And we could use illuminated buttons , which we are all familiar with when we're using a mobile phone , or something fam familiar . Or we could use fluorescent materials which would just take in the light during the day , and then as soon as they go off they would glow in the dark . So if we lost the remote control , perhaps there could be a button on the television set itself , which you could press , and then an alarm from the handset would sound where it was , hopefully in the room . , another thing I think we d missed out on on the last meeting was the fact that we should consider the environmental impact of our design . , from previous researches I've carried out on other projects , we've learnt about smart materials where specific alloys of metals have a shape memory . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: So they can be heated and and cooled , and they change the shape of the metal . So , for example , a screw that's holding something together could expand and it would force all the components apart . So , the benefits of this for our product would be that when it came to the end of its product life , if it was heated , everything would spring apart . So , all the individual components could be easily separated , and then some could be reused , some could be recycled , and I think that would be very important for products now . Especially 'cause there's much responsibility for all the companies who are coming up with like new designs . 'Cause all , we all know that our resources are being limited , and we have to be very environmentally conscious . project manager: So that , someone could have this product for as long as they felt that they wanted it , and then once they contribute it , then that company can break down the part , the parts better ? industrial designer: And then Yeah . Yeah they would , you would make the , the product as you normally would , apart from the , the bits that hold it all together would be made out of this shape-memory alloy . , the user would return the p product to the company , 'cause it's the product's responsibility to get rid of what they've made . , and then the company could then just use , make use of this shape-memory alloys to split up the components , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: and then either reuse some bits , and other bits which are obviously gonna wear out with time , or not usable , they might be like be able to put into scrap metal . Something like the case , if it's scratched or something , you would want to reuse it , but you might be able to melt it down and reuse it again somewhere else . Would we be the company that would break down these , or metals ? Or would we contribute to another group ? industrial designer: You could we could probably empl em employ a , a side company or something to do that for us . industrial designer: but project manager: One thing we have to consider is our one hundred percent turnover goal that we have for our financial sector . project manager: so we'll have to investigate how much that will cost us , cost the company , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Well I the fact of the shape-memory alloys is that they , they don't need to be manually de deconstructed . industrial designer: So I suppose it does need like high contact , yeah , you know high quality machinery , and very specific machinery , but project manager: Alright . project manager: I'm sorry , could you industrial designer: There we go project manager: Those were industrial designer: . , an' yeah , well how the infrared will actually be sent through the chip to be received by the chip on the television set itself . industrial designer: Okay ? So , now is it F_ eight again to escape ? Or escape ? There we go . Can you see ? marketing: Oh , user interface: Do you think Is it , function eight yeah ? project manager: Yeah . , in this case it's the function of the remote control , which is to send messages to the television , television set . By taking inspiration from other similar designs , we'll try and come up with an original trendy remote control , which is sellable international . , multifunctional controls can be difficult to use , as the multitude of buttons can be confusing . A single function remote control is simpler to use , but it means you have to have other remote controls for your other entertainment devices . user interface: I think that a single function remote control would be preferable , because it's easier to use . , it will make an original design more obtainable , as we have less functional necessities to include in the design . And probably more sellable just because it's more compatible with a r a wider range of devices . Does anyone have any questions ? marketing: So as far as we know , a single function television remote control is us usable internationally ? user interface: Well , it's just that , when we're creating it , we're , we have to make it compatible with different brands of devices . user interface: And it would be easier to make it compatible with just different brands of television devices rather than other ent , marketing: D_V_D_s and V_C_R_ ? user interface: yeah , project manager: Right . project manager: Does everyone agree with this ? Does anyone object and , and find the multifunctional might be a better way to go ? industrial designer: I was just wondering about the , what , what Genevieve said before , about having like some hidden controls like having the outer casing . And that would probably , I d , well well what you said before about it being a more profitable simplistic design . Do you think ? marketing: Yeah , I think I agree with the single design thing for now , because we're trying to do so much , that if we're trying to make a unique , user-friendly , dadada , and it's also multi also multifunctional , we're gonna go over budget for one thing . project manager: Alright , well , marketing: project manager: are you ready for your presentation Genevieve ? marketing: Yes I am . Except you're not hooked up to the marketing: Oh , user interface: marketing: I'm not hooked up , but other than that , completely ready . , if you all remember from the email we got before our very first kick-off meeting , with the coffee machine ? The functional requirements of that was to produce hot coffee quickly . , I've done some marketing research , a lot of interviews with remote control users , and some internet research . project manager: I'm sorry , what was that last thing that you just said ? marketing: we should be looking towards trends in both clothing and interior design . marketing: Any trends that are going on in , in the public , even media , industrial designer: . marketing: you know who's famous , what T_V_ shows are being watched , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: the other twenty five percent didn't specify if they love them or found them , you know , neutral . project manager: I'm sorry , that eighty percent of users would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy . You mean that they would spend more money on a fancy-looking remote control ? marketing: Yeah , they're willing , they're willing to spend money on a remote control with personality . marketing: As opposed to your basic , you know , oval black , all same size button remote control . project manager: And another thing with lots of surfing , we'd probably have to work on something that could be a lot more durable , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: because I find with channel-changers that , a lot of the numbers get rubbed down if they're printed on the button . marketing: And actually to go with that , I'm gonna give you some statistics on the relevancy of the buttons , how much they're used . , so obviously when commercials come on they're changing it , so as you said we want a durable button that's not gonna run down . user interface: It has T_V_ has like information , it has information on holidays , the news , entertainment . marketing: So like a running banner , underneath project manager: No it's a button that you press , and then you , like a menu pops up . industrial designer: It's like user interface: And you have page numbers like for the menu , and you press the page numbers with your remote , and it , it'll come up . industrial designer: Yeah , it's just information that , like television timetables , what's on , what's on now , what's on next , on every channel , and marketing: Right . Well I guess I'm not with it , because I wasn't But it's , it's being used fourteen times an hour . So it looks like something that we're gonna want to do some research on and include on our remote control . You know if you get a new T_V_ set , you tune in all the channels , industrial designer: To get the right reception and picture , I suppose . marketing: Is that what it is ? People with arthritis and such ? project manager: That's rather sad . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: marketing: maybe our industrial designer: Oh , I'm guessing that's what it is . marketing: But we'll have to also avoid , you know , buttons responding to the slightest touch as well . Ninety one point two percent said that they would pay extra money to have voice recogni voice recognition included on their remote control . , and you can see that number decreases a bit with ol s Interestingly enough , twenty five to thirty five is the lowest amount . So I guess we're gonna have to figure out what age group we're , we're targeting , and if and if voice recognition is something we wanna look into . project manager: I agree with if we're targeting young adults then it would be something we should look into . project manager: and especially if we are trying to be trendy , go with fashions , things like that . project manager: ages like from thirty five to sixty five which show lower numbers probably won't be as concerned . I don't know if it'd be , if we'd still have a remote , or if you're talking to your television and saying change channel . marketing: So it m it may be too complicated for us , but it's something to keep in mind anyway . industrial designer: And if there was conversation in the room at the same time , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: although in theory it doesn't tend to be when you're watching television , project manager: industrial designer: but could be very difficult to get the specific design . project manager: We need to decide if that is our intention is , is a simplistic design . project manager: because if , if it is then I think voice , voice-activated marketing: It looks like project manager: Yeah , and that would sort of negate the whole remote control thing , marketing: project manager: because if people can activate the television with their voice then they won't be using a , they won't be talking into a remote , I'm sure . an L_C_D_ screen though might be something that , you know , you can shift through pages kind of li the way this PowerPoint is working . industrial designer: What , what would appear on the screen ? project manager: I have no idea still . marketing: now that's , I , I dunno exactly what exactly we'd put on there . Could it it It would be good if it had the actual programme that was on , and what was next . But that would probably be industrial designer: Like linked in with the teletext , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: or sort of like an teletext at your fingers , without having to access that through the television . user interface: marketing: Well I guess that's something we can all take back to our respective research . Every remote control looks the same , so in my opinion it should be , user-friendly and unique . user interface: marketing: So if we're , if we're aiming to make this an international university , universally accepted product industrial designer: . if we wanted to concentrate on fifteen to twenty five years olds , we could go for the fancy stuff . But if we wanna make fifty million , and and have everyone want this remote control , we should maybe stick to the basics . user interface: And we should keep in mind that fifteen to twenty five year olds might not have twenty five Euros to spend on a remote control . Like their priorities might not be a fancy remote control , when they're just starting out marketing: you know , a sixteen year old boy would say , yeah I'd pay extra for voice recognition , until they realise that's three months allowance . marketing: so I I think , I think the older generations we should be catering to a bit more . And if one of the largest , or most complained about thing is that it takes so long to get to know how to use a remote control , user interface: Twenties . project manager: I'm sure that something like an L_C_D_ screen or remote control would be just furthering that problem . Before we go into more discussion on we want this design to look like , I've received some information from the management that will affect some of our decisions . , for one thing , because Having controls with D_V_D_ , V_C_R_ , that sort of thing , would really complicate the design of the remote control . , we've decided not to include them and make it a specific , just a specific television function . Which is good as , as we've sort of decided that we would like to go with that anyway . Another thing that might affect other decisions is that the management feels that teletext is outdated , because more people are using the internet now . industrial designer: Were they , was the management suggesting use of the internet rather than teletext , or just avoiding both altogether ? project manager: well , we don't have the resources or or possibility of using the internet with the remote control , industrial designer: Yeah . This is for the design , the design of the product is that we wanna create , more of a sense that people know that this is from our company . So , all the remote controls must have our We'll incorporate our logo and colour in in some way . project manager: So , perhaps our logo on the bottom , or wherever you feel like it would look good . project manager: it doesn't have to be the colour of our of our company industrial designer: Just project manager: but , another thing is that , industrial designer: project manager: we need to , we probably would have to have that colour and , and logo decided upon . , I'm assuming that we already have one , but for the purposes of this meeting I , I wasn't offered a , like a type of logo or colour , so if that could be somewhere on the design so that we can be recognisable . , so , now we need to discuss , and come to a decision on our remote control functions , of , of how this is going to be . industrial designer: marketing: Okay , so I Are we going to write off the L_C_D_ option ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: I think it would be annoying though if I don't use teletext that much , but if it was on your T_V_ , you'd want to be able to use it , if project manager: Yeah , but another thing is that if we're reaching an international crowd , I know for one that in North America there is no such thing as teletext , so it'd be really superfluous . project manager: Do you know if anywhere else has it ? industrial designer: I don't know . industrial designer: But if Was it a management decision that we're having project manager: It was a management decision , industrial designer: Okay . project manager: so it's , it's pretty much out of our hands at this point . industrial designer: Minimal marketing: And the What was the word they used ? F findability is important . project manager: 'Cause I'm sure that could be inex inexpensive because we could use the same kind of infrared user interface: Yeah . user interface: Would you be able to , put the little device anywhere ? 'Cause isn't our remote control for all T_V_s , so industrial designer: If user interface: you'd ha industrial designer: Do you mean the the link between the user interface: Yeah , with the button that you pressed . user interface: C 'cause then it would only be a applicable to one T_V_ set , so it would need to be something that you could stick somewhere , or something . project manager: Yeah , it would have t industrial designer: Maybe something adhesive that you could like stick onto the back of any set that would be yeah not very obtrusive . Then it wouldn't , it probably wouldn't be able to use It would be able to use the same reception on the remote c control I guess , but the actual device would have to have its own infrared signaller . user interface: Would it need a battery then ? project manager: Maybe , industrial designer: Pr probably . industrial designer: Unless it could be project manager: That's your department you'll have to sort that out . , unless some way , it could have some universal connection to like the socket , the same socket that the T_V_'s supplied from . project manager: Yeah , you'll have to industrial designer: So , more research into that one . project manager: Yeah , you'll have to investi Do some research on that , user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . , alright , and I'm sure that , the glow-in-the-dark , fluorescent , whatever , system , is a go ahead . Is everyone interested in that ? industrial designer: Y marketing: On the buttons ? user interface: I I like the light up suggestion . user interface: 'Cause you know the way fluorescent lights lose their brightness after certain time , so industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: it doesn't user interface: I would go for marketing: It could it could be a tactile thing as well . right , if w if we're minimising buttons , we might be able to make them actually larger . industrial designer: Like a raised marketing: and I don't know what we could do for , for channels . S user interface: Well just the numbers could be embossed , couldn't it ? Like raised . user interface: Just little arrows , that you could feel , maybe ? industrial designer: Yeah marketing: Yeah . marketing: I just thought that it , it might be sucking more battery power , if there , if it is a light up . project manager: But industrial designer: And also y , Heather you mentioned before , like how it should be accessible to everybody . industrial designer: So like you say tactile might be better , because it'd be more available to everybody . Could we somehow We could , may , possibly , sorry , incorporate them both so that the buttons could maybe be in the shape of the numbers themselves and be made out of some glow-in-the-dark material . project manager: 'Cause I d I don't think that glow-in-the-dark material , like the actual soft plastic , costs that much more than other colours . marketing: I guess the other option , referring to the battery thing is , you know how cellphones will t light up for fifteen seconds or something , when you're s and then it goes , industrial designer: Yeah . I know , I'm thinking of mostly when you're watching a movie you turn all the lights off right . marketing: And you don't want to turn on the lights , to turn it down , because there's suddenly an explosion , and it's gonna wake up the baby . industrial designer: I project manager: for the meeting , but I think we should discuss this light subject a little bit more before we close . What were you talking about with the lighting up buttons ? marketing: Oh , just if it was kinda the same way that a cell You know how a cellphone will light up for about ten , fifteen seconds when you touch a button , after having not touched it for a while . marketing: if instead of a constant light up on the , on the remote control , if it lights up for ten seconds when it's touched again . marketing: Yeah , and you , you touch it and it just kind of lights up a bit , and it gives a faint glow . industrial designer: So , self-timed marketing: So if you have all the lights off in your living room , you'll , you'll temporarily see it . project manager: So , do you think that we should do the lighting up thing , and the glow-in-the-dark thing , and the shape of the numbers ? Do we have to kind of decide what we're gonna do with this . And as you're saying like numbers can wear off if they're just sort of like painted on , you know printed . And it could , if it's that softer rubber material it'll be , maybe , better for people with els no industrial designer: durable . project manager: what's it called , R_S_I_ , what was it that we were talking about ? industrial designer: Oh yeah . , did we want to go for the glow-in-the-dark look ? industrial designer: project manager: Or did we want to go for the lighting up instantly ? user interface: If project manager: Like should we do both ? Or we can have one or the other ? Because it might , for , for our design purposes , the lighting up thing might be better because glow-in-the-dark material has a funny kinda colour . industrial designer: Yeah , and we could marketing: whereas we're trying to be trendy and fashionable . industrial designer: Yeah there are now like loads , or a huge range of different colours that it could light up in as well , marketing: So industrial designer: which could like link in with the company colours . industrial designer: or like we've just limited t with the , just ordinary phosphorescent so project manager: Right . user interface: I was thinking though , if it was glow-in-the-dark , you could put the Real Reaction symbol as glow-in-the-dark , and then it would be constantly advertised . And do you have anything marketing: What project manager: Do you have anything to say ? marketing: Oh sorry . So I I dunno if there's something that diff , you know like five different face plates . I dunno if this will start making it more complicated , but it could increase the popularity of the , of the remote . Interchangeable thing ? marketing: Yeah , project manager: Like an iPod or something ? user interface: That would be good . marketing: And I dunno if we'd want to go with like T_V_ show themes or something . user interface: Yeah , and then that would be more profitable like as a sideline to the remote as well . You could start out with three , and if , if we hit it big then we can add some on . industrial designer: als project manager: You'd just get one mould , user interface: No . industrial designer: Interchan And also possible , we could gain out of that by advertising certain T_V_ shows , or project manager: Yeah . project manager: So , if it takes off then we'll , we'll , we'll try that out . project manager: Do we need to reach a decision on that right now ? industrial designer: I've project manager: Because we need to investigate the financial implications . Is it industrial designer: Let's project manager: Does it need to be decided on now ? Or should we industrial designer: I think we could probably leave that 'til later on , then <doc-sep>project manager: Can I close this ? user interface: we don't have any changes , do we ? project manager: Oh , okay . Well Ah s Forgot to insert the minutes , but it's about the same thing we discussed before . Well , we discussed the design , no sharp corners , we rounded it off , like you see on the other screen , which is fine . We agreed that we would implement both the L_C_D_ and speech recognition , but I'll get to that in a moment . Nee no , you just go ahead and present the w we'll scrap it later because What ? industrial designer: I think it's more or less the same as we had . user interface: It's basically what we agreed upon , marketing: ? project manager: Oh that's user interface: but just a little bit more specified . industrial designer: No much s project manager: hasn't changed that much , huh ? industrial designer: No no no , not at all . Basically in what we discussed , cover and buttons will be made of rubber , yellow colour , black components , as you can see right over here . user interface: So Probab project manager: I think that's more I think that's more durable anyway than printed on to user interface: Yeah . user interface: And it I guess it's more easier to just paint it on the rubber industrial designer: Yeah , of course . user interface: that's what we had We chose the buttons to be teletext , okay button , favourite channel and the mute . So just half a Euro for You have pushbuttons and an L_C_D_ display . Well think I had the best solution that I came up with is just to s take out the speech recognition . But ninety percent who favour an L_C_D_ display , and only sixty percent that favour speech recognition . I think it's also harder to user interface: we don't really have a extra function with the speech sample , marketing: Yeah . So and so it's still stuck with thirteen , so I had to take out the special colour I suppose . Yeah , I could take out the push-buttons , marketing: Pushbut project manager: but we need those . So , generally what I came up with , in order to be cou to to have production cost of twelve and a half Euros , spe scrap speech recognition industrial designer: Huh . project manager: and the separate covers can account for the if people want it , we'll just then we'll do it in black . We'll just deliver it in black , have the it has all the function that it's supposed to have , and if you want it if you want the custom design , then you can buy the separate covers . user interface: I'd I tend to disagree with you on that , because the trend issue was a big issue when we started designing this . project manager: It was a big issue , but user interface: So can't we just basically extend it to thirteen ? project manager: I'll just go back . let's just let's see what okay , let's just see what we no , we we have to be under twelve and a half . marketing: Yeah , it project manager: It it's not marketing: The p project manager: the project is a no-go if we go over twelve and a half , industrial designer: Okay , but there's another problem . marketing: What industrial designer: If we take another cover , for instance black , then we also need another button frame , 'cause black and black doesn't work obviously . project manager: I think you that's what you were ass assigned to do really , to to see how b th both those work together . project manager: So I think yeah , it's I think it's y one of the it's a good way to to help people to make to keep the product trendy too . project manager: And everything that's left is is the basic function that that we want our product to have . project manager: Then again , we have the L_C_D_ display , which is also expensive . project manager: For you ? industrial designer: Although we are demolishing a little bit the style . marketing: But the and user interface: I think the colour is more important than the really the curve , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: But project manager: user interface: because if you just end up with an entirely black remote control project manager: I think it's it it does ruin it , marketing: Yeah . The people project manager: but the fact that I t took that decision or t industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Took this example actually , not really decision , but the example is because we do offer the the possibility of adding your own custom covers . So it's just you deliver a basic remote control with a possibility to change you into whatever you want . industrial designer: Can we then not also change the material ? We take plastic for the basic cover project manager: You can take plastic , industrial designer: and project manager: but I d it's something that's stuck into my mind is that something that really came forward from the marketing research is that people like the the the the squishy feeling of the spongy feeling of the marketing: Spongy , yeah . project manager: and it really makes it also makes it different from the existing remote controls , marketing: Yeah . project manager: Rubber would increase durability industrial designer: But project manager: because it doesn't break . But what do you then suggest we'd lose ? Because we have to lose two things and I guess . project manager: I al like I said , I lost the speech recognition and I lost the special colour , marketing: But industrial designer: Yes . industrial designer: Okay , and that's enough ? project manager: Yeah , that's that that that's enough , because user interface: So black and grey is okay . marketing: The people want to pay for for it , so why why do we have to keep us on the twelve and a half ? project manager: To ensure the profit . We're just we're the project team and we got our our orders from the pro from the boss of our company marketing: Yeah . if we we have the the backup of or the backup design thing marketing: I hope the people will like it , project manager: to have marketing: but project manager: I think they would do . Th I think they do like because yo we you we agree upon that the that the the the cover thing was a nice idea , marketing: project manager: because p you could have all sort of designs while at the same time just manufacturing one product , one basic product which you could turn into any any taste you want . project manager: So I think it's the best solution to make those cu custom covers for the design aspect industrial designer: Perhaps we should make m marketing: Yeah . project manager: and keep the functionality between of within the th the boundaries of the your f your budget . project manager: So industrial designer: Perhaps we should make clear to our customer that we had to do this to stay under the cost . And that's they know that this is an option and that we had to drop the option to stay under the cost , that they know that . Is it worth is it is it industrial designer: Perhaps they decide tha user interface: But they don't project manager: does it mean anything to the customer ? Like , it like , we don't care we don't care that you had to industrial designer: Of course . Perhaps they no , but perhaps they think okay , the cover is such a nice idea , let's that that then they that allow us to make some more costs . project manager: True , industrial designer: We ca we we can at least tell them that project manager: but we did we didn't get that . project manager: it should either be a pack , maybe we sh that should be sold in in the s in stores with with a standard cover or something . project manager: But industrial designer: No , I'm not talking about that cost but the one that g has given us the order to design this . We could at least m make it like this , like you said , project manager: They could , but industrial designer: and then tell them okay , we had to drop this and that , just that you know . project manager: So it's either one fi just just to get it f just to get it through final , it's either turned into plastic , drop the squishy feel , make it make it more breakable , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: I'd say lose the curve and the colour project manager: I say lose the curve . Oh that's true , industrial designer: and project manager: we could lose the c I forgot that , yeah , sorry . So user interface: So which curve is that ba project manager: That's just this one just d this is the banana curve . project manager: So I think it would be a good idea to keep the curve to separate it from the rest of the remote control world , so to speak . user interface: I would project manager: And I'm in favour of keeping the rubber , because it has more more advantages than the colour yellow has . user interface: because that's an extra option , an extra service we can deliver for a little bit of more money . So I think we can take that option and just with with the idea in the back of our head that you can customise your remote control . project manager: I sort of expected that everything would turn out this way , but because you yeah , everything cannot be for free . We didn't I think it was too bad we didn't have the financial info the last time . project manager: it was really essential really user interface: we could have project manager: to ma because we spent entire stage designing a product of which we had no idea what it would cost . marketing: project manager: So industrial designer: Me too , I felt a bit blind throughout the project , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: because in the beginning I had no list of available materials , project manager: Yeah , I think would have been . project manager: Materials would be ok industrial designer: and then I d had not list of available c finances . industrial designer: So project manager: So I suppose marketing: Let's see project manager: Yeah , let's see if it sells . project manager: it's got everything for the for the reasonable price , because we didn't know what it's gonna cost anyway . I will pre present some statements and we will decided together wha what if it's true or false project manager: Okay . I thought it was okay , but the advanced settings , screen , audio and channel project manager: They're stuck under menu . project manager: because we we really took them for the they have the feel they want , marketing: Oh the menu button is it . marketing: Then it's all S project manager: I think it's very very well met . marketing: it's red , okay , but Look and feel is everybo it's true . marketing: So Anyone ? And the next one yeah , when it's lost you can find it . marketing: It's project manager: It's I don't think it's perfect , but we did everything possible to to get it back . industrial designer: I think the L_C_D_ display could be a little bit more difficult then a normal remote control , marketing: But I think that's a part of it . So marketing: Yeah , an L_C_D_ , it tells a lot about user interface: And it's pretty straight-forward , industrial designer: Yeah , I th project manager: It's pretty straight-forward , -huh . user interface: you have a navigation no keys to navigate through the L_C_D_ menus . user interface: So marketing: So it's a one user interface: One I d no , marketing: or a I don't know . user interface: actu project manager: I think but we didn't even marketing: For the advanced settings . project manager: but I don't think it takes no , it really does doesn't take time to learn , I think . We took it s it's so easy , user interface: No , it it is pretty straight-forward . marketing: Oh , so it project manager: we have so little button , everything speaks for itself really . marketing: Takes no ti project manager: Maybe it's a two , because d the L_C_D_ is a little is a little new and there is there are some option hidden under the menu button . marketing: But it tells you or not ? project manager: You can use the L_C_D_ in a good way . I think it's perfect , the w where it is , what it can do , if it useful . What are we displaying on the L_C_D_ screen ? Just only the channels and or industrial designer: the menus Things like brightness and those kind of things we've put in the menu , marketing: What ? industrial designer: because we have no buttons for those . marketing: And for a channel selection , or that's not project manager: Well I thought it was I thought it was I thought that people wanted previews on their I'm not sure if that even possible , marketing: Yeah , I thought I thought too project manager: but marketing: but project manager: 'cause it's this requires a quite quite a bit of band-width . marketing: Maybe a T_V_ guide or something in your L_C_D_ project manager: But I think in for example like T_V_ guides , I think that's that th that you can transmit through it and everything . project manager: But also things like like like menus or p how about preferences of your with configuring your remote control for favourite your favourite channel for example , how do you configure that . No , maybe it's not a one because it's we're not using it perfectly . project manager: marketing: So everybody's agree with an three on it , project manager: Yeah , we are using it , user interface: Yeah . marketing: it's project manager: but it's not marketing: W project manager: it's not poorly used , but it's not efficiently used , I think . project manager: We could have ev even lost the selection button and done everything via L_C_D_ selection . project manager: It's now it's just extra to illustrate im extra features , marketing: Yeah , I project manager: but okay . that's industrial designer: Think about project manager: Can you talk to remote control ? user interface: Or we could say it project manager: Well , it can't talk anymore . user interface: Or we could say neutral , project manager: Oh yeah user interface: we 'cause we scratched the project manager: Just to be a prick , user interface: C project manager: but of course you can talk to your remote control , it doesn't do anything . project manager: Yeah , special co but we took into consideration the fact that it's customisable user interface: So I marketing: Yeah , project manager: to the fashi marketing: but we user interface: Yes , but the end product So industrial designer: . marketing: yeah , we don't have it , so d project manager: We don't have it we do have it , marketing: In the end product . user interface: Maybe we should go with a two then , marketing: But it's not a one . user interface: because it's not perfect , because we can't do it initially , marketing: Yeah . project manager: but you have to pay extra for the for the possibility of having it in a f a different colour . marketing: So project manager: marketing: we can say it's it's the product is it's okay . project manager: It's okay , but that's yo m marketing: Y not industrial designer: project manager: mostly it's it's influenced by the fact that we didn't have enough resources to implement speech recognition . project manager: Without that it would be like under it wouldn't yeah , it would be under two . user interface: Yeah , if we make it into a four , as in neutral , because we didn't implement it , so we can't say that we that it's really not well implemented . user interface: So We could definitely have done better if we've had more resources , industrial designer: of course . user interface: but project manager: Yeah , I think it's probably I industrial designer: project manager: I do admit that we d did miss a little or didn't sp didn't talk talk enough about the possibility of the L_C_D_ display . project manager: So like I said , changing channels , everything hidden in your L_C_D_ display , so you just need the navigation buttons to do everything . project manager: I think we div I think we did very well , industrial designer: It's a good product . industrial designer: But if pep people really want speech recognition , then they must be prepared to pu to pay more , because it's cannot be done for this . project manager: They sh they should get kids , and just stick 'em in T_V_ and say change the channel . industrial designer: You cannot th think of that project manager: Or your sh you should lose the L_C_D_ screen probably , industrial designer: No , it's not . project manager: but I think that's I think the L_C_D_ screen is more worth than speech recognition . user interface: So did you project manager: Let's see , what was left in the the Another one . General project , what's i in For example , I thou I thought we were pretty creative in what we created . We took the whole new approach of making exchangeable cover for example , which I thought was pretty creative , because it was never never ever listed somewhere . Because , yeah was very hard to work with one another if you cannot communicate in the meantime , industrial designer: Yes . project manager: because when I got the when I got the input for the financial results , initially of course I wanted to contact you . project manager: Say , look , this is you're doing the wrong thing , marketing: Yeah . project manager: you're s you're wasting your time now , because we're implementing stuff that we cannot afford . project manager: because that's that's what would w you what you would normally do , either call or email someone . project manager: It didn't have industrial designer: So project manager: or didn't knew what they costs or whatever . project manager: There was just too little information about what things actually cost and if you could use them . I think s especially for design issues , it's very easy just to give your give your thoughts a little it's easier to share them . user interface: Although for actual design I'd say the response time should be a little bit higher , industrial designer: . project manager: It's a little less it the response time is le it's very bad . project manager: It's good to visualise everything , but I think the response time should could be a lot better . you have to finish a page before going to a n project manager: No , you don't have to . marketing: You can project manager: I just you just ditch it and you can copy it or whatever . industrial designer: Okay , I saw that project manager: only if you check the notes or press done . industrial designer: Yeah , project manager: You can just preview your p you can just preview your page in the in the programme . And when the third one was finished , I wanted to download it and then it was not possible anymore , because you have to close all the pinnits the pages before going further . industrial designer: That's not very handy , project manager: That's industrial designer: but if you know that , then it's not a problem . Any new ideas ? Yeah , more communication between between that's the thing I noticed , that communication is very very important , industrial designer: marketing: Important to project manager: because if you get new information , it's essential f for the other team-mates to know that as soon as possible , because you would avoid making doing extra work , because you were doing extra work now m working on the on the speech recognition , you have limitation both on the technical on the d on the design side . But that's I think it's more of a a setting here that you cannot communicate than than somewhere else . project manager: So user interface: Yeah , well it could also possibly be well , is it a more real-time information base , so we can all see which information is available to one another . I'm not sure i I'm not sure you got spammed as well , industrial designer: project manager: but I get spammed like every t every two minutes there was a there was another email about master classes or something . So I just user interface: Well , I personally did not have that , marketing: project manager: Oh okay . project manager: I didn't have any more information , it's just always the same here . So I'd I had no extra information to go on that one than what you give me actually . project manager: yeah , w I could have done a little extra work probably , then marketing: it's project manager: But I was busy enough anyway . project manager: Any new ideas found ? Or is that a 'cause yeah , it's well , industrial designer: No . user interface: How much time do we have for this anyway ? project manager: I have no clue . project manager: if the project is evaluated and it was it was in b within budget , we should celebrate . project manager: I'm not sure what we should still do though t let's see what all your tasks were finished , right ? What you ha from your assistant . project manager: Okay , marketing: Yeah , project manager: I should I think I sh marketing: my personal coach i project manager: I still have the the total report to finish up . I think we took very little time now , because Yeah , we're in agreement , everything the design is okay . marketing: What industrial designer: No , project manager: How about you cook a how about you cook up a product name ? user interface: Product name . user interface: Well , I was going for the R_C_ deluxe , but it's not really a catchy name or anything , project manager: No , user interface: it's more project manager: it's industrial designer: at least it's not something with numbers . user interface: Is that a name or a c campaign ? marketing: project manager: No that's a that's a catchy slogan . Something like It's short f industrial designer: The Real Reactor , I don't find that that bad at all . user interface: Should I write the banana down or project manager: I take f marketing: Yeah , sure . user interface: You mean it like this ? industrial designer: Yeah , that marketing: Real Reaction Remote Control . It should be it should be longer , because it's not a product name that you f print on a box . project manager: Just write out triple , like a word triple R_C_ , triple stripe Oh . Triple R_ or triple R_C_ ? user interface: Like a C_ right now or a dash in a C_ ? marketing: Triple R_ dash . I think that the the R_C_ together takes away the the the image of it's a triple industrial designer: . project manager: the first the first one looks like it's a triple remote control , industrial designer: . project manager: Yeah , triple R_ yeah , you can user interface: Well , that's another option . industrial designer: did you do now ? project manager: Just like this just and you just print triple R_ , it looks doesn't look bad , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Could you guys draw me a picture of the final design to put on the cover of the report ? user interface: Yeah , sure . marketing: industrial designer: Can't we take this one ? marketing: Oh sh industrial designer: Otherwise we have to do it all over again . marketing: user interface: I don't really know whether we can save it as a picture or no . industrial designer: Is it okay if I try ? Is that okay with you ? user interface: Sure

The group brainstormed several potential product names, such as "banana", "RC deluxe", "real reactor", and "triple RC". After careful consideration, they focused on refining the name "triple RC" and ultimately settled on "triple R". The group found this name to be cool, especially when printed on the front, and catchy. They unanimously agreed to eliminate "banana remote" and "the deluxe" from the options, as they all agreed that "triple R" was the best choice. The project manager expressed a desire to incorporate the company's logo and color into the product design, although it didn't necessarily have to be the exact same color. While there was no specific plan regarding the color and logo, the industrial designer suggested the color yellow, which was ultimately adopted.

Question: Summarize the discussion on the design and feedback of the remote control device for children, including the working design and additional design aspects. Article: project manager: I think we're slightly ahead of ourselves from the last meeting , user interface: project manager: This is where we talk about properties , materials , user-interface and trend-watching . project manager: So I think we've touched on a few things to do with that already , but we'll just go over it . we had a couple of changes in our plans in that we couldn't use teletext , it wasn't gonna be a control for everything and that we had to incorporate the image of the company into it somehow . we have decided on a leaving out the voice recognition , we've decided on there being a flip design and a different shape from what's normal . We were thinking a shell , but something along those lines , just a different shape from what's normal , . project manager: and we were gonna think about the port and an alarm for getting it lost , user interface: project manager: things like that , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so shall we start with the first presentation ? marketing: Shall I ? user interface: Yep . Okay so we decided on our market and so this feedback from the marketing department is really about trend watching . the methods we used to decide on current trends and so on , market trends , were that we did our traditional our usual market research study with a hundred subjects and the the general feedback from them is that the most im w I'm sorry I'm slightly tongue-tied after lunch , user interface: project manager: It's okay . we decided on the most important aspect i required in a remote control device and we'll come to that later . Also with our company being forerunners in putting fashion into technology , we also looked at a fashion update using our consultants on fashion and design in Paris and Milan . so the general findings from that was in the market trends the most important aspect for remote controls were people want a fancy look and feel , rather than the the current functional look and feel of remote controls . They also also want a remote control to be technologically innovative , and of course , as we predicted , that it should be easy to use . Now I should point out that the first of those findings , fancy look and feel , is the most important , is twice as important as the second , technologically innovative , which is in turn twice as important as being easy to use . So possibly that the feature that we put first is actually third is still important , but it's third in order of preference for the the subject group we looked at . marketing: Okay , now the fashion update which relates to very personal preferences among our subject group , we found from our consultants in Paris and Milan who des attended all the design and fashion fairs there , that fruit and vegetables are going to be the theme for clothes , shoes and furniture . So should we be thinking of using something like that in our remote control design too ? There also seems to be a trend towards a spongy feel to materials , again in contrast to last year . So a lot of interesting feedback there , both from our market research departments and from our people in Paris and Milan . marketing: Unless anyone has any questions about that ? project manager: I don't think so , not yet . project manager: especially if you do them on too tight and you can't get the leverage on them to undo them . this is all about the design of the actual components and the availability of the components we have in stock at the moment . The the main idea of the whole thing is just so you sh you just press buttons and it should activate things on the T_V_ and we discussed last meeting that it should be easy to find . also in this study I've looked into the availability of some of the materials , 'cause some of the things that we looked at last time aren't un unfortunately aren't available . This is the chip called the T_A_ double one eight three five which is what's used in pretty much every remote control 'cause it sends out standard signals , based on your input and it's pretty much used for all all T_V_ remotes at the moment . marketing: industrial designer: There's actually no rechargeable option available , so we I saw the the standard double A_ and triple A_ which we thought were a bit bit too bulky at the moment , dynamo charging , I thought that that might be a bit silly to be to be honest , project manager: Wa can you explain that ? industrial designer: people won't it's it's basically like wind-up radio . marketing: project manager: How what kind of how l long can you get out of that , industrial designer: It might project manager: can you pick it up and then wind it for two minutes and then that's it for the night ? Or industrial designer: You Yeah , yeah , oh yeah I presu you wouldn't have to wind it for very long , but I don't I don't think it's really sort of necessary when you th you think of the next two options , like the the solar charging , 'cause most people have the light on in the room anyway so they could get when when you got T_V_ . project manager: That doesn't count though does it ? marketing: Does does light charge as as sunlight does ? project manager: I thought it was U_V_ like industrial designer: No . marketing: Artificial light ? industrial designer: Is it ? Alright i project manager: Any , any marketing: Has to be solar . Regarding those sizes , which one you think will be light because we we have to take into consideration size also , so maybe a standard triple A_ might take lesser space or and dynamo might take more space . industrial designer: Yeah it would the d yeah the dynamo would take more space 'cause you actually need a physical sort of handle to wind up . marketing: That's going to project manager: people who live in basement flats there's not that many people , but there are people . user interface: marketing: I know , industrial designer: But marketing: different parts of the world too , if we're if we're marketing internationally . industrial designer: and most people most people also watch T_V_ in the in the night anyway . project manager: but then it would be charging through the day , I think the point is that it charges through the day and then you've got it charged for the evening . industrial designer: The the kinetic charging which is like you get it in r you get it in wrist watches project manager: Yeah I've seen industrial designer: and you d you don't even notice it . the amount the amount of probably moving around you'd be doing all the time would would charge it up , I don't think you'd ever need to actually physically start shaking it up to make it work . user interface: And are these like what are the life of the kinetic battery , it like it runs for long time ? industrial designer: yeah it's it charges into some form of it's a smaller cell which it charges into and the si the size sort of a watch a watch battery , user interface: industrial designer: And that'll that would l would last for well I do I d I'm not entirely sure how long it would last but I've never seen one run out . user interface: We c project manager: But then if you think about a watch , it's on your wrist so it's on your whole bod it's on your body the whole time industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: so you're walking around , you're doing things , it is moving a lot of the time . If you'd industrial designer: Yeah and project manager: you switch the T_V_ on , then you put it on the side , then you pick it up to change it and then you put it on the side . industrial designer: Yeah but then again project manager: Is it really gonna be enough ? industrial designer: I I think it is because if you think about it , the watch , although it's only a tiny amount it's it's it's always moving for the whole day and they don't run out over night when you leave them on the side . industrial designer: And th for the same the same reason , you're only using it for a v incredibly short amount of time just to send the signal and then you're finished with it project manager: So it's not the draw on it isn't industrial designer: and you put it marketing: . industrial designer: no no I do I don't think the the draw on it would be marketing: marketing: Could I just ask referring back to solar charging , is that compatible with standard batteries ? industrial designer: . marketing: could people put standard batteries in but with a s you know they could leave it in the sunlight for solar charging industrial designer: Ye yeah I think I th g y you could have a dual power thing marketing: or the two things not compatible ? project manager: Like a dual kind of . industrial designer: but the the thing with the solar cells is you would need to put them on the case and they because , if you lie on a calculator they they're qui they're quite big and they all they all look i identical . What kind of price are we looking at for industrial designer: They're they're expensive , they don't user interface: It's twelve point f project manager: I presume the normal batteries are the cheapest ? industrial designer: Yeah the normal batteries would be the cheapest I'd presume then it would actually be the the solar charging ones , but the It's i I think they're not very resistant to dropping , project manager: Solar . industrial designer: 'cause if you drop stuff yeah if you if you have y project manager: Well they're not designed industrial designer: the size you'd need to charge a remote wouldn't be that big but if remotes always get thrown around and stuff , so . calculators you don't really throw around a lot whereas remotes you do , project manager: You do get a bit of wear industrial designer: they can t project manager: but don't calculators have a battery in them as well ? industrial designer: Yeah they do , they yeah they've got dual things , but they're the batteries are smaller I think . W w which one would last the longest , because we don't want customers to be like you know charging like a mobile phone every day . user interface: A remote control , like , industrial designer: W m yeah user interface: so we have to s look at the life also . industrial designer: so the Yeah the the s if you if you had something du using the standard batteries and the solar charging , I don't think you'd I think the it would d well you know how long the standard double A_s would last in or triple A_s would last . marketing: It would just detract from the attractiveness of the of the whole feature , industrial designer: Yeah I think i I think it would , yeah . project manager: Can we think about that ? 'Cause if we're doing the kinetic thing and it's industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: Shouldn't we do some market research on that first before we add it in because I I personally project manager: Well add it in to think about marketing: right , okay . project manager: because , where am I ? If it is the kinetic thing and it is small and it is portable and it is a different shape and the kinetic is something people don't do kind of industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: we're doing something original and different but if you wore it if it's something you could just clip on your pocket then you would have that less , you you wouldn't lose it so much . project manager: But then maybe that's looking at someone who's just sitting on their own rather than industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: It's not something that's come up in any of our focus groups and market research , project manager: No . industrial designer: my second part of my findings the mo most current remotes use this silicone P_C_B_ board which pr printed circuit board , which basically has these contacts that are really close together and then when you press down on the rubber button , it'll connect the circuit and each each switch is connected to two different legs on the chip and so sends a different message and that then gets translated by the chip into a code and then it's fired out of this L_E_D_ in the sequence of l on and off bursts . project manager: What kind of things do we have to consider there ? Can we what kind of size , does it come in varying sizes or is it just one size and we would have to fit the design of industrial designer: Well well this the thi the thing about is they they can be as big or as small as you want them to be because you can you can print circuit board like that that it's it's simply spaced like that so you can have fit the n the size of the nine buttons in . If you if you see how thin the tracks are , you could you could s you could put them virtually right next to each other and have a much smaller switch on each one , project manager: industrial designer: if you if you wanted to but the there is an option to do to do it like that , or you could have some sort of array of switches which I'll speak about in the next bit project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so that And then to yeah , so to conserve battery life the remote should be in a standby mode no while not being used . Now what I was thinking about that was 'cause sometimes when y when you have these things , they've got little lights on behind the buttons , so you can see what all the buttons are , like on a mobile phone , they do it more often than on a than on a T_V_ remote , project manager: industrial designer: but you could you could have lights behind the buttons and after like five or ten seconds of not being used I'd have that turned off , if we decided to go for buttons that could light up . industrial designer: the case material , I've a been sent what the factory can actually give us , the there's the plastic which I think we were gonna go for anyway as the main case case housing project manager: industrial designer: and the the main problems with the well you could go for wood but I think it would be a bit impractical . industrial designer: which to make it is expensive , and rubber , well you're saying that people like this spongy feel this year , so perhaps some something made of rubber , marketing: . industrial designer: but I was thinking more of the buttons , because the buttons which they've they've said that they've they've put across are what is used in some stress ball manufacture and it's meant to be anti R_S_I_ . industrial designer: I'm no I'm not sure how that would work because surely your fingers would still be moving over the short distances but that's what they said . the problem with the casing is that there's quite there's quite a few design restrictions that they've got on the shape of the case . If you go for titanium they can only do a standard box shape , whereas if you come to plastic they can they can be a little more they can they can do sort of curved shapes . But whether whether or not because we'd have it in two separate units user interface: Second thing is project manager: Hinged , yeah . user interface: yeah and second question is like , a mobile you can change the cover , you call it a skin or whatever . user interface: So in this case if you're looking at like a customer can change the colour like from green , parrot green to chilli red or something like that . user interface: So is that feature available in like titanium , industrial designer: Yeah I th user interface: or it's like only specific to plastic or industrial designer: . Yeah in in titanium I don't I don't think it would be available at all really , the ju just marketing: industrial designer: it w well you could make it available in the titanium , it was just it would be so expensive to buy a new case for it , because of the expense of how much titanium is is user interface: industrial designer: it's light and strong but I think it should be left for aircraft design rather than for for a remote . I've got a mobile phone myself which is titanium and it does mark very easily if you drop it . marketing: I was just wondering if we make the basic mould out of plastic but have like a rubber cover that goes over , industrial designer: Rubber , yeah . marketing: that would give the spongy feel , that also allows us to kind of have different fasciae for the phone . project manager: So instead of the fascia that comes off being plastic , the fascia that comes off would be the rubber , marketing: Like a rubber sleeve almost , yeah . user interface: Something like project manager: like those pens that you get with the grip , that you can you can pull that off . industrial designer: T marketing: Very cheap way of changing the look of it and people can just buy a new one if they want to . project manager: Well that's been really popular with mobile phones so I don't see why not . industrial designer: just just going back to the interface designs with the buttons , the I kno we were planning to do some sort of touch screen . industrial designer: Now what I was saying before about instead of having you could have just a bare P_C_B_ circuit board and I'm sure you could probably get it in different colours and so just by touching it with your finger it'd make the connection over if you had them close enough , that would be one option . the second option th they offer rubber buttons , but I thought that an L_C_D_ type of screen 'cause one they're incredibly thin and don't take up much space , two they you can have them in a sort of array and you can arrange the buttons on the screen in a sort of set thing and you could have them like a touch user interface: Sorry I didn't get the last part , you're talking of industrial designer: display . what what user interface: Just what you said I I didn't get the meaning of it completely , you're saying like industrial designer: Oh on the on the L_C_D_ screen you could becau you could fit it user interface: -huh . industrial designer: the problem with it basically is that it's flat and so you can't do lots of curve curved things with it , user interface: Okay . industrial designer: but you can you wouldn't have with the L_C_D_ you'd have the wires coming off , you wouldn't have that with the with the L_C_D_ , you'd only have that with the printed circuit board . industrial designer: With W also with the marketing: I don't s sorry to interrupt , I don't see why the curved thing is a problem , if we for example had a shell , once we open that industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: You could have a flat screen inside , yeah , marketing: yeah , so it'd be f yeah , yeah . industrial designer: but I'm just wondering whether we want an L_C_D_ screen inside . marketing: Have I misunderstood you ? industrial designer: It wouldn't be like full colour , it would just be black and white , marketing: industrial designer: so you wouldn't be pressing down on 'em , w or we could have rubber buttons which are made of this material which is anti-R_S_I_ . project manager: I think it would be good to have a contrast between , if the whole thing is gonna be this rubber thing it would be good to open it up and see something quite fancy looking inside . project manager: Now how would you distinguish , if you had it bare , how would you distinguish where you had to press , industrial designer: Yeah I hadn't I hadn't really thought of that to be honest . project manager: marketing: I just had another idea , I don't know if it helps with that , but just to do with the R_S_I_ . Is it possible , just as an option , when we open it up , people can use their fingers to press the button , or we have inside like a small pointer thing when people want to . industrial designer: Yeah you could , you could have some sort of stylus that you could pull out project manager: Like one of the palm pop thing . user interface: Absolutely , f for somebody who very often , if he would industrial designer: 'cause I had marketing: Yeah . user interface: a person who switches channels very often or does use a particular function very often will find it very irritating to use a industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and he might spoil the touch-pad very fast compared to a button like , if you keep punching with an pointer or whatever . marketing: Yeah just a thought they wouldn't actually need one and they could use anything they've got , couldn't they ? A pencil or a pen , so they wouldn't really need a project manager: Okay , we'll talk about that so if you finish your industrial designer: Yeah that's project manager: and we'll come back to that . industrial designer: yeah that that's the end of m my project manager: That's you , right okay . user interface: And just one small question before like you are , regarding the circuit , since we are hav having a flip-top , we can customise the two circuits for different type of buttons industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: like we are keeping the standard buttons on the top and the more complex buttons under this thing , so we can divide the circuit like you know . industrial designer: you'd you'd actually have two separate you'd have two separate circuit boards but they'd be joined by wires or like some cabling between them , user interface: Okay . marketing: I'll just raise another point while it occurs to me , it kind of applies to both our designers here , so I'm not sure how it would fit in . marketing: If we flip open , now you know how you've got some mirrors in nightclubs that are mirrors when you turn to them and you turn away and it gives like an advertising display , you seen those ? project manager: No . Is it possible that when we open our flip-top shell it's a little compact mirror and when you press a button it then goes onto the phone display th the remote control display thing . project manager: Well it's a remote control , you were sitting watching T_V_ are you gonna want to sort of open it and say oh shit I should go and have a shower and do my hair before I put the T_ marketing: Yeah . I know what you mean , it's with us using the ideas for a mobile ph industrial designer: marketing: it's with us using the ideas for mobile phones I kinda got sidetracked onto that I think , okay . marketing: trying to think of other features we can build in that wouldn't cost too much project manager: . industrial designer: you can you could do it , you could have a 'cause if you if you just put the full charge through an L_C_D_ display it'll completely blank it out , marketing: . industrial designer: but I don't know if you could get any mirror effect on it , I'm not sure about marketing: Oh I think forget about the mirror project manager: Okay , okay . First thing is basically on design we just took the input from the previous meeting , especially from the marketing and industrial design , to check on the customer needs and feasibility . Second is we checked into competitors , the picture here shows one of the standard models offered by competitors here . So y you generally see there's not much of variety and like marketing team said , people need trendy , they are bored of black and white . user interface: Like , some some people have a Here you see this ? This is on a I I I found th that only common feature is the ch channel control and volume control , rest other buttons , they are in a very disorganized and they are not consistent th with other models and all . user interface: Okay , and second as already discussed with William , we are going to have m maybe a G_ G_U_I_ interface in the f in the middle of the flip-top industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and g graphic user interface marketing: Sorry what does that stand for ? project manager: Which means user interface: basically which is what we d do in computer , have icons or touch pad or whatever , marketing: Okay . user interface: which is industrial designer: If you if yeah if you have like buttons that appear on the screen in this L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Like you have on a l icons or something y you have is a good example of G_U_I_ graphic user interface . user interface: So basically not point or click Press any particular device , he just has to click on that particular icon to simplify . user interface: And on the top m repetitive buttons which are like volume or channel changing and all could be on the pointing device , that means the use of button . user interface: So we are having a combination of boards , so f on the s simpler board , on the top we have this button , rubber buttons , to keep frequently changing the channels . project manager: Can we swap that round so th that the ones that we use all the time are on the bottom part ? user interface: project manager: 'Cause if you're thinking about holding it you would be using your thumbs to press , just like a mobile phone . marketing: No you'd hold it you don't if you flip it open then you'd be Wouldn't you ? Isn't that the idea ? You us if we just use the shell as an example again , you open that , you've got your L_C_D_ display there and you've got the buttons there so you're holding it in the palm of your hand , yeah . That's what I was just saying , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah but you can do it with your thumb li user interface: But project manager: and then have the and then have the L_C_D_ at the top user interface: user interface: Okay and you mean to the project manager: so have the the volume and the programme , things like that , user interface: And the lower distance . Okay we had a latest finding of voice recognition , there was a mail which mentions that our division has developed a new speech recognition s feature . We have to check into the for financial f feasibility whether we can incorporate it this at a low cost , but for like we had g s response from the customers that they would like to have the feature of finding it . user interface: So it could be like , where is the remote , and the remote answers I am here . user interface: Some kind of thing or it gives a b bleep sound or some kind of sound marketing: . user interface: and if this can be incorporated this would be more you can say trendy also ? And technologically innovative also . My personal preferences would be like , as already marketing department , they want something to do with fruit so I wouldn't say the design should be like a fruit , but yeah we can take inspiration from fruit colours , like the vibrant colours , red chilli marketing: . user interface: tomato red or whatever and second thing is cer certain standard buttons we should have , like for example , i if you see the previous slide industrial designer: Well , yeah we user interface: I think most of the users would now be well acquainted with this cer central pattern , here , so we we we would not change h that particular pattern industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: I can't see that , is that play and stop and things ? user interface: This is central one , the one you project manager: Or is that volume and channel ? user interface: yeah volume and channel . So keep that m that standardised because that's the most common feature across all models , if you look at all the models , it's here . I'm not sure how long we've got left , but we need to make a decision about the things we've discussed . project manager: that means that there's no function for li the port , you know that it sits in , then pressing the button then having industrial designer: . industrial designer: Yeah I think project manager: It's a bi i it's like a g it's a gadget , it's a industrial designer: if Yeah it is it is qui it's quite a cool feature to have project manager: selling point . industrial designer: and also if they've got it if they've got these parts already in stock , then it won't be cheap to re-manufacture them , user interface: So do you reckon that's a good idea that , where's the remote , I'm here thing ? I think that would be quite fun . project manager: I think the only pitfall that we would have would be how much it's going to cost if that means we have to cut down somewhere else , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah to s th well it's it's not as expensive as it would be if it was full colour 'cause if we've just got a black and white one , marketing: . marketing: we've deci seem to have decided on that , did we decide on double A_ or triple A_ batteries ? user interface: . project manager: Do you want like a back-up ? marketing: No , one of the decisions we had to make was whether we had double A_ or triple A_ batteries 'cause they've still got to be charged this way haven't they ? industrial designer: K no the kinetic ones come come with a sort of w watch a battery that goes in a watch . industrial designer: So it's a lot smaller , so it would marketing: Got you on that okay , didn't realise . The buttons what did you give us as our The bare-board L_C_D_ or industrial designer: Yeah the well I think were we're going for the L_C_D_ on that one , on the buttons , user interface: industrial designer: on the on the on on the top one we're gonna project manager: On the top one okay you've got the touch industrial designer: yeah . project manager: okay and then industrial designer: On the bottom we were gonna have the rubber , the rubber ones , the anti-R_S_I_ ones . marketing: Sorry could you repeat that last part ? industrial designer: okay on we've got the flip the flip-screen , the top one is gonna be the L_C_D_ and the bottom one is gonna be the rubberised buttons . user interface: For the body design I think plastic , w yeah industrial designer: Plastic , user interface: we could use the body , project manager: For the inside . user interface: for the inside and rubber as a padding or for the grip , something like to add to the design . marketing: - , user interface: marketing: so we decided on a rubber casing for the plastic shell , a variety of designs , user interface: Plast right . and it is just although it's rubberised and spongy , apart from that we're just going to go for sort of vegetable and fruit colours , we're not gonna try and make it actually a vegetable or fruit design or anything else , like a shell that we discussed , industrial designer: no . user interface: It's project manager: we don't wanna be tacky if we've got a kind of different shape anyway marketing: Okay . project manager: the fact the m the material that we would be using would be cheap , so we could make it red , we could make it psychedelic , you know , we could make it black and white zebra stripes , marketing: project manager: but that's not really what we're focusing on , what we're focusing on is the m you know marketing: The feel . Is that going to be this image I've got in my head of something kind of shaped like that , maybe about that size , made of plastic , fits into the palm of the hand , rubberised cover that's spongy . Is that really going to fit fancy look and feel which was the major thing that people wanted , market research , user interface: I it's different . project manager: It's just different marketing: is that fancy ? project manager: it's just different from everything else and , I'm trying to imagine clean looking houses , marketing: . project manager: so you either want something that goes with that , which is what's on the market anyway , marketing: project manager: or you want something that contrasts as you know like you get clocks now that are more of a talking point than an actual clock because they're so interesting and industrial designer: . I'm just kind of pushing at that to see if you came out with anything else , but I totally agree . marketing: This would definitely be different enough , I just wondered if anybody could come up with something even more project manager: And you would just have an across the b you would have so many different options that you could do , you could have a plain black one , you could have sparkly pink glittery ones for your little marketing: Well the thing is the rubberised covers are going to be s relatively cheap to produce , that if in a year's time we we get feedback from the design fairs that show something else is coming it's so easy for us to just produce that and it can be slipped on , project manager: . project manager: And ones tha ones that have rubbery spikes marketing: which is another beauty of it . project manager: y you know , you could just go so far with it , industrial designer: You can you can just marketing: user interface: Acupressure , you could talk of acupressures . project manager: like a puffer fish , you could just , you could take it wherever , marketing: project manager: so I think that's quite a flexible thing . user interface: And finally the body should be retouchable , may maybe ch you can change the body or the case casing the case outside , project manager: Yes . user interface: it should be moulded it with the design in such a way you can change it every time . marketing: for the decisions that we've made , kinetic charging , the watch-type batteries , L_C_D_ display on th the top side of the flip top , rubberised buttons on the bottom side , we're gonna use fruit and vegetable colours for the rubber cover , the case itself is plastic . That's how far we've got , what else do we have to add to our decisions here ? user interface: Fine , we were talking of voice recognition also marketing: . user interface: because that we are not for how to look it remote control if it's lost . user interface: So , are we looking at voice ? marketing: Yes , it was just , there was just a cost issue with that , but it's a good idea we just need to check on the cost , user interface: Or maybe like William was suggesting in the last thing some devices you put on key chains . project manager: Have you user interface: sorry I didn't mention this , but we'll be incorporating in the design . marketing: 'Cause I took it from the feedback you gave in the last meeting from y from y your report , it's not just a case of having a little R_R_ hidden somewhere , they do want it to be obvious that it's our product project manager: Well they do , marketing: don't they ? project manager: but I think we can you could marketing: Since it's the only one of its kind on the market it's obviously gonna be ours . project manager: Obviously it'll have a logo on it just like everything , but everything else has a logo on it . The point is that it's got to stand out somehow differently but I think it does , without that marketing: Okay . Did we I know at the last meeting we spoke about a beeper , I think that was you talked about a beeper for a location , have we just rejected that in favour of voice recognition then ? project manager: Depending on how i industrial designer: Yeah , depending on the expense of it . project manager: we've got this memo saying that it's something that the company's looking into , so industrial designer: And they've got in stock , so yeah . project manager: that seems to make sense , but if it turns out that it's hugely expensive we'd have to cut down somewhere else , then it's worth thinking about . user interface: Again a questionnaire huh ? project manager: so I think we've probably got it says , closing we have forty minutes marketing: You got to go through . user interface: project manager: It's either that or we only had forty minutes to discuss what we just discussed and don't know how long that took <doc-sep>Well , of course we're new to each other , so I'd like to get acquainted first . So let's do that first , Let's start with you , can you introduce yourself ? You're our Marketing Expert . And I will see what the user wants and what we can do with the new produ project product . industrial designer: My name is Xavier Juergens , I'm the Industrial Designer , and there are three main questions that I have to find an answer to today . First one is what happens inside the apparatus , second is what is the apparatus made of , marketing: . So , our new project is about we need design a remote control for television set , so , which has to be original , trendy and user-friendly . It's We're inspired by latest fashion , not only electronics , but also the latest trends in clothes and interior design . Everybody has a piece of individual work and a meeting afterwards , so we can share information about So I'm gonna keep this short , since we had a technical problem . Every meeting we everybody can present their their views and everything , so to help with these , you have we have the SMARTboards here . I'm supposed to give you an introduction on this doodling board , so it's actually it's very easy . And so it will be easy just to illustrate your views , if you wanna change the format , you just either take out jus just like the pen , and whatever you want , your current colour , your line width , just to make the line bigger . We're just gonna keep using this board all the time , so I think it will be it's very clear for everyone , I suppose . Yeah , just just just stuff that you wanna share , just put it in the in the project folder , like I put my presentation now . I'll put the the minutes of every meeting , I'll put them there too , so everybody can read up if they have to leave early or whatever . user interface: Well , I'm more into the technical aspects of drawing , industrial designer: user interface: so I'm not really good at drawing animals , project manager: Draw us a technical animal . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: This thing isn't doing what I'm What I want . project manager: marketing: user interface: I'll just finish up real soon , because I'm marketing: user interface: So it doesn't really look like a dolphin , project manager: Anyway , user interface: but then again , this is all new for me . project manager: it should It It's supposed to be a dolphin , you like the freedom that it that it represents . Do that in my spare time , so that's basically an project manager: What do you like ? Okay . It's big , it's strong , so Oh , it's a little bit user interface: It's not really that responsive , no . project manager: user interface: You picked a hard one , didn't you ? industrial designer: My drawing skills are really bad , so . project manager: marketing: What ? They are industrial designer: They are really bad , my drawing skills . industrial designer: I'm not sure how the legs should go , but project manager: industrial designer: these are stripes . project manager: What does it want ? industrial designer: well , basically it hunts for prey , but it does it always in a very well-thought way . industrial designer: And it always goes for security , in seeking a hide spot and and doing everything , marketing: . So marketing: project manager: I'm just too lazy to draw it all black , so That's the coolest ant ever . user interface: You've done this before , haven't you ? industrial designer: project manager: I love to draw ants . You're supposed to make i make it different from from what other people have , and just make it a little distinct . Well I guess we have a little little time extra , but Just a little quick discussion to to open open our work . What are y What are your first ideas for the new product ? What user interface: Well , I basically had a question . Do Are we going to introduce a multi remote control ? Is it just the T_V_ or do we want to in project manager: The project I got was just for a T_V_ remote control . marketing: But user interface: thing to keep in mind is that we need to stick to what people are familiar with . user interface: No rational changes or whatever , 'cause it revolutionary changes , project manager: Okay , so very intuitive design , I guess . So that was something I wanted to add , project manager: user interface: and perhaps some usability aspect . Do we want people who are disabled in any way to , yeah , to be able to use it as well ? project manager: Yeah , we want I suppose we want almost everyone to be using it . So I think , really disabled people , yeah , might be a problem , but I think it's a little take it into consideration . industrial designer: Only one thing that has to be added according to me is the the material it is made of , it should be something light . industrial designer: That's it speaks for itself , project manager: It should be light , okay . project manager: What do we This Quick What we're going to Selling price , twenty five Euros . Do you have anything you you came up with yet ? About marketing transfer , whatever ? marketing: about what ? Marketing ? project manager: Marketing I'm not sure what you what you came up with yet . You have anything to share ? Or else we'll cut the meeting just cut the meeting short marketing: no , not really yet , project manager: since we're supposed to stop . marketing: and I will say it project manager: Anyways , the the personal coach will give you the your p your personal assignments and everything <doc-sep>project manager: So marketing: So project manager: I hope you're ready for this functional design meeting . we want to know to at the end to know the new project's requirement so we need to know the the user needs that we want to fulfil to fulfil the from the technical part we want to know how it going to work and third part I don't remember marketing: project manager: which is not very good . marketing: So I dunno if I can do that like this ? Yeah ? So it's being modified . I am the expert in marketing and I want to tell you about what people s want and like and dislike in remote controls , and I hope this is going to help you to to design it correctly . marketing: So basically what I suggest is that instead of deciding ourself what what could be and what should be a good remote control , let's ask people who are users of remote controls how they feel about w the current remote controls , what they like , what they don't like and and what they do with them by the way industrial designer: marketing: because they are supposed to be useful . So we've we've conducted a a survey on on the use of remote controls and I'd like to show you some of the results we found on this survey . Yeah , so basically what we found was that there are several things that the user don't like in remote controls . Current remote controls as you know they're the same as this one they're not nice colour , not nice shape , they're all the same , and they're not l good looking . what is interesting is that in fact it seems that they were people are ready to pay for nice and look and fancy looking remote control , so I think we should probably spend lots of time in and effort in that . And the other thing is that the the current remote controls are not so easy to use and it it the the current facilities that they offer do not match what people really want to use their remote controls . For instance we see that they zap very often so I think this is a very important functionality that it should be easy for them to to zap in one way or another . And most of the buttons on current remote controls are not used , so I think we should design something where some of the buttons which are those that are used should be easier to see and use than others that only a couple of people are using . Now people are very frustrated w with their remote controls industrial designer: marketing: and they for instance they don't even find it project manager: marketing: it's it's often lost somewhere in the in the in your home and nobody knows where it is . marketing: Maybe if we have something where we could ask the remote control please , where are you ? industrial designer: Yeah . of course phone you can always phone your phone project manager: marketing: but you can't phone your your remote control . industrial designer: marketing: And because of the fact that there are so many buttons in these remote controls that nobody use , industrial designer: . marketing: in fact they don't even know how to use them , so most of the the people say they they don't know how to they to use properly their r remote controls . And they are bad for R_S_I_ but I don't remember what is R_S_I_ . nobody has any idea about that ? Well I'll check with my industrial designer: Yeah , it's electromagnetic waves or something kind of maybe effect . marketing: I think it's a technical thing industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: which our industrial designer: because infrared uses some electromagnetic technology , project manager: industrial designer: and those waves have high marketing: So , it seems that it's a lot of people for a concept that we don't know user interface: But twenty six percent , do you know project manager: Or something we don't know . marketing: So anyway user interface: One of us marketing: that's for what the biggest frustration of the user and industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: s functions that may be used by u the user in the current available remote controls and well the tables look very nice to read but what is important is to understand that the power button is not used often because in general you use it only once per session , but it is very relevant . project manager: marketing: Ah now I remember what is R_S_I_ project manager: marketing: it's repetitivity stress injury . marketing: I continue my presentation so yeah , user interface: marketing: channel selection is very important , very often used . It seems that people find teletext teletext relevant , even if I personally never use it but seems that it's average relevant at least , so . project manager: I have been told that we don't consider teletext , that it's out of date now because of internet . marketing: I can tell you that in a l in a scale between one and ten relevant not relevant to relevant people scored a six on this , which is not as these these two one were had I think ten I think . marketing: Not very relevant , so if if there are good reason not to put teletext it's okay but just know that people find it somehow relevant . project manager: marketing: That's for the main functions I think and then we can ask ourself what people don't have that may be useful . One of the thing the trend that you are probably aware of is the possibility the eventual possibility of having speech recognition in your remote control , so you wouldn't have to tap tap in your buttons but just tell your remote control or whatever you need you have what you want . So we've conducted a survey about whether people would like or not to have this kind of functionality in their remote control and as we can see it really depends on the age . marketing: So now it really depends on the kind of targeting wha who are we targeting with this remote control ? industrial designer: 'Cause marketing: I think if we are targeting young people then it's probably something we have to consider . If we are targeting you very old people this is something they really don't know why they this should be so now project manager: And I don't have any conclusion , I didn't have time the meeting was very tight , so that's basically my findings . marketing: Yeah one question , user interface: you are a Market Expert marketing: yeah ? user interface: so marketing: I am . user interface: should we aim at the young people or not ? marketing: I think we should aim at the young people . marketing: In general the the early adopters of a new device are young people , less than more than user interface: Okay , then teletext is used less . project manager: So now I think it's the turn of the the I'm not sure marketing: project manager: Of the technical function , so marketing: So I think it's you , huh ? industrial designer: it's marketing: No ? user interface: That's me . project manager: what effect industrial designer: techni function of marketing: No , user requiremen industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: I have to do working design so project manager: So you're user interface: That's but this but number three , yes . marketing: user interface: However , Project Manager asked me to give you some presentation about technical functions design . , as I'm a more an artist marketing: project manager: user interface: that's gonna be less technical functions but more User Interface and current intentions and everything which is linked with this . marketing: project manager: user interface: 'Cause current remote controls they are never easy enough to use . marketing: project manager: user interface: It's quite a standard one , but it's not from a T_V_ , it's from a much easier device like air conditioning or something . Only buttons we need is on off , volume , channels and maybe some options or something else , and please make a click , compared to this one marketing: industrial designer: It's user interface: which one would you prefer ? I guess this . marketing: I would say the simplest one as long as there are the I find the buttons that I need every time I need a button . marketing: industrial designer: Maybe it can be yeah middle of like , between those two user interface: Yeah , and our method is going to be , provide simple industrial designer: li project manager: Oh sorry . user interface: Our question of the style , we should remember that our company marketing: user interface: puts fashion into electronics and we should never forget about it . user interface: it's very well , it's it's not an easy field to to play , you know ? So be simple . marketing: user interface: For personal preferences I think that to make a baby-proof remote control it got to be a titanium . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: It's a really good style , it going to be look like like this . And all these buttons should be easy to find and to click , 'cause when you watch a movie and you want to change something , you always try to find a good button and click it , but you should do it by touching it and finding it easily just by touch . So Press project manager: user interface: I would propose this concept for design , just few buttons , a screen with a back light which can change colours , titanium industrial designer: . And let us include two nice features into this device , first , power on and off can be made fully automatic . When you go to the sofa , take your control and point it to the T_V_ , project manager: It's off . marketing: And when does it turn off ? user interface: When you don't touch the control but you go out of the For for enough time marketing: Oh so you have a user interface: like you marketing: sensing sensor machine that knows user interface: It's a question to our technical design , our two engineers . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: Tech user interface: And another nice feature that I would like to implement is volume control . Suppose you set u you set up some volume and then you move out or you move to the other corner of the room and take your control with you . Like , you want to to change the chair or you want to move to the armchair from the sofa or something , and then the volume changes . user interface: you just control the marketing: According to your distance to and the angle maybe , if you have a stereo system . So marketing: I'm not sure about the screen , wha what is the use usefulness of the screen ? is it a touch screen by the way ? user interface: I think it can be just a menu which can be controlled with a left , right , up , down and enter . user interface: which makes it easier to find , and each can it can respond for your voice , like it can turn on the light for you just to f find it easily , yeah ? project manager: . project manager: I see that you target several s application not only T_V_ but i like we talk about universal remote control . user interface: Let it be universal , so you want to use it for your hi-fi system . S user interface: All the rest , we sh we'll put it into this menu on the screen . Since we were targeting a really soon date for the the the i issuing of this remote control I think we will only concentrate on T_V_ for the moment and then maybe m make it more generalised yeah . marketing: So for instance if I want to go to directly to channel twenty five , how would I do can I do that with this ? user interface: twenty five . marketing: that's not so easy to go just next next next when you have hundreds of channels . marketing: Or is it ? user interface: Basically you use just four or five channels , right ? marketing: Most people user interface: Yeah . user interface: So set up your T_V_ set like channels that you use they're one , two , three and five , and you will never have to go to a twenty fives channel . marketing: In fact in in one remote control that I've seen , instead of doing that d you could just say these are the cha ch channel three , twenty eight , forty eight and sixty four are those that I want to by cycled with my next button . industrial designer: But even we can have some L_C_D_ display , like you can de you can just button the number marketing: Go to channel twenty five . industrial designer: and then it go marketing: One thing is that as I said in my presentation people really do like to z zap . marketing: So even if they are only watching four or five channels , I think they want to zap out of the one hundred channels , user interface: But otherwise like we can put some display on numbers and then they can just press suppose two five they just press two and five marketing: So it would be industrial designer: and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: if you want to go for a universal then we ought to limit for functions for each of our devices . user interface: Could we carry out some research if we w really need this , like how many people really need to go to channel number twenty five and then to sixty four ? marketing: Well I could could have a look at that maybe . I am an expert in industrial design of all electronic devices and I previously devised many like digital calculators and electronic calculators . Well , as you know the basic function of remote control is sending some message to the the device , like T_V_ or V_C_R_ or D_V_D_ player etcetera . So we will have a p portable device which will send message to the the main device like T_V_ . So we need to have some energy source to do what to do the functions , what we want on this portable device . And usually this so to do these functions we need an interface , which basically some kind of pressing buttons or keys or like moving jack or something like that . And then these messages these key buttons can be transferred into some kind of message and then it will process by the chip and then it will generate some information to the main device . So , basically we need since we are focusing on our interface device remote control mainly the energy source like the battery and then we have user interface like the keypad and you know buttons we want , and then we have some chip , it's mainly digital signal processing chip because since we are I am one doing mostly digital devices we ought to have some kind of processor which take care of all these functions and put it in some digital format . And then we'll have the infrared L_E_D_ source which sends the information to the main device . Then we'll have switch in our main device to do particular operations , and we ought to do different codes for different T_V_s , project manager: industrial designer: so some T_V_s will have different encryption codes for doing s s channel changing and these things . industrial designer: Yeah yeah , because the people don't use one particular brand so project manager: . industrial designer: So we need to check their specifications and do their encryption that's passing information to the T_V_ device . industrial designer: Then , components , so we have the main energy source and then we will have some buttons and then we will have infrared source and then we have some inside some chip in in the device . And since I also want to know feedback from our Marketing Expert and User Interface , project manager: Yeah , I'm sure , because since our User Interface speech recognition and also Marketing Expert for the speech recognition is really handy , project manager: industrial designer: we can have another , like s simple speech recogniser on our D_S_B_ chip . industrial designer: Since we have some kind of energy this is our this normal battery , so this battery , once you s switch on it will take power and we can have some speech recognition and in our g generally small digital signal processing chip so that and we will put the small simple speech recogniser project manager: On industrial designer: and we can also train the speech recogniser for particular user so you just project manager: train it , okay . No , even in you can find even simple mobile device like any mobile brand you can have these voice dialers or these things , yeah . marketing: Think of a all these young people who would love to say that this remote control only works for them , user interface: Okay . project manager: And what about the price of this component ? industrial designer: So maybe we can make it in five Euros and even less than that , project manager: It okay . industrial designer: because we have only very few words like like power , switch on or some like project manager: industrial designer: then we'll have something like this we'll have volume and then we will have s particular channel , so users can listen . marketing: The user will just be able to say please can you pump up the vo pump up the volume project manager: industrial designer: Ye No , yeah , a user can use any kind of sender but they should have this prompt volume and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: yeah volume and decrease or increase , so we try to only recognise those words marketing: Okay . industrial designer: and and because we can't really say user to say same wording marketing: Couple of words . industrial designer: And then we can have channel they can say , okay I want eight , because we don't know like users have different programmes , they don't really follow same channels strict so we just want channel number , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: we don't want like B_B_C_ or C_N_N_ or something else marketing: Of course it has to be industrial designer: because it will be complicated so we'll have only these three main basic anyway volume is not really speech recognition problem , marketing: Okay . user interface: No you know it's a conceptual question , 'cause now I see th this the picture in front of my eyes like a user taking his remote control and shouting into it , volume up , volume up , project manager: marketing: But then I think you you user interface: and and he's coming you know , he's really annoyed with this , down , up , down . project manager: marketing: First of all I I think this is not functionality that it is going to be instead of using the buttons . industrial designer: Yeah actually we we can have one switch to like switch on , on and off , this processor and This really , suppose like here we have our main chip which controls power , volume and this part and this D_S_P_s . industrial designer: Again , this to have some interaction like suppose people use D_S_P_ then it particularly sends some information to the chip like in some form , like volume and like this key . industrial designer: So it may not be like very expensive , because since we are only focusing on T_V_ remote control marketing: T_V_ . industrial designer: so and we have only few things here project manager: Sho to to train , okay . user interface: Like , if I want to put volume up I like do I take my remote control do like something like marketing: user interface: roll 'em up industrial designer: this point we didn't consider user interface: or roll 'em down . marketing: Very expensive , industrial designer: because it's it's very expensive marketing: no ? industrial designer: because v our target is only like twelve point five Euros project manager: And well , what about the idea of automatic on off on the button , yeah . user interface: why ? industrial designer: and user interface: That's just industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: And volume control . industrial designer: even automatic on off is also a bit problematic , because it different criteria for different people like so suppose people are really they just they don't touch the remote and y you don't know how much time you need to switch on or switch off marketing: So but industrial designer: and marketing: Sh should we target a a user personalised remote control ? So in in a given room there might be more than one remote control . Yeah that can be possible , especially for power settings , so user can say okay , suppose they're watching a tennis match or something then they can say okay after one hour I marketing: . project manager: Wouldn't that make arguments ? industrial designer: They can make marketing: Yeah , of course . project manager: I want user interface: industrial designer: Yeah we can have marketing: That's no problem , we will sell more . project manager: And we can increase this the strength user interface: We got a really good Market Expert . project manager: y you can buy one with user interface: Let's send more , let's sell more . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: I think , okay , we're just on time . project manager: Then we will work again for thirty minutes individual work , and we will meet again for the next meeting , and in this one want to to be more focused on the individual actions the on the components so you will focus on the component concept industrial designer: Yeah yeah . project manager: of course the U_I_D_ Mark will be focused on the user interface concept industrial designer: Mark will project manager: and our m Market Expert Sammy Benjo on the trend watching . And we have maybe we have to we say , only for T_V_ , not teletext ? marketing: project manager: I think automatic on off control it's not possible . user interface: should it be equipped with the , with speakers ? marketing: Speakers in the remote cont user interface: Like , you want to find it , you shout marketing: Oh yeah . project manager: yeah user interface: control , project manager: that's user interface: and it answers is I'm here ? Or marketing: It just beeps . project manager: yeah ? Think industrial designer: Yeah , especially the power , it really consumes project manager: -huh . industrial designer: because it should be all the time on and project manager: And marketing: Well I I heard of devices where you just whistle them and and they project manager: And it's answered . industrial designer: But it's a good feature I guess yeah we need to think about more how to incorporate it . user interface: Just don't interfere with other devices like 'cause like all these people do that their lights are turning on with clapping . marketing: Oh that's e that already exists user interface: Yeah , I got it at my home , like . Good project manager: So , marketing: we're done ? project manager: yeah , industrial designer: Yeah <doc-sep>We're here to have a kick-off meeting for the design of a f for the beginning of new project remote control for the design for a new remote control . marketing: project manager: So I'm first going to do an opening then we get used to one anothers and we speak about this tool we're going to design and try to make a project plan , some discussion and then we talk of the next meeting . marketing: project manager: I think the important points we have to t talk about are it's functional design , it's conceptual design , and desail detailed design . project manager: user interface: It's gonna be not my favourite one but the one I can draw . project manager: industrial designer: user interface: And it's gonna be you'll try to guess . marketing: A r a rabbit , oh oh yeah , where is the carrot ? project manager: user interface: That's it . project manager: You want to go ? industrial designer: marketing: I am not very good at this kind of stuff . industrial designer: marketing: My favourite animal is project manager: industrial designer: You wa marketing: user interface: Wow . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: What about you project manager: yeah Christa Pavlov . project manager: So they have to be waterproof maybe ? marketing: It has to be wha baby proof project manager: 'Cause they eat she ate it . marketing: because even if she's not very tall she's high enough so that when she throw it away it's industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: But how gonna okay , just but it's monochrome it's n it's not like industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah even we can change colours , no ? Like the marketing: Oh like the phones , industrial designer: like the phones and these things we c yeah . project manager: Small also ? Don't you think industrial designer: Huh not so big like yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , not too much buttons and marketing: Should it be , y you know these remote controls where they are what they call a universal ret remote control project manager: marketing: so y you can decide that now it's the remote control for the television , then it's the remote control for the the sound system , or for your refrigerator industrial designer: . project manager: Yeah , industrial designer: marketing: whatever project manager: that's marketing: I dunno if it's project manager: marketing: Or if we should have a targeted re remote control . marketing: So colour , robustness , easy to use , size , project manager: So , I think there's marketing: yeah , size matters , yeah . Colour , size , sh project manager: So you you think it's better if small than bigger . marketing: But what would be different from this , from the others ? I dunno if industrial designer: maybe we can change the colours that at least the frame . marketing: I think one thing important for instance in this remote control if you remember when people use it they're they never find a good button in the right place . marketing: For some reason they they they click the off button when they want to use the industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: So there's a problem in the design of that kind of remote control somehow , project manager: . So , some kind of idea with cellular phone with a a screen that will tell you what marketing: I dunno . marketing: Too expensive for twelve Euro ? user interface: And n maybe not too expensive , project manager: And too expensive . marketing: So ma I prefer to have the off button at the top right , industrial designer: Ye yeah . marketing: so I would have my own design of the remote control because it's in fact just a a full touch screen remote control , industrial designer: . industrial designer: it it's like marketing: I don't know if it makes sense , but project manager: industrial designer: it's like two types no ? people are right handed or left handed so y because I am left handed I use like this , say if you're right handed you use like this marketing: Yeah , for instance , . industrial designer: user interface: so how many actions do we need to implement in it ? industrial designer: huh . user interface: On off ? industrial designer: Maybe I think even we can keep two switches and then we can only make one working . industrial designer: We can adapt only one switch , suppose here like we can make two switches and if I'm left-hander I use this switch to follow the main operations . user interface: if it's less than three then we can make it like a industrial designer: Two . marketing: Three buttons you mean ? user interface: like three mental states , project manager: Three option . project manager: Maybe if it's more , if there is a software inside industrial designer: project manager: that ask you three user interface: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: If it if we want a r universal remote control that we sa like we say before it may may need more than three three button , three possibilities , ye yeah . user interface: But for standard actions you usually what do you do , you change channels , you adjust volume , and nothing else . marketing: Yeah but for instance when you change channels you can have you can just go to the next one or go to channel twenty five . industrial designer: marketing: Because I'm only using three or four channels but industrial designer: Yeah . But they keep generally their t slash slash this thing and then the dash dash and then you can put yeah , you can only have one bit . I change channel like this , m I want to go to twenty five , and then to ten , -huh yeah . marketing: And then back to the one I was before , project manager: Also we can be here marketing: so there's whichever it was . project manager: marketing: Then you can watch what your ah you could also record your record your sequence of actions , industrial designer: . marketing: that becomes more complex , project manager: industrial designer: marketing: but you could look at what the other people have used there or remote controls . project manager: we're going to meet again in thirty minutes and I want you to work on these ideas and try to make a the ones , make to decide what what are the ones important and what are the one that we don't want . marketing: So what does M_E_ means ? M_E_ the user requirements ? Or that's that's for us ? user interface: Market Expert . user interface: marketing: Oh , of course yeah , the user requirement specifications , -huh , yeah

The group discussed the importance of child safety in remote controls, suggesting that they should be brightly colored or in monochrome colors that children are attracted to. Market research indicated that a fancy look and feel, technological innovation, and ease of use were the most important aspects of the device. Design themes such as fruits and vegetables, which were popular at fashion fairs in Paris and Milan, were considered. There was also a trend towards using spongy materials. The industrial designer described the portable device, including an energy source, interface with buttons and keys, a processor, infrared source, and encryption codes for different TVs. Speech recognition was also taken into account. However, gesture recognition and automatic power control were abandoned due to cost constraints. The group also discussed how to help users locate the controller. The user interface designer emphasized the need for the remote control design to cater to different customers, including those with disabilities. The industrial manager highlighted the importance of lightness in the design.

Question: What were the group's discussions and decisions regarding the component design, display, actual components, energy source, and case material design of the remote control? Article: Okay and the agenda will be the opening and that's the product manager or secretary that's me and the presentations from the Christine and Agnes and from Mister Ed . And finally in this meeting we have to decide marketing: project manager: and we are to take a decision on the remote control concept and the functional design So we have forty minutes , I think it's little bit low , but I I hope we can finish it up so I'll handle to the the functional team , to the Christine , okay , to discuss about the components concept . So project manager: industrial designer: we were looking he specifically at the components the following components , the case , the power supply , the means of communications with the television set . In instance we had talked about using some sort of speech recognition , project manager: industrial designer: you have to have microphone well no you don't actually I haven't have to have microphone in the device , but maybe you do have it a a way marketing: industrial designer: it has to it has to hear the speaker user interface: industrial designer: and , so it could be in the television set , could be in the device , but somewhere you have to put the microphone , and a w a way of making beeps or sounds so you can find it when it's gets lost . Our method for going about this is we've looked at the histo hi historical record , what's worked , what hasn't and then we also we wanted to evaluate some new materials marketing: industrial designer: and we contacted manufacturing for their input because , course , we m might come up and choose the material that then manufacturing didn't have the technologies or capabilities to offer us , so this is the approach that we took during our our research . marketing: industrial designer: So for the case , we told we were making a specifica specific assumption that it would be curved in design . marketing: industrial designer: Course , you know , I wanted it to be expandable and shrinkable , but that doesn't seem to b be one of the choic non-option we can we can really seriously explore , user interface: industrial designer: so then we were thinking about rubber , but unfortunately that's been eliminated because of the heat factor user interface: industrial designer: and th there might be some problems with the m how it's goes with the board . and then th plastic also has this problem of melting and it's brittle it gets brittle after a while , user interface: industrial designer: so we still had titanium and and wood available , but unfortunately titanium's also been eliminated , user interface: industrial designer: the m people in manufacturing said that you couldn't make d curved cases out of titanium , although how Apple did it with th PowerBook I'm not su quite sure but nevertheless they've eliminated all of our options except wood . marketing: industrial designer: And a as she said , it's an environmentally friendly material , so we're we're currently proposing , marketing: industrial designer: we'll get to all my personal preferences in just a second . marketing: industrial designer: So then there's this other matter of the chips and well we could use a simple design on the board , user interface: project manager: industrial designer: these simple chips , but that's only works for the bu you don't get very much intelligence with this simple one . And then there was the regular which I regret that I've forgotten exactly why I'm eliminating that one . the other option was this advanced chip on print , and we liked th we we found that it it includes this infrared sender , marketing: industrial designer: which w 'member the beam was that was an important component of finding the right chip . marketing: industrial designer: And manufacturing has told us that they've recently developed a a sensor and a speaker that would be integrated into this advanced chip on print , so we we now jumping right to our personal preferences I I'd really think we should , you know , use some of some really exotic woods , like , user interface: industrial designer: you know , well you guys come from tropical countries so you can kinda think of some trees and some nice woods . I think that people will might really want to design their own cases , you see , they could do sort of a this three-dimensional design on the internet , and then they could submit their orders , kinda like you submit a custom car order , you know , and you can choose the colour and the size of the wheels and the colours of the leather and things like that , and then I think we should go with the solar cells as well as the microphone and speaker on the advanced chip . So this is the findings of our research marketing: industrial designer: and my recommendations for the new remote control w would be to have have it be made out of wood . Do you have any problems with that ? project manager: Can you go back one slide ? industrial designer: I'm not sure , how do I Oh , I know , let's see . project manager: Yes , question , what's mean exactly , advanced chip on print ? What's the meaning of that ? industrial designer: I think it's a multiple chip design and it's maybe printed on to the circuit board . project manager: Yeah , is it means it's on the yeah is it on a micro-proc micro-processor based or industrial designer: I don't know , but I'll find out more at our next meeting . project manager: Okay , tha that would be great , so if you find out from the technology background , okay , so that would be good . user interface: Why was the plastic eliminated as a possible material ? industrial designer: Because it gets brittle , cracks user interface: user interface: industrial designer: I don't know , speak for yourself , I'm planning to be around for a while . user interface: Although I think marketing: user interface: I think with wood though you'd run into the same types of problems , wouldn't you , it chips , it if you drop it , industrial designer: marketing: user interface: it's I'm not su industrial designer: project manager: So so you're not convinced about the the wood , yes . user interface: industrial designer: you're what ? marketing: Actually , I'm ready to sell it . user interface: I think if you re if you use really good quality wood , then it might work , marketing: I'm ready to sell it . industrial designer: You think ? And you could you could sell oils with it , to take care of it . user interface: but you can't just use marketing: No y no no no , the o the only w the only wood you can use are the ones that are hard , extremely hard wood , user interface: Yeah , exactly , yeah . industrial designer: Well I'm glad you user interface: marketing: That's actually very innovative idea . marketing: industrial designer: marketing: Well , it's actually a very innovative n different idea that you know you can choose your colour of wood , your type of wood . marketing: it's each person is gonna have their own personalised , individualised speech recognition remote control in wood , that's not on the market . user interface: project manager: Yeah , so it it's looks good the the design the functional design , what about yo you ? marketing: user interface: in terms of comments on this or in terms of my own project manager: Yes , in t yes , in term in terms of comments first marketing: In turns of wow . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: She works in the cubicle next to me so she's she was already a little bit prepared for this . user interface: marketing: Wood ? user interface: I think we can get the quality materials then it shouldn't influence the design principles too much , which you'll see with my presentation . marketing: user interface: One thing we'd have to check though is what the users whether how quickly the novelty wears off of having industrial designer: Yeah , you wouldn't wanna have to have splinters in your hand while you're using your user interface: Yeah , for example . So , have to see how kid-friendly it is and and all that , marketing: industrial designer: It's really good if your dog gets ahold of it , they can use it for teething . user interface: but marketing: user interface: marketing: They do that anyway with the rubber and plastic , industrial designer: Yeah , they do it with other materials as well , yeah . So , it's a very short presentation , 'cause I'm actually gonna draw you the layout on the board so if you want to just go straight to the second slide , which basically shows , sort of marketing: user interface: I took the ideas that we were talking about last time and tried to put that into the remote control so the things that y you can actually see on it are the on off switch , volume and channel control , the menu access button , ergonomic shape , which I completely agree with Christine's idea to have it sort of molded , so it's slightly more ergonomic and comfortable to hold than the r standard very straight remote controls . And actually the other thing with the wood if we take your customising idea , is that people can actually do sort of quasi-measurements on their hand size , so if someone has larger hands , you have a wider remote control . , one thing I thought might be kind of interesting is to put a flip screen on it , just like you have on flip phones , marketing: user interface: so that you don't have this case where someone sits on the remote control or accidentally puts their hand on it , especially if you have little kids around , they're not pressing the buttons while you're trying to watch a T_V_ show and accidentally change the channel or turn it off . user interface: And also you had issues with the batteries running out , marketing: user interface: so I thought maybe we could put a little battery life-light on it that kind of goes dimmer and dimmer and dimmer as your battery is starts to die . And in terms of invisible features , audio and tactile feedback on button presses and , like you said , speech recognition . user interface: So , in terms of what this thing would actually look like marketing: user interface: Despite working in interface design , I'm not the greatest artist in the world , so you'll have to forgive me . You'd have something like this with an on-off switch fairly big , sort of in the corner and by itself , so you don't accidentally turn your T_V_ off while you're trying to manoeuvre other buttons . And then you have sort of one of those toggle displays for , oops , channels and volume , sort of for surfing channels and then volume , so the volume would be the up and down , 'cause volume goes up and down and then channels left to right . And then on one side you would have an access to the menu on your T_V_ project manager: user interface: and on the other side a way to turn off the voice control . So that if the user doesn't want to use their voice , they can just turn it off and you don't have the remote control accidentally changing things on you . user interface: so again you can have a little L_C_D_ light somewhere , the flip thing and Have I forgotten anything ? I don't think so . project manager: user interface: which is one of the things I really wanted to keep , is keep it simple , not have too many buttons , not have too many functionalities thrown into it . Think the design can pretty much carry over to everything , although with the wood the flip screen might have to do something slightly different . But you also have to d start watching out for the weight , 'cause depending on how much the the flip screen will add to the weight of the remote control , you don't want it to start getting too heavy . user interface: But that's the general layout with the general functionalities , if we come up with something else . As you can see , there's still lots of space on the actual remote control and if you do it customisably , you can make this thing fairly small or fairly o large , depending on personal preferences . user interface: So , that's pretty much all I had to say , everything else in terms of design issues . the centering of the key pad and the channel is just depending on where your thumb is and you tend to use the the volume control and the browsing more than the actual number pad , so that would be sort of in direct line of where your thumb goes when you are holding the remote control , industrial designer: user interface: So once we decide exactly what we want , then we can figure out the exact positioning , but more or less I think it should go along those lines . We've been giving simple questionnaires in different areas because th obviously we have to see what the com consumers are looking for today , 'cause trends change very very quickly . In six months maybe this idea is already gone out the window , so it's gonna be a question how fast we can act . This is what we know from the last from the questionnaires from the the all the p surveys we've done , fancy and feel-good , that's what we've been looking for , something that feels good in the hand , that's easy to use . Looking for next generation of innovation , because all the remotes out there now , they're all very similar , they all do the same thing , project manager: industrial designer: marketing: we have to have something completely different . Okay ? Easy to use , has always has become has become another major interest that , with the whiteboard we can see that it's a remote that's easy to use . And I think this is another thing that's interesting is the consumers actually willing to pay the price for exciting tel technology . So even if we have a product that may be more expensive , if it comes out right , if they look it looks and feels good and has technology . The second one , there is about forty-five thousand different buttons on it , which makes it fairly hard to read , very hard to use . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: The first one , I see that they put in a display . Now there's something else with the little flip-up , now we're adding all kinds of things in , user interface: marketing: but with the little flip-up , if you have a little display on the flip-up that when you close it everything is locked . marketing: Maybe the display also makes it easier to use , because sometimes when you're looking for buttons , maybe if you see a display user interface: industrial designer: Context-sensitive instructions , depending on what the tel what mode the T_V_ or the D_V_D_ or something else is in . marketing: Okay Because I've seen mostly the standard ones , user interface: Especially you might need something like that for training the speech recognition and marketing: yeah . marketing: So maybe if we can incorporate the easiness of use , trendy , fancy , feels good , with a display , wood , designer wood , designer colours user interface: industrial designer: user interface: project manager: industrial designer: You know , maybe what you could do is when somebody orders the device id you could send them like a b some sort of a foam rubber ball , marketing: we might've user interface: Oh yeah . user interface: Yeah , so it's really molded to to your specific industrial designer: To t an and then you would know like what the geometry of their hands would be and marketing: project manager: marketing: How hard they squeeze ? user interface: industrial designer: Yes you'd know what kind of wood to get . user interface: But th for that you'd also have to do sort of an average across families and things like that if unless everyone has their own personal remote . industrial designer: That's right , that's right , you wouldn't wanna go too far down that . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: No , but incorporating the three obviously it'd be something totally new on the market , totally different user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: and from user interface: Well , already the customisability is a really good sort of new gimmick . marketing: Right , you take it apart , and put on another face , take it off and put on another face user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: We'd also have to wor consider that who we were gonna get to make these custom cases in terms of manufacturing processes , we might wanna learn about labour laws . project manager: industrial designer: You know in different countries and stuff wher so we can do it cheap , but you don't wanna exploit labour in third world countries . industrial designer: So actually you could turn it y turn around and say that you're par the reason the cost is high for the device is because you're paying a a working wage to the person who made the device . project manager: Yeah , but we can get a production in , countries like , India industrial designer: Cost of living is low . project manager: yes , yes , countries like India or China or Malaysia , so you can go a better features and better price and you can sell more . So industrial designer: Good , well th that'd be something that manufacturing would have to explore more project manager: Yeah , yeah , so Yes . project manager: So Yeah , so industrial designer: Yeah marketing: We're here to design , come up with a nice product . project manager: Yes , but that that we can that we can talk about the production later , okay , depends on the the quantity , okay . project manager: So we don't need to have our own fabric factory or something , industrial designer: project manager: so we can have a tie-up with who the do the fabric , okay , for the different electronics items , then we can have a business tie-up and to get to cut the cost , okay , to sell more . So , but le let's decide first about the components concept and interface concept , okay , if is acceptable for both of you , what Ed was talking . And your design whether you want with the display or without display or just a simple , so user interface: I think it depends , I think it's a good idea , but we need to really think about how useful it's gonna be because theoretically with the T_V_ you already have a big display right in front of you . user interface: So , if we're trying to keep costs down , then maybe sacrificing the display is a way to go . user interface: it depends on how much putting a display costs and what it would be used for industrial designer: . user interface: 'cause if it's only used for one little thing , then putting in a big display case or a big display that's probably expensive just to do the training on the chip for the speech recognition or whatever , may not be the most cost-efficient way to go , project manager: user interface: but that's just sort of speculation , . industrial designer: What do you think Ed ? Do you he liked the display in one of the concepts that you showed , do you know how much it costs , to to add a little display like this ? marketing: No . No industrial designer: Do you wanna take an action item to go find out ? marketing: no p spec It's 'cause we have to find out cost on it . industrial designer: So the the advanced chip on print is what what we've we've deci we've determined marketing: industrial designer: and the engineering industrial design is the recommendation , and I think we've kinda come to some agreement regarding this concept of a wooden case . user interface: What about the buttons , would Would the buttons be wood too , or industrial designer: I don't think so , no , project manager: I don't think so . industrial designer: so you have that tactile experience of project manager: Don't looks nice . Yeah , so what we'll do is , we will stick with the the simple design for time being until th Ed find outs about the how much it's cost to the extra , in case we go for the display . project manager: maybe what you can do is , both of you , you can come up with the the prototype , okay , the model . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: So are we done with this meeting ? project manager: Yeah , I hope , if is it okay if they will come up with the prototype design , okay . Then they can show you how it looks like , and then we can submit to the I will submit to the management . Okay ? Then meantime you can come up with the price , how much it's cost as extra for the display . user interface: project manager: Of course you'll make money too , industrial designer: project manager: so it it's not only pay-out , you make money too , your commission . user interface: marketing: user interface: marketing: project manager: Okay , so , any questions ? user interface: No . project manager: So , by next meeting , so , please come up with the the prototype , okay , then , then we can proceed from there . project manager: So thanks for all your efforts and coming for the meeting again , and see you soon then <doc-sep>project manager: I figured with the spam thing , if you can't beat it , join in . user interface: marketing: user interface: That's the kind of spam that everybody likes to receive . project manager: Are you ready ? Okay , right , well , I take it that you are all ready now . which was we got together just to basically decide on well to talk about what it is that we were actually supposed to be doing , marketing: project manager: and who we all are and stuff like that , get bit more of an idea together of what's going on . what we are gonna talk about in this meeting is now that we know what it is that we are doing , now we know that it's a T_V_ remote and stuff and you guys have just been off doing some some R_ and D_ for that , that's research and development for those that haven't heard that before , user interface: marketing: yeah , we're gonna hear your th three little presentations , marketing: project manager: whether they be on computer or on the whiteboard or whatever you want . Do you have any preference of order ? project manager: I'd like to hear marketing: project manager: o I'd like to hear who's g who's on the from from Catherine actually first . I want what I'd like to hear about is if we've finally decided on what sort of energy we're gonna be using and industrial designer: marketing: Batteries . project manager: It's just that yeah , let's let's hear from you first . industrial designer: Where is that thing ? user interface: Okay , it's marketing: It's here . industrial designer: so for the energy sources we can have a basic battery , a hand dynamo which is which was used in the fifties for torches , if you remember that kind of which wouldn't be v wouldn't be v v project manager: I don't think any of us remember the fifties . marketing: industrial designer: You can have a kinetic provision of energy , which is used on some watches these days . industrial designer: Or you can use solar cells , but I'm not sure about that indoors , really , but user interface: Well , there's sometimes combinations , like calculators do combinations of battery with but also using some solar power . project manager: Do sol solar panel things , do they have to work from the sun or can they work from a light bulb ? marketing: . user interface: I think , it has to be on the on the solar energy , but I don't know . industrial designer: And if we want something fancier , I think the kinetic provision of energy could be nice , marketing: . industrial designer: For the case of the remotes itself , they can be a general case , which is just a flat one . You can have a curved one or a double curved one , if you know what , so project manager: What's a double curved one ? industrial designer: You know , kind of more ergonomic , that kind of suits the palm of your hand , that kind of thing . industrial designer: So then the case material itself , so it can be either plastic or latex , rubber , wood , or titanium . And th for each of them you have cases where for example titanium , you can't use it for if you if we're choosing a double curved case , we can't choose titanium . And if we are choosing solar cells then we can't choose latex for the case material , so we just have to take that into account . And I think we discussed earlier on the R_ S_ I_ problem thing , so we could project manager: So that might be an idea of using the rubber , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: but then it should , you know user interface: Let's have a squeezable remote . And also it doesn't break as easily maybe , project manager: when a T_V_ programme's got one industrial designer: I dunno user interface: project manager: watching the match and your team's just lost , you can fuzz it across the room and it'll bounce off the wall back at you . marketing: I think rubber's project manager: Rubber , we're all we're all going we're all liking that idea ? You think you can market that ? marketing: But after my after my fashion thing , I think you'll realise that rubber is more project manager: Ooh , we like rubber , ooh . And then there are the push-buttons , so you can have basic push-buttons or a scroll-wheels , like you have on a mouse , or you could have L_C_D_ , which gives you a display . industrial designer: So if you use a rubber double curved case , you must use rubber push-buttons . project manager: Well , we're gonna go with I think we've decided that it's gonna be a rubber case so industrial designer: So it's a constraint . Yeah , but is it a double curved one or not ? If it's not a double curved , then we've got the choice for the push-buttons , if it's a double curve , we've gotta go for rubber push-buttons . user interface: If it's rubber , isn't it malleable anyway , it doesn't matter if it's double isn't a rubber case , mean it's completely flexed , it it flexes to whatever they want it to ? Mean so what's the difference between a normal rubber case and a rubble doub double rubber double curved case ? project manager: rubble double double . industrial designer: No , but na le you see , you've got , okay , the energy that's one thing , project manager: I'll have a Big Mac , please . And that's we don't care if it's rub rubber or not , but then we've decided that we going for rubber for the case material . So if we've chosen rub rubber and if now we have the choice for the case whether it's flat , single curved or double curved . And I'm just saying if it if we choose it to be double curved then we need to go I dunno why , but we need to go for rubber push-buttons . so the push-buttons themselves they can be just simple or they can be so that's just the electronics between the but behind the push-buttons . industrial designer: and the price that go with it with it , so the simple push-buttons are gonna be the cheapest . If we get an advanced chip which is used for the L_C_D_ , the display thing , then that's even more expensive . project manager: is , okay , advanced chip on print , which I presume is like one P_C_B_ and that's got all the electronics on one board including the infra-red sender ? industrial designer: . what a what alternatives do we have to that ? Y what alternatives do we have to the chip on print ? industrial designer: Well , if if it's not chip on print then , I guess , you get different chip components , and you build them separately and doesn't include the infra-red . It's less expensive project manager: so it sounds industrial designer: Technically speaking , it's not as advanced , but it does the job , too . project manager: So , why would we not go for that ? If it's something that's inside the the unit . project manager: we wanna go for an i i all industrial designer: So let's not go for the project manager: so long as it works , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . marketing: What about the just developed sample sensor ? user interface: I think push-buttons is project manager: What about what ? marketing: G there , the sample sensor , sample speaker thing . industrial designer: Well project manager: Well , what do we need a speaker for in a remote control unit ? marketing: I dunno . industrial designer: It'd be it'd be cool , but they are saying they've just developed it , user interface: Yeah . But it's gonna be the most expensive option , probably and project manager: S user interface: Th the the speech recognition option is it doesn't seem really very promising for us , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause The yeah the example that they're already using it for is with the coffee machine , where , basically , you can program a sample wi That when you say something it will give a response , and you program the response as well . So you can program your coffee-maker that when you say , good morning , to it it says , hello Rick , or whatever . user interface: it would be one thing if it was speech recognition where you say something and it turns the T_V_ on like , turn the T_V_ on , and i turns comes on , but it's not that . user interface: So , yeah , like what's the point of saying , Hello remote , hello , how how are you ? marketing: Oh , then then project manager: Yeah . marketing: I thought I thought it was when they said user interface: Yeah , if you're really lonely , it is it's marketing: I thought when they said , voice recognition , they meant like , industrial designer: Channel five . industrial designer: Okay , so I'll go back , maybe , to the previous slide and we can decide for each problem , what we should choose . project manager: It's cheap , it's cheerful , it's worked , does work . Then the case , do you want it flat or curved or sing or double curved ? project manager: We were go we were going with the late with the the R_S_I_ rubber , weren't we ? user interface: Yeah , so we want it rub rubber double curved . industrial designer: Okay , so then if we use double curved case , then we have to u choose rubber push-buttons , project manager: Yep , but we're going for the simple buttons . industrial designer: and that's fine ? project manager: And it's cheapest all round , it sounds kinda funky , and we can also market it industrial designer: P user interface: Yeah . project manager: as i 'cause we were s saying earl you were saying earlier in your research that the the people have the R_ people were getting the complaining about R_S_I_ , and this is anti-R_S_I_ . You industrial designer: I thought they would give an option of flat buttons or a project manager: You see , you can still get it does you still get repetitive strain injury , whether you are pressing a button or pressing a flat bit of screen . project manager: It's the v it's the fact that you are pressing the same doing the same movement . industrial designer: project manager: But the fact that this this rubber i is actually used in these anti-R_S_I_ ps specific marketing: . marketing: Yeah , so they can sit there and go like user interface: Not that watching T_V_ should be that stressful . project manager: And you know , yeah , you can fuzz it across the room and throw it at throw it at your children yeah . marketing: user interface: Oh yeah , I guess T_V_ can be stressful , yeah , if you're watching sports . I also took Reissa's marketing findings from the last meeting into consideration , 'cause I think that's that's crucial as far as what keys we're going to inc inclu what buttons we are going to include and and how they're laid out . user interface: and so the manufacturing division sent some some samples of of interface components that we might be interested in using that have been used in other products , like the coffee machine . It would just be probably the most expensive part of our remote without any actual interesting functionality as far as operating the T_V_ . so yeah , they they also give the they they suggested the idea of using a spinning wheel like you use on the side of an M_P_ three player like iPod . user interface: so we've already addressed that and I think that would actually be worse for something like R_S_I_ you got that thumb movement that you're constantly doing . user interface: and I I have a feeling that we're interested in in something more general , but they suggested , you know , going i a little bit into a a niche , like either gearing our remote towards kids , where you could have lot of colours , the keys might be you know , funny or or , project manager: user interface: or something for the elderly , where the remote's very large and the buttons are very large and there's only a few buttons . But you know we can we can discuss this , but it sounded like from our last meeting we really wanted something that was general , but done well . You don't want you want people to be able to quickly access the buttons that they use a lot without always pressing the wrong one . And I didn't mention that we need a power button in our last I can give you an example here of , good layout and bad layout industrial designer: user interface: from our manufacturing department . So this would be an example of bad layout , where you have volume up and volume down , but they have a V_ on both of them , so project manager: Yeah . user interface: And so , yeah , I th I think my personal preferences of we've all kind of talked about and seemed to be on the same page . user interface: I didn't I didn't think the spinning-wheel or the L_C_ display were were crucial for us . Well let's so w what are our definite decisions on this then as a team ? The The the the interface type we're going for user interface: So we're we're not gonna have any sort of display I think . user interface: ideally , a a power , channel up , channel down , volume up , volume down , and a numerical keypad . And some sort of it will either have a a lock button like we mentioned or or a cover or something like that . user interface: Well now that we've decided on our project manager: Are we gonna hav hav an are we d marketing: project manager: have we decided on whether w we're gonna s supplement it with anything , you know , colours or particular gimmicky bits to it , we're not we're just gonna go for something user interface: it seems like we wouldn't wanna make it too busy and too sort of gaudy , project manager: We're marketing: Maybe we can user interface: but Yeah , I would say mayb maybe a couple of colours like like a black with with yellow and somewhere , like maybe the R_R_ can be yellow , or something like that . Let's move over to user interface: I I guess the fact also that we are having a rubber case would prevent us from having the cover function that we thought of before . user interface: 'cause s so if we wanna have a lock of some sort it would have to be a button . user interface: But I think that should be , I can speak with the button department , but I think that it should be easy to have a button that just prevents prevents the other the other buttons from operating . Well , I'm just basically letting you know what's happening in the markets project manager: yeah . marketing: and also recent investigation that we've done in the remote control market , we have found that for the remote control market these are like most important aspects like that we really need to project manager: marketing: which we've already probably discussed . So the remote control has to look and feel fancier than the ones that already that we already have . So it has to be project manager: Yeah , why should people buy this when they're already got a remote that came with the T_V_ ? marketing: Yep . So project manager: What's that mean ? marketing: Technologically it should be like work , basically , I guess . user interface: Well it should be it should be maybe cutting edge in some sense , marketing: Should user interface: have something that's little more technologically advanced than what's on the market . project manager: Okay , now the trouble is is we've already decided that we're going with the stuff that works already , that's cheap . user interface: it's different , but I wouldn't say like a rubber remote is fancy . marketing: That's why I was thinking , Bluetooth , 'cause if you like put up Bluetooth , and it's like a Bluetooth remote control , everybody's gonna like , oh , 'cause Bluetooth is the in thing nowadays , like it really is , like people and when it comes to marketing like that's what people go for , they don't really care whether , you know , at the end of the day whether it works properly or not . marketing: Well , they do , but it's like it's not project manager: One hundred per cent , that's your first thing , you go , oh I'm not gonna buy that , 'cause I dunno if it works or not . project manager: Okay , well , what do you two think about this ? user interface: So is is the advantage of Bluetooth that you can just like synchronise it with other marketing: But like project manager: Yeah , what I don't understand what m user interface: electronics ? marketing: You could always insert , yeah . user interface: Yeah , that's basically what it allows you to do , project manager: Yeah , user interface: right ? project manager: and it this is just gonna all this is being used for is your television . marketing: Yeah , but , people like project manager: It would that would mean you'd need a television that has Bluetooth in it , which no no television does , marketing: Well , if you're looking at if you looking at something that's going to be bought by people , you have to make it new , you have to make it state of the art . industrial designer: Well project manager: does it ? That would mean we'd have to make a television as well . industrial designer: Bluetooth would , for example , enable you , I think , to connect for example you if you get a w call on your mobile phone , but your mobile phone is downstairs or something , you would get on your television you're being called by this person right now . industrial designer: No i user interface: Yeah , the that wouldn't be the remote so much , project manager: Yeah , user interface: project manager: and i industrial designer: No , but if you get Bluetooth on the remote , you'd be able to project manager: Nah , the televi the television would have to be a Bluetooth compatible , basically . marketing: Well , it doesn't project manager: An and there is no there is no such thing marketing: Like it doesn't have to be , you know , Bluetooth , that was just an idea , but like it needs do something that , you know , is new . Whether it's a battery it could be something really really minor , you know , like but I think we are really keeping to what is already out there , and people've already seen it , people've already got it . marketing: If we want something new , we need to move away from what we already have and just go creative . It's been done for watches , but I haven't seen that for remotes , yet . marketing: project manager: The fact that it's made out of this rubber , we can throw it about . Th we should encourage people to throw their remote controls about , because it charges itself up by doing it . industrial designer: Yeah , well , and in little characters you say , yeah , but not too much . user interface: Yes , so can project manager: But yeah , by the squeezing it the marketing: I think , safety s user interface: Yeah , we can make the squeezing of the rubber be the be the generating like the energy generator . Next year's fashion i very much in fruit and vegetables are thm are like the theme for cloths , shoes and furniture . So next year people will be buying , I found this really funny , you know , strawberry shaped chairs , industrial designer: user interface: Okay , so we could have keys that are like a b like a broccoli key and a and an avocado key on them . and as it's rubber the feel which is in this year is spongy , so it's it's not quite spongy , but spongy , I would say is user interface: . And so personal what I was just saying like move away from the current remote controls like the look and the feel of the current ones and change the look and feel , while still keeping to the company's image , basically . marketing: So we're moving in the right direction like project manager: Alright , yeah , no , this i this is good , user interface: Yeah . project manager: so through all that we've we go we're right , we're gonna go go back to going with the kinetic thing , industrial designer: Yep . project manager: that's great , using the spongy rubber that we were talking about that anti-R_S_I_ you can as you squeeze it you are not only therapeuticising yourself , you are charging the batteries , marketing: . project manager: industrial designer: sued the Beatles so user interface: Okay , we'll make it a pomegranate , a big pomegranate . industrial designer: project manager: Well , okay , it seems like the only thing that we haven't really finally agreed on is its image . Like , yeah , we're we're saying no we don't want it to be fruit and vegetables , but we dunno what it should be , user interface: . project manager: or like are we going yeah it looks slick , but what do what do we mean by slick sort of thing ? marketing: Well I think , if it's rubber it needs to be project manager: you said earlier on i it should be funky . I think , it's it should be , what do you associate with rubber ? You know like project manager: L keep it clean , keep it clean . industrial designer: marketing: Okay , sor I sorry , I used the wrong word , what do you associate with the mate the material that material ? industrial designer: marketing: like I'm just thinking bright colours . Wanna make it different colours so anybody can choo like like project manager: Like the volume buttons should be the all the same colour and the d and the the channel buttons should be one colour and stuff like that , do you mean ? user interface: . Tha user interface: The one thing I'm wondering about , I hope that we're not going like too much down a gimmicky road of of having project manager: Yeah , we that's we we user interface: if somebody go goes into the store they're gonna see like three or four normal remotes , and then a big spongy pink t tomato remote . user interface: what are ninety per cent of people gonna take ? marketing: Well I can say in this country , you'll get , you know , lots of people wanting something really funky and cool . project manager: marketing: And parents will see the will see the pro as well , because it's like kids won't break it , it's not breakable if you throw it around . The only thing is is that really small kids might chew on it , but project manager: Well , it's it's gotta be chew proof . marketing: So user interface: marketing: so it's rea it's quite project manager: marketing: it's quite like user friendly industrial designer: marketing: and also for different families , like like family use as well , so for little kids and for old ki like teenagers will like it , I think . Especially maybe younger girls if it's in pink they'll be like pink remote control for their room something . project manager: So , what are you saying , maybe we should market it in different colours for different marketing: Yeah . project manager: so we could do like the pink range , the blue range , the green range , the industrial designer: That's yeah . marketing: So like you walk in , you're like , oh I like that remote control , because it's so bright , and then , and then the shop assistant comes up and says , oh what colour would you like ? and then they go like , oh I can choose the colour wow . So it puts , I think , even the customer into more control over what they're buying instead of , you've got all colour it's either that or nothing . user interface: Yeah , that that seems to work well with for products like iPod , marketing: It's user interface: where , you know , you have a variety of colours , that people feel like they're customising it when they buy it , even , you know , just just by the fact of choosing . industrial designer: Although I'd be curious to see how many marketing: D you've got the industrial designer: You know , there are some colours that I wouldn I would never choose , and I would be curious how many people choose that colour . project manager: Well that's that can be down to bit of market researching you know , user interface: Right . Well , we'll alright let's what we're gonna aim to get together by the next meeting then is from you Catherine wi your y y you know you're gonna be working on the the look and feel design . project manager: Gabriel , you're gonna be working on , you know come up with the the user interface design . project manager: come up ki you know , be ab for the next meeting be able to come in and show us some some i some physical ideas . project manager: We were kinda going , yeah , it's gotta feel nice , it's gotta look cool and that it's industrial designer: It is . project manager: you know now we can actually start , you know , s some sort of physical something or other . And I will be industrial designer: marketing: project manager: talking to the bosses , basically , and marketing: project manager: f fielding off some more spam and industrial designer: Great . So we know for definite we know we've we've now got some definite things going on . project manager: we definitely know that it's gonna be a simple buttons , we're not gonna be going for the new technological chip on print expensive things , so we've we're keeping the costs down . project manager: People , you know , people are saying , oh , standard stuff gives you repetitive strain injury , well this remote control is designed to do the complete opposite , marketing: Yeah . you know , we're gonna we we're gonna as a sort of extra something on it , you know what what extra things are there extra things this product have ? We'll look into this lock key user interface: Right . project manager: facility , although whether or not it happens , or is possible , I don't know , but something to look into . project manager: everyone know what they're doing ? 'Cause if you don't , you'll I'm sure you'll soon get an e-mail about it . project manager: It's we're we've still couple of minutes until our meeting's due to finish . But I got a note saying that you two who are gonna be working together marketing: project manager: so bef before you all disappear off just user interface: Okay , I'll stay in here . user interface: Does the pay-raise immediately come into effect on our next pay-check , or is that project manager: I think , it's , yeah , I think , it's gonna be par part more of a profit sharing on the product . industrial designer: marketing: user interface: So we're buying fut , we're getting futures in the company . project manager: Yeah , I think i I think that's I think that's the way it's gonna happen at the moment . user interface: I'd like to share in the coffee machine profits , because that's really doing well . user interface: Well I I did notice looking at , they told you that they wanted whatev our product to represent the the R_R_ brand and and to be immediately noticeable . user interface: if you look like at the coffee maker at the at the corporate web page , it's not obvious . Well it is to us , because we we worked worked here for years and we use that coffee machine , but it's doesn't have the colour scheme of of the of the company anywhere on it obviously it's just sil silver and black . project manager: And the spaceship doesn't have the R_ have a massive R_ and R_ down the side of it user interface: No <doc-sep>project manager: I think we're slightly ahead of ourselves from the last meeting , user interface: project manager: This is where we talk about properties , materials , user-interface and trend-watching . project manager: So I think we've touched on a few things to do with that already , but we'll just go over it . we had a couple of changes in our plans in that we couldn't use teletext , it wasn't gonna be a control for everything and that we had to incorporate the image of the company into it somehow . we have decided on a leaving out the voice recognition , we've decided on there being a flip design and a different shape from what's normal . We were thinking a shell , but something along those lines , just a different shape from what's normal , . project manager: and we were gonna think about the port and an alarm for getting it lost , user interface: project manager: things like that , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so shall we start with the first presentation ? marketing: Shall I ? user interface: Yep . Okay so we decided on our market and so this feedback from the marketing department is really about trend watching . the methods we used to decide on current trends and so on , market trends , were that we did our traditional our usual market research study with a hundred subjects and the the general feedback from them is that the most im w I'm sorry I'm slightly tongue-tied after lunch , user interface: project manager: It's okay . we decided on the most important aspect i required in a remote control device and we'll come to that later . Also with our company being forerunners in putting fashion into technology , we also looked at a fashion update using our consultants on fashion and design in Paris and Milan . so the general findings from that was in the market trends the most important aspect for remote controls were people want a fancy look and feel , rather than the the current functional look and feel of remote controls . They also also want a remote control to be technologically innovative , and of course , as we predicted , that it should be easy to use . Now I should point out that the first of those findings , fancy look and feel , is the most important , is twice as important as the second , technologically innovative , which is in turn twice as important as being easy to use . So possibly that the feature that we put first is actually third is still important , but it's third in order of preference for the the subject group we looked at . marketing: Okay , now the fashion update which relates to very personal preferences among our subject group , we found from our consultants in Paris and Milan who des attended all the design and fashion fairs there , that fruit and vegetables are going to be the theme for clothes , shoes and furniture . So should we be thinking of using something like that in our remote control design too ? There also seems to be a trend towards a spongy feel to materials , again in contrast to last year . So a lot of interesting feedback there , both from our market research departments and from our people in Paris and Milan . marketing: Unless anyone has any questions about that ? project manager: I don't think so , not yet . project manager: especially if you do them on too tight and you can't get the leverage on them to undo them . this is all about the design of the actual components and the availability of the components we have in stock at the moment . The the main idea of the whole thing is just so you sh you just press buttons and it should activate things on the T_V_ and we discussed last meeting that it should be easy to find . also in this study I've looked into the availability of some of the materials , 'cause some of the things that we looked at last time aren't un unfortunately aren't available . This is the chip called the T_A_ double one eight three five which is what's used in pretty much every remote control 'cause it sends out standard signals , based on your input and it's pretty much used for all all T_V_ remotes at the moment . marketing: industrial designer: There's actually no rechargeable option available , so we I saw the the standard double A_ and triple A_ which we thought were a bit bit too bulky at the moment , dynamo charging , I thought that that might be a bit silly to be to be honest , project manager: Wa can you explain that ? industrial designer: people won't it's it's basically like wind-up radio . marketing: project manager: How what kind of how l long can you get out of that , industrial designer: It might project manager: can you pick it up and then wind it for two minutes and then that's it for the night ? Or industrial designer: You Yeah , yeah , oh yeah I presu you wouldn't have to wind it for very long , but I don't I don't think it's really sort of necessary when you th you think of the next two options , like the the solar charging , 'cause most people have the light on in the room anyway so they could get when when you got T_V_ . project manager: That doesn't count though does it ? marketing: Does does light charge as as sunlight does ? project manager: I thought it was U_V_ like industrial designer: No . marketing: Artificial light ? industrial designer: Is it ? Alright i project manager: Any , any marketing: Has to be solar . Regarding those sizes , which one you think will be light because we we have to take into consideration size also , so maybe a standard triple A_ might take lesser space or and dynamo might take more space . industrial designer: Yeah it would the d yeah the dynamo would take more space 'cause you actually need a physical sort of handle to wind up . marketing: That's going to project manager: people who live in basement flats there's not that many people , but there are people . user interface: marketing: I know , industrial designer: But marketing: different parts of the world too , if we're if we're marketing internationally . industrial designer: and most people most people also watch T_V_ in the in the night anyway . project manager: but then it would be charging through the day , I think the point is that it charges through the day and then you've got it charged for the evening . industrial designer: The the kinetic charging which is like you get it in r you get it in wrist watches project manager: Yeah I've seen industrial designer: and you d you don't even notice it . the amount the amount of probably moving around you'd be doing all the time would would charge it up , I don't think you'd ever need to actually physically start shaking it up to make it work . user interface: And are these like what are the life of the kinetic battery , it like it runs for long time ? industrial designer: yeah it's it charges into some form of it's a smaller cell which it charges into and the si the size sort of a watch a watch battery , user interface: industrial designer: And that'll that would l would last for well I do I d I'm not entirely sure how long it would last but I've never seen one run out . user interface: We c project manager: But then if you think about a watch , it's on your wrist so it's on your whole bod it's on your body the whole time industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: so you're walking around , you're doing things , it is moving a lot of the time . If you'd industrial designer: Yeah and project manager: you switch the T_V_ on , then you put it on the side , then you pick it up to change it and then you put it on the side . industrial designer: Yeah but then again project manager: Is it really gonna be enough ? industrial designer: I I think it is because if you think about it , the watch , although it's only a tiny amount it's it's it's always moving for the whole day and they don't run out over night when you leave them on the side . industrial designer: And th for the same the same reason , you're only using it for a v incredibly short amount of time just to send the signal and then you're finished with it project manager: So it's not the draw on it isn't industrial designer: and you put it marketing: . industrial designer: no no I do I don't think the the draw on it would be marketing: marketing: Could I just ask referring back to solar charging , is that compatible with standard batteries ? industrial designer: . marketing: could people put standard batteries in but with a s you know they could leave it in the sunlight for solar charging industrial designer: Ye yeah I think I th g y you could have a dual power thing marketing: or the two things not compatible ? project manager: Like a dual kind of . industrial designer: but the the thing with the solar cells is you would need to put them on the case and they because , if you lie on a calculator they they're qui they're quite big and they all they all look i identical . What kind of price are we looking at for industrial designer: They're they're expensive , they don't user interface: It's twelve point f project manager: I presume the normal batteries are the cheapest ? industrial designer: Yeah the normal batteries would be the cheapest I'd presume then it would actually be the the solar charging ones , but the It's i I think they're not very resistant to dropping , project manager: Solar . industrial designer: 'cause if you drop stuff yeah if you if you have y project manager: Well they're not designed industrial designer: the size you'd need to charge a remote wouldn't be that big but if remotes always get thrown around and stuff , so . calculators you don't really throw around a lot whereas remotes you do , project manager: You do get a bit of wear industrial designer: they can t project manager: but don't calculators have a battery in them as well ? industrial designer: Yeah they do , they yeah they've got dual things , but they're the batteries are smaller I think . W w which one would last the longest , because we don't want customers to be like you know charging like a mobile phone every day . user interface: A remote control , like , industrial designer: W m yeah user interface: so we have to s look at the life also . industrial designer: so the Yeah the the s if you if you had something du using the standard batteries and the solar charging , I don't think you'd I think the it would d well you know how long the standard double A_s would last in or triple A_s would last . marketing: It would just detract from the attractiveness of the of the whole feature , industrial designer: Yeah I think i I think it would , yeah . project manager: Can we think about that ? 'Cause if we're doing the kinetic thing and it's industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: Shouldn't we do some market research on that first before we add it in because I I personally project manager: Well add it in to think about marketing: right , okay . project manager: because , where am I ? If it is the kinetic thing and it is small and it is portable and it is a different shape and the kinetic is something people don't do kind of industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: we're doing something original and different but if you wore it if it's something you could just clip on your pocket then you would have that less , you you wouldn't lose it so much . project manager: But then maybe that's looking at someone who's just sitting on their own rather than industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: It's not something that's come up in any of our focus groups and market research , project manager: No . industrial designer: my second part of my findings the mo most current remotes use this silicone P_C_B_ board which pr printed circuit board , which basically has these contacts that are really close together and then when you press down on the rubber button , it'll connect the circuit and each each switch is connected to two different legs on the chip and so sends a different message and that then gets translated by the chip into a code and then it's fired out of this L_E_D_ in the sequence of l on and off bursts . project manager: What kind of things do we have to consider there ? Can we what kind of size , does it come in varying sizes or is it just one size and we would have to fit the design of industrial designer: Well well this the thi the thing about is they they can be as big or as small as you want them to be because you can you can print circuit board like that that it's it's simply spaced like that so you can have fit the n the size of the nine buttons in . If you if you see how thin the tracks are , you could you could s you could put them virtually right next to each other and have a much smaller switch on each one , project manager: industrial designer: if you if you wanted to but the there is an option to do to do it like that , or you could have some sort of array of switches which I'll speak about in the next bit project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so that And then to yeah , so to conserve battery life the remote should be in a standby mode no while not being used . Now what I was thinking about that was 'cause sometimes when y when you have these things , they've got little lights on behind the buttons , so you can see what all the buttons are , like on a mobile phone , they do it more often than on a than on a T_V_ remote , project manager: industrial designer: but you could you could have lights behind the buttons and after like five or ten seconds of not being used I'd have that turned off , if we decided to go for buttons that could light up . industrial designer: the case material , I've a been sent what the factory can actually give us , the there's the plastic which I think we were gonna go for anyway as the main case case housing project manager: industrial designer: and the the main problems with the well you could go for wood but I think it would be a bit impractical . industrial designer: which to make it is expensive , and rubber , well you're saying that people like this spongy feel this year , so perhaps some something made of rubber , marketing: . industrial designer: but I was thinking more of the buttons , because the buttons which they've they've said that they've they've put across are what is used in some stress ball manufacture and it's meant to be anti R_S_I_ . industrial designer: I'm no I'm not sure how that would work because surely your fingers would still be moving over the short distances but that's what they said . the problem with the casing is that there's quite there's quite a few design restrictions that they've got on the shape of the case . If you go for titanium they can only do a standard box shape , whereas if you come to plastic they can they can be a little more they can they can do sort of curved shapes . But whether whether or not because we'd have it in two separate units user interface: Second thing is project manager: Hinged , yeah . user interface: yeah and second question is like , a mobile you can change the cover , you call it a skin or whatever . user interface: So in this case if you're looking at like a customer can change the colour like from green , parrot green to chilli red or something like that . user interface: So is that feature available in like titanium , industrial designer: Yeah I th user interface: or it's like only specific to plastic or industrial designer: . Yeah in in titanium I don't I don't think it would be available at all really , the ju just marketing: industrial designer: it w well you could make it available in the titanium , it was just it would be so expensive to buy a new case for it , because of the expense of how much titanium is is user interface: industrial designer: it's light and strong but I think it should be left for aircraft design rather than for for a remote . I've got a mobile phone myself which is titanium and it does mark very easily if you drop it . marketing: I was just wondering if we make the basic mould out of plastic but have like a rubber cover that goes over , industrial designer: Rubber , yeah . marketing: that would give the spongy feel , that also allows us to kind of have different fasciae for the phone . project manager: So instead of the fascia that comes off being plastic , the fascia that comes off would be the rubber , marketing: Like a rubber sleeve almost , yeah . user interface: Something like project manager: like those pens that you get with the grip , that you can you can pull that off . industrial designer: T marketing: Very cheap way of changing the look of it and people can just buy a new one if they want to . project manager: Well that's been really popular with mobile phones so I don't see why not . industrial designer: just just going back to the interface designs with the buttons , the I kno we were planning to do some sort of touch screen . industrial designer: Now what I was saying before about instead of having you could have just a bare P_C_B_ circuit board and I'm sure you could probably get it in different colours and so just by touching it with your finger it'd make the connection over if you had them close enough , that would be one option . the second option th they offer rubber buttons , but I thought that an L_C_D_ type of screen 'cause one they're incredibly thin and don't take up much space , two they you can have them in a sort of array and you can arrange the buttons on the screen in a sort of set thing and you could have them like a touch user interface: Sorry I didn't get the last part , you're talking of industrial designer: display . what what user interface: Just what you said I I didn't get the meaning of it completely , you're saying like industrial designer: Oh on the on the L_C_D_ screen you could becau you could fit it user interface: -huh . industrial designer: the problem with it basically is that it's flat and so you can't do lots of curve curved things with it , user interface: Okay . industrial designer: but you can you wouldn't have with the L_C_D_ you'd have the wires coming off , you wouldn't have that with the with the L_C_D_ , you'd only have that with the printed circuit board . industrial designer: With W also with the marketing: I don't s sorry to interrupt , I don't see why the curved thing is a problem , if we for example had a shell , once we open that industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: You could have a flat screen inside , yeah , marketing: yeah , so it'd be f yeah , yeah . industrial designer: but I'm just wondering whether we want an L_C_D_ screen inside . marketing: Have I misunderstood you ? industrial designer: It wouldn't be like full colour , it would just be black and white , marketing: industrial designer: so you wouldn't be pressing down on 'em , w or we could have rubber buttons which are made of this material which is anti-R_S_I_ . project manager: I think it would be good to have a contrast between , if the whole thing is gonna be this rubber thing it would be good to open it up and see something quite fancy looking inside . project manager: Now how would you distinguish , if you had it bare , how would you distinguish where you had to press , industrial designer: Yeah I hadn't I hadn't really thought of that to be honest . project manager: marketing: I just had another idea , I don't know if it helps with that , but just to do with the R_S_I_ . Is it possible , just as an option , when we open it up , people can use their fingers to press the button , or we have inside like a small pointer thing when people want to . industrial designer: Yeah you could , you could have some sort of stylus that you could pull out project manager: Like one of the palm pop thing . user interface: Absolutely , f for somebody who very often , if he would industrial designer: 'cause I had marketing: Yeah . user interface: a person who switches channels very often or does use a particular function very often will find it very irritating to use a industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and he might spoil the touch-pad very fast compared to a button like , if you keep punching with an pointer or whatever . marketing: Yeah just a thought they wouldn't actually need one and they could use anything they've got , couldn't they ? A pencil or a pen , so they wouldn't really need a project manager: Okay , we'll talk about that so if you finish your industrial designer: Yeah that's project manager: and we'll come back to that . industrial designer: yeah that that's the end of m my project manager: That's you , right okay . user interface: And just one small question before like you are , regarding the circuit , since we are hav having a flip-top , we can customise the two circuits for different type of buttons industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: like we are keeping the standard buttons on the top and the more complex buttons under this thing , so we can divide the circuit like you know . industrial designer: you'd you'd actually have two separate you'd have two separate circuit boards but they'd be joined by wires or like some cabling between them , user interface: Okay . marketing: I'll just raise another point while it occurs to me , it kind of applies to both our designers here , so I'm not sure how it would fit in . marketing: If we flip open , now you know how you've got some mirrors in nightclubs that are mirrors when you turn to them and you turn away and it gives like an advertising display , you seen those ? project manager: No . Is it possible that when we open our flip-top shell it's a little compact mirror and when you press a button it then goes onto the phone display th the remote control display thing . project manager: Well it's a remote control , you were sitting watching T_V_ are you gonna want to sort of open it and say oh shit I should go and have a shower and do my hair before I put the T_ marketing: Yeah . I know what you mean , it's with us using the ideas for a mobile ph industrial designer: marketing: it's with us using the ideas for mobile phones I kinda got sidetracked onto that I think , okay . marketing: trying to think of other features we can build in that wouldn't cost too much project manager: . industrial designer: you can you could do it , you could have a 'cause if you if you just put the full charge through an L_C_D_ display it'll completely blank it out , marketing: . industrial designer: but I don't know if you could get any mirror effect on it , I'm not sure about marketing: Oh I think forget about the mirror project manager: Okay , okay . First thing is basically on design we just took the input from the previous meeting , especially from the marketing and industrial design , to check on the customer needs and feasibility . Second is we checked into competitors , the picture here shows one of the standard models offered by competitors here . So y you generally see there's not much of variety and like marketing team said , people need trendy , they are bored of black and white . user interface: Like , some some people have a Here you see this ? This is on a I I I found th that only common feature is the ch channel control and volume control , rest other buttons , they are in a very disorganized and they are not consistent th with other models and all . user interface: Okay , and second as already discussed with William , we are going to have m maybe a G_ G_U_I_ interface in the f in the middle of the flip-top industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and g graphic user interface marketing: Sorry what does that stand for ? project manager: Which means user interface: basically which is what we d do in computer , have icons or touch pad or whatever , marketing: Okay . user interface: which is industrial designer: If you if yeah if you have like buttons that appear on the screen in this L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Like you have on a l icons or something y you have is a good example of G_U_I_ graphic user interface . user interface: So basically not point or click Press any particular device , he just has to click on that particular icon to simplify . user interface: And on the top m repetitive buttons which are like volume or channel changing and all could be on the pointing device , that means the use of button . user interface: So we are having a combination of boards , so f on the s simpler board , on the top we have this button , rubber buttons , to keep frequently changing the channels . project manager: Can we swap that round so th that the ones that we use all the time are on the bottom part ? user interface: project manager: 'Cause if you're thinking about holding it you would be using your thumbs to press , just like a mobile phone . marketing: No you'd hold it you don't if you flip it open then you'd be Wouldn't you ? Isn't that the idea ? You us if we just use the shell as an example again , you open that , you've got your L_C_D_ display there and you've got the buttons there so you're holding it in the palm of your hand , yeah . That's what I was just saying , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah but you can do it with your thumb li user interface: But project manager: and then have the and then have the L_C_D_ at the top user interface: user interface: Okay and you mean to the project manager: so have the the volume and the programme , things like that , user interface: And the lower distance . Okay we had a latest finding of voice recognition , there was a mail which mentions that our division has developed a new speech recognition s feature . We have to check into the for financial f feasibility whether we can incorporate it this at a low cost , but for like we had g s response from the customers that they would like to have the feature of finding it . user interface: So it could be like , where is the remote , and the remote answers I am here . user interface: Some kind of thing or it gives a b bleep sound or some kind of sound marketing: . user interface: and if this can be incorporated this would be more you can say trendy also ? And technologically innovative also . My personal preferences would be like , as already marketing department , they want something to do with fruit so I wouldn't say the design should be like a fruit , but yeah we can take inspiration from fruit colours , like the vibrant colours , red chilli marketing: . user interface: tomato red or whatever and second thing is cer certain standard buttons we should have , like for example , i if you see the previous slide industrial designer: Well , yeah we user interface: I think most of the users would now be well acquainted with this cer central pattern , here , so we we we would not change h that particular pattern industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: I can't see that , is that play and stop and things ? user interface: This is central one , the one you project manager: Or is that volume and channel ? user interface: yeah volume and channel . So keep that m that standardised because that's the most common feature across all models , if you look at all the models , it's here . I'm not sure how long we've got left , but we need to make a decision about the things we've discussed . project manager: that means that there's no function for li the port , you know that it sits in , then pressing the button then having industrial designer: . industrial designer: Yeah I think project manager: It's a bi i it's like a g it's a gadget , it's a industrial designer: if Yeah it is it is qui it's quite a cool feature to have project manager: selling point . industrial designer: and also if they've got it if they've got these parts already in stock , then it won't be cheap to re-manufacture them , user interface: So do you reckon that's a good idea that , where's the remote , I'm here thing ? I think that would be quite fun . project manager: I think the only pitfall that we would have would be how much it's going to cost if that means we have to cut down somewhere else , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah to s th well it's it's not as expensive as it would be if it was full colour 'cause if we've just got a black and white one , marketing: . marketing: we've deci seem to have decided on that , did we decide on double A_ or triple A_ batteries ? user interface: . project manager: Do you want like a back-up ? marketing: No , one of the decisions we had to make was whether we had double A_ or triple A_ batteries 'cause they've still got to be charged this way haven't they ? industrial designer: K no the kinetic ones come come with a sort of w watch a battery that goes in a watch . industrial designer: So it's a lot smaller , so it would marketing: Got you on that okay , didn't realise . The buttons what did you give us as our The bare-board L_C_D_ or industrial designer: Yeah the well I think were we're going for the L_C_D_ on that one , on the buttons , user interface: industrial designer: on the on the on on the top one we're gonna project manager: On the top one okay you've got the touch industrial designer: yeah . project manager: okay and then industrial designer: On the bottom we were gonna have the rubber , the rubber ones , the anti-R_S_I_ ones . marketing: Sorry could you repeat that last part ? industrial designer: okay on we've got the flip the flip-screen , the top one is gonna be the L_C_D_ and the bottom one is gonna be the rubberised buttons . user interface: For the body design I think plastic , w yeah industrial designer: Plastic , user interface: we could use the body , project manager: For the inside . user interface: for the inside and rubber as a padding or for the grip , something like to add to the design . marketing: - , user interface: marketing: so we decided on a rubber casing for the plastic shell , a variety of designs , user interface: Plast right . and it is just although it's rubberised and spongy , apart from that we're just going to go for sort of vegetable and fruit colours , we're not gonna try and make it actually a vegetable or fruit design or anything else , like a shell that we discussed , industrial designer: no . user interface: It's project manager: we don't wanna be tacky if we've got a kind of different shape anyway marketing: Okay . project manager: the fact the m the material that we would be using would be cheap , so we could make it red , we could make it psychedelic , you know , we could make it black and white zebra stripes , marketing: project manager: but that's not really what we're focusing on , what we're focusing on is the m you know marketing: The feel . Is that going to be this image I've got in my head of something kind of shaped like that , maybe about that size , made of plastic , fits into the palm of the hand , rubberised cover that's spongy . Is that really going to fit fancy look and feel which was the major thing that people wanted , market research , user interface: I it's different . project manager: It's just different marketing: is that fancy ? project manager: it's just different from everything else and , I'm trying to imagine clean looking houses , marketing: . project manager: so you either want something that goes with that , which is what's on the market anyway , marketing: project manager: or you want something that contrasts as you know like you get clocks now that are more of a talking point than an actual clock because they're so interesting and industrial designer: . I'm just kind of pushing at that to see if you came out with anything else , but I totally agree . marketing: This would definitely be different enough , I just wondered if anybody could come up with something even more project manager: And you would just have an across the b you would have so many different options that you could do , you could have a plain black one , you could have sparkly pink glittery ones for your little marketing: Well the thing is the rubberised covers are going to be s relatively cheap to produce , that if in a year's time we we get feedback from the design fairs that show something else is coming it's so easy for us to just produce that and it can be slipped on , project manager: . project manager: And ones tha ones that have rubbery spikes marketing: which is another beauty of it . project manager: y you know , you could just go so far with it , industrial designer: You can you can just marketing: user interface: Acupressure , you could talk of acupressures . project manager: like a puffer fish , you could just , you could take it wherever , marketing: project manager: so I think that's quite a flexible thing . user interface: And finally the body should be retouchable , may maybe ch you can change the body or the case casing the case outside , project manager: Yes . user interface: it should be moulded it with the design in such a way you can change it every time . marketing: for the decisions that we've made , kinetic charging , the watch-type batteries , L_C_D_ display on th the top side of the flip top , rubberised buttons on the bottom side , we're gonna use fruit and vegetable colours for the rubber cover , the case itself is plastic . That's how far we've got , what else do we have to add to our decisions here ? user interface: Fine , we were talking of voice recognition also marketing: . user interface: because that we are not for how to look it remote control if it's lost . user interface: So , are we looking at voice ? marketing: Yes , it was just , there was just a cost issue with that , but it's a good idea we just need to check on the cost , user interface: Or maybe like William was suggesting in the last thing some devices you put on key chains . project manager: Have you user interface: sorry I didn't mention this , but we'll be incorporating in the design . marketing: 'Cause I took it from the feedback you gave in the last meeting from y from y your report , it's not just a case of having a little R_R_ hidden somewhere , they do want it to be obvious that it's our product project manager: Well they do , marketing: don't they ? project manager: but I think we can you could marketing: Since it's the only one of its kind on the market it's obviously gonna be ours . project manager: Obviously it'll have a logo on it just like everything , but everything else has a logo on it . The point is that it's got to stand out somehow differently but I think it does , without that marketing: Okay . Did we I know at the last meeting we spoke about a beeper , I think that was you talked about a beeper for a location , have we just rejected that in favour of voice recognition then ? project manager: Depending on how i industrial designer: Yeah , depending on the expense of it . project manager: we've got this memo saying that it's something that the company's looking into , so industrial designer: And they've got in stock , so yeah . project manager: that seems to make sense , but if it turns out that it's hugely expensive we'd have to cut down somewhere else , then it's worth thinking about . user interface: Again a questionnaire huh ? project manager: so I think we've probably got it says , closing we have forty minutes marketing: You got to go through . user interface: project manager: It's either that or we only had forty minutes to discuss what we just discussed and don't know how long that took

The group reached a consensus on the design of the remote control, opting for a wooden case with rubber buttons. They also decided to incorporate an advanced chip on print that could integrate a sensor and a speaker. Additionally, they agreed to include a microphone in the device to help locate it when lost. The group discussed the cost-efficiency of adding a display, considering factors such as the size of the television screen and the doubts surrounding the cost-effectiveness of a display. They decided to conduct further research before making a final decision on its adoption. The Industrial Designer explained the use of the TA11835 chip in most remote controls and the use of a silicone printed circuit board to connect the circuits. The size of the board was determined to be customizable. The group also discussed different energy sources for the remote, including basic batteries, hand dynamos, kinetic energy, and a combination of battery and solar power. Each source had its own advantages and disadvantages. The Industrial Designer suggested different case designs, including a general flat case, a curved case, or a double curved case for better ergonomics. The material options for the case included plastic, latex, rubber, wood, or titanium. Ultimately, they decided on a double curved rubber case with rubber push-buttons and a basic battery.

Question: What were the team's thoughts on sending an email to request changes, a single KLT, Dave leaving, insertion penalties, and the baseline? Article: grad a: So , I think this is gonna be a pretty short meeting because I have four agenda items , three of them were requested by Jane who is not gonna be at the meeting today . Does anyone besides Jane know what the transcription status is ? phd f: sort of , I do , peripherally . phd c: Is that English ? phd f: Well first of all with IBM I got a note from Brian yesterday saying that they finally made the tape for the thing that we sent them a week or week and a half ago phd d: That 's our system . grad a: Ugh ! phd f: and that it 's gone out to the transcribers and hopefully next week we 'll have the transcription back from that . grad a: C can I have a pen ? phd f: Jane seems to be moving right along on the transcriptions from the ICSI side . phd f: Yeah , so , I guess she 's hired some new transcribers phd d: Speaking grad e: Which meetings is she transcribing ? phd f: and well we 've we 've run out of E D Us because a certain number of them are , sort of awaiting to go to IBM . phd d: So does she have transcribers right now who are basically sitting idle because there 's no data back from IBM grad e: So we 're doing some in parallel . phd d: Because I I need to ask Jane whether it 's it would be OK for her , s some of her people to transcribe some of the initial data we got from the SmartKom data collection , which is these short like five or seven minute sessions . phd d: and we want it You know , we need The Again , we we have a similar logistic set - up where we are supposed to send the data to Munich grad a: Right . phd d: And so I wanted to ask Jane if if , you know , maybe one of their transcribers could could do since these are very short , that should really be , professor b: And it 's One session is only like seven professor b: So that should have ma many fewer And it 's also not a bunch of interruptions with people and all that , phd d: Right . And some of it is read speech , so we could give them the the thing that they 're reading professor b: right ? So . phd d: And so , I guess since she 's I was gonna ask her but since she 's not around I maybe I 'll professor b: Yeah , well it certainly seems phd d: if if that 's OK with you to to , you know , get that stuff to ask her for that , then I 'll do that . Yeah , if we 're held up on this other stuff a little bit in order to encompass that , that 's OK because I I , I still have high hopes that the that the IBM pipeline 'll work out for us , so it 's phd d: Yeah . phd f: Oh , yeah , and also related to the transcription stuff , so I 've been trying to keep a web page up to date f showing what the current status is of the trans of all the things we 've collected and what stage each meeting is in , in terms of whether it 's grad a: Can you mail that out to the list ? phd f: - , yeah I will . I That 's the thing that I sent out just to foo people saying can you update these pages grad a: Oh , OK , OK . phd f: and so that 's where I 'm putting it but I 'll I 'll send it out to the list telling people to look at it . So Jane also wanted to talk about participant approval , but I don't really think there 's much to talk about . professor b: You are going to grad a: I 'm gonna send out to the participants , with links to web pages which contain the transcripts and allow them to suggest edits . phd c: So but it 's just transcripts , not the not the audio ? grad a: Nope , they 'll have access to the audio also . phd f: So , the audio that they 're gonna have access to , will that be the uncompressed version ? Or will you have scripts that like uncompress the various pieces and grad a: Oh , that 's a good point . Yeah , it 's it 's probably going to have to be the uncompressed versions because , it takes too long to do random access decompression . Yeah , I was just wondering because we 're running out of the un - backed - up disk space on grad a: Well , that was the other point . phd f: Oh , was that another one ? grad a: Yep , that 's another agenda item . grad a: So , But that is a good point so we 'll get to that , too . I 've added some stuff that indes indexes by the meeting type MR , EDU , et cetera and also by the user ID . The back - end is , going more slowly as I s I think I said before just cuz I 'm not much of a Tcl - TK programmer . So I think Don and I are gonna work on that and and you and I can just talk about it off - line more . grad e: And , also , I was just showing Andreas , I got an X Waves kind of display , and I don't know how much more we can do with it with like the prosodic stuff where we have like stylized pitches and signals and the transcripts on the bottom grad a: Oh , cool . grad e: so , right now it 's just an X Waves and then you have three windows but I don't know , it looked pretty nice and I 'm sure it think it has potential for a little something , grad a: For a demo ? grad e: yeah , for a demo . grad e: So professor b: OK , so again , the issue is For July , the issue 's gonna be what can we fit into a Windows machine , and so on , but grad e: Oh . grad e: Well , we 'll see , phd c: I 've been putting together Transcriber things for Windows so i And I installed it on Dave Gelbart 's PC and it worked just fine . phd d: Really ? So is that Because there 's some people It would be cool if we could get that to work at at SRI phd c: Yeah . phd d: because the grad a: Well Transcriber is Tcl - TK , very generic with Snack , phd d: we have m m We have more Windows machines to run the phd c: Yeah . Yeah but But the problem is the version Transcriber works with , the Snack version , is one point six whatever and that 's not anymore supported . But I just wrote an email to to the author of to the Snack author and he sent me to one point six whatever library grad a: Well I thought it was packaged with Transcriber ? phd c: and so it works . Yeah , but then you can't add our patches and then the the new version is is totally different grad a: Oh . phd c: and you can't you can't access that so you have to install First install Tcl then install Snack and then install the Transcriber thing and then do the patches . Ugh ! phd d: I I wonder if if we should contribute our changes back to the authors so that they maintain those changes along phd c: Yeah . grad a: We have Yeah b it 's just hasn't made it into the release yet . phd f: So did you put the the NT version out on the Meeting Recorder page ? Or phd c: No , I haven't done that yet . professor b: So , can some of the stuff that Don 's talking about somehow fit into this , mean you just have a set of numbers that are associated with the grad e: Yeah . phd c: So grad e: Yeah , it 's basically ASCII files or binary files , whatever representation . Just three different It 's a waveform and just a stylized pitch vector basically so it 's phd d: So So Well grad e: we could do it in Matl - you could do it in a number of different places I 'm sure . phd d: But But it would be cool if the Transcriber interface had like another window for the you know , maybe above the waveform where it would show some arbitrary valued function that is that is you know time synchron ti ti time synchronous with the wavform . Again it 's it 's It 's more Tcl - T grad e: Yeah . grad a: So someone who 's familiar with Tcl - TK has to do it , phd d: Right . grad a: But it it seems to me that I c phd c: And grad a: It doesn't seem like having that real time is that necessary . grad e: What do you mean by real time ? Do you mean like phd f: Like being able to scroll through it and stuff for the demo . phd f: Is that what you mean ? grad a: It just seems to me jus grad e: It would be cool to see it phd f: Yeah . grad e: It would be cool like to see to hear it and see it , phd c: And to hear it . grad a: Sure , but I don't think I You can do all that just statically in phd c: Yeah . grad e: I think it would lose Yeah , y grad a: Just record the audio clip and show an image and I think that 's grad e: Right , right . , no , we 're talking about on the computer and and , I think when we were talking about this before we had littl this little demo meeting , grad e: Right . professor b: we sort of set up a range of different degrees of liveness that you could have and , the more live , the better , but , given the crunch of time , we may have to retreat from it to some extent . So I think For a lot of reasons , I think it would be very nice to have this Transcriber interface be able to show some other interesting signal along with it phd d: But , Anyway , jus just looking for ways that we could actually show what you 're doing , in to people . professor b: Cuz a lot of this stuff , particularly for Communicator , certainly a significant chunk of the things that we waved our arms about th originally had t had to do with prosodics It 'd be nice to show that we can actually get them and see them . So , we have a little bit of time before that becomes critical , but we are like ninety five percent , ninety eight percent on the scratch disks for the expanded meetings . grad a: And , my original intention was like we would just delete them as we needed more space , but unfortunately we 're in the position where we have to deal with all the meeting data all at once , in a lot of different ways . grad a: Yeah , there 're a lot of transcribers , phd c: Yeah . grad a: so all of those need to be expanded , and then people are doing chunking and I want to do , the permission forms , phd f: grad a: so I want those to be live , so there 's a lot of data that has to be around . One of the things I was thinking is we we just got these hundred alright , excuse me ten , SPARC - Blade SUN - Blades . grad a: And so it seems to me we could hang scratch disk on those because they 'll be in the machine room , they 'll be on the fast connection to the rest of the machines . phd f: Well , is there Why not just hang them off of Abbott , is there a grad a: Because there 's no more room in the disk racks on Abbott . phd f: You can put two phd d: Oh you mean you put them inside the pizza boxes for the grad a: Sure . grad a: So you can just go out and buy a PC hard drive and stick it in . professor b: But if Abbott is going to be our disk server it it file server it seems like we would want to get it , a second disk rack or something . What I 'm looking for is where do we s expand the next meeting ? phd c: Yep . professor b: Well , for the next meeting you might be out of luck with those ten , mightn't you ? , you know Dave Johnson is gone for , like , ten days , grad a: Oh , I didn't know he had left already . grad e: How much space do you need for these ? professor b: I don't know what his schedule is . phd f: I I thi grad e: I have I have an eighteen gig drive hanging off of my computer . grad a: Alright ! What 's your computer 's name ? grad e: So , Samosa . grad a: And you 're o you 're offering ? grad e: I 'm not doing anything on it right now until I get new meetings to transcri or that are new transcriptions coming in I really can't do anything . grad e: not that I can't do anything , I jus phd f: I I jus I just gave Thilo some about ten gigs , the last ten gigs of space that there was on on Abbott . And So but that But grad a: Which one was that , X G ? X G ? phd c: XG . phd d: That 's also where we store the The Hub - five training set waveforms , phd c: Oops . grad a: But that won't be getting any bigger , phd d: right ? phd f: No . grad a: will it ? phd f: I don't think that 's on XG . phd d: But I 've also been storing I 've been storing the feature files there and I guess I can s start deleting some because we now know what the best features are grad e: Well phd d: and we won't be using the old ones anymore . phd d: Oh thats XA Oh that 's X phd c: Isn't that XH ? phd f: I th grad a: Not not for long . grad e: I have a lot of space and it 's not it 's n There 's very little Yeah not for long . phd d: Maybe I 'm confu grad e: But it 's not going f phd d: Oh no I 'm sorry . grad a: Yeah , it 's probably Probably only about four gig is on X on your X drive , phd c: So . grad a: but we 'll definitely take it up if you grad e: I th phd d: I think you 're right . It 's XH and D grad e: I think it 's about four or five gig cuz I have four meetings on there , phd d: The b I 'm also using DG I got that confused . grad a: The " more disk space " button ? professor b: Just press Press each meeting saying " we need more disk space " " this week " . professor b: And And how much does each meeting take ? phd f: And it 's about a gig uncompressed . phd c: It 's It 's a little bit more as I usually don't do not uncompress the all of the PZM and the PDA things . So there 's what thirty some gig of just meetings so far ? professor b: So - so So maybe there 's a hundred gig or something . Well we We haven't uncompressed all the meetings , but grad a: I would like to . it 's just a question of figuring out where they should be and hanging them , grad a: Yep . professor b: but But , we could You know , if you want to get four disks , get four disks . Well I sent that message out to , I guess , you and Dave asking for if we could get some disk . phd f: I s I sent this out a a day ago grad a: And put it where ? professor b: Right . phd f: but and Dave didn't respond so I don I don't know how the whole process works . does he just go out and get them and if it 's OK , and grad a: Yep . And just say an - e just ask him that , you know , wha what should you do . And in my answer back was " are you sure you just want one ? " So I think that what you want to do is plan ahead a little bit and figure " well , here 's what we pi figure on doing for the next few months " . So this is a question that 's pretty hard to solve without talking to Dave , phd d: Th - The phd f: I think part of the reason why Dave can't get the the new machines up is because he doesn't have room in the machine room right now . phd d: One One On - One thing to in to t to do when you need to conserve space is phd f: So he has to re - arrange a bunch of stuff . phd d: I bet there are still some old , like , nine gig disks , around and you can probably consolidate them onto larger disks and and you know recover the space . An - and so , he always has a a lot of plans of things that he 's gonna do to make things better in many ways an and runs out of time . And so I think what he 's been concentrating on is the back the back up system , rather than on new disk . Basically , we can easily get one to four disks , you just go out and get four and we 've got the money for it , it 's no big deal . , but the question is where they go , and I don't think we can solve that here , you just have to ask him . grad a: Yeah , it 's just It 's not on the net , so it 's a little awkward phd d: The only phd f: . phd d: What do you mean it 's not on the net ? grad a: It 's not phd c: It 's not bad . grad a: It 's behind lots of fire walls that don't allow any services through except S S phd d: Oh because it 's because it 's an ACIRI machine ? grad a: Yep . grad a: And also on the list is to get it into the normal ICSI net , but Who knows when that will happen ? phd d: But that can't be that hard . phd d: grad a: No , the the problem with that apparently is that they don't currently have a wire running to that back room that goes anywhere near one of the ICSI routers . If there was a person dedicated to doing it they would happen pretty easily but it 's it 's jus every ever everybody everybody has a has grad a: But Dave has to do all of them . But at any rate I think that there 's a there 's a longer term thing and there 's immediate need and I think we need a a conversation with , maybe maybe after after tea or something you and I can go down and and talk to him about it Just say " wha you know , what should we do right now ? " phd f: How long is David gonna be gone ? professor b: eleven days or something ? grad a: Oh my ! professor b: Yeah basically tomorrow and all of the week after . The only oth thing other thing I was gonna add was that , I talked briefly to Mari and we had both been busy with other things so we haven't really connected that much since the last meeting we had here but we agreed that we would have a telephone meeting the Friday after next . And I I I wanted to make it , after the next one of these meetings , so something that we wanna do next meeting is is to put together , a kind of reasonable list for ourselves of what is it , that we 've done . just sort of bulletize o e do do I can I can dream up text but this is basically gonna lead to the annual report . grad a: This is the fifteenth ? So just a week from tomorrow ? professor b: that would grad a: OK . So , we can This So that 's an phd d: Is this gotta be in the morning ? professor b: phd d: Or Because you know I Fridays I have to leave like around two . So if it could be before that would be be professor b: No , no but I I I don't need other folks for the meeting . professor b: Yeah so what I meant was on the me this meeting if I wa something I I I 'm making a major thing in the agenda is I wanna help in getting together a list of what it is that we 've done so I can tell her . professor b: but but , and then the next day , late in the day I 'll be having that that discussion with her . phd d: One thing we in past meetings we had also a you know various variously talked about the work that w was happening sort of on the on the recognition side professor b: And I wondered whether we should maybe have a separate meeting and between you know , whoever 's interested in that because I feel that there 's plenty of stuff to talk about but it would be sort of maybe the wrong place to do it in this meeting if professor b: Think so ? phd d: Well , it 's that It 's just gonna be ver very boring for people who are not you know , sort of really interested in the details of the recognition system . professor b: Well , OK , so how many how many people here would not be interested in in a meeting about recognition ? phd c: Me too . phd d: Well I know Well , Jane an Well you mean in a separate meeting or ha ha talking about it in this grad a: No . professor b: Real grad e: Watch a ball game ? professor b: Yeah , real real real men " Real men do decoding " or something like that . phd d: it it 's sort of when when the talk is about data collection stuff , sometimes I 've you know , I I 'm bored . grad a: The Nod off ? phd d: So it 's I c I can sympathize with them not wanting to i to to be you know If I cou you know this could professor b: It 's cuz y you have a So you need a better developed feminine side . phd d: I 'm professor b: There 's probably gonna be a lot of " bleeps " in this meeting . You know , whatev or whenever we feel like we phd f: Right , I was Why don't we alternate this meeting every other week ? grad a: Or just alternate the focus . grad a: Oh sor phd f: But I do I don't a lot of times lately it seems like we don't really have enough for a full meeting on Meeting Recorder . phd f: So if we could alternate the focus of the meeting grad a: Let 's read digits and go . professor b: And then if we find , you know we 're just not getting enough done , there 's all these topics not coming up , then we can expand into another meeting . Let 's chat about it with Liz and Jane when we get a chance , see what they think and phd d: phd f: and there 's lots of things , you know , details and stuff that would I think people 'd be interested in and I 'd you know , where do we go from here kind of things and So , it would be good . professor b: Yeah , and you 're you 're attending the the front - end meeting as well as the others so you have you have probably one of the best you and I , I guess are the main ones who sort of see the bridge between the two . phd d: I jus So the latest result was that yot I tested the the sort of final version of the PLP configuration on development test data for for this year 's Hub - five test set . phd d: And the recognition performance was exactly , and exactly up to the you know , the first decimal , same as with the Mel Cepstra front - end . , well i there was a little bit of a phd f: Oh ! phd d: i overall . phd d: And then the really nice thing was that if if we combine the two systems we get a one and a half percent improvement . phd d: Which u actually uses the whole N - best list from both systems to mmm , c combine that . professor b: So except the only key difference between the two really is the kind of smoothing at the end which is the auto - regressive versus the cepstral truncation . phd d: And , the phd f: But a percent and a half ? grad a: Yeah , it 's pretty impressive . phd f: That 's phd d: And And so after I told the my colleagues at SRI about that , you know , now they definitely want to , you know , have a Next time we have an evaluation they want to do , you know , basically a at least the system combination . , and , you know , why not ? professor b: Sure , why not ? phd d: . phd d: w what do you mean ? More features in the sense of front - end features or in the sense of just bells and whistles ? grad a: No , front - end features . Let 's , you know , try RASTA and MSG , and phd d: Oh Yeah . That 's the the the There 's one thing you don't want to overdo it because y every front - end You know , if you you know you basically multiply your effort by N , where N is a number of different systems phd f: Oh . So one one compromise would be to only to have the everything up to the point where you generate lattices be basically one system and then after that you rescore your lattices with the multiple systems and combine the results and that 's a fairly painless thing . phd f: Do you think we 'd still get the one and a half phd d: I I think so . Maybe a little less because at that point the error rates are lower and so if You know , maybe it 's only one percent or something but that would still be worthwhile doing . Jus - You know , just wanted to let you know that that 's working out very nicely . phd d: And then we had some results on digits , with We We So this was really really sort of just to get Dave going with his experiments . But as a result , you know , we were sort of wondering why is the Hub - five system doing so well on the digits . phd d: And the reason is basically there 's a whole bunch of read speech data in the Hub - five training set . phd d: And you c And Not all of No it 's actually , digits is only a maybe a fifth of it . professor b: A fifth of it is how much ? phd d: The rest is is read is read TIMIT data and ATIS data and Wall Street Journal and stuff like that . But a fi a fifth is how much ? phd d: A fifth would be maybe two hours something . professor b: Yeah , so that 's actually not that different from the amount of training that there was . phd d: But it definitely helps to have the other read data in there professor b: Oh yeah phd d: because we 're doing professor b: w phd d: You know the error rate is half of what you do if you train only on ti TIMIT not TIMIT TI - digits , professor b: phd d: That 's e professor b: Because because , it was apparent if you put in a bunch more data it would be better , phd d: That was e Right , right . So we only for the Hub - five training , we 're only using a fairly small subset of the Macrophone database . grad a: I could also put in focus condition zero from Hub - four from Broadcast News , which is mostly prepared speech . So , you know that might be useful for the people who train the the digit recognizers to to use something other than TI - digits . They they they experimented for a while with a bunch of different databases with French and Spanish and so forth cuz they 're multilingual tests phd d: professor b: But but yeah certainly if we , If we knew what the structure of what we 're doing there was . professor b: Once we know , then the trainable parts of it it 'd be great to run lots of lots of stuff through . And then I th guess Chuck and I had some discussions about how to proceed with the tandem system and You wanna You wanna see where that stands ? phd f: Well , I 'm phd d: phd f: Yeah , so Andreas brought over the alignments that the SRI system uses . And so I 'm in the process of converting those alignments into label files that we can use to train a new net with . phd d: An - And one side effect of that would be that it 's that the phone set would change . So the MLP would be trained on I think only forty - six or forty - eight phd f: Right . phd d: which is smaller than the than the phone set that that we 've been using so far . phd d: And that that that will probably help , actually , phd f: So it 's a little different ? phd d: because the fewer dimensions e the less trouble probably with the as far as just the , Just You know we want to try things like deltas on the tandem features . And so , you know , fewer dimensions in the phone set would be actually helpful just from a logistics point of view . Although we , it 's not that many fewer and and and we take a KLT anyway so we could phd d: Right . And then we wanted to s just limit it to maybe something on the same order of dimensions as we use in a standard front - end . So that would mean just doing the top I don't know ten or twelve or something of the KLT dimensions . My impression was that when we did that before that had very little he didn't lose very much . phd d: But then And then something Once we have the new M L P trained up , one thing I wanted to try just for the fun of it was to actually run like a standard hybrid system that is based on you know , those features and retrain MLP and also the you know , the dictionary that we use for the Hub - five system . professor b: And the b And the base u starting off with the base of the alignments that you got from i from a pretty decent system . phd d: because you know , compared to what Eric did a while ago , where he trained up , I think , a system based on Broadcast News and then tra retraining it on Switchboard or s and professor b: Yeah . phd d: But he I think he d he didn't he probably didn't use all the training data that was available . We we made some improvements to the dictionary 's to the dictionary about two years ago which resulted in a something like a four percent absolute error rate reduction on Switchboard , which professor b: Well the other thing is , dipping deep into history and into our resource management days , when we were collaborating with SRI before , phd d: professor b: it was I think , it is was a really key starting point for us that we actually got our alignment . professor b: When we were working together we got our initial alignments from Decipher , at the time . Later we got away from it because because once we had decent systems going then it was it was typically better to use our own systems phd f: Yeah . professor b: cuz they were self consistent but but certainly to start off when we were trying to recover from our initial hundred and forty percent error rate . professor b: And we 're not quite that bad with our our Switchboard systems but it was they certainly aren't as good as SRI 's , phd d: OK . phd f: W What is the performance on s the best Switchboard system that we 've done ? Roughly ? professor b: Well , the hybrid system we never got better than about fifty percent error . And it was I think there 's just a whole lot of things that no one ever had time for . we always had a list of a half dozen things that we were gonna do and and a lot of them were pretty simple and we never did . professor b: we never did an never did any adaptation phd d: But that w Even that that number professor b: we never did any phd d: Right . And And that number I think was on Switchboard - one data , right ? Where the error rate now is in the twenties . phd d: So it would be So it would be good t to sort of r re professor b: Yeah . And the other thing that that would help us to evaluate is to see how well the M L P is trained up . phd d: So it 's sort of a sanity check of the M L P outputs before we go ahead and train up the you know , use them as a basis for the tandem system . Not phd f: Should we Should we bother with using the net before doing embedded training ? professor b: But . phd d: But phd f: should should we even use that ? phd d: Oh oh that 's a good question . phd f: Or should I just go straight to phd d: Yeah , we we weren't sure whether it 's worth to just use the alignments from the S R I recognizer or whether to actually go through one or more iterations of embedded training where you realign . You run it ? Keep keep both versions ? See which one 's better ? professor b: yeah . professor b: And while it 's training you may as well test the one you have and see how it did . You know , it 's phd d: But But so I grad a: Sort of given up guessing . phd d: Well but i But in your experience have you seen big improvements in s on some tasks with embedded training ? Or was it sort of small - ish improvements that you got professor b: well . professor b: because we 're coming from , alignments that were achieved with an extremely different system . grad a: Although , we 've done it with When we were combining with the Cambridge recurrent neural net , embedded training made it worse . phd d: So you you started training with outputs from a with alignments that were generated by the Cambridge system ? grad a: Yep . professor b: Oh ! phd d: No it 's weird that it did I 'm sorry . Tha - u we we 've see and wi with the numbers OGI numbers task we 've seen a number of times people doing embedded trainings and things not getting better . phd d: Oh actually it 's not that weird because we have seen We have seen cases where acoustic retraining the acoustic models after some other change made matters worse rather than better . professor b: But I But I would I would suspect that something that that had a very different feature set , for instance they were using pretty diff similar feature sets to us . professor b: I I would expect that something that had a different feature set would would benefit from phd d: professor b: sorry , it was the other thing is that what was in common to the Cambridge system and our system is they both were training posteriors . professor b: So , that 's another pretty big difference grad a: That 's another big difference . professor b: and , one bac at least Back at phd d: You mean with soft targets ? Or ? Sorry , I 'm sor I missed What What 's the key issue here ? professor b: Oh , that both the Cambridge system and our system were were training posteriors . And if we 're we 're coming from alignments coming from the SRI system , it 's a likelihood - based system . You know , there 's diffe different front - end different different , training criterion , I would think that in a that an embedded embedded training would have at least a good shot of improving it some more . I was wondering you know what size net I should Anybody have any intuitions or suggestions ? professor b: how much training data ? phd f: Well , I was gonna start off with the small train set . professor b: And how How many hours is that ? phd f: That 's why I was I I 'm not sure how much that is . phd d: I think that has about Well i you 'd would be gender - dependent training , right ? So So I think it 's that 's about mmm , something like thirty hours . phd f: In the small training set ? grad a: Hello ? phd d: I I think so . I 'll grad a: Excuse me ? phd d: It 's definitely less than a hundred grad a: Alright . It 's it 's th the thing I 'll I 'll think about it a little more phd d: It 's m It 's more than phd f: And a thousand is too small ? professor b: Oh let me think about it , but I think that that th at some point there 's diminishing returns . professor b: but it but but there is diminishing returns and you 're doubling the amount of time . phd d: Remember you 'll have a smaller output layer so there 's gonna be fewer parameters there . phd d: And then professor b: Fifty s Fifty four to forty eight ? grad a: Vast majority is from the input unit . grad a: Right , because you used the context windows and so the input to hidden is much , much larger . professor b: Yeah , so it 's it 'd be way , way less than ten percent of the difference . What am I trying to think of ? phd f: The The net that that we did use already was eight thousand hidden units and that 's the one that Eric trained up . professor b: So , yeah definitely not the one thousand two thousand fr the four thousand will be better and the two thousand will be almost will be faster and almost as good . a four thousand is well within the range that you could benefit from but the two thousand 'd be faster so phd d: Right <doc-sep>professor b: So what what from what grad a: Hello ? professor b: Whatever we say from now on , it can be held against us , right ? phd e: That 's right . So I I the the problem is that I actually don't know how th these held meetings are held , if they are very informal and sort of just people are say what 's going on phd e: Yeah . phd e: We just sorta go around and people say what 's going on , what 's the latest professor b: Yeah . So I guess that what may be a reasonable is if I first make a report on what 's happening in Aurora in general , at least what from my perspective . professor b: And and so , I I think that Carmen and Stephane reported on Amsterdam meeting , phd d: o professor b: which was kind of interesting because it was for the first time we realized we are not friends really , but we are competitors . phd e: right ? that they were trying to decide ? professor b: There is a plenty of there 're plenty of issues . phd e: Like the voice activity detector , professor b: Well and what happened was that they realized that if two leading proposals , which was French Telecom Alcatel , and us both had voice activity detector . And I said " well big surprise , we could have told you that n n n four months ago , except we didn't because nobody else was bringing it up " . professor b: Obviously French Telecom didn't volunteer this information either , cuz we were working on mainly on voice activity detector for past several months phd e: Right . professor b: I said " well yeah , you are absolutely right , if I wish that you provided better end point at speech because or at least that if we could modify the recognizer , to account for these long silences , because otherwise that that th that wasn't a correct thing . " And so then ev ev everybody else says " well we should we need to do a new eval evaluation without voice activity detector , or we have to do something about it " . Because but in that case , we would like to change the the algorithm because if we are working on different data , we probably will use a different set of tricks . professor b: But unfortunately nobody ever officially can somehow acknowledge that this can be done , because French Telecom was saying " no , no , no , now everybody has access to our code , so everybody is going to copy what we did . " Yeah well our argument was everybody ha has access to our code , and everybody always had access to our code . We thought that people are honest , that if you copy something and if it is protected protected by patent then you negotiate , or something , phd e: Yeah . professor b: But And French Telecom was saying " no , no , no , phd e: professor b: there is a lot of little tricks which sort of cannot be protected and you guys will take them , " which probably is also true . , you know , it might be that people will take th the algorithms apart and use the blocks from that . But I somehow think that it wouldn't be so bad , as long as people are happy abou honest about it . professor b: And I think they have to be honest in the long run , because winning proposal again what will be available th is will be a code . So the the people can go to code and say " well listen this is what you stole from me " phd e: The biggest problem of course is that f that Alcatel French Telecom cl claims " well we fulfilled the conditions . " And e and other people don't feel that , because they so they now decided that that is the whole thing will be done on well - endpointed data , essentially that somebody will endpoint the data based on clean speech , because most of this the SpeechDat - Car has the also close speaking mike and endpoints will be provided . professor b: And we will run again still not clear if we are going to run the if we are allowed to run new algorithms , but I assume so . but since u u n u at least our experience is that only endpointing a a mel cepstrum gets gets you twenty - one percent improvement overall and twenty - seven improvement on SpeechDat - Car phd e: . professor b: So they agreed that there will be a twenty - five percent improvement required on on h u m bad mis badly mismatched phd e: But wait a minute , I thought the endpointing really only helped in the noisy cases . professor b: Yeah but you have the same prob MFCC basically has an enormous number of insertions . professor b: And so , so now they want to say " we we will require fifty percent improvement only for well matched condition , and only twenty - five percent for the serial cases . professor b: And and they almost agreed on that except that it wasn't a hundred percent agreed . And so last time during the meeting , I just brought up the issue , I said " well you know quite frankly I 'm surprised how lightly you are making these decisions because this is a major decision . For two years we are fighting for fifty percent improvement and suddenly you are saying " oh no we we will do something less " , but maybe we should discuss that . And everybody said " oh we discussed that and you were not a mee there " and I said " well a lot of other people were not there because not everybody participates at these teleconferencing c things . " However , there is only ten or fifteen lines , so people can't even con you know participate . " Immediately Nokia raised the question and they said " oh yeah we agree this is not good to to dissolve the the the criterion . professor b: So now officially , Nokia is complaining and said they they are looking for support , I think QualComm is saying , too " we shouldn't abandon the fifty percent yet . professor b: Next Wednesday we are going to have another teleconferencing call , so we 'll see what where it goes . phd e: So what about the issue of the weights on the for the different systems , the well - matched , and medium - mismatched and professor b: Yeah , that 's what that 's a g very good point , because David says " well you know we ca we can manipulate this number by choosing the right weights anyways . professor b: yeah , if of course if you put a zero weight zero on a mismatched condition , or highly mismatched then then you are done . So phd e: And they 're the staying the same ? professor b: Well , of course people will not like it . Now What is happening now is that I th I think that people try to match the criterion to solution . But it 's should happen at a point where everybody feels comfortable that we did all what we could . professor b: Basically , I think that that this test was a little bit bogus because of the data and essentially there were these arbitrary decisions made , and and everything . So what we are doing at OGI now is working basically on our parts which we I think a little bit neglected , like noise separation . so we are looking in ways is in which with which we can provide better initial estimate of the mel spectrum basically , which would be a l , f more robust to noise , and so far not much success . professor b: We tried things which a long time ago Bill Byrne suggested , instead of using Fourier spectrum , from Fourier transform , use the spectrum from LPC model . Their argument there was the LPC model fits the peaks of the spectrum , so it may be m naturally more robust in noise . And I thought " well , that makes sense , " but so far we can't get much much out of it . professor b: we may try some standard techniques like spectral subtraction and phd e: You haven't tried that yet ? professor b: not not not much . professor b: like for instance Dennis Klatt was suggesting the one way to deal with noisy speech is to add noise to everything . phd e: Oh ! professor b: So that makes th any additive noise less addi less a a effective , phd e: I see . It was kind of like one of these things , you know , but if you think about it , it 's actually pretty ingenious . So well , you know , just take a take a spectrum and and and add of the constant , C , to every every value . And if if then if this data becomes noisy , it b it becomes eff effectively becomes less noisy basically . professor b: But of course you cannot add too much noise because then you 'll s then you 're clean recognition goes down , but it 's yet to be seen how much , it 's a very simple technique . professor b: Yes indeed it 's a very simple technique , you just take your spectrum and and use whatever is coming from FFT , add constant , phd e: . That that Or the other thing is of course if you have a spectrum , what you can s start doing , you can leave start leaving out the p the parts which are low in energy and then perhaps one could try to find a a all - pole model to such a spectrum . Because a all - pole model will still try to to to put the the continuation basically of the of the model into these parts where the issue set to zero . phd e: ! What is that ? professor b: Ah , you don't know about TRAPS ! grad a: . phd e: The TRAPS sound familiar , I but I don't professor b: Yeah tha This is familiar like sort of because we gave you the name , but , what it is , is that normally what you do is that you recognize speech based on a shortened spectrum . professor b: Essentially L P - LPC , mel cepstrum , everything starts with a spectral slice . so if you s So , given the spectrogram you essentially are sliding sliding the spectrogram along the f frequency axis phd e: professor b: So you can say " well you can also take the time trajectory of the energy at a given frequency " , and what you get is then , that you get a p vector . Namely you can say i it I will I will say that this vector will eh will will describe the phoneme which is in the center of the vector . professor b: And you so you classi so it 's a very different vector , very different properties , we don't know much about it , but the truth is phd e: . But you have many of those vectors per phoneme , professor b: Well , so you get many decisions . professor b: Because if you run this recognition , you get you still get about twenty percent error twenty percent correct . professor b: on on like for the frame by frame basis , so so it 's much better than chance . But the latest observation is that you you you are you can get quite a big advantage of using two critical bands at the same time . Because there are some reasons I can I could talk about , will have to tell you about things like masking experiments which yield critical bands , and also experiments with release of masking , which actually tell you that something is happening across critical bands , across bands . And phd e: Well how do you how do you convert this energy over time in a particular frequency band into a vector of numbers ? professor b: It 's time T - zero is one number , time t phd e: Yeah but what 's the number ? Is it just the professor b: It 's a spectral energy , logarithmic spectral energy , phd e: it 's just the amount of energy in that band from f in that time interval . professor b: And that 's what that 's what I 'm saying then , so this is a this is a starting vector . professor b: for instance a question is like " how correlated are the elements of this vector ? " Turns out they are quite correlated , because , especially the neighboring ones , right ? They they represent the same almost the same configuration of the vocal tract . professor b: Then the question is " can you describe elements of this vector by Gaussian distributions " , or to what extent ? Because And and and so on and so on . professor b: But is the is the critical band the right dimension ? So we somehow made arbitrary decision , " yes " . Then but then now we are thinking a lot how to how to use at least the neighboring band because that seems to be happening This I somehow start to believe that 's what 's happening in recognition . Cuz a lot of experiments point to the fact that people can split the signal into critical bands , but then oh so you can you are quite capable of processing a signal in independently in individual critical bands . But at the same time you most likely pay attention to at least neighboring bands when you are making any decisions , you compare what 's happening in in this band to what 's happening to the band to to to the to the neighboring bands . That 's why the articulatory events , which F F Fletcher talks about , they are about two critical bands . professor b: You need to you need to compare it to something else , what 's happening but it 's what 's happening in the in the close neighborhood . So if you are making decision what 's happening at one kilohertz , you want to know what 's happening at nine hundred hertz and it and maybe at eleven hundred hertz , but you don't much care what 's happening at three kilohertz . phd e: So it 's really w It 's sort of like saying that what 's happening at one kilohertz depends on what 's happening around it . But it 's but for but for instance , th what what humans are very much capable of doing is that if th if they are exactly the same thing happening in two neighboring critical bands , recognition can discard it . grad a: Hey ! professor b: Hey ! OK , we need us another another voice here . professor b: And so so so for instance if you d if you a if you add the noise that normally masks masks the the the signal right ? phd e: professor b: and you can show that in that if the if you add the noise outside the critical band , that doesn't affect the the decisions you 're making about a signal within a critical band . If the noise is modulated , with the same modulation frequency as the noise in a critical band , the amount of masking is less . professor b: So the s m masking curve , normally it looks like sort of I start from from here , so you you have no noise then you you you are expanding the critical band , so the amount of maching is increasing . And when you e hit a certain point , which is a critical band , then the amount of masking is the same . professor b: But , if you if you if you modulate the noise , the masking goes up and the moment you start hitting the another critical band , the masking goes down . So essentially essentially that 's a very clear indication that that that cognition can take into consideration what 's happening in the neighboring bands . But if you go too far in a in a if you if the noise is very broad , you are not increasing much more , so so if you if you are far away from the signal from the signal f the frequency at which the signal is , then the m even the when the noise is co - modulated it it 's not helping you much . So things like this we are kind of playing with with with the hope that perhaps we could eventually u use this in a in a real recognizer . phd e: But you probably won't have anything before the next time we have to evaluate , professor b: Probably not . phd e: right ? professor b: Well , maybe , most likely we will not have anything which c would comply with the rules . professor b: latency currently chops the require significant latency amount of processing , phd e: professor b: because we don't know any better , yet , than to use the neural net classifiers , and and TRAPS . professor b: Though the the work which everybody is looking at now aims at s trying to find out what to do with these vectors , so that a g simple Gaussian classifier would be happier with it . professor b: or to what extent a Gaussian classifier should be unhappy that , and how to Gaussian - ize the vectors , and phd e: . Then Sunil is asked me f for one month 's vacation and since he did not take any vacation for two years , I had no I didn't have heart to tell him no . professor b: And phd e: Is he getting married or something ? professor b: well , he may be looking for a girl , for for I don't I don't I don't ask . Well , I 've known other friends who they they go to Ind - they go back home to India for a month , they come back married , professor b: Yeah . professor b: and then of course then what happened with Narayanan was that he start pushing me that he needs to get a PHD because they wouldn't give him his wife . And she 's very pretty and he loves her and so so we had to really phd e: So he finally had some incentive to finish , professor b: Oh yeah . phd e: huh ? professor b: Sort of figured that That was a that he he told me the day when we did very well at our NIST evaluations of speaker recognition , the technology , and he was involved there . So I I said " well , yeah , OK " so he took another another three quarter of the year but he was out . phd e: huh ? professor b: So I wouldn't surprise me if he has a plan like that , though though Pratibha still needs to get out first . professor b: And S and Satya needs to get out very first because he 's he already has four years served , though one year he was getting masters . phd e: So have the when is the next evaluation ? June or something ? professor b: Which ? Speaker recognition ? phd e: No , for Aurora ? professor b: there , we don't know about evaluation , next meeting is in June . But I , yeah , what I think would be of course extremely useful , if we can come to our next meeting and say " well you know we did get fifty percent improvement . If if you are interested we eventually can tell you how " , but we can get fifty percent improvement . Do you know what the new baseline is ? Oh , I guess if you don't have professor b: Twenty - two t twenty twenty - two percent better than the old baseline . But I assume that it will be similar , I don't I I don't see the reason why it shouldn't be . professor b: Cuz if it is worse , then we will raise the objection , phd e: Yeah . professor b: we say " well you know how come ? " Because eh if we just use our voice activity detector , which we don't claim even that it 's wonderful , it 's just like one of them . professor b: We get this sort of improvement , how come that we don't see it on on on on your endpointed data ? phd c: Yeah . phd c: because the voice activity detector that I choosed is something that cheating , it 's using the alignment of the speech recognition system , professor b: Yeah . C yeah phd c: and only the alignment on the clean channel , and then mapped this alignment to the noisy channel . professor b: Well David told me David told me yesterday or Harry actually he told Harry from QualComm and Harry brought up the suggestion we should still go for fifty percent he says are you aware that your system does only thirty percent comparing to to endpointed baselines ? So they must have run already something . But we think that we we didn't say the last word yet , that we have other other things which we can try . Because Nokia was objecting , with QualComm 's we basically supported that , we said " yes " . " The Guenter Hirsch who d doesn't speak for Ericsson anymore because he is not with Ericsson and Ericsson may not may withdraw from the whole Aurora activity because they have so many troubles now . phd e: Where 's Guenter going ? professor b: Well Guenter is already he got the job already was working on it for past two years or three years phd e: professor b: he got a job at some some Fachschule , the technical college not too far from Aachen . phd e: ! professor b: So it 's like professor u university professor phd e: professor b: you know , not quite a university , not quite a sort of it 's not Aachen University , but it 's a good school and he he 's happy . ! professor b: And he well , he was hoping to work with Ericsson like on t like consulting basis , but right now he says says it doesn't look like that anybody is even thinking about speech recognition . But this is being now discussed right now , and it 's possible that that that it may get through , that we will still stick to fifty percent . Which event es essentially I think that we should be happy with because that that would mean that at least people may be forced to look into alternative solutions phd c: professor b: but not phd c: Which would mean like sixty percent over the current baseline , which is professor b: Yeah . professor b: Is it like sort of is How did you come up with this number ? If you improve twenty by twenty percent the c the f the all baselines , it 's just a quick c comp co computation ? phd c: Yeah . phd c: Yeah , because it de it depends on the weightings professor b: Yeah , yeah . How 's your documentation or whatever it w what was it you guys were working on last week ? phd c: Yeah , finally we we 've not finished with this . phd d: Ma - nec to need a little more time to improve the English , and maybe s to fill in something some small detail , something like that , phd c: Well , we have a document that explain a big part of the experiments , phd d: Necessary to to include the bi the bibliography . phd e: So have you been running some new experiments ? I I thought I saw some jobs of yours running on some of the machine phd c: Yeah . We 've fff done some strange things like removing C - zero or C - one from the the vector of parameters , and we noticed that C - one is almost not useful at all . phd e: Eh Is this in the baseline ? or in phd c: In the No , in the proposal . professor b: So we were just discussing , since you mentioned that , in it w phd c: professor b: driving in the car with Morgan this morning , we were discussing a good experiment for b for beginning graduate student who wants to run a lot of who wants to get a lot of numbers on something phd c: professor b: which is , like , " imagine that you will you will start putting every co any coefficient , which you are using in your vector , in some general power . professor b: So if you put it in a s square root , that effectively makes your model half as efficient . professor b: And and i i i but it 's the mean is an exponent of the whatever , the the this Gaussian function . phd e: You 're compressing the range , professor b: So you 're compressing the range of this coefficient , so it 's becoming less efficient . Morgan was @ @ and he was he was saying well this might be the alternative way how to play with a with a fudge factor , you know , in the phd e: Oh . professor b: And I said " well in that case why don't we just start compressing individual elements , like when when because in old days we were doing when when people still were doing template matching and Euclidean distances , we were doing this liftering of parameters , right ? phd e: - huh . professor b: and it 's highly affected by frequency response of the of the recording equipment and that sort of thing , phd c: professor b: Bell Labs had he this r raised cosine lifter which still I think is built into H HTK for reasons n unknown to anybody , but but we had exponential lifter , or triangle lifter , basic number of lifters . But so they may be a way to to fiddle with the f with the f phd e: Insertions . professor b: Insertions , deletions , or the the giving a relative basically modifying relative importance of the various parameters . professor b: The only of course problem is that there 's an infinite number of combinations and if the if you s if y phd e: Oh . You need like a some kind of a professor b: Yeah , you need a lot of graduate students , and a lot of computing power . phd e: You need to have a genetic algorithm , that basically tries random permutations of these things . If you were at Bell Labs or I d d I shouldn't be saying this in on on a mike , right ? Or I IBM , that 's what maybe that 's what somebody would be doing . professor b: Oh , the places which have a lot of computing power , so because it is really it 's a p it 's a it 's it will be reasonable search phd e: professor b: but I wonder if there isn't some way of doing this search like when we are searching say for best discriminants . phd e: You know actually , I don't know that this wouldn't be all that bad . phd e: right ? And then these exponents are just applied to that professor b: Absolutely . Each each phd e: And is this something that you would adjust for training ? or only recognition ? professor b: For both , you would have to do . phd e: So you 'd actually professor b: Because essentially you are saying " this feature is not important " . professor b: Or less important , so that 's th that 's a that 's a painful one , yeah . phd e: So for each set of exponents that you would try , it would require a training and a recognition ? professor b: Yeah . You just may n may need to c give less weight to to a mod a component of the model which represents this particular feature . So if you Instead of altering the feature vectors themselves , you you modify the the the Gaussians in the models . You modify the Gaussian in the model , but in the in the test data you would have to put it in the power , but in a training what you c in a training in trained model , all you would have to do is to multiply a model by appropriate constant . But why if you 're if you 're multi if you 're altering the model , why w in the test data , why would you have to muck with the cepstral coefficients ? professor b: Because in test in test data you ca don't have a model . professor b: That is true , but w , so what you want to do You want to say if obs you if you observe something like Stephane observes , that C - one is not important , you can do two things . professor b: If you have a trained trained recognizer , in the model , you know the the the the component which I di dimension wh phd e: All of the all of the mean and variances that correspond to C - one , you put them to zero . But what I 'm proposing now , if it is important but not as important , you multiply it by point one in a model . professor b: But but but phd e: But what are you multiplying ? Cuz those are means , right ? grad a: You 're multiplying the standard deviation ? phd e: you 're grad a: So it 's professor b: I think that you multiply the I would I would have to look in the in the math , how how does the model phd e: I think you professor b: Yeah . phd e: Yeah , I think you 'd have to modify the standard deviation or something , so that you make it wider or narrower . professor b: Effectively you , you know y in f in front of the of the model , you put a constant . grad a: right ? professor b: And and and phd e: So by making th the standard deviation narrower , your scores get worse for professor b: Yeah . By making it narrower , phd e: Right ? professor b: y your phd e: there 's you 're you 're allowing for less variance . Because see what you are fitting is the multidimensional Gaussian , right ? phd e: professor b: It 's a it has it has thirty - nine dimensions , or thirteen dimensions if you g ignore deltas and double - deltas . professor b: So in order if you in order to make dimension which which Stephane sees less important , not not useful , less important , what you do is that this particular component in the model you can multiply by w you can you can basically de - weight it in the model . But you can't do it in a in a test data because you don't have a model for th when the test comes , but what you can do is that you put this particular component in and and you compress it . phd e: Couldn't you just do that to the test data and not do anything with your training data ? professor b: That would be very bad , because your t your model was trained expecting , that wouldn't work . After you train the model , you sort of y you could do you could do still what I was proposing initially , that during the training you you compress C - one that becomes then it becomes less important in a training . professor b: But if you have if you want to run e ex extensive experiment without retraining the model , you don't have to retrain the model . But after , you wh when you are doing this parametric study of importance of C - one you will de - weight the C - one component in the model , and you will put in the you will compress the this component in a in the test data . phd e: Could you also if you wanted to if you wanted to try an experiment by leaving out say , C - one , couldn't you , in your test data , modify the all of the C - one values to be way outside of the normal range of the Gaussian for C - one that was trained in the model ? So that effectively , the C - one never really contributes to the score ? phd c: professor b: No , that would be a severe mismatch , phd e: Do you know what I 'm say professor b: right ? what you are proposing ? N no you don't want that . But what if you set if to the mean of the model , then ? And it was a cons you set all C - ones coming in through your test data , you you change whatever value that was there to the mean that your model had . professor b: I see what you are sa saying , phd c: Right ? grad a: Saying . , no , the If you set it to a mean , that would No , you can't do that . phd e: Oh , that 's true , right , yeah , because you you have phd c: Wait . Which professor b: Because that would be a really f fiddling with the data , phd e: Yeah . professor b: But what you can do , I 'm confident you ca phd e: professor b: well , I 'm reasonably confident and I putting it on the record , right ? y people will listen to it for for centuries now , is what you can do , is you train the model with the with the original data . So what you will do is that a component in the model for C - one , you will divide it by by two . Then if you think that some component is more is more important then th th th it then then i it is , based on training , then you multiply this particular component in the model by by by phd e: You 're talking about the standard deviation ? professor b: yeah . professor b: Yeah , multiply this component i it by number b larger than one , phd e: phd c: Yeah , but , at the phd e: But don't you have to do something to the mean , also ? professor b: No . phd c: But I think it 's the The variance is on on the denominator in the in the Gaussian equation . If you want to decrease the importance of a c parameter , you have to increase it 's variance . phd e: And now you 're you 're you 're changing that by squaring it . phd e: Do you see what ? phd c: I think What I see What could be done is you don't change your features , which are computed once for all , professor b: - huh . phd c: And then if you want to decrease the importance of C - one you just take the variance of the C - one component in the in the model and increase it if you want to decrease the importance of C - one or decrease it phd e: Yeah . Yeah , but , but it 's it 's i it 's do - able , phd c: Well . phd e: to get this this the effect I think that you 're talking about , professor b: phd e: Yeah , because if you had a huge variance , you 're dividing by a large number , you get a very small contribution . grad a: Doesn't matter phd c: Yeah , it becomes more flat grad a: Right . grad a: Yeah , the sharper the variance , the more more important to get that one right . phd e: Yeah , you know actually , this reminds me of something that happened when I was at BBN . phd e: And this particular pitch algorithm when it didn't think there was any voicing , was spitting out zeros . So we were getting when we did clustering , we were getting groups of features professor b: p Pretty new outliers , interesting outliers , right ? phd e: yeah , with with a mean of zero and basically zero variance . phd e: So , when ener when anytime any one of those vectors came in that had a zero in it , we got a great score . phd e: So if you have very small variance you get really good scores when you get something that matches . So that 's a way , yeah , yeah That 's a way to increase the yeah , n That 's interesting . phd e: You you have a step where you you modify the models , make a d copy of your models with whatever variance modifications you make , and rerun recognition . phd e: That could be set up fairly easily I think , and you have a whole bunch of you know professor b: Chuck is getting himself in trouble . Huh ! grad a: Didn't you say you got these HTK 's set up on the new Linux boxes ? phd e: That 's right . professor b: Hey ! phd e: In fact , and and they 're just t right now they 're installing increasing the memory on that the Linux box . professor b: And Chuck is sort of really fishing for how to keep his computer busy , grad a: Right . professor b: that 's yeah , that 's a good thing grad a: That 's right . professor b: because then y you just write the " do " - loops and then you pretend that you are working while you are sort of you c you can go fishing . Then you are sort of in this mode like all of those ARPA people are , right ? phd e: Yeah . professor b: since it is on the record , I can't say which company it was , but it was reported to me that somebody visited a company and during a d during a discussion , there was this guy who was always hitting the carriage returns on a computer . professor b: So after two hours the visitor said " wh why are you hitting this carriage return ? " And he said " well you know , we are being paid by a computer ty we are we have a government contract . " It was in old days when there were of PDP - eights and that sort of thing . phd e: Oh , my gosh ! So he had to make it look like professor b: Because so they had a they literally had to c monitor at the time at the time on a computer how much time is being spent I i i or on on this particular project . phd e: Have you ever seen those little It 's it 's this thing that 's the shape of a bird and it has a red ball and its beak dips into the water ? professor b: Yeah , I know , right . professor b: It would be similar similar to I knew some people who were that was in old Communist Czechoslovakia , right ? so we were watching for American airplanes , coming to spy on on on us at the time , phd e: professor b: so there were three guys stationed in the middle of the woods on one l lonely watching tower , pretty much spending a year and a half there because there was this service right ? And so they very quickly they made friends with local girls and local people in the village phd e: Ugh ! professor b: and phd e: Yeah . professor b: and so but they there was one plane flying over s always above , and so that was the only work which they had . They like four in the afternoon they had to report there was a plane from Prague to Brno Basically f flying there , phd e: Yeah . professor b: so they f very q f first thing was that they would always run back and and at four o ' clock and and quickly make a call , " this plane is passing " then a second thing was that they they took the line from this u u post to a local pub . And they but third thing which they made , and when they screwed up , they finally they had to p the the p the pub owner to make these phone calls because they didn't even bother to be there anymore . At least they were sort of smart enough that they looked if the plane is flying there , right ? And the pub owner says " oh my four o ' clock , OK , quickly p pick up the phone , call that there 's a plane flying . professor b: There was no plane for some reason , phd e: And there wasn't ? professor b: it was downed , or and so they got in trouble . phd e: And we 'll just professor b: Well , at least go test the s test the assumption about C - C - one to begin with . It might be that phd e: Yeah , so the first set of variance weighting vectors would be just you know one modifying one and leaving the others the same . professor b: Because you see , what is happening here in a in a in a in such a model is that it 's tells you yeah what has a low variance is is is more reliable , phd e: That would be one set of experiment professor b: right ? How do we phd e: Wh - yeah , when the data matches that , then you get really professor b: Yeah . professor b: How do we know , especially when it comes to noise ? phd e: But there could just naturally be low variance . professor b: Yeah ? phd e: Because I Like , I 've noticed in the higher cepstral coefficients , the numbers seem to get smaller , right ? So d phd c: They t phd e: just naturally . professor b: Yeah that 's why people used these lifters were inverse variance weighting lifters basically that makes Euclidean distance more like Mahalanobis distance with a diagonal covariance when you knew what all the variances were over the old data . Turns out that the variance decreases at least at fast , I believe , as the index of the cepstral coefficients . professor b: So typically what happens is that you you need to weight the weight the higher coefficients more than the lower coefficients . When we talked about Aurora still I wanted to m make a plea encourage for more communication between between different parts of the distributed center . even when there is absolutely nothing to to s to say but the weather is good in Ore - in in Berkeley . I 'm sure that it 's being appreciated in Oregon and maybe it will generate similar responses down here , like , phd c: We can set up a webcam maybe . phd e: Is the if we mail to " Aurora - inhouse " , does that go up to you guys also ? professor b: I don't think so . professor b: We should definitely set up phd e: Yeah we sh Do we have a mailing list that includes the OGI people ? professor b: Yeah . And then we also can send the the dis to the same address right , and it goes to everybody phd e: professor b: Because what 's happening naturally in research , I know , is that people essentially start working on something and they don't want to be much bothered , right ? but what the the then the danger is in a group like this , is that two people are working on the same thing and i c of course both of them come with the s very good solution , but it could have been done somehow in half of the effort or something . reasonably good one , because he 's doing it for Intel , but I trust that we have rights to use it or distribute it and everything . phd e: ! professor b: u s And so so we we will make sure that at least you can see the software and if if if if it is of any use . He says " well you know it 's very difficult to collaborate if you are working with supposedly the same thing , in quotes , except which is not s is not the same . professor b: Which which one is using that set of hurdles , another one set is using another set of hurdles . professor b: Yeah because Intel paid us should I say on a microphone ? some amount of money , not much . And they wanted to to have software so that they can also play with it , which means that it has to be in a certain environment phd e: . professor b: they use actu actually some Intel libraries , but in the process , Lucash just rewrote the whole thing because he figured rather than trying to f make sense of including ICSI software not for training on the nets phd e: . professor b: but I think he rewrote the the the or so maybe somehow reused over the parts of the thing so that so that the whole thing , including MLP , trained MLP is one piece of software . professor b: Yeah ? grad a: I remember when we were trying to put together all the ICSI software for the submission . He said that it was like it was like just so many libraries and nobody knew what was used when , and and so that 's where he started and that 's where he realized that it needs to be needs to be at least cleaned up , grad a: Yeah . Well , the the only thing I would check is if he does he use Intel math libraries , professor b: e ev phd c: because if it 's the case , it 's maybe not so easy to use it on another architecture . professor b: n not maybe Maybe not in a first maybe not in a first ap approximation because I think he started first just with a plain C C or C - plus - plus or something before phd c: Ah yeah . I never checked carefully these sorts of professor b: I know there was some issues that initially of course we d do all the development on Linux but we use we don't have we have only three s SUNs and we have them only because they have a SPERT board in . In that way Intel succeeded with us , because they gave us too many good machines for very little money or nothing . phd e: The way that it works is each person goes around in turn , and you say the transcript number and then you read the digits , the the strings of numbers as individual digits . phd e: So you don't say " eight hundred and fifty " , you say " eight five oh " , and so forth <doc-sep>phd c: Adam , what is the mike that , Jeremy 's wearing ? grad f: It 's the ear - plug mike . professor b: Oh ! postdoc a: Is that Does that mean you can't hear anything during the meeting ? grad d: It 's old - school . grad f: Huh ? What ? Huh ? professor b: Should we , close the door , maybe ? grad f: It it 's a fairly good mike , actually . professor b: Well , that 's a grad f: Ugh ! So I didn't send out agenda items because until five minutes ago we only had one agenda item and now we have two . So , just to repeat the thing bef that we said last week , it was there 's this suggestion of alternating weeks on more , automatic speech recognition related or not ? Was that sort of the division ? grad f: Right . professor b: So which week are we in ? grad f: Well We haven't really started , but I thought we more we more or less did Meeting Recorder stuff last week , so I thought we could do , professor b: I thought we had a thing about speech recognition last week too . grad f: But I figure also if they 're short agenda items , we could also do a little bit of each . grad f: So , as most of you should know , I did send out the consent form thingies and , so far no one has made any Ach ! any comments on them . So , w what follows ? At some point y you go around and get people to sign something ? grad f: No . professor b: And how long of an opportunity did you tell them ? grad f: July fifteenth . professor b: Given that it 's that long , Why was that date chosen ? You just felt you wanted to ? grad f: Jane told me July fifteenth . postdoc a: I , I thought grad f: You y you had professor b: I don't grad f: I had heard July fifteenth , so that 's what I put . professor b: No , the only th the only mention I recall about that was just that July fifteenth or so is when this meeting starts . postdoc a: It 's fine with me if it is , or we cou But I thought it might be good to remind people two weeks prior to that professor b: w postdoc a: in case , you know , " by the way this is your last " professor b: Right . professor b: We probably should have talked about it , cuz i because if we wanna be able to give it to people July fifteenth , if somebody 's gonna come back and say " OK , I don't want this and this and this used " , clearly we need some time to respond to that . the people who are in the meeti this meeting was , these the meetings that in are in set one . grad f: I we don't My understanding of what we had agreed upon when we had spoken about this months ago was that , we don't actually need a reply . postdoc a: And he 's got it so that the default thing you see when you look at the page is " OK " . postdoc a: So that 's very clear all the way down the page , " OK " . postdoc a: Which means also we get feedback on if , there 's something that they w that needs to be adjusted , because , these are very highly technical things . , it 's an added , level of checking on the accuracy of the transcription , as I see it . The reason I did that it was just so that people would not censor not ask to have stuff removed because it was transcribed incorrectly , postdoc a: And the reason I liked it was because grad f: as opposed to , postdoc a: was because it , it gives them the option of , being able to correct it . So , you have it nicely set up so they email you and , grad f: When they submit the form , it gets processed and emailed to me . phd c: Oh , those are the NSA meetings ? phd e: The non - native phd h: Those are postdoc a: Yeah . phd e: The all non - native postdoc a: That 's that 's that 's r grad f: postdoc a: But what what I meant to say was that it 's the other group that 's not n no m no overlap with our present members . And then maybe it 'd be good to set an explicit deadline , something like a week before that , J July fifteenth date , or two weeks before . professor b: I would suggest we discuss , if we 're going to have a policy on it , that we discuss the length of time that we want to give people , grad f: grad f: Well , the only thing I said in the email is that the data is going to be released on the fifteenth . grad f: So my feeling is if someone after the fifteenth says , " wow I suddenly found something " , we 'll delete it from our record . grad f: If someone says " hey , look , I found something in this meeting and it 's libelous and I want it removed " . postdoc a: I I agree with that part , but I think that it would it , we need to have , a a a message to them very clearly that beyond this date , you can't make additional changes . professor b: So if we agreed , OK , how long is a reasonable amount of time for people to have if we say two weeks , or if we say a month , I think we should just say that say that , you know , i a as , " per the the the , page you signed , you have the ability to look over this stuff " and so forth " and , because we w " these , I would I would imagine some sort of generic thing that would say " because we , will continually be making these things available to other researchers , this can't be open - ended and so , please give us back your response within this am you know , within this amount of time " , whatever time we agree upon . grad f: Well , did you read the email and look at the pages I sent ? professor b: Did I ? No , I haven't yet . OK , well why don't you do that and then make comments on what you want me to change ? professor b: No , no . I I 'm what I 'm what I 'm I 'm trying to spark a discussion hopefully among people who have read it so that that you can you can , decide on something . professor b: and then grad f: I already did decide something , and that 's what 's in the email . OK , so grad f: And if you disagree with it , why don't you read it and give me comments on it ? postdoc a: Yeah . professor b: Well , the one thing that I did read and that you just repeated to me was that you gave the specific date of July fifteenth . professor b: And you also just said that the reason you said that was because someone said it to you . So what I 'm telling you is that what you should do is come up with a length of time that you guys think is enough grad f: Right . But we can make the assumption , can't we ? that , they will be receiving email , most of the month . Sometimes somebody will be away and , you know , there 's , for any length of time that you , choose there is some person sometime who will not end up reading it . phd h: S so maybe when Am I on , by the way ? grad f: I don't know . The , Maybe we should say in w you know , when the whole thing starts , when they sign the the agreement that you know , specify exactly , what , you know , how how they will be contacted and they can , you know they can be asked to give a phone number and an email address , or both . A And , then , you know , say very clearly that if they don't if we don't hear from them , you know , as Morgan suggested , by a certain time or after a certain period after we contact them that is implicitly giving their agreement . postdoc a: the f phd h: Well , if that 's i tha if that 's already if grad f: so , eh , that 's gonna be a little hard to modify . postdoc a: Well , the form Well , the form doesn't say , if , you know , " if you don't respond by X number of days or X number of weeks " phd h: I see . So what does it say about the the the process of of , y the review process ? postdoc a: It doesn't have a time limit . That you 'll be provided access to the transcripts and then , allowed to remove things that you 'd like to remove , before it goes to the general , larger audience . phd e: I 'm not as diligent as Chuck , but I had the feeling I should probably respond and tell Adam , like , " I got this and I will do it by this date , and if you don't hear from me by then " You know , in other words responding to your email once , right away , saying " as soon as you get this could you please respond . phd e: And then if you if the person thinks they 'll need more time because they 're out of town or whatever , they can tell you at that point ? Because grad f: Oh , I just I didn't wanna do that , because I don't wanna have a discussion with every person if I can avoid it . phd e: Well , it 's grad f: So what I wanted to do was just send it out and say " on the fifteenth , the data is released , postdoc a: grad f: if you wanna do something about it , do something about it , but that 's it " . So , we 're assuming that phd h: Well , that 's that would be great if but you should probably have a legal person look at this and make sure it 's OK . Because if you if you , do this and you then there 's a dispute later and , some you know , someone who understands these matters concludes that they didn't have , you know , enough opportunity to actually exercise their their right phd e: Or they they might never have gotten the email , because although they signed this , they don't know by which date to expect your email . grad f: So let 's say someone I send this out , and someone doesn't respond . Do we delete every meeting that they were in ? phd e: Well , then grad f: I don't think so . phd e: but that 's why there 's such a thing as registered mail grad f: That will happen . Because people don't read their email , or they 'll read and say " I don't care about that , I 'm not gonna delete anything " and they don just won't reply to it . phd h: Maybe , do we have mailing addresses for these people ? grad f: No . postdoc a: But the ones that we 're dealing with now are all local , phd h: Well , then postdoc a: except the ones who , we we 're totally in contact with all the ones in those two groups . postdoc a: So maybe , I you know , that 's not that many people and if I if , i i there is an advantage to having them admit and if I can help with with processing that , I will . It 's it 's there is an advantage to having them be on record as having received the mail and indicating grad f: Yeah . grad f: And so it seems like this is a little odd for it to be coming up yet again . professor b: Right ? So phd e: You 'll either wonder at the beginning or you 'll wonder at the end . phd e: there 's no way to get around I It 's pretty much the same am amount of work except for an additional email just saying they got the email . phd e: And maybe it 's better legally to wonder before you know , a little bit earlier than grad f: Well postdoc a: It 's much easier to explain this way . Well , why don't you talk t postdoc a: T t to have it on record . grad f: Morgan , can you talk to our lawyer about it , and find out what the status is on this ? Cuz I don't wanna do something that we don't need to . grad f: Because what I 'm telling you , people won't respond to the email . No matter what you do , you there 're gonna be people who you 're gonna have to make a lot of effort to get in contact with . grad d: i it 's k grad f: And do we want to spend that effort ? phd h: . postdoc a: Except I really think in this case I I 'm agr I agree with Liz , that we need to be in the clear and not have to after the fact say " oh , but I assumed " , and " oh , I 'm sorry that your email address was just accumulating mail without notifying you " , you know . professor b: But the thing is that , you know , I I I think , without going through a whole expensive thing with our lawyers , from my previous conversations with them , my my sense very much is that we would want something on record as indicating that they actually were aware of this . grad f: and I thought that we had even gone by the lawyers asking about that and they said you have to s they 've already signed away the f with that form that they 've already signed once . postdoc a: I don't remember that this issue of the time period allowed for response was ever covered . professor b: We certainly didn't talk , about with them at all about , the manner of them being made the , materials available . phd h: We do it like with these professor b: That was something that was sort of just within our implementation . phd h: We can use it we can use a a ploy like they use to , you know , that when they serve , like , you know , like dead - beat dads , they they they make it look like they won something in the lottery and then they open the envelope grad d: And they 're served . So you just make it , you know , " oh , you won you know , go to this web site and you 've , you 're " phd e: That 's why you never open these things that come in the mail . grad f: Well , it 's just , we 've gone from one extreme to the other , where at one point , a few months ago , Morgan was you were saying let 's not do anything , phd h: Right . phd h: i i it it might well be the case grad f: and now we 're we 're saying we have to follow up each person and get a signature ? phd h: it might Right . grad f: what are we gonna doing here ? phd h: It might well be the case that that this is perfectly you know , this is enough to give us a basis t to just , eh , assume their consent if they don't reply . phd h: But , I 'm not you know , me not being a lawyer , I wouldn't just wanna do that without having the the expert , opinion on that . grad f: Then I think we had better find out , so that we can find a phd h: Yeah . I I think that it 's a common courtesy to ask them , to expect for them to , be able to have @ @ us try to contact them , grad f: For for th postdoc a: u just in case they hadn't gotten their email . My Adam , my my view before was about the nature of what was of the presentation , grad f: professor b: of of how my my the things that we 're questioning were along the lines of how easy , h how m how much implication would there be that it 's likely you 're going to be changing something , as opposed to grad f: professor b: But , the attorneys , I , I can guarantee you , the attorneys will always come back with and we have to decide how stringent we want to be in these things , but they will always come back with saying that , you need to you want to have someth some paper trail or which includes electronic trail that they have , in fact O K 'd it . professor b: So , I think that if you f i if we send the email as you have and if there 's half the people , say , who don't respond at all by , you know , some period of time , we can just make a list of these people and hand it to , you know , just give it to me and I 'll hand it to administrative staff or whatever , grad f: Right . professor b: and they 'll just call them up and say , you know , " have you Is is this OK ? And would you please mail you know , mail Adam that it is , if i if it , you know , is or not . phd e: The other thing that there 's a psychological effect that at least for most people , that if they 've responded to your email saying " yes , I will do it " or " yes , I got your email " , they 're more likely to actually do it later than to just ignore it . phd e: And of course we don't want them to bleep things out , but it it 's a little bit better if we 're getting the their , final response , once they 've answered you once than if they never answer you 'd at al at all . phd e: You know , an official OK from somebody is better than no answer , even if they responded that they got your email . And they 're probably more likely to do that once they 've responded that they got the email . professor b: I think the main thing is , what lawyers do is they always look at worst cases . professor b: So they s so so Tha - that 's what they 're paid to do . professor b: And so , it is certainly possible that , somebody 's server would be down or something and they wouldn't actually hear from us , and then they find this thing is in there and we 've already distributed it to someone . So , what it says in there , in fact , is that they will be given an opportunity to blah - blah - blah , postdoc a: professor b: but if in fact if we sent them something or we thought we sent them something but they didn't actually receive it for some reason , then we haven't given them that . grad f: Well , so how far do we have to go ? Do we need to get someone 's signature ? Or , is email enough ? professor b: I i i em email is enough . , I 've been through this , I 'm not a lawyer , but I 've been through these things a f things f like this a few times with lawyers now grad f: phd c: Do you track , when people log in to look at the ? grad f: . grad f: If they don't submit the form , it goes in the general web log . grad f: Right ? Cuz if someone just visits the web site that doesn't imply anything in particular . postdoc a: I I could get you on the notify list if you want me to . professor b: So again , hopefully , this shouldn't be quite as odious a problem either way , in any of the extremes we 've talked about because , we 're talking a pretty small number of people . grad f: W For this set , I 'm not worried , because we basically know everyone on it . grad f: You know , they 're all more or less here or it 's it 's Eric and Dan and so on . But for some of the others , you 're talking about visitors who are gone from ICSI , whose email addresses may or may not work , professor b: grad f: and So what are we gonna do when we run into someone that we can't get in touch with ? postdoc a: I don't think , They 're so recent , these visitors . postdoc a: They 're prominent enough that they 're easy to find through I , I I w I 'll be able to if you have any trouble finding them , I really think I could find them . , and I think , you know , if you go into a room and close the door and and ask their permission and they 're not there , it doesn't seem that that 's the intent of , meaning here . , because they they filled out a contact information and that 's where I 'm sending the information . professor b: Well , the way ICSI goes , people , who , were here ten years ago still have acc have forwards to other accounts and so on . professor b: So it 's unusual that that they , grad f: So my original impression was that that was sufficient , that if they give us contact information and that contact information isn't accurate that we fulfilled our burden . postdoc a: I just professor b: So if we get to a boundary case like that then maybe I will call the attorney about it . professor b: and and and , you know , people people see long emails about things that they don't think is gonna be high priority , they typically , don't don't read it , or half read it . postdoc a: And actually , professor b: But postdoc a: I I didn't anticipate this so I that 's why I didn't give this comment , and it I this discussion has made me think it might be nice to have a follow - up email within the next couple of days saying " by the way , you know , we wanna hear back from you by X date and please " , and then add what Liz said " please , respond to please indicate you received this mail . " professor b: or e well , maybe even additionally , " Even if you 've decided you have no changes you 'd like to make , if you could tell us that " . You know , it makes you feel m like , if you were gonna p if you 're predicting that you might not answer , you have a chance now to say that . Whereas , I , I would be much more likely myself , phd c: And the other th phd e: given all my email , t to respond at that point , saying " you know what , I 'm probably not gonna get to it " or whatever , rather than just having seen the email , thinking I might get to it , and never really , pushing myself to actually do it until it 's too late . I was I was thinking that it also lets them know that they don't have to go to the page to accept this . So that way they could they can see from that email that if they just write back and say " I got it , no changes " , they 're off the hook . phd c: They don't have to go to the web page professor b: the other thing I 've learned from dealing with dealing with people sending in reviews and so forth , is , if you say " you 've got three months to do this review " , people do it , you know , two and seven eighths months from now . professor b: If you say " you 've got three weeks to do this review " , they do do it , you know , two and seven eighths weeks from now they do the review . professor b: And , So , if we make it a little less time , I don't think it 'll be that much grad f: Well , and also if we want it ready by the fifteenth , that means we better give them deadline of the first , if we have any prayer of actually getting everyone to respond in time . professor b: There 's the responding part and there 's also what if , I hope this doesn't happen , what if there are a bunch of deletions that have to get put in and changes ? grad f: Right . professor b: if we want it to grad f: Ugh ! Disk space , postdoc a: By the way , has has Jeremy signed the form ? grad f: oh my god ! I hadn't thought about that . grad f: That for every meeting any meeting which has any bleeps in it we need yet another copy of . phd c: Do you have to do the other close - talking ? phd e: as well as all of these . phd e: You have to do all You could just do it in that time period , though , grad f: Yes . postdoc a: Well I you know , I think at a certain point , that copy that has the deletions will become the master copy . So I I don't want I really would rather make a copy of it , rather than bleep it out professor b: Are you del are you bleeping it by adding ? grad f: and then Overlapping . So what I really think is " bleep " professor b: I I I I understand , but is is it summing signals grad f: and then I want to professor b: or do you delete the old one and put the new one in ? grad f: I delete the old one , put the new one in . postdoc a: But And then w I was gonna say also that the they don't have to stay on the system , as you know , professor b: Yeah . postdoc a: cuz cuz the the ones grad f: Say again ? postdoc a: Once it 's been successfully bleeped , can't you rely on the ? phd c: Or we 'll tell people the frequency of the beep professor b: Encrypt it . postdoc a: Can't you rely on the archiving to preserve the older version ? phd h: Oh , yeah . You could encrypt it , you know , with a with a two hundred bit thousand bit , grad d: You can use spread spectrum . grad d: Then you have , like , subliminal , messages , grad f: But , ha you 've seen the this the speech recognition system that reversed very short segments . It 's just we 've had meeting after meeting after meeting a on this and it seems like we 've never gotten it resolved . And , and I 'm sorry responding without , having much knowledge , but the thing is , I am , like , one of these people who gets a gazillion mails and and stuff comes in as grad f: Well , and that 's exactly why I did it the way I did it , which is the default is if you do nothing we 're gonna release it . grad f: Because , you know , I have my stack of emails of to d to be done , that , you know , fifty or sixty long , and the ones at the top I 'm never gonna get to . professor b: So so the only thing we 're missing is is some way to respond to easily to say , " OK , go ahead " or something . So , i this is gonna mean phd c: Just re - mail them to yourself and then they 're at the bottom . The m email doesn't specify that you can just reply to the email , as op as opposed to going to the form postdoc a: phd h: In postdoc a: And it also doesn't give a a specific I didn't think of it . grad f: and postdoc a: S I think it 's a good idea an ex explicit time by which this will be considered definite . , I got email , and it i if I use a MIME - capable mail reader , it actually says , you know , click on this button to confirm receipt of the of the mail . phd h: So grad f: You you can grad d: It 's like certified mail . This is not So , I I know , you can tell , you know , the , mail delivery agent to to confirm that the mail was delivered to your mailbox . phd h: th there was a button that when you clicked on it , it would send , you know , a actual acknowledgement to the sender that you had actually looked at the mail . phd h: But it o but it only works for , you know , MIME - capable you know , if you use Netscape or something like that for your n grad f: Yeah . professor b: It 's not that you 've looked at it , it 's that you 've looked at it and and and agree with one of the possible actions . professor b: Right ? phd h: You know , you can put this button anywhere you want , professor b: Oh ? Oh , I see . phd h: and you can put it the bottom of the message and say " here , by you know , by clicking on this , I I agree , you know , I acknowledge " professor b: That i i my first - born children are yours , and Yeah . Are , grad f: Well , I could put a URL in there without any difficulty and even pretty simple MIME readers can do that . postdoc a: But why shouldn't they just email back ? I don't see there 's a problem . phd h: I 'm just saying that grad f: Well , I cuz I use a text mail reader . phd h: if ev but I 'm phd e: Don't you use VI for your mai ? phd h: Yeah . phd h: So I i There 's these logos that you can put at the bottom of your web page , like " powered by VI " . phd e: Like , there were three meetings this time , or so postdoc a: Six . So I guess if you 're in both these types of meetings , you 'd have a lot . But How , it also depends on how many Like , if we release this time it 's a fairly small number of meetings , but what if we release , like , twenty - five meetings to people ? In th grad f: Well , what my s expectation is , is that we 'll send out one of these emails every time a meeting has been checked and is ready . grad f: maybe Is that the way it 's gonna be , you think , Jane ? postdoc a: I agree with you . It 's we could do it , I I could I 'd be happy with either way , batch - wise What I was thinking , so this one That was exactly right , that we had a , I I had wanted to get the entire set of twelve hours ready . But , this was the biggest clump I could do by a time where I thought it was reasonable . My , I was thinking that with the NSA meetings , I 'd like there are three of them , and they 're , I I will have them done by Monday . , unfortunately the time is later and I don't know how that 's gonna work out , but I thought it 'd be good to have that released as a clump , too , because then , you know , they 're they they have a it it 's in a category , it 's not quite so distracting to them , is what I was thinking , and it 's all in one chu But after that , when we 're caught up a bit on this process , then , I could imagine sending them out periodically as they become available . , it 's a question of how distracting it is to the people who have to do the checking . Adam had a script that will put everything back together and there was Well , there was one small problem but it was a simple thing to fix . Now we haven't actually had anyone go through that meeting , to see whether the transcript is correct and to see how much was missed and all that sort of stuff . There are a fair number of " yeahs " and " - huhs " that it 's just that aren't in there . Like you said , that 's that 's gonna be our standard proc that 's what the transcribers are gonna be spending most of their time doing , I would imagine , postdoc a: professor b: It 's gonna postdoc a: Do you suppose that was because they weren't caught by the pre - segmenter ? grad f: Yes , absolutely . So maybe when the detector for that gets better or something I w I There 's another issue which is this we 've been , contacted by University of Washington now , of course , to , We sent them the transcripts that correspond to those six meetings and they 're downloading the audio files . Yeah , I pointed them to the set that Andreas put , on the web so th if they want to compare directly with his results they can . And , then once , th we can also point them at the , the original meetings and they can grab those , too , with SCP . grad f: There 's another meeting in here , what , at four ? Right ? Yeah , so we have to finish by three forty - five . phd h: D d So , does Washi - does does UW wanna u do this wanna use this data for recognition or for something else ? phd c: for recognition . phd e: didn't they want to do language modeling on , you know , recognition - compatible transcripts phd h: Oh . postdoc a: This is to show you , some of the things that turn up during the checking procedure . phd e: or ? postdoc a: @ @ So , this is from one of the NSA meetings and , i if you 're familiar with the diff format , the arrow to the left is what it was , and the arrow to the right is what it was changed to . The last time , " And the transcriber thought " little too much " But , really , it was " we learned too much " , which makes more sense syntactically as well . phd h: And these the parentheses were f from postdoc a: Then Oh , this that 's the convention for indicating uncertain . So the original was " So that 's not so Claudia 's not the bad master here " , and then he laughs , but it really " web master " . postdoc a: And then you see another type of uncertainty which is , you know , they just didn't know what to make out of that . grad d: Jane , these are from IBM ? grad f: Spit upon ? grad d: The top lines ? postdoc a: No , no . postdoc a: The transcribers transcriber 's version ver versus the checked version . The , version beyond this is So instead of saying " or " , especially those words , " also " and " oder " and some other ones . postdoc a: cuz it 's , like , below this it 's a little subliminal there . OK , then you got , instead of " from something - or - other cards " , it 's " for multicast " . , and the final one , the transcriber had th " in the core network itself or the exit unknown , not the internet unknown " . And it it comes through as " in the core network itself of the access provider , not the internet backbone core " . postdoc a: but , you know in this this area it really does pay to , to double check and I 'm hoping that when the checked versions are run through the recognizer that you 'll see s substantial improvements in performance cuz the you know , there 're a lot of these in there . So how often ? grad f: Yeah , but I bet I bet they 're acoustically challenging parts anyway , though . grad f: Oh , really ? , it 's Oh , so it 's just jargon . this is cuz , you know you don't realize in daily life how much you have top - down influences in what you 're hearing . phd h: Well , but postdoc a: And it 's jar it 's jargon coupled with a foreign accent . phd h: But but But we don't , our language model right now doesn't know about these words anyhow . phd h: you know , un until you actually get a decent language model , @ @ Adam 's right . postdoc a: Well , also from the standpoint of getting people 's approval , professor b: Yeah . postdoc a: cuz if someone sees a page full of , barely decipherable w you know , sentences , and then is asked to approve of it or not , it 's , grad f: Did I say that ? professor b: Yeah . That would be a shame if people said " well , I don't approve it because the it 's not what I said " . grad f: Well , that 's exactly why I put the extra option in , professor b: Yeah . grad f: is that I was afraid people would say , " let 's censor that because it 's wrong " , professor b: Yeah . postdoc a: And then I also the final thing I have for transcription is that I made a purchase of some other headphones phd h: C postdoc a: because of the problem of low gain in the originals . And and they very much appro they mu much prefer the new ones , and actually I , I I think that there will be fewer things to correct because of the the choice . Ugh ! postdoc a: but , they 're just not as good as these , in this with this respect to this particular task . postdoc a: I don't know exactly , grad f: But postdoc a: but we chose them because that 's what 's been used here by prominent projects in transcription . phd h: So you have spare headsets ? postdoc a: Sorry , what ? phd h: You have spare headsets ? grad f: They 're just earphones . , just earphones ? , because I , I could use one on my workstation , just to t because sometimes I have to listen to audio files and I don't have to b go borrow it from someone and postdoc a: We have actua actually I have W Well , the thing is , that if we have four people come to work for a day , I was I was hanging on to the others for , eh for spares , phd h: Oh , OK . postdoc a: It 'd just have to be a s a separate order an added order . phd e: Yeah , that We should order a cou , t two or three or four , actually . phd e: We have phd h: I think I have a pair that I brought from home , but it 's f just for music listening professor b: No . phd e: Sh - Just get the model number phd h: and it 's not Nnn . grad f: W , could you email out the brand ? postdoc a: Oh , sure . So what 's the other thing on the agenda actually ? grad f: the only one was Don wanted to , talk about disk space yet again . phd e: It 's one of these it 's it 's social professor b: It 's I i i it i phd e: and , discourse level grad d: Yeah . professor b: double double grad f: Yeah , it was really goo phd e: See , if I had that little scratch - pad , I would have made an X there . So , without thinking about it , when I offered up my hard drive last week grad f: Oh , no . I , I realized that we 're going to be doing a lot of experiments , o for this , paper we 're writing , so we 're probably gonna need a lot more We 're probably gonna need that disk space that we had on that eighteen gig hard drive . We just need to phd e: I think we need , like , another eighteen gig disk to be safe . , I guess the thing is is , all I need is to hang it off , like , the person who 's coming in , Sonali 's , computer . phd h: Oh , so so , you mean the d the internal the disks on the machines that we just got ? grad d: Whew . grad d: So are we gonna move the stuff off of my hard drive onto that when those come in ? grad f: On phd h: Oh , oh . phd e: Do when when is this planned for roughly ? phd c: They should be I I imagine next week or something . So grad f: If you 're if you 're desperate , I have some space on my drive . grad d: I think if I 'm grad f: But I I vacillate between no space free and a few gig free . phd e: Well , each meeting is like a gig or something , grad f: It 's eventually real disk space . I was just going to comment that I I 'm going to , be on the phone with Mari tomorrow , late afternoon . She was re she was referring to it as I think this actually didn't just come from her , but this is what , DARPA had asked for . But of course the fiscal year starts in October , so I don't quite understand w w why we do an annual report that we 're writing in July . It 's that the meeting is in July so they so DARPA just said do an annual report . I 'll do it , you know , as much as I can without bothering people , just by looking at at papers and status reports . And if , if I have some questions I 'll grad f: When we remember to fill them out . If people could do it as soon as as you can , if you haven't done one si recently . , but , you know , I 'm I 'm sure before it 's all done , I 'll end up bugging people for for more clarification about stuff . But , I don't know , I guess I guess I know pretty much what people have been doing . And if something hasn't , I 'll be talking to her late tomorrow afternoon , and if something hasn't been in a status report and you think it 's important thing to mention on this kind of thing , just pop me a one - liner and and and I 'll I 'll have it in front of me for the phone conversation . grad f: Not here , but later today ? grad d: We should probably talk off - line about when we 're gonna talk off - line . Yeah , I might want to get updated about it in about a week cuz , I 'm actually gonna have a a few days off the following week , a after the after the picnic . grad f: So we were gonna do sort of status of speech transcription automatic transcription , but we 're kind of running late . phd e: How long does it take you to save the data ? grad f: Fifteen minutes . grad f: ten minute phd e: Guess we should stop , like , twenty of at the latest . professor b: Well , I would love to hear about it , grad f: What do you have to say ? professor b: especially since grad f: I 'm interested , so professor b: Yeah . Well , I 'm gonna be on the phone tomorrow , so this is just a good example of the sort of thing I 'd like to hear about . professor b: Cuz he looked at you phd h: What ? professor b: and says you 're sketching . phd h: I I I I 'm not actually , I 'm not sure what ? Are we supposed to have done something ? grad f: No . grad f: Whew ! professor b: That was grad f: Dodged that bullet . phd e: Yeah , we 're phd h: the the next thing on our agenda is to go back and look at the , the automatic alignments because , I got some I I I learned from Thilo what data we can use as a benchmark to see how well we 're doing on automatic alignments of the background speech or , of the foreground speech with background speech . phd e: And then , I guess , the new data that Don will start to process phd h: But , we haven't actually phd e: the , when he can get these You know , before we were working with these segments that were all synchronous and that caused a lot of problems phd h: Mmm . phd e: And so that 's sort of a stage - two of trying the same kinds of alignments with the tighter boundaries with them is really the next step . , but we 're hoping to have a paper for that as well , which should be an interesting grad f: When 's it due ? phd e: The t paper isn't due until August . phd e: But , the good news is that that will have sort of the European experts in prosody sort of a different crowd , and I think we 're the only people working on prosody in meetings so far , so that should be interesting . postdoc a: What 's the name of the meeting ? phd e: it 's ISCA Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding , or something like that phd h: It 's called Prosody to grad f: phd e: some generic , so it 's focused on using prosody in automatic systems and there 's a , a web page for it . Well , that th Hey , if that 's what it takes , that 's fine with me <doc-sep>professor b: OK So today we 're looking at a number of things we 're trying and fortunately for listeners to this we lost some of it 's visual but got tables in front of us . what is what does combo mean ? phd c: So combo is a system where we have these features that go through a network and then this same string of features but low - pass filtered with the low - pass filter used in the MSG features . And so these low - pass filtered goes through M eh another MLP and then the linear output of these two MLP 's are combined just by adding the values and then there is this KLT . There is there is the features there 's the OGI features and then those features go through a contextual l l let 's take this bottom arr one pointed to by the bottom arrow . phd c: professor b: So phd c: So we have these features from OGI that goes through the three paths . phd c: The second path is MLP also using nine frames several frames of features professor b: Yeah . phd c: MLP professor b: Aha ! aha ! phd c: Adding the outputs just like in the second propose the the proposal from for the first evaluation . So this is yeah professor b: And so and then the the the one at the top and I presume these things that are in yellow are in yellow because overall they 're the best ? phd c: Yeah that 's the reason , yeah . professor b: Oh let 's focus on them then so what 's the block diagram for the one above it ? phd c: For the f the f first yellow line you mean ? professor b: Yeah . phd c: Yeah so it 's basically s the same except that we don't have this low - pass filtering so we have only two streams . phd c: professor b: Do you e they mentioned made some when I was on the phone with Sunil they they mentioned some weighting scheme that was used to evaluate all of these numbers . actually the way things seems to well it 's forty percent for TI - digit , sixty for all the SpeechDat - Cars , well all these languages . professor b: and we don't have the TI - digits part yet ? phd c: no . And so have you put all these numbers together into a single number representing that ? phd c: Yeah . professor b: OK so that should be pretty easy to do and that would be good phd c: No . professor b: and how does this compare to the numbers oh so OGI two is just the top top row ? phd d: Yeah . phd c: So yeah to actually OGI two is the the baseline with the OGI features but this is not exactly the result that they have because they 've they 're still made some changes in the features professor b: OK . I don't know by how much because they did not send us the new results professor b: OK . phd c: professor b: OK so the one one place where it looks like we 're messing things up a bit is in the highly mismatched Italian . phd c: But there are thirty - six and then sometimes we are we are we are around forty - two and professor b: Now up phd c: but professor b: so one of the ideas that you had mentioned last time was having a a second silence detection . professor b: So filt is what that is ? phd c: Filt , yeah phd d: Yeah . phd c: yeah so it seems f for the the well match and mismatched condition it 's it brings something . but actually apparently there are there 's no room left for any silence detector at the server side because of the delay . phd c: t two days ago they were still working on this trying to reduce the delay of the silence detector so but yeah if we had time perhaps we could try to find some kind of compromise between the delay that 's on the handset and on the server side . Perhaps try to reduce the delay on the handset and but well For the moment they have this large delay on the the feature computation and so we don't professor b: OK . So Alright so for now at least that 's not there you have some results with low - pass filter cepstrum doesn't have a huge effect but it but it looks like it you know maybe could help in a couple places . professor b: and Yeah and let 's see What else did we have in there ? I guess it makes a l at this point this is I I guess I should probably look at these others a little bit And you you yellowed these out but Oh I see yeah that that one you can't use because of the delay . let 's see that one Well even the just the the second row doesn't look that bad right ? That 's just yeah ? phd c: Yep . professor b: phd c: Actually the yeah the second line is pretty much like the first line in yellow except that we don't have this KLT on the first on the left part of the diagram . Yeah so when we do this weighted measure we should compare the two cuz it might even come out better . professor b: So so there 's so I I would put that one also as a as a maybe . and it yeah and it 's actually does does significantly better on the highly mismatched Italian , so s and little worse on the mis on the case , but Well yeah it 's worse than a few things phd c: professor b: so let 's see how that c that c c see how that comes out on their their measure and are are we running this for TI - digits or phd c: Yeah . professor b: Now is TI di is is that part of the result that they get for the development th the results that they 're supposed to get at the end of end of the month , the TI - digits are there also ? phd c: Yeah . Oh I see the one I was looking down here at the the o the row below the lower yellowed one . professor b: What happens there is it 's around the same and so you could reduce the dimension as you were saying before a bit perhaps . professor b: It 's significantly worse it 's it 's it 's it 's mostly worse . phd c: Exc - except for the HM phd d: For many a mismatch it 's worse . What are what are the sizes of any of these sets , I I 'm I 'm sure you told me before , but I 've forgotten . So you know how many words are in one of these test sets ? phd c: phd d: I don't remember . professor b: About ? phd c: it 's it depends well the well matched is generally larger than the other sets and I think it 's around two thousand or three thousand words perhaps , at least . professor b: So the so the sets so the test sets are between five hundred and two thousand sentences , let 's say phd c: Mmm . professor b: and each sentence on the average has four or five digits or is it most of them longer or phd c: Yeah . phd d: Yeah for the Italian even seven digits y more or less phd c: It it d Seven digits . phd d: but sometime the sentence have only one digit and sometime like the number of credit cards , something like that . See the the reason I 'm asking is is is we have all these small differences and I don't know how seriously to take them , right ? phd c: - ? professor b: So i if if you had just you know to give an example , if you had if you had a thousand words then a a tenth of a percent would just be one word , phd c: Yeah . professor b: so yeah it be kind of I 'd kind of like to know what the sizes of these test sets were actually . phd d: The size that we have ? phd c: We could we could run run some kind of significance tests professor b: Yeah since these well also just to know the numbers , phd c: or phd d: Yeah . phd d: Yeah we have the result that the output of the HTK professor b: Yeah . professor b: Yeah so anyway if you could just mail out what those numbers are and then then that that be great . professor b: what else is there here ? see the second second from the bottom it says SIL , but this is some different kind of silence or thing or what was that ? phd c: phd d: It the the output silence of the MLP . To apply also to in include also the the silence of the MLP we have the fifty - six form and the silence to pick up the silence and we include those . phd d: Yeah , because when we apply the KLT phd c: No they 're I think there is this silence in addition to the KLT outputs professor b: No . phd c: it is because we we we just keep we don't keep all the dimensions after the KLT phd d: In addition t phd c: and yeah . phd c: So we try to add the silence also in addition to the these twenty - eight dimensions . And what and what 's OGI forty - five ? The bottom one there ? phd c: it 's o it 's OGI two , it 's so the th it 's the features from the first line phd d: It 's in fact OGI two . professor b: Right , but what 's the what does the last row mean ? phd c: So it 's basically this but without the KLT on the from the left path . So what 's the difference between the second phd c: the second line you don't have this combo stuff so you just professor b: Oh . phd d: professor b: OK , so alright so it looks to me I guess the same given that we have to take the filt ones out of the the running because of this delay problem so it looks to me like the ones you said I agree are are the ones to look at phd c: professor b: oh yeah also when when they 're using this weighting scheme of forty , thirty - five , twenty - five is that on the percentages or on the raw errors ? I guess it 's probably on the percentages right ? phd c: I guess , yeah . OK so if we can know what how many words are in each and then Dave Dave promised to get us something tomorrow which will be there as far as they 've gotten Friday phd c: professor b: and how long did it I guess if we 're not doing all these things if we 're only doing I guess since this is development data it 's legitimate to do more than one , right ? ordinarily if in final test data you don't want to do several and and take the best phd c: Yeah . professor b: that 's that 's that 's not proper but if this is development data we could still look at a couple . But we have to decide we have to fix the system on this d on this data , to choose the best professor b: Yeah . phd c: and these professor b: But the question is when when do we fix the system , phd c: But we could professor b: do we fix the system tomorrow or do we fix the system on Tuesday ? phd c: it d professor b: I Yeah , OK except that we do have to write it up . professor b: Right so maybe what we do is we we we as soon as we get the data from them we start the training and so forth phd c: Yeah but professor b: but we start the write - up right away because as you say there there 's only minor differences between these . professor b: Yeah , and and I I would you know , I would I 'd kind of like to see it phd c: yeah . Have y have you seen alt d do they have a format for how they want the system descriptions or anything ? phd c: not really . Yes , for those who are listening to this and not looking at it it 's not really that impressive , it 's just tiny . It 's all these little categories set a , set b , set c , multi - condition , clean . Do you know what no what no mitigation means here ? phd c: it should be the the problem with the error channel error professor b: Oh that 's probably the phd c: or professor b: this is probably channel error stuff phd c: well , you professor b: huh ? Oh this is i right , it says right above here channel channel error resilience , phd c: Yeah . and they have yes , split between seen databases and non - seen so basically between development and and evaluation . professor b: And so right , it 's presumed there 's all sorts of tuning that 's gone on on the see what they call seen databases and there won't be tuning for the unseen . So the everything else is the SpeechDat - Car , that 's the multi multilingual phd c: Yeah , so it 's not divided between languages you mean or professor b: Well , it is . phd c: it just professor b: It is , but there 's also there 's these tables over here for the for the TI - digits and these tables over here for the car data which is which is I guess all the multilingual stuff phd c: Oh yeah . professor b: Well anyway , sounds like there 'll be a lot to do just to work with our partners to fill out the tables over the next next few days phd c: professor b: I guess they have to send it out let 's see the thirty - first is Wednesday and I think the it has to be there by some hour European time on Wednesday phd c: professor b: so I think basically phd d: We lost time Wednesday maybe because that the difference in the time may be is a long different of the time . professor b: E excuse me ? phd d: Maybe the Thursday the twelfth of the night of the Thurs - thirty - one is is not valid in Europe . professor b: Yes , so I think we have to actually get it done Tuesday phd d: Tuesday . professor b: phd c: Except if if it 's the thirty - one at midnight or I don't know we can still do some work on Wednesday morning . W i is but is is it midni I thought it was actually something like five PM on phd c: Yeah , well . professor b: was like I thought it was five PM or something , I didn't think it was midnight . professor b: well , so five PM their time is is if phd d: Not five PM , three PM . phd d: no three three A - three PM ? phd c: No , we are wondering about the the the hour that we have to eh I don't know if it 's three PM it 's phd d: Oh yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . phd c: Yeah , it 's it 's midnight but professor b: Yes , yes , but I didn't think it was midnight that it was due , I thought it was due at some hour during the day like five PM or something . professor b: so I I well we should look but my assumption is that we basically have to be done Tuesday . professor b: but then then we 'll actually have the new data which is the German and the Danish phd c: Yeah . professor b: but that really will be much less work because the system will be fixed phd c: Yeah . professor b: so all we 'll do is take whatever they have and and and run it through the process . professor b: so there 'll be no new training , there 'll just be new HTK runs , so that 's means in some sense we can kind of relax from this after after Tuesday and and maybe next meeting we can start talking a little bit about where we want to go from here in terms of the research . professor b: you know what things did you think of when you were doing this process that you just didn't really have time to adequately work on so phd c: professor b: What ? grad a: Oh , Stephane always has these great ideas and oh , but we don't have time . professor b: And and also it 's still true that I think it 's true that that we we at least got fairly consistent i improved results by running the neural net transformation in parallel with the features phd c: But professor b: rather than in sequence which was was your suggestion and that that that seems to have been borne out . professor b: The fact that none of these are are you know , enormous is is is not too surprising most improvements aren't enormous and phd c: Yeah . professor b: some of them are but you have something really really wrong and you fix it you can get big and really enormous improvements phd c: professor b: but Cuz our best improvements over the years that we 've gotten from finding bugs , but Anyway OK well I I think I see where we are and everybody knows what they 're doing and is there is there anything else we should talk about or or are we done ? phd c: We so basically we will I think we 'll try to to focus on these three architectures and and perhaps I was thinking also a fourth one with just just a single KLT because we did not really test that professor b: - huh . professor b: Oh I have yeah I do have one other piece of information which I should tell people outside of this group too I don't know if we 're gonna need it but Jeff up at the University of Washington has gotten a hold of a some kind of server farm of of ten multiprocessor IBM machines RS six thousands phd c: professor b: and and so I think each one is four processors or something or I don't know , eight hundred megahertz or something and there 's four processors in a box and there 's ten boxes and there 's some kind of ti so if you know he 's got a lot of processing power and we 'd have to schedule it but if we have some big jobs and we wanna wanna wanna run them he 's he 's offering it . It 's when he was here eh he he used i not only every machine here but every machine on campus as far as I could tell , so so in some ways he just got his payback , but again I I don't know if we 'll end up with if we 're gonna be CPU limited on anything that we 're doing in this group phd c: OK well you guys doing great stuff so that 's that that 's really neat and we 'll g don't think we need to Oh well the other thing I guess that I will say is that the digits that we 're gonna record momentarily is starting to get are starting to get into a pretty good size collection and in addition to the SpeechDat stuff we will have those to work with really pretty soon now so that 's that 's another source of data . which is s under somewhat better control and that we can we can make measurements of the room the that you know if we feel there 's other measurements we don't have that we 'd like to have we can make them and Dave and I were just talking about that a little while ago so that 's another another possibility for this this kind of work . professor b: K , if nobody has anything else maybe we should go around do do our digits do our digits duty <doc-sep>professor b: OK , so We we had a meeting with , with Hynek , in in which , Sunil and Stephane , summarized where they were and and , talked about where we were gonna go . phd e: D did did you guys get your code pushed together ? phd d: Oh , yeah . professor b: What was the update ? phd a: What was the update ? So there is th then the all the new features that go in . These are the phd e: Is the , the CVS mechanism working well ? phd a: Yeah . phd e: Are are people , up at OGI grabbing code , via that ? phd d: I don't think I don't think phd e: Or ? phd a: I don't know if they use it , but . phd d: Yeah , I I don't think anybody up there is like working on it right now . professor b: I think it more likely that what it means is that when Sunil is up there he will grab it . professor b: But what 'll happen is is he 'll go back up there and , Pratibha will come back from from , the east coast . professor b: And , and and I guess actually , after Eurospeech for a little bit , he 'll go up there too . So , actually everybody who 's working on it will be up there for at least a little while . phd e: So has Has anybody tried remotely accessing the CVS using , SSH ? professor b: Yeah . phd a: I don't know if Hari did that or You d phd d: I can actually do it today . , I can just log into phd e: Have you tried it yet ? phd d: No , I didn't . phd a: Actually I I tried wh while when I installed the repository , I tried from Belgium . phd a: I logged in there and I tried to import phd e: Yeah ? It worked good ? phd a: Yeah , it works . phd e: Oh , good ! phd a: But it 's So , right now it 's the mechanism with SSH . phd e: Great ! phd a: I don't s I didn't set up You can also set up a CVS server on a new port . phd e: right ? phd a: But I didn't do that because I was not sure about security problems . I I would have to phd e: So w when you came in from Belgian Belgium , using SSH , was it asking you for your own password into ICSI ? So if yo you can only do that if you have an account at ICSI ? phd a: Right . phd e: Cuz there is an a way to set up anonymous CVS right ? phd a: Yeah , you ha in this way you ca you have to set up a CVS server but then , yeah , you can access it . phd e: So the anonymous mechanism phd a: You can access them and mostly if you if y the set the server is set up like this . Because a lot of the open source stuff works with anonymous CVS and I 'm just wondering , for our transcripts we may want to do that . professor b: Yeah , for this stuff I don't think we 're quite up to that . So , phd e: What 's new ? professor b: Well , I think maybe the thing to me might be I me I 'm sure you 've just been working on on , details of that since the meeting , right ? And so phd a: Mmm , since the meeting , well , I I 've been I 've been train training a new VAD and a new feature net . professor b: But I guess maybe the thing since you weren't yo you guys weren't at that that meeting , might be just just to , sort of recap , the the conclusions of the meeting . Cuz that was sort of , we we 'd sort of been working up to that , that that , he would come here this week and and we would sort of phd e: - huh . professor b: Since he 's going out of town like now , and I 'm going out town in a couple weeks , and time is marching , sort of , given all the mu many wonderful things we could be working on , what what will we actually focus on ? phd e: professor b: And , and what do we freeze ? And , you know , what do we ? So , . So then there 's something central and there aren't at least a bunch of different versions going off in in ways that differ trivially . professor b: and then within that , I guess the idea was to freeze a certain set of options for now , to run it , a particular way , and decide on what things are gonna be experimented with , as opposed to just experimenting with everything . So we 've been working like six weeks on on the noise compensation and we end up with something that seems reasonable . phd e: Are you gonna use which of the two techniques ? phd a: So finally it 's it 's , Wiener filtering on FFT bins . And it uses , two steps , smoothing of the transfer function , the first step , that 's along time , which use recursion . And after this step there is a further smoothing along frequency , which use a sliding window of twenty FFT bins . And , phd e: So this is on the , before any mel scaling has been done ? phd a: Yeah , yeah . phd e: This is phd a: It was professor b: This this smoothing is done on the estimate , of what you 're going to subtract ? Or on the thing that has already had something subtracted ? phd a: Yeah . So we are going to fix this for the moment and work on the other aspects of the whole system . phd a: So professor b: Actually , let me int eh , Dave isn't here to talk about it , but let me just interject . This module , in principle , i , you would know whether it 's true in fact , is somewhat independent from the rest of it . , well you don't I guess you don't re - synthesize speech , but you could phd a: We we do not fo professor b: but you could . phd a: Well well , we do , but we don't don't re - synthesize . In in the program we don't re - synthesize and then re - analyze once again . professor b: But you have a re - synthesized thing that you that 's an an option here . professor b: Yeah , I gu I guess my point is that , i in some of the work he 's doing in reverberation , one of the things that we 're finding is that , it 's it 's for the for an artificial situation , we can just deal with the reverberation and his techniques work really well . But for the real situation , problem is , is that you don't just have reverberation , you have reverberation in noise . So in fact it might be a very nice thing to do , to just take the noise removal part of it and put that in front of what he 's looking at . And , generate new files or whatever , and and , and then do the reverberation part . He 's , e phd e: I guess he 's busy with professor b: Yeah , prelims , right . professor b: but but , you know , that 'll , it 's clear that we , we are not with the real case that we 're looking at , we can't just look at reverberation in isolation because the interaction between that and noise is is considerable . And that 's , in the past we 've looked at , and this is hard enough , the interaction between channel effects and and , and additive noise , so convolutional effects and and additive effects . And we have , the , LDA stuff that in principle is doing something about convolutional effects . i i There 's all these interactions between these two and that 's part of why these guys had to work so hard on on juggling everything around . But now when you throw in the reverberation , it 's even worse , because not only do you have these effects , but you also have some long time effects . And , so Dave has something which , is doing some nice things under some conditions with with long time effects but when it 's when there 's noise there too , it 's it 's it 's pretty hard . So we have to start Since any almost any real situation is gonna have , where you have the microphone distant , is going to have both things , we we actually have to think about both at the same time . professor b: So , So there 's this noise suppression thing , which is sort of worked out and then , maybe you should just continue telling what what else is in the the form we have . phd a: Yeah , well , the , the other parts of the system are the the blocks that were already present before and that we did not modify a lot . professor b: So that 's again , that that 's the Wiener filtering , followed by , that 's done at the FFT level . And then the mel and then the log , and then the phd a: Then the LDA filter , professor b: LDA filter . phd a: mmm , then the downsampling , professor b: And then downsample , phd a: DCT , professor b: DCT , phd a: then , on - line normalization , professor b: on - line norm , phd a: followed by upsampling . phd a: And finally frame dropping , which , would be a neural network also , used for estimated silence probabilities . And the input of this neural network would be somewhere between log mel bands or one of the earlier stages of the processing . So that 's sort of most of this stuff is yeah , is operating parallel with this other stuff . So the things that we , I guess we sort of , There 's there 's some , neat ideas for V A So , in I think there 's sort of like There 's a bunch of tuning things to improve stuff . There 's questions about various places where there 's an exponent , if it 's the right exponent , or ways that we 're estimating noise , that we can improve estimating noise . But structurally it seemed like the things the main things that that we brought up that , are are gonna need to get worked on seriously are , a a significantly better VAD , putting the neural net on , which , you know , we haven't been doing anything with , the , neural net at the end there , and , the , opening up the second front . phd e: The other half of the channel ? professor b: Yeah , yeah , cuz we we have we have , half the the , data rate that they allow . phd e: That what you mean ? professor b: And , so the initial thing which came from , the meeting that we had down south was , that , we 'll initially just put in a mel spectrum as the second one . We probably will go to something better later , but the initial thing is that cepstra and spectra behave differently , phd e: phd e: So if you took the system the way it is now , the way it 's fro you 're gonna freeze it , and it ran it on the last evaluation , where it would it be ? phd a: It , phd e: In terms of ranking ? phd a: Ri - right now it 's second . professor b: Although you you know , you haven't tested it actually on the German and Danish , have you ? phd a: No , we didn't . phd e: So on the ones that you did test it on it would have been second ? professor b: Yeah . Would it But When you 're saying second , you 're comparing to the numbers that the , that the best system before got on , also without German and Danish ? phd a: Yeah , yeah . professor b: Well ranking didn't before , but I 'm just asking where this is to where theirs was without the German and Danish , phd a: Yeah . phd e: Where where where were we actually on the last test ? professor b: Oh , we were also esp essentially second , although there were there were , we had a couple systems and they had a couple systems . And so , I guess by that we were third , but , there were two systems that were pretty close , that came from the same place . phd e: We 're so this second that you 're saying now is system - wide second ? professor b: See , no I think it 's also institutional , isn't it ? phd e: Still institutionally second ? professor b: Right ? , I think both of their systems probably phd a: we are between their two systems . professor b: And and , you know , in some sense we 're all doing fairly similar things . , one could argue about the LDA and so forth but I I think , you know , in a lot of ways we 're doing very similar things . But what what phd e: So how did they fill up this all these these bits ? , if we 're u professor b: why are we using half ? Well , so you could you c phd e: Yeah . Or how are they using more than half , I guess maybe is what I professor b: Yeah , so I I think , you guys are closer to it than me , so correct me if I 'm wrong , but I I think that what 's going on is that in in both cases , some kind of normalization is done to deal with convola convolutional effects . And they seem to comple complement each other enough and be different enough that they both seem to help help us . phd e: So th So professor b: So that if you throw away high modulation frequencies , then you can downsample . professor b: So phd e: So what if you didn't So do you explicitly downsample then ? Do we explicitly downsample ? professor b: Yeah . phd e: And what if we didn't do that ? Would we get worse performance ? phd a: Yeah , not better , not worse . professor b: I think it doesn't affect it , does it ? phd e: I see . So I think the thing is , since we 're not evidently throwing away useful information , let 's try to put in some useful information . professor b: And , so I you know , we we 've found in a lot of ways for quite a while that having a second stream , helps a lot . So that 's that 's put in , and you know , it may even end up with mel spectrum even though I 'm saying I think we could do much better , just because it 's simple . And you know , in the long run having something everybody will look at and say , " oh , yeah , I understand " , is is very helpful . phd e: So you would you 're You 're thinking to put the , mel spectrum in before any of the noise removal stuff ? or after ? professor b: Well , that 's a question . It looks like it 'd be straightforward to to , remove the noise , and , phd e: Cuz that happens before the mel conversion , right ? professor b: Yeah . There 's even a question in my mind anyhow of whether th you should take the log or not . phd d: Well , it it it it so it actually makes it dependent on the overall energy of the , the frame . professor b: If you do or don't normalize ? phd d: If yo if you don't normalize and if if you don't normalize . And then if if normalization helps , then y you have something to compare against , and say , " OK , this much effect " , you don't want to change six things and then see what happens . And then saying , oh particularly because we 've found in the past there 's all these these these different results you get with slight modifications of how you do normalization . So , I would think you would wanna have some baseline that says , " OK , we don't normalize , this is what we get " , when we do this normalization , when we do that normalization . phd e: So this second stream , will it add latency to the system professor b: No , it 's in parallel . phd e: or ? grad c: Para professor b: We 're not talking about computation time here . grad c: So with this , new stream would you train up a VAD on both both features , somehow ? phd d: No , I guess the VAD has its own set of features . that 's phd d: which could be this one of these streams , or it can be something derived from these streams . phd a: And there is also the idea of using TRAPS , maybe , for the VAD , which , phd d: Yeah , that 's also phd a: Well , Pratibha apparently showed , when , she was at IBM , that it 's a good idea . grad c: Would would that fit on the handset , or ? Oh ! phd a: I have no idea . phd d: Well , it has t the th phd a: It would have to fit but Yeah . And so I guess the issue there is , are we are we using neural - net - based TRAPS , and and how big are they ? So that 'll that 'll be , you know , an issue . grad c: Cuz she also does the , the correlation - based , TRAPS , with without the neural net , just looking at the correlation between professor b: Right . professor b: Or a simple neural net , right ? , the thing is , if you 're doing correlation , you 're just doing a simple , dot product , you know , with some weights which you happened to learn from this learn from the data . professor b: And so , putting a nonlinearity on it is , you know , not that big a deal . professor b: So , the question is , how complex a function do you need ? Do you need to have an added layer or something ? In which case , potentially , you know , it could be big . phd e: So the meeting with Hynek that you guys just had was to decide exactly what you were gonna freeze in this system ? Is that ? Or was there ? Were you talking about what t new stuff , or ? professor b: What to freeze and then what to do after we froze . And like I was saying , I think the you know , the basic directions are , there 's lots of little things , such as improve the noise estimator but the bigger things are adding on the neural net and , the second stream . phd d: So , I 'll , I 'll actually after the meeting I 'll add the second stream to the VAD and maybe I 'll start with the feature net in that case . It 's like , you 're looking at the VAD , right ? phd a: yeah . phd d: OK , so just figure how to take the features from the final phd a: Yeah . But , yeah , I think there are plenty of issues to work on for the feature net @ @ . phd e: What about the , the new part of the evaluation , the , Wall Street Journal part ? professor b: Right . Well you you may be called upon to help , on account of , all the work in this stuff here has been , with small vocabulary . So what how is the , interaction supposed to happen ? , I remember the last time we talked about this , it was sort of up in the air whether they were going to be taking , people 's features and then running them or they were gonna give the system out or phd d: Yeah . professor b: Do we already have it ? phd d: Yeah , th I I guess it 's almost ready . phd e: So we 'll have to grab this over CVS or something ? phd d: It - no , it 's just downloadable from their from their web site . professor b: Cuz one of the things that might be helpful , if you 've if you 've got time in all of this is , is if if these guys are really focusing on improving , all the digit stuff , maybe and you got the front - end from them , maybe you could do the runs for the phd e: OK . professor b: and and , you know , iron out hassles that that you have to , tweak Joe about or whatever , phd e: Sure . professor b: S phd d: So I 'll point you to the web site and the mails corresponding . So I phd e: And it but it 's not ready yet , the system ? phd d: I I think they are still , tuning something on that . So they 're like , d they 're varying different parameters like the insertion penalty and other stuff , and then seeing what 's the performance . phd e: Are those going to be parameters that are frozen , nobody can change ? Or ? phd d: w I guess there is , time during which people are gonna make suggestions . phd d: So these sugges these this , period during which people are gonna make suggestions is to know whether it is actually biased towards any set of features or professor b: Yeah , so I th th certainly the thing that I would want to know about is whether we get really hurt , on in insertion penalty , language model , scaling , sorts of things . professor b: in which case , H Hari or Hynek will need to , you know , push the case more about about this . phd e: And we may be able to revisit this idea about , you know , somehow modifying our features to work with professor b: Yes . , some of that may be , a last minute rush thing because if the if our features are changing . Yeah , the other thing is that even though it 's months away , it 's starting to seem to me now like November fifteenth is right around the corner . And , if they haven't decided things like this , like what the parameters are gonna be for this , when " deciding " is not just somebody deciding . , in fact there should be some understanding behind the , deciding , which means some experiments and and so forth . phd e: So wha what 's the significance of November fifteenth ? professor b: That 's when the evaluation is . So , yeah , so after But , you know , they may even decide in the end to push it off . But , due to other reasons , like some people are going away , I 'm I 'm hoping it 's not pushed off for a l a long while . There 's there 's not anybody OGI currently who 's who 's , working with this and and phd e: Is is this part of the evaluation just a small part , or ho how important is this to the overall ? professor b: I I think it 's it 's , it depends how badly you do . phd d: b phd e: This is one of those things that will be debated afterwards ? professor b: Yeah . Well , it 's it 's Conceptually , it my impression , again , you guys correct me if I 'm wrong , but my impression is that , they want it as a double check . That you haven't come across you haven't invented features which are actually gonna do badly for a a significantly different task , particularly one with larger vocabulary . professor b: the truth is , most of the applications they 're looking at are pretty small vocabulary . phd e: Seems to me that if it 's a double check , they should give you a one or a zero . Y you passed the threshold or you didn't pass the threshold , and they shouldn't even care about what the score is . , but in in the current thing , for instance , where you have this well - matched , moderately - matched , and and mis highly - mismatched , the emphasis is somewhat on the on the well - matched , but it 's only a a marginal , phd e: Yeah . professor b: right ? It 's like forty , thirty - five , twenty - five , or something like that . So you still if you were way , way off on the highly - mismatched , it would have a big effect . So again , if you 're if you get If it doesn't help you much , for noisy versions of this of large vocabulary data , then , you know , it may not hurt you that much . professor b: But if it if you don't if it doesn't help you much at all , or to put it another way , if it helps some people a lot more than it helps other people , if their strategies do , then phd e: So is this , ? , Guenter was putting a bunch of Wall Street Journal data on our disks . phd e: So that 's the data that we 'll be running on ? professor b: Yeah . professor b: well there 's training and test , right ? phd e: I I guess , I 'm not sure . professor b: No , if it 's like the other things , there 's there 's data for training the H M Ms and and data for testing it . phd e: I just professor b: So I wouldn't So it it 's phd e: OK . But I think it 's trained on clean and Is it trained on clean and and test on ? phd d: The Wall Street ? professor b: Yeah . It 's training on a range between ten and twenty DB , I think , and testing between five and fifteen . phd d: It 's , It 's like a medium medium - mismatch condition , sort of . phd a: and So the noise is There is a range of different noises also which are selected randomly and added randomly , to the files . When did they estimate that they would have that system available for download ? phd d: I guess I guess one some preliminary version is already there . phd e: Oh , so there 's w something you can download to just learn ? phd d: Yeah , it 's already there . phd e: OK , phd d: But they 're actually parallel - y doing some modifications also , I think . phd d: So I guess the f final system will be frozen by middle of , like , one more week maybe . grad c: Is this their , SVM recognizer ? phd d: No , it 's just a straightforward . professor b: You know , their their They have a lot of options in their recognizer and and the SVM is one of the things they 've done with it , but it 's not their more standard thing . phd d: Yeah , this is a g yeah , this i professor b: what ? phd d: yeah . phd e: So , just so that I understand , they 're providing scripts and everything so that basically , you you push a button and it does training , and then it does test , and everything ? Is that the idea ? phd d: I I I think yeah , I I guess something like that . phd d: is what Do they provide all the scripts , everything , and then Just , phd e: I see . Somehow yo there 's hooks to put your features in and phd d: ju Yeah , I th I think . In fact , if you look into it a little bit , it might be reasonable You know Joe , right ? Yeah . professor b: Just to sort of ask him about the issue of , different features having different kinds of , scaling characteristics and so on . So that , you know , w w possibly having entirely different optimal values for for the usual twiddle factors and what 's what 's the plan about that ? phd e: OK . phd d: So sh shall we , like , add Chuck also to the mailing lists ? It may be better , in that case if he 's going to professor b: Yeah . phd d: Yeah , I guess maybe Hari or Hynek , one of them , has to send a mail to Joe . phd d: Well , yeah , to add or maybe wh phd e: I I know him really well . professor b: Do you have Hari 's , ? phd e: I have Hari 's professor b: Yeah , so maybe just CC Hari and say that you 've just been asked to handle the large vocabulary part here , and , you know , phd e: OK . Why don't you just ask Joe but CC Hari , and then in the note say , " Hari , hopefully this is OK with you " . professor b: That way you can get started asking Joe quickly while he 's while he 's maybe still , you know , putting in nails and screws and Yeah . phd d: And there is an , archive of all the mails that has been gon that has gone , between these people among these people . phd d: So , like like , it 's , like professor b: Have you thought about how long would be , most useful for you to go up to OGI ? phd a: I don't know , . professor b: Oh , so you 're you 're imagining more that you would come back here first for a while and then and then go up there ? phd a: I professor b: it 's to you . professor b: I ju you guys are Well , y anyway , you don't have to decide this second but thi think about it about what what you would think would be the the best way to work it . And , I was looking at some of the work that , Sangita was doing on these TRAPS things . So she has , she has temporal patterns for , a certain set of phonemes , from from TIMIT , right ? the most common phonemes . , so she has , a TRAP for each one of the phonemes , times fifteen , for each of the fifteen critical bands . And , she does this agglomerative hierarchical clustering which which basically , is a clustering algorithm that , starts with many , many , many different points many different clusters , corresponding to the number of data , patterns that you have in the data . phd e: And then you can pick , values anywhere along that tree to fix your set of clusters . grad c: Right , usually it 's when , when the sol similarity measures , don't go down as much . And what she found was , sh , was there were five broad , broad categories , corresponding to , things like , fricatives and , vocalic , and , stops . , and , I was thinking about ways to to generalize this because w you 're it 's sort of like a it 's not a completely automatic way of clustering , because yo beforehand you have these these TRAPS and you 're saying that that these frames correspond to this particular phoneme . , and that 's that 's constraining your your clustering to to the set of phonemes that you already have . , whereas maybe we want to just take take a look at , arbitrary windows in time , of varying length , and cluster those . grad c: And I 'm thinking if we if we do that , then we would probably , at some point in the clustering algorithm find that we 've clustered things like , OK , thi this is a transition , this is a relatively stable stable point . grad c: and I 'm hoping to find other things of of similarity and maybe use these things as the intermediate , intermediate categories that , I 'll later classify . F , I 'm professor b: Cuz that 's what you 're gonna be using , right ? grad c: Yeah , yeah . I I haven't exactly figured out , the exact details for that but , the the representation of the data that I was thinking of , was using , critical band , energies , over different lengths of time . professor b: Yeah , it seems somehow that needs th , there 's a couple things that I wonder about with this . professor b: if you 're going for this sort of thing where you have , little detectors that are looking at narrow bands , then what you 're going to be looking for should be some category that you can find with the narrow bands . , and then the other thing , is that I wonder about with it , and and don't take this in the wrong way , like I I know what I 'm doing or anything , grad c: Right . professor b: the sort of standard answer about this sort of thing is that if you 're trying to find the right system in some sense , whether you 're trying by categories or or parameters , and your goal is discrimination , then having choices based on discrimination as opposed to , unsupervised nearness of things , is actually better . professor b: and I don't know if that , since you 're dealing with issues of robustness , you know , maybe maybe this isn't right , but it 'd be something I 'd be concerned about . Because , for instance , you can imagine , i i if you remember from from , from your your quals , John Ohala saying that , " buh " and " puh " differed , not really cuz of voicing but because of aspiration . professor b: So , if you looked if you were doing some coarse clustering , you probably would put those two sounds together . And yet , I would gue I would guess that many of your recognition errors were coming from , pfft , screwing up on this distinction . professor b: So , in fact , it 's a little hard because recognizers , to first order , sort of work . And the reasons we 're doing the things we 're doing is because they don't work as well as we 'd like . And since they sort of work , it means that they are already doing if you go and take any recognizer that 's already out there and you say , " how well is it distinguishing between schwas and stops ? " grad c: professor b: Boy , I bet they 're all doing nearly perfectly on this , right ? grad c: professor b: So these these big categories that differ in huge obvious ways , we already know how to do . So , what are we bringing to the party ? , in fact what we wanna do is have something that , particularly in the presence of noise , is better at distinguishing between , categories that are actually close to one another , and hence , would probably be clustered together . , I understand that there 's this other constraint that you 're considering , is that you wanna have categories that , that would be straightforward for , say , a human being to mark if you had manual annotation . But I think it 's also essential that you wanna look at what are the confusions that you 're making and how can you come up with , categories that , can clarify these confusions . professor b: So , the standard sort of way of doing that is take a look at the algorithms you 're looking at , but then throw in some discriminative aspect to it . Y y this is more like , you know , how does LDA differ from PCA ? , they 're the same sort of thing . professor b: But , you know and and , this is a little harder because you 're not just trying to find parameters . , well W actually , you stopped thinking about it for a long time , but you used to think about it a lot . phd e: I guess I don't I don't , it 's not clear to me how to reconcile , you know , what you 're saying , which I think is right , with the way I 've been looking at it . But it seems to me that the desire the desirable feature to have is something that , is bottom - up . phd e: And and so I guess what I don't understand is how to do that and still be discriminative , because to be discriminative you have to have categories and the only categories that we know of to use are sort of these human human sig significant categories that are significant to humans , like phonemes , things like that . professor b: Well , here 's a here 's a , Here 's a generic and possibly useless thought , which is , what do you really , in a sense the only s s systems that make sense , are ones that that have something from top - down in th in them . Right ? Because if e even the smallest organism that 's trying to learn to do anything , if it doesn't have any kind of reward for doing or penal penalty for doing anything , then it 's just going to behave randomly . professor b: So whether you 're talking about something being learned through evolution or being learned through experience , it 's gotta have something come down to it that gives its reward or , you know , at least some reinforcement learning , phd e: Right . professor b: right ? phd e: So the question is , how far down ? professor b: And phd e: We could stop at words , but we don't , right ? We go all the way down to phonemes . professor b: Right , but I me I I think that maybe in some ways part of the difficulty is is trying to deal with the with these phonemes . You know , and and and i it 's almost like you want categories if if our if our , metric of of goodness , i if our phd e: professor b: correction if our metric of badness is word error rate then , maybe we should be looking at words . professor b: for for for very nice , reasons we 've looked for a while at syllables , and they have a lot of good properties , but i i i if you go all the way to words , that 's really , d w In many applications you wanna go further . You wanna go to concepts or something , or have have have concepts , actions , this sort of thing . And and phd e: Yeah , so the common right , the common wisdom is you can't do words because there 's too many of them , right ? So you have to have some smaller set that you can use , and and so everybody goes to phonemes . But the problem is that we we build models of words in terms of phonemes and these models are are really cartoon - ish , right ? So when you look at conversational speech , for example , you don't see the phonemes that you that you have in your word models . See , so her here 's maybe where If the issue is that we 're trying to come up with , some sort of intermediate categories which will then be useful for later stuff , then maybe it doesn't matter that we can't have enough phd e: professor b: what you wanna do is is build up these categories that are that are best for word recognition . professor b: And and somehow if that 's built into the loop of what the categories , we do this every day in this very gross way of of running o a thousand experiments phd e: Right . In some ways it 's really not a bad bad thing to do because it tells you in fact how your adjustments at the very low level affect the the final goal . professor b: so maybe there 's a way to even put that in in a much more automatic way , phd e: Right . professor b: where you take , you know , something about the error at the level of the word or some other it could be syllable but in some large unit , phd e: - huh . professor b: and yeah , you may not have word models , you have phone models , whatever , but you sort of don't worry about that , and just somehow feed it back through . professor b: You know , so that 's , wh what I called a useless comments because I 'm not really telling you how to do it . But , it 's a it 's it 's , you know it phd e: No , but I think the important part in there is that , you know , if you want to be discriminative , you have to have , you know , categories . If you can put the words in to the loop somehow for determining goodness of your sets of clusters professor b: Now , that being said , I think that that if you have something that is , i Once you start dealing with spontaneous speech , all the things you 're saying are are really true . professor b: If you have read speech that 's been manually annotated , like TIMIT , then , you know , i i you the phones are gonna be right , actually , for the most part . Yeah , professor b: So so , it doesn't really hurt them to to do that , to put in discrimination at that level . professor b: if you go to spontaneous speech then it 's it 's trickier and and and , the phones are , you know , it 's gonna be based on bad pronunciation models that you have of phd e: professor b: and , And it won't allow for the overlapping phenomenon phd e: Mmm . So it 's almost like there 's this mechanism that we have that , you know , when when we 're hearing read speech and all the phonemes are there you know , we we deal with that , but but when we go to conversational , and then all of a sudden not all the phonemes are there , it doesn't really matter that much to us as humans because we have some kind of mechanism that allows for these word models , whatever those models are , to be munged , you know , and and it doesn't really hurt , and I 'm not sure how how to build that in . professor b: Yeah , I guess the other thing i is is to think of a little bit , we when y when you start looking at these kind of results I think it usually is is pretty intuitive , but start looking at , what are the kinds of confusions that you do make , you know , between words if you want or or or , even phones in in in in read speech , say , when there is noise . You know , so is it more across place or more across manner ? Or is it cor you know , is it ? grad c: professor b: I know one thing that happens is that you you you , you lose the , low energy phones . And if that if that is if it , if that turns it into another word or or different you know , or another pair of words or something , then it 's more likely to happen . But , I don't know , I w I would I would guess that you 'd grad c: Anyway , that 's phd e: I think part of the difficulty is that a l a lot of the robustness that we have is probably coming from a much higher level . phd e: You know , we understand the context of the situation when we 're having a conversation . And so if there 's noise in there , you know , our brain fills in and imagines what what should be there . professor b: but , even if you do , diagnostic rhyme test kind of things , you know , where there really isn't an any information like that , people are still better in noise than they than they are in in , than the machines are . If we 're not working on that then we should work on something else and improve it , but especially if it looks like the potential is there

The team had concerns about the effectiveness of email communication, especially during the summer when they would be out of town. Despite their belief that emails should be sufficient for data collection based on past experiences, there was skepticism about obtaining consent through this method. PhD C suggested testing on a single KLT, which the professor agreed to as long as it could be easily managed within their schedule. However, they faced a challenge when they realized that Dave Johnson, who was needed to install the SUN-Blades for storage, would be unavailable for ten days. It became apparent that there was no dedicated person to assist them. The Aurora staff was experimenting with different parameters, including the insertion penalty, and the professor expressed interest in knowing the specific penalties to inform their decision-making process. PhD C believed that the team was close to achieving a fifty percent improvement over the new baseline, which translated to a sixty percent improvement over the old baseline. Their model was currently performing at around fifty to fifty-five percent above the old baseline, although the exact numbers depended on the weightings used.

Question: Why did Marketing disagree with the fancy design requirement and the setting price proposed by Project Manager? What did Marketing think about Project Manager's system when evaluating the project and why did Project Manager agree with Marketing when assessing the criteria of matching the operating behaviour of the user? Article: The what we have to get through in this meeting is firstly the prototype presentation from you two , so you can show us what you've been working on so diligently . project manager: then industrial designer: project manager: then Cat's going to present the evaluation criteria that we're going to be evaluating this against . user interface: project manager: Then I need to say some st a few things about finance , 'cause we have to check that it's within the finance criteria . and then we'll be making sure that our product fits both the evaluation criteria from Cat and the financial limits . and then we will have a brief evaluation of the whole process of production and design that we've been through . S marketing: And then do we get to make a remote control ? industrial designer: project manager: 'Cause we missed out . project manager: So industrial designer: project manager: it's now I guess that we're supposed to start at fifteen thirty five , so we've got until four fifteen . How how much do we have , forty minutes ? project manager: Is that right ? user interface: Yeah , about four fifteen , yeah . Do you want user interface: So , you said are are we starting with the the project manager: Yes . user interface: so will you maybe start with like the the shape and things and and then I will explain the the user interface th things , like the buttons and the scrolling things and industrial designer: Okay . project manager: user interface: marketing: You think bananas are a safe thing to use ? project manager: industrial designer: marketing: It's a bit phallic . project manager: Does it vibrate when you press the buttons ? industrial designer: so basically it's the it's the flip open thing again . project manager: And it's the whole thing's made of rubber , is that user interface: yeah . marketing: Is it to scale , or do you think you can make it a bit smaller ? user interface: Yeah , . user interface: yeah , but one thing we actually kind of forgot while designing , that one side was supposed to be rounder , industrial designer: Yeah , user interface: so we said the back side round , yeah . marketing: and then the whole shape's curvy , so I would say that this curvy does look quite like a vegetable . project manager: user interface: So so the user interface as as we discussed last time on on the on the cover we just have the very basic things . user interface: So we have that n channels here starting from one two three there would be numbers in in the on the actual one . user interface: So it's four , up to four , up to seven , up to nine and zero , z zero here . It's it's quite standard place for it and and also the colour is quite often red , so it's it's kind of user friendly . user interface: And then these ones would be for flipping the channels back and like the previous one and the next one . user interface: And and we would also have a l little thing saying here , previous and ne prevon prevon next . user interface: On the side , marketing: Ah , you did get that in then , user interface: this one . user interface: And and and it's it's on the back is cover or back lid , because if you flip it open , you can still do the scrolling here . user interface: See ? So the volume is you just scroll , but then once you flip it open , okay , there there you have the screen project manager: Yeah . user interface: You can move back and forth and then if you need to m choose something on the screen , you just push the cen the middle button . project manager: Y or you could have it so you on the wheel if you marketing: On the wheel , like if you hold the wheel down then it will mute . industrial designer: on the L_C_D_ we r you know , the main menu will have various options . user interface: Well , but the but the mute yeah , the scrolling is kind of you have to scroll all the way to make it mute , right ? project manager: But if you hold it in , industrial designer: . marketing: Yeah , but it's a scroll and click , isn't it ? project manager: if it's a scroll and click so you hold it in ? marketing: Okay , cool . user interface: So I think it project manager: And it's with the the black and yellow you're even in the right colours . user interface: Yeah , I think we could do l the logo in grey , as it is on the website . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: project manager: it's a sort of intermediate colour , I guess . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: I hate Play-Do , it's just minging . project manager: I suspect we're gonna have a couple of minor finance issues , but we'll se I'm sure we can get around them somehow . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: We'll just send all of our manufacturing to some nice poor country industrial designer: project manager: and cut some of the prices that way . marketing: so one is , you know , yes , it totally meets with that requirement and seven is , no , it really doesn't , we need to go back and start again . Basically , what I did was I went through all the like user requirements and things that we've done and we've worked on and like made a list of them . you know , so that we can evaluate each one and like so it was about going back to the start and saying oh yeah , we did manage to do that , or oh no , we really forgot about that . Is that right ? marketing: Yes , I did have A_ , B_ , C_ , and D_ down here , but it seems to have turned into like just bullet points . But if you can imagine that they say A_ , B_ , C_ , and D_ , then that would be really good . marketing: Well , I thought we'd kinda said that you'd have a little thing to stick on the T_V_ ? project manager: Yeah , just prepare one now . What do you all say ? industrial designer: So ? project manager: I reckon it user interface: S seven was th the maximum , yeah ? marketing: Yeah . Okay what I've done on the next page is I've set it up so we just put the marks in . project manager: we can if we industrial designer: I can I can take note marketing: If you take a note of them , and then I'll put them in in a minute . marketing: Okay , so we're all agreeing on seven for A_ ? project manager: Yeah . Does it match the operating behaviour of the user ? industrial designer: the the only thing that we were considering was that this thing is kind of more for right-handed people than for left-handed people , project manager: I think it does . industrial designer: so if you're left-handed you're kind of left scrolling with your finger . user interface: so y so we we might do we might want to do like a another m model another another version , which is like exactly the mirror image of this one . project manager: 'cause you don't always have all left-handers or all right-handers in a family . industrial designer: So bu it's it's not a huge problem , marketing: I th I think it's not it's not like it's a pen . user interface: But then then I think left-handed people are already used to discrimination anyway , project manager: Yeah . user interface: so they just marketing: Yeah , but because it's not like it's a pen , you know , left-handed people can't normally write right-handed , user interface: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , because anyway , right-handed people would be able to scroll with it , marketing: Yeah . user interface: so i if the majority are right-handed , it's project manager: marketing: So that does kind of negate the whole R_S_I_ issue . marketing: So maybe we need to put that needs a little bit of investigation , maybe give it a five , I would say ? project manager: marketing: What do you what do you all think ? industrial designer: . user interface: Or maybe six , because it's just one one i one among the issues , project manager: Yeah , I think I think for user interface: . project manager: most people are right-handed , so in in terms of our greatest target group , I think it's pretty good , but we might want to flag it for management , they want might want to user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: It might be a little clumsy when when it opens up , right , project manager: They industrial designer: so it opens on the side . industrial designer: So you guys can decide wh whether user interface: it will be and it will be it won't be heavy . user interface: Yeah well yeah , project manager: The length is gonna be difficu user interface: but it's it's a bit long . marketing: But you were thinking about making it smaller , yeah ? industrial designer: this this kind of makes it more project manager: . marketing: So it works like a mobile phone flipping , but y you know , as long as that side's flat , than that will work . Are are we admitting defeat on C_ or are we saying we're gonna stick a locator on the T_V_ ? industrial designer: No , we have a locator . project manager: No , we're gonna put it like we've got th there's the locator dot . Cool , so that means you need a that does mean you need a little speaker on it though , user interface: that you stick on T_V_ . user interface: Yeah well w but l but the speak sample speaker is included , so it it has some capacity to to do some to make some sounds , so yeah . If if this means intuitive , if it means the way people kind of are used to finding things project manager: Yeah . user interface: and it's I th I think it's project manager: I'd say six , 'cause the the the standard layout for numbers is three three three and one , rather than the way you've got it . marketing: Yeah , and d industrial designer: And even the scroll , it's a it's a new technology project manager: So industrial designer: so m m might be a little more difficult for people to get used to in the beginni project manager: Might be industrial designer: so it is kind of not very intuitive but it's a good technology , once they get used to it . project manager: But it and it's something that they will be experiencing in a lot of different places soon . marketing: So , should we maybe say f a five industrial designer: So l marketing: and say it is intuitive , project manager: Five ? marketing: but it's different , so , do you know , it's obvious how to use it , project manager: Yeah . It has taken a little while , hasn't it ? intuitive but Sorry , it's really hard to write on those . marketing: I just went a bit mad , didn't I ? project manager: marketing: okay , cool , E_ , okay . I would guess this comes back from this whole B_ thing links in here , so possibly for left-handed . user interface: but then who would be really pushing the buttons so much on the on the remote control anyway , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , so it's kinda industrial designer: Yeah , I I think it is ergonomic . marketing: I used to send fifty texts a day , you know , project manager: Well we've banned them from marketing: and I never got repetitive strain injury from that , project manager: industrial designer: yeah . industrial designer: And moreover it it has L_C_D_ and everything , project manager: Yeah . marketing: Hang on , how come it's showing up with the things there but it only had bullet points there ? That's just project manager: Ah , that's the second one . So you must have changed it on this one where it's got score , but not on the previous slide . industrial designer: Anyway it ha yeah , user interface: Technologi well industrial designer: it's the most sophisticated remote that I ever seen . Well we have we have the sample speaker as well , which is yeah , it's kind of new . marketing: Yeah , but you don't project manager: All of the components have been used in other things before . marketing: They're never been used i they've never been using remote remote control before I don't think . project manager: What do you reckon , five , six ? marketing: Yeah , what do you all think ? user interface: Six . marketing: Six ? user interface: how how far can you go with a remote control , really ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: Well , that's it , user interface: It still has to do what i what it has to do . industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , but everything has been used in space before it gets to anyone else really , hasn't it ? project manager: marketing: So , I don't think many peop project manager: Space remote . user interface: Yeah , isn't it fashionable ? project manager: industrial designer: The carrot banana remote . marketing: So , we give it seven , and we write user interface: Fruit fruit and vegetables are fashionable these days , so . user interface: What's the assessment ? marketing: So , we need the average here , so we got user interface: The average is about six and something . marketing: So we've got four sevens , user interface: No , wait , a little bit under six . project manager: Fifty one , one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight . project manager: Six point point industrial designer: Fifty one divided by user interface: Six point something , yeah . project manager: Now wait until we get to finance and then we'll see if we can afford it . marketing: project manager: That's all you've got at the moment , or did you have anything more ? marketing: no , that's it , project manager: That's it ? marketing: yeah . marketing: user interface: project manager: Computer no signal ? industrial designer: I guess it'll have to wait for a bit . project manager: It could be marketing: Yeah , but rubber comes coloured , doesn't it ? You know . project manager: it's I would maybe it's like if you want titanium coloured or wood coloured , it's different . user interface: Or maybe maybe if you want some kind of pattern thing on it , project manager: Yeah , let's leave it as zero , 'cause it's easy . project manager: We we're definitely going to have to user interface: We have pushbuttons , industrial designer: . project manager: so we've got pushbutton , and then we've user interface: scro we have scroll wheel as well . project manager: Scroll wheel with pushbutton we had , no ? industrial designer: No we we have yeah . user interface: Yeah , but what do we ha we have L_C_ display , but but the wh but the s spinning wheel project manager: But the the spinning wheel's not there . I have think maybe it's integrated with the L_C_ display ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: We've got more than one pushbutton though , user interface: Okay , let's yeah . project manager: marketing: haven't we ? project manager: I think the pushbutton oh . marketing: 'Cause then you have project manager: I don't know if that's one marketing: That means you can only have twenty five push buttons in total doesn't it ? Not counting anything , we'd still be in budget . industrial designer: Huh ? project manager: Push what industrial designer: Wh wh what is the limit ? . project manager: whether whether pushbutton means that p count by button or do we user interface: We have to count all of them , or yeah . industrial designer: No it says what what is the kind of interface , marketing: Well it doesn't , but it project manager: No . industrial designer: if it is pushbutton then you got a zero point five , it's a scroll wheel so we we've put it's pushbutton and scroll wheel and L_C_D_ display , project manager: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , the sample sensor will have to go , 'cause that's the most expensive thing on there . marketing: But that's a bit of a gimmick anyway really , isn't it ? industrial designer: and the locator also goes away . marketing: does project manager: What else does it need ? user interface: Well the speaker the sample speaker is is expensive , but we could just have some some very very easy device that just beeps . project manager: Yeah , 'cause the sample speaker was , I think , more complicated then just a beeping thing . project manager: Yeah , okay , so we industrial designer: A also i in the case I'm not sure that you will evaluate this as a curved surface , because it's just rubber , so it's probably a flat surface rubber . marketing: See , I was gonna say the scroll wheel pushbutton thing , 'cause project manager: Take it down to just a scroll wheel . We could do industrial designer: So tha that mean that we cannot press how do we how do we make a selection in in the L_C_D_ ? user interface: Yeah , then then we would be in the b budget . industrial designer: If in the L_C_D_ we can scroll , right ? But how do we make a selection if we d cannot push the button . user interface: Yeah b no no , you can push this one , but we don't have a pushbutton we ca we don't have this muting mechanism for this scrolling thing . industrial designer: it's it's the scroll wheel and I thought we were referring to this as a scroll spinning wheel and pushbutton thing . That's the spin wheel though , isn't it ? Didn't that come with the L_C_ project manager: That's with the L_C_ industrial designer: That comes with the L_C_D_ ? marketing: Yeah . marketing: Unless we just take off the scroll wheel altogether project manager: It's nothing n marketing: and just have pushbuttons for the volume . project manager: Yeah , marketing: the scroll wheel's pretty cool , but project manager: I have industrial designer: Instead of scrolling here we have two buttons here , up for up and down . Oh look , we're way under budget and we'll make huge profits and we'll all get bonuses . marketing: Yeah , well we could admit to the single curve , couldn't we ? industrial designer: project manager: Or or that we have to have some sort of special colour . project manager: and then I'll take I can send it back to management and say we weren't quite sure about the colour , if that costs extra then we've still got some space for it , industrial designer: We have , yeah . industrial designer: Because we keep all the features , we keep voice recognition , we keep L_C_D_ display . marketing: We just got rid of a gimmick that was never anyway , industrial designer: yeah . marketing: and the scroll wheel is essentially the two buttons that was it's not a great difference I don't think . user interface: But yeah , it's it's not like sample speaker , but it will just beep , so we still have the locate . industrial designer: project manager: Tha user interface: Which colour , the the colour of the phone or the colour of the industrial designer: marketing: Oh the the beeper thing . project manager: 'Cause we we won't have run out of our pot of Play-Doh . we need we've just got about ten minutes or so left of the meeting , so it would be good if we could just have a little talk about the project itself and how it went , so that we can feed back to the management for next time they're designing a product . project manager: Feedback ? Ideas ? user interface: Yeah , as far as creativity is concerned , yeah I think there was there was room for creativity . The only the only problem being that at the end we had to cut some things down because of the the budget we had . industrial designer: I think n one thing that was lacking was that we did not know what the various things cost to begin with . marketing: If we'd had that sheet at the beginning should've been like , okay , so we can have that lot , let's just throw it together and do what we can . project manager: But in terms of the process of going and working individually and then coming back to a meeting , that that worked in terms of . marketing: so you didn't st go off and think , wouldn't it be great to have a vibrating remote control shaped like a banana , project manager: industrial designer: marketing: and then , you know , come back three days later and Jen's going look , look , it vibrates and it looks like a banana . That would just be so cool , to d do all your notes and s project manager: Yeah , you could take it to lectures and just write stuff down industrial designer: Yeah yeah yeah , project manager: and have it printed out when you got back to the office . industrial designer: that's it's it's project manager: They great ? industrial designer: I wonder what one of these costs . project manager: Do you think they'd notice if one went ? marketing: I don't think you should say that was the recording . project manager: But that worked well having having a whiteboard that we could draw on as well as having the PowerPoint , 'cause the I find that the problem with PowerPoint often is that it's so static and you can't change it once you're in there , marketing: It is a bit limiting , isn't it ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , and and and this time also the time limits but actually preparing the marketing: Yeah . marketing: you didn't have the whole whooshing thing , 'cause there wasn't time for that , so yeah . We could make some little user interface: But yeah , but already just just preparing the slides before before the meeting , yeah . marketing: Are we supposed to say nice things about Jen now ? industrial designer: project manager: And presumably you don't you can say nasty things as well . project manager: Did anyone feel that they were getting sort of covered up and not being able to say their bit ? user interface: To express them industrial designer: . user interface: pretty novel solution for a for a remote control really , all this flipping open thing and project manager: Yeah . marketing: I don't know , I don't go shopping for remote controls that often , maybe somebody's already though of it . user interface: Yeah , neither neither do I , project manager: user interface: but I've never seen anything and and none of my examples were was was like this , actually , so . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: Yeah maybe w maybe we could have a patent on this one . marketing: I think we'd like to think the ideas were new , project manager: Banana remote . Vibrate user interface: marketing: Yeah , but that would just come up with like other things really wouldn't it . project manager: well within budget , including a little what have we got ? One Euro left over for bits that we didn't foresee . Were there any was there anything that you found difficult , or anything that didn't go as smoothly as you'd hope ? user interface: And my main difficulty was the the time pressure . industrial designer: I thought that was good though , because if you're given too much time then you got nothing to do with your time and yeah . project manager: We've got about five minutes left , but if we've finished , then we've finished . industrial designer: We certainly are , project manager: and you should never drag a meeting on just because you have extra time . marketing: project manager: It was very productive day and marketing: We could draw animals on the board again . industrial designer: user interface: Oh , you don't like anim marketing: It's just minging . project manager: Right , so we have to complete the final questionnaire and meeting summary when they send it . industrial designer: Was there a questionnaire already sent ? project manager: I don't know if it's already sent or not . project manager: presumably I have to marketing: Do we have to go back into the other room or can we stay in here now ? project manager: I don't see why you can't stay here , really <doc-sep> we're gonna discuss the look and feel design , the user interface design , and we're gonna evaluate the product . And the end result of this meeting has to be a decision on the details of this remote control , like absolute final decision , and then I'm gonna have to specify the final design in the final report . So just from from last time to recap , we said we were gonna have a snowman shaped remote control with no L_C_D_ display , no need for talk-back , it was hopefully gonna be kinetic power and battery with rubber buttons , maybe backlighting the buttons with some internal L_E_D_s to shine through the casing , hopefully a jog-dial , and incorporating the slogan somewhere as well . user interface: well look at the expense sheet , and it turned to be quite a lot expensive to have open up and have lots of buttons and stuff inside , project manager: . user interface: so instead we've this is gonna be an L_C_D_ screen , just a a very very basic one , very small with access to the menu through the the scroll wheel and confirm button . user interface: apart from that , it's just pretty much the same as we discussed last time . industrial designer: And there isn't d it doesn't open up to the advanced functions ? the advanced functions are still hidden from you , but they're hidden in the sense that they're not in use . marketing: Where are they ? industrial designer: they're in the L_C_D_ panel and the jog-dial ? marketing: Ah , right . industrial designer: Okay 'cause project manager: So w what kind of thing is gonna be marketing: Great . user interface: industrial designer: The L_C_D_ panel just displays functionally what you're doing . If you're using an advanced function right , like c brightness , contrast , whatever , it will just say marketing: Right . industrial designer: You know it's like it only has four columns , it's a very simple L_C_D_ like , whereas many the minimum amount we need that the user will automatically know like this is brightness or this is contrast . industrial designer: It might even be one , a bit more complex L_C_D_ panel with pictures like maybe the sun or the , you know , the the symbols of the various functions . project manager: Where are we gonna have the slogan ? industrial designer: they're al along this user interface: You know , just like right inside there . industrial designer: You have this space here , and then you have this thing on the side as well , or at the bottom . project manager: industrial designer: 'Cause slogans are usually quite small , right , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: say a button's about this size , right , so you would still have plenty of space for a slogan , say even for that . project manager: So if this isn't to scale , what kind of dimensions are you thinking about here ? user interface: Well we want the other buttons to be big enough to push easily with a finger project manager: user interface: so we reckon maybe that'll be about the same size as the palm of your hand . industrial designer: Yep so that would be about a centimetre for a button , so one two three four centimetres . marketing: That'd be good , in fact a pen is about ten centimetres usually , so that would be that sounds like a really good size , if you see it there . Is these are these the colours that of production , or is this just what we had available ? user interface: Well I'm We're gonna have again the the sort of the foggy yellow from last time that lit up when you pushed the button . project manager: Okay so just user interface: project manager: could you just list all the things that it does s so I can write them in the report . user interface: But this button , because it's red it's sort of very prominent , we're gonna use it as it can be the power button if you hold it for maybe two seconds it'll send a stand-by signal . user interface: apart from that it's gonna be used as a confirm button for the L_C_D_ screen industrial designer: Sure . industrial designer: Oh we've discussed how h high it is , but how wide is it ? user interface: I don't know . marketing: How high is it ? industrial designer: No as in the height , but what about the width ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: Oh is this k to get an idea of scale from your from your thing there okay . project manager: So you can power on and off , what else can you do ? marketing: Three and a half . user interface: were gonna have the volume control here , but because we've got the the L_C_D_ and the jog-dial we just thought we'd use that as the volume . user interface: you can use it for more advanced functions like contrast , colour and project manager: Contrast , brightness , user interface: yeah . project manager: yeah , and anything else ? user interface: just whatever else we wanted to include as the advanced functions , we didn't actually go through and specify the project manager: Well of the designers what are they ? user interface: what can a T_V_ do ? industrial designer: Okay things like brightness , contrast , project manager: -huh . Are you having a V_C_R_ , are you having you know which input do you have ? marketing: - , industrial designer: Audio , we have like your basic y your base , your mid-range , your high range . industrial designer: Yep , left-right balance , maybe even pre-programmed sound modes , like the user could determine like a series of sound modes , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: and then what could happen would be when you click on that then it would go to that setting . project manager: is there anything else at all it can do ? That 'cause that's that's fine . Okay right I g I guess that's it , so we can now We can now have a little look at the the Excel sheet and price listing , and see if we need to if we need to rethink anything at all . project manager: So for this first part here power-wise , have we got battery ? industrial designer: The battery . industrial designer: We need an project manager: And that's because of cost restraints is it ? industrial designer: Yep . project manager: what about the electronics here ? industrial designer: We need an advanced chip I think , yep . project manager: Okay the case , what does it mean by single and double , do you know ? user interface: I think single would just be sort of one sort of oval whereas double is this sort of thing . project manager: Is there any rubber at all in the buttons or any industrial designer: I think we're gonna have to skip the rubber . project manager: So I'll have to put that Oh no wait we ho how many colours have we got there ? industrial designer: For the case itself , one colour . industrial designer: 'Cause the case unit itself , the rest of our components go on top of it . project manager: Okay so interface-wise , is it this third option we have , the two of them there ? marketing: . project manager: Okay and then buttons , we have what , two colours ? industrial designer: How many user interface: we have got some push buttons as well . user interface: So I reckon we've got one button for this thing 'cause it's just one big sheet of rubber . user interface: I'm not sure if that counts but industrial designer: Okay let's just be safe and put like say four buttons for that one . user interface: You can see we're we're all very far beyond the project manager: So w why are we arriving at the number four ? Where does the number four come from ? industrial designer: 'Cause that's one button by its the complexity of twelve buttons . project manager: Okay right , industrial designer: So we're just estimating that yeah it would be less . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: Now we're gonna something's gonna have to go . we're at sixteen point eight and marketing: how - how are we going to achieve this high-end product if project manager: Well we h something has to go to the tune of two point t three Euro , marketing: We only have very sparse project manager: so let me see , what are we marketing: Two point three ? Four point three no ? project manager: oh yes sorry , four point three . user interface: Well we could take out ones by making it single curved , just fill in those bits . industrial designer: How much would that save us ? marketing: And then where is the project manager: How much would that save us ? industrial designer: That will only save you one . industrial designer: The other thing could be that you could take away the L_C_D_ panel and the advanced chip together , project manager: One . industrial designer: because when you do something on the T_V_ , the T_V_ responds and reacts as well , marketing: industrial designer: so the user could be looking at the T_V_ and pushing his thing so we may not need to user interface: That's fair enough , yeah . industrial designer: so when we scroll we need just some way to get the T_V_ to respond , marketing: industrial designer: which I think is a technically doable thing so project manager: Okay so marketing: and we ha where are the four the four push buttons are where exactly now ? industrial designer: The twelve buttons that you see there . user interface: That's one piece of rubber but it's gonna have twelve button things underneath so project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Functionally you're gonna have to intercept So four is a good estimate for project manager: Do you think ? industrial designer: Yeah , so you can't actually cut It's like three times the number of buttons , four , eight , twelve . project manager: Like is is that one big button or is it twelve buttons , industrial designer: It It needs to be more than one big button because if you open up your phone , underneath there's actually one button underneath , it's just that the panel itself is a single panel . marketing: industrial designer: or the colours , you could take away s colours for th for the buttons . project manager: Well do you want colour differentiation here ? industrial designer: No that's not the button we're talking about . industrial designer: the buttons only refer to the pad so project manager: Right so industrial designer: Should we take that off ? project manager: Ah . industrial designer: so then these just become normal coloured buttons , so that might be some some way of cutting the cost . marketing: user interface: So I reckon project manager: marketing: How about with embossing the logo , isn't that going to cost us some money ? project manager: Doesn't say so . Just one ? Does that mean that one button has a special form or user interface: I think there's just one button so project manager: Yeah okay . So we're not gonna have the L_C_D_ anymore , and we'll just gonna have an on t on the T_V_ it'll show you what you're doing , which I think is fair enough , and so this is gonna be one big thing here . marketing: Was the goal in your in your prototype design that it be as low profile as possible ? industrial designer: What do you mean by profile ? marketing: Sort of flat as possible . user interface: sort of deep enough to be comfy to hold in your hands rather than being wide and flat . marketing: Yeah that's what I was thinking , to industrial designer: We didn't have enough Play-Doh to make it three D_ . industrial designer: So there's one more dimension to the thing which we need to to add , marketing: project manager: So just to well to be thorough then , width-wise we're looking at about what three centimetres or something ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: How how tall do you envisage it being ? About that big ? industrial designer: Two . Okay so can we close that ? This is what it's the final spec that it's gonna be . marketing: it's probably just I dunno if it's worth getting into , but just in in that we want this to be stylish , should we think a little bit more out of the box in terms of a button grid , because I've seen there's lots of devices out there that that instead of taking your standard nine nine square grid , and they have it sort of stylized or in different concept that that industrial designer: I think that's something that's very hard to catch , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: The the look and the colour is something which is cool , marketing: Yeah , alright . industrial designer: but I think that there's also that factor of if it's too unfamiliar marketing: Okay , sure . industrial designer: then because when you put it on the shelf marketing: What about button shape ? Square buttons ? industrial designer: Yeah button shape might be a good idea to change , rather than rather than positioning , marketing: Okay . industrial designer: 'cause I think positioning is we're kinda engrained into the the telephone kind of marketing: Yeah . So at this point we , let me see , discuss how satisfied we all are with with these four points , with the room for creativity in the project , and leadership and teamwork , and the stuff we had around us I guess . project manager: let me see marketing: Do you want me to d Do you want me to do my design evaluation last ? industrial designer: Maybe we should do the design evaluation first . project manager: Yeah I wasn't really sure what that was marketing: Or project manager: Yeah marketing: Evaluation . , alright so the way this works , I'm gonna need to plug into PowerPoint , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: I don't think you need the power , marketing: industrial designer: so marketing: What's that ? industrial designer: No , that's okay that's okay . marketing: I don't need the PowerPoint ? industrial designer: No , the power cord itself . marketing: Oh course , industrial designer: Yeah , so then you have a bit more freedom to marketing: yeah that's true . marketing: so what this is is a set-up for us to use a kind of a like a user interface: Is it ? industrial designer: You killed a monster . user interface: marketing: The idea is that I've set up I've reviewed all of the the points of discussion from the beginning , and used that as a criteria of evaluation for the for the current design th or the plan , and so we can review that . I think it's gonna end up being sort of elementary because we're sort we're in n we're not gonna probably use it to change anything but Doesn't seem like it's going , does it ? project manager: Oh there it is . and I'm gonna write up our results on the board , so this'll be a way for us to go through and decide if we're sort of review where we stand with it . Okay , so So to sort of b bring together two things , sort of design goals and also the market research that we had , when we rate this , one is v high in in succeeding or fitting to our original aim and seven is low , project manager: 'kay . So these i these i th are the and we've been asked to to collectively rate this , so what we can do is try and just y work on a consensus system so we just come to an agreement . project manager: What does anybody else think ? marketing: Yeah me my only reservation with it was that we basically went with yellow because it's the company's colour , project manager: . industrial designer: It's one to seven , right ? project manager: Oh yes marketing: The project manager: sorry then marketing: So it meant three , project manager: then I would say two or three . industrial designer: Wait , what's the scale , one to seven , right ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: One's high-ish isn't it ? Ah , okay so yeah , two or three . project manager: Well it has the wee jog-dial marketing: We had to remove project manager: but marketing: Yeah , so we've had to remove a few of our features we wanted , project manager: . marketing: but jog-dial industrial designer: Say it's more project manager: I'd go with three or four , marketing: 's good . marketing: I shouldn't have said colour , but just industrial designer: Okay , the blue the blue colours and don't re don't actually represent the colour , project manager: Well that's kind of marketing: Sorta . industrial designer: Yeah , the the yellow is more representative of the colour , project manager: couldn't it ? industrial designer: but the button itself , the blue can be anything else . project manager: Well yeah , it's really basic looking isn't it ? marketing: F f yeah f fairly basic , project manager: I'd give that nearly a one . , soft and spongy , have we achieved that ? We've used mostly plastic in the end so it's going to be quite a bit of a compromise for price . marketing: That's user interface: so it's probably gonna be marketing: industrial designer: Yeah , company logo . marketing: could we have used an entirely rubber frame to it ? Was that an option ? industrial designer: I think it'll be cost prohibitive , user interface: I think I'd probably increase the cost . marketing: Okay , logo , we've got it in there , haven't we ? industrial designer: Yep . Gonna have that on the side , aren't we , like there or something ? marketing: Huh . marketing: Okay , so we can say then that out of a possible or what would be our goal here ? project manager: Out of forty nine , I guess . marketing: I think 'cause if you turn that into a hundred it would be about project manager: Twice that , marketing: about thirty one , project manager: about thirty one . marketing: and then invert that , it's project manager: So yeah ab well yeah about sixty nine , seventy percent yeah . project manager: Is that you all have all finished , or marketing: Yeah that's that's me . I did have one other one other frame I thought , I I d not knowing how we would deal with this information , I thought okay in theory this kind of a process would be about refining our design , revisiting our original goals . marketing: It's not something I need to p push through , but I thought should we thinking more about the dimensions , sort of like more of a three dimensional shapes as well as opposed to just that flat project manager: marketing: Could our design involve a series of colours so that it's more of like a line where we have like sort of the , I don't know like the harvest line or the vibrant , industrial designer: Yep . marketing: I dunno the Whatever just some theme and then we have different tones , lime green , lemon . project manager: Okay , great are you submitting the the evaluation criteria or am I ? I don't know what your instructions have been . project manager: just wondering if I need to include it in the minutes , user interface: project manager: because if you're submitting it anyway then marketing: I will , yeah . industrial designer: 'Kay I'm I'm listening I'm just trying to incorporate the logo into the the thing , so I'm playing with the Play-Doh as well . user interface: industrial designer: Just in case you're wondering , why is he still playing with the Play-Doh ? marketing: Huh . industrial designer: Just about right user interface: industrial designer: L_E_G_O_ Lego . well do you wanna just individually say what you think about about these four points and or not those four points , my four points , sorry , forgotten that . do you wanna start Andrew ? marketing: Sure , so what is it you're asking of me now ? project manager: I don't know , just your opinion on those four those four points really and how we used them . The the room is fairly institutional , but the main thing is , I think our use of this space is more just to report on things as opposed to be creative and constructive and it would probably help to have l sort of a cumulative effect of we have ideas and we come back and then the ideas are still in discussion , you know , project manager: -huh . marketing: as in other words this this room is sort of a centre point of creativity , whereas in reality as we've gone through this , it's not really the centre point of creativity , it's more just a project manager: Well d do you feel though that that you were able to have quite a lot of creative input into the thing ? marketing: d debating Yeah , yeah but that's just the thing is the quest in terms of the the first point there , the room , it feels as though the creativity goes on when we leave , and then we come here and then we kind of put out our ideas and then , you know . project manager: But I don't I don't think it means the room as in this room . I think it means like you know marketing: Oh , oh right right , oh right okay room for creativ project manager: Yeah . project manager: Well I dunno do you th I think it means I think it means did you feel you were able to give creative input so marketing: Sorry . Yeah I th okay on th yeah dif answering the question in those terms I'd say that actually there's sort of a tease of creativity because we're asked to work through this , but actually the guidelines are fairly contrived in terms of okay fashion trends , say fruit and vegetable colour scheme , project manager: We're told okay think in terms of style and look and feel and technology , but build something for twelve and a half pounds , project manager: Okay . marketing: so actually the creativity was more more of like a a f sort of a f formality then an actual industrial designer: You feel like you're caged within whatever y project manager: Okay . marketing: Yeah within the constraints industrial designer: It's like a balloon in a cage , it can only go so big and not hit the side . user interface: I agree with his point it's it is quite a lot of fun t to go and then you have sort of hit the end then go right , gotta cut everything out 'cause we don't have enough money . industrial designer: I think another point is that the meetings are more brainstorming sessions than meetings , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Because for a brainstorming meeting you want a structure that allows you to allows ideas to get tossed , to be evaluated , and to be reviewed , and to get feedback and come back . industrial designer: And I guess that point about the room not being r very friendly to that , I think that's a very big thing , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: and I think the fact that we're wearing these things restricts marketing: Yeah , sure . industrial designer: I feel it 'cause I wear m my glasses , right , and that but that irritates me right project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: it it it does actually you know affect how , w whether you feel comfortable to communicate . industrial designer: I feel like I'm hiding behind the equipment , rather than the equipment is helping me , and you know . project manager: So you think a more relaxed atmosphere would be more kind of conducive to creative thought or marketing: Right . industrial designer: Not not so much an atmosphere , the atmosphere is very relaxed , but the the gear project manager: Yeah , but actual environment ? industrial designer: yeah you know that creates boundaries to that marketing: . what about leadership ? industrial designer: project manager: I don't know if that means like , if I did a good job or something . marketing: Yeah , well well my sense on that is sort of what kind of guidance and direction , encouragement project manager: From like your personal coach person and stuff like that , do you think maybe ? marketing: Yeah from and you as well I think , just sort of acting as team leader . my personal views on on leadership is that effective effective leadership sort of gives people a certain room for freedom and delegation , but then to come back with something that they take great ownership and industrial designer: project manager: In in reality I think here the the different elements of leadership such as the the original b briefing and then the personal coach and the and then you know having having you with your the meeting agenda is actually quite a quite a quite a con confining framework to work within . And so it is leadership almost to the point of sort of disempowering the the the team member , so project manager: -huh , okay . marketing: But it's not bad leadership , it's just sort of s fairly strong , you know . It turns it turns the individual into more of like a sort of a predetermined mechanism , as opposed to a sort of a free project manager: So you think maybe a little too controlling or industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , oh yeah , without without a doubt . industrial designer: I think structure is probably what you're saying that , each individual is structured to one particular task , and one parti rather than controlling . industrial designer: I don't think there's a sense of control 'cause all the decisions have been made in terms of a , like a consensus right , we go around and we think about it , marketing: industrial designer: It doesn't tell you , you know , some ways that you might wanna be a bit more creative in terms of the process you know , not the project manager: Okay . project manager: Okay , what about teamwork ? marketing: did , you wanna comment Craig ? user interface: reckon that was a bit hard because we could only discuss things in the meeting . user interface: If we could just go up to somebody outside the meeting and have a quick talk with them , that would've been a lot easier . industrial designer: I think you tried to use the common share folder to to to to communicate , marketing: Fully agree . project manager: Okay , so to s to to summarize the teamwork issue , saying that if we could communicate outside the meeting , you know just like quick questions , quick thoughts , whatever , it probably would be bit easier . industrial designer: I think the tools that they were given , the tool set that were given to us are fancy but they don't support collaboration , I think that's the word . marketing: Yeah , in it - , industrial designer: They don't support the team working together , you know , marketing: - , - , project manager: Oh right , okay . marketing: Yeah , sort of taking upon that idea , w the way I see this i is that it's the the s the structure in which we've we've approached this whole task is quite contrary to the p principle of teamwork because the the tasks were d d sort of divided , and then the work went on in isolation project manager: . marketing: I I don't know what you guys did while you were together , maybe that was a bit different , industrial designer: We had Play-Doh fun . marketing: but yeah , but but actually if you if you imagine not entire the completely same task given to us but us said okay , first thing we have to do is come up with let's say a design concept , and we sit here together and do it , project manager: Yeah . To s to say okay go off and don't talk to each other , it's actually p sort of predisposes you to quite the contrary of teamwork . project manager: Right , anything else to say on teamwork at all ? industrial designer: No , not really . project manager: Okay , what about the you know how we used the whiteboard , the digital pens , the projector , stuff like that ? did anybody think anything was like really useful , marketing: project manager: anything was pretty un f unsupportive ? marketing: I think the whiteboard , for me , is the kind of thing I would use all the time , but it's not quite as useful as to us as it could have been , maybe just in the way that we we use it , in the sense that once we have an idea out there or while work was going on in between meetings , that could have been up on a board you know as opposed to in like in text . I know that people who design cars and you know in aviation they quite often just have a simple like fibreglass prototype and it's completely you know abs abstract from the final product , but they use it as a kind of a context to sort of walk around and puzzle and and point and discuss project manager: marketing: and and and in a way everybody's as we discuss things in the in theoretically and out of our notebooks , we're just we're actually just each of us discussing something that's in each of our own minds . marketing: like at one point I peeked across and looked at Craig's paper and I'm like , now I know what he's thinking 'cause I saw his book . marketing: But the b the b whiteboard could've actually been this kind of continuing project manager: So do you think producing a prototype earlier in the process woulda been a good idea ? marketing: Think could be , yeah . industrial designer: I think the the focus of it a lot was the PowerPoint as opposed to the to the whiteboard , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: and I think that m is also does you know hinder us and things I think . industrial designer: It will be cooler to have the whiteboard rather than the the PowerPoint , marketing: industrial designer: or maybe the whiteboard and the PowerPoint in the same place , marketing: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , because the PowerPoint was provided to us while we had time to prepare , whereas I can imagine if I'd been encouraged to use Paintbrush , for example , or whatever , I would've actually used it , project manager: Alright . marketing: 'ca you know , just 'cause that's sorta how we what we were set up to to use while we had our time . industrial designer: And a lot of the information on the PowerPoints , I don't think , you know , we needed to actually it could have , we could have gone through it verbally , project manager: Yeah . project manager: What about the digital pens , did you find them easy enough to use ? industrial designer: Yep clunky . project manager: industrial designer: Having to tick it before you go off was a bit hindering as well , 'cause you're half way through a thought , and then you run out of paper and then you have to jump . project manager: I know , I think at the very start of today I like wrote a whole load of stuff , didn't click note on one , marketing: Yeah . project manager: then went back and wrote one tiny wee thing on the another page , but then did click note , and so I'm quite worried that I've just written over the top of it or something , marketing: . industrial designer: But I think the pen is v is very intuitive , everybody knows how to use it , we don't have to worry . project manager: Yeah , marketing: - , industrial designer: So I think the pen's good . marketing: user interface: marketing: And o on the topic of the technology , it just occurred to me that we actually didn't need to move our computers because each computer has all of the files . marketing: It just occurred to me that they all industrial designer: Yeah we only needed one computer and marketing: We only actually needed one computer . marketing: If there had been a fifth , that coulda just been sitting there ready to go the whole time . industrial designer: And the computer may not be conducive to a meeting because you tend to look at your computer and wanna have the urge to check something , you know , marketing: Yeah . marketing: project manager: Do you think the computers just provide distraction in a meeting ? industrial designer: I think too many computers are just distracting . I know I I like to have things written down in front of me actually , like a lot of the stuff that was emailed to me I ended up you know like writing down there or something so I could look at it really quickly and not have the distraction of all of that , marketing: project manager: what else any wh I do I'm not really sure what they're looking for when they say new ideas found . I don't know is user interface: Is this for the project or project manager: could you think of like anything else that would have been helpful today at all ? marketing: Well , the w main one for me is that the process na in a natural f context would not have been interrupted by this necessity to discommunicate ourselves from each other . Yeah if we just had marketing: So , that's kind of a new idea for me is like just sort of that idea , well you know it's kind of s hard to keep f working forward on a team a team based project when when you're told you must now work away from your team . Yeah I I dunno I think it was quite good that we had time limits on the meetings because they really could have run on and like my experience with meetings is that they really do , and you can spend a lot of time talking about marketing: Oh yeah . project manager: The only thing is though like when we had our meeting about the conceptual design , I thought there maybe another fifteen minutes would have been useful there but yeah . project manager: I really thi i I think maybe if we'd like all been working in the one room , and they just said you know like every hour or something everybody make sure yo you know just have a have a short meeting and then just c marketing: project manager: just to have like something written down , just like you know a a milestone if you like rather than having meetings , but marketing: What are you guys doing now ? user interface: Do we know what the other ones are ? industrial designer: marketing: I I don't know . project manager: So is that j is that just is that just a logo or does it do anything ? marketing: Logo . industrial designer: The the red is supposed to represent the whatever else you wanna print on the side of it . industrial designer: You can wear Homer , project manager: industrial designer: you can throw Homer when you're frustrated , doh . user interface: project manager: Oh no , that's cool , it's got I'm kind of industrial designer: It's clunky . project manager: I'm slightly gutted that we couldn't get plastic and rubber , I think that would have been nice . project manager: Play-Doh s marketing: industrial designer: It is useful and in in in in in in in conceptualizing , in being creative . industrial designer: 'Cause like you say , it's something you can put your hands on and feel and touch and get a sense for . industrial designer: Like we were playing with the Play-Doh and the ideas came with the Play-Doh rather than with everything else . It's just , I'm just fiddling with the Play-Doh , and I'm going yeah yeah it's kinda cool . And some Play-Dohs are actually I think edible aren't they ? industrial designer: No , all Play-Doh is edible . project manager: Yeah like the stuff for user interface: I think they're all non-toxic 'cause it's aimed for like two-year-olds . industrial designer: It's just wheat , it's the stuff that your mom could make with preservatives and project manager: Yeah so to marketing: Wow , . project manager: wha what are your summarising words about Play-Doh ? industrial designer: It's helpful to the creative process . industrial designer: it engages all your senses not just your sight , but your sense of feel your sense of touch . I think that that's very helpful because it it starts to pop up , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: whereas on a piece of paper , on a computer , on a board , even with a three D_ graphic thing it still , it requires a lot of project manager: Yeah . marketing: Do we retreat to our , to continue our industrial designer: I think we could probably do it here as long as we don't collaborate . marketing: industrial designer: Can we turn off the microphones ? project manager: Yeah , yeah if the meeting's over then yeah I guess so <doc-sep>As you can see our agenda is to open up the meeting , become acquainted with each other , have a little training on tools , create a plan , discuss things and and we only have twenty minut twenty five minutes total . Okay , so we'll have a functional design individual work with meeting and then conceptual design t and then detailed design . Kate , why don't you try it first , if you can either bring your things with you , I guess industrial designer: yeah , if I can pick up with all these bits and pieces , hang on . project manager: And while you're doing that we'll try and figure out how to hook these things on as well , 'cause we're all gonna have to be able to walk around . project manager: industrial designer: Do you have to be able to recognise what animal it is ? project manager: I do not think so , user interface: Are we all gonna draw a cat ? project manager: I think it's just to try out the whiteboard . user interface: project manager: industrial designer: You can tell it's not a bunny rabbit by the ears . And the characteristics ? industrial designer: the favourite characteristics of the cat the whiskers I think , because they're the easiest to draw . Kate ? industrial designer: user interface: And they sit on your shoulder and whisper the answers to your homework in your ear when you're doing your homework . industrial designer: Gosh , user interface: A shark ? industrial designer: why didn't I think of fish ? That's even easier to draw than cat . marketing: I like them because they're sleek project manager: Favourite characteristics ? marketing: and they have a lot of freedom but they also do n swim in groups , project manager: 'Kay . industrial designer: marketing: Do you have a favourite one ? project manager: I'm afraid I'm with Steph . But I'm afraid I take the coward's way out , and the cat's looking the other way . Now we have to get down to the nitty-gritty of how to make this and this remote control has to be sold we're to sell it for twenty five Euros , with a profit aim ultimately of fifty million Euros . would be an awful lot of these , would be like what , a hundred million of them to make twenty five Euros on each one and to make a total profit of fifty million . Now if they cost twelve and a half , you're selling it for twenty five , you're making twelve and a half Euros each . and we're to make a profit of fifty million , that's t can you do the maths and how many are we selling ? marketing: yeah . I was just wondering if that's the If fifty percent is normal project manager: Mark-up ? marketing: B yeah . project manager: marketing: And and your question is how many do we have to sell ? project manager: Yes , 'cause our market is international and your problem is has to do with marketing of you know , you gotta know how many we're going to be selling to know how big a market you have to target and who is that . Yeah , that's project manager: To give you a pretty good idea of where you're looking . In order to make fifty million Euros , and you're only getting twelve and a half each marketing: And if we make Any of you use of remote control for a television or D_V_D_ or something ? You're both nodding , industrial designer: That that that's the sorta product we're talking about , one that will work for a in a home environment , for a T_V_s and marketing: Yeah . Well I've seen some remote controls that are for more than one device at a time , but I also have heard about them not working well or not well co-ordinated and you wind up working with this one for thi this three and then this one over here for another . user interface: It is true that you always sit around you know , you're sitting on your sofa and you wanna change something , there's five different remotes , and one for the D_V_D_ and one for the video and one for cable and one for whatever else . marketing: project manager: Are there any ideas for the remote ? What would it be for and what group would be be for ? We have to think about that one . Like I've got one at home that has well , apart from the obvious , channels , channel up , channel down , volume , marketing: Yeah . user interface: you know , subtitles , mute , there's a lotta buttons that I've got no idea what they do , like . marketing: because I think one of the things that being somewhat computer literate , we tend to go to menus and then make choices , you know , so if it's like an volume button , you know , you can go in and say mute or or volume . We don't need to have like the l the numbers if we also have channel up channel down . project manager: but the I think that's the industrial design is the first one , industrial designer: . project manager: And user , that's you S Steph , for the technical functions design , and for marketing the user requirements specification . I think there's going to be a lot of we have to help each other and work through this as a group , and I think we all , you know , we like our kitty-cat and our rat and our fish , but I think we all have to like each other to get this done . as it says , we're gonna get individual instructions , but I don't think they allowed a lot of extra time , so I think a little bit of less of this and more at do will set us in good stead . then I don't see any reason to prolong it and f we should finish this meeting at ni right now and go into other things <doc-sep> important thing of this phase is that we're going to try to get an agreement about the user requirements , technical function design , and the working design . That that means that you can have a little trouble with , little trouble with the air conditioning , that's because of this user interface: Okay . But it's going to be cold anyway , so I don't think you're gonna need it . So I suggest we take about seven minutes per presentation , and then we can have a little discussion about the new project requirements which have been sent to me . And then the decision on the control functions which we wanna include and those which we don't wanna include . So marketing: project manager: Just maybe it's easier if you Yeah I think you will tell your presentation as well . Fifty percent of the people indicated they only loo used about ten percent of the buttons on a remote control . Channel selection and volume selection both got a ten on a scale of one to ten for relevancy . So the users of forty six to sixty five years cons The make up forty percent of the market . this also makes up most the biggest part of the market , so that will also be where our main profit would be gettable . The results also indicated that about one quarter of the people questioned thought that the remote control caused R_S_ R_S_I_ . And thirty four percent thought that it was hard to learn a n how to operate a new control , remote control . And the functionality As a lot of people indicated , they only use about ten percent of the buttons , I think we should make very few buttons . Then as mo as a lot of people indicated that their remote got lost in the room , it might be and I say might be because it would certainly boost the production costs a lot . And this would , could get a button in it which would send a signal to the remote which would then beep . And in addition to this it could recharge the batteries in the remote if you put it in . Then a surprisingly great deal of people w indicated that an L_C_D_ screen in the remote control would be preferred . This would also greatly increase the production costs but I think these are just some small factors we could consider . So anybody have any questions until now ? marketing: Any questions ? project manager: About functional requirements ? user interface: project manager: We've got plenty of time , user interface: ? marketing: Yeah project manager: so marketing: you should go to the top thingy . I've do I've done a little research on the internet and not much information about it , about interface but Yeah I I've been thinking about a simple manner to put a lot of functions in one in one remote control . so you've got a lot of devi devices like D_V_D_ television , stereo . Got many functions in one remote control , but yeah you can see , this is quite simple remote control . people don't like it , so Well what I was thinking about was keep the general functions like they are . So Wh what I was th thinking about was you've got this the remote control project manager: industrial designer: user interface: and you got here the general functions , like the on-off button sound I dunno And here you've got a s kind of a display . So yeah you got a general f f the functions of the device for a D_V_D_ player or so the pl yeah f for playing reverse . So this button is for a D_V_D_ or So for every device you've got a a f a b a part display of a part buttons . user interface: So project manager: Anybody has questions about the technical functions ? industrial designer: Well project manager: industrial designer: I think if we are gonna use a touchscreen we're gonna go way above the twelve and a half Euros . project manager: maybe we can first listen to your presentation ? marketing: We would have to look into that . project manager: marketing: project manager: I think it's going to it's not too much . The remote determines what button it is , uses the infrared to send a signal to the T_V_ . When the user presses a button , a signal got sent , goes to the LED and transmits tranmi transmits its to the T_V_ . I think we should focus on aesthetics , the design and the user interface , because if you're going to use high-tech materials the price is going to go sky-high . And you only have to design a remote once , and if you use high-tech materials it come back in every product . So it's , in my idea , it's it's gonna be smart to invest in di in design and not in in the product itself . marketing: project manager: Okay now I hope everybody has a little bit more insight in the functions we all have and what we are doing right now . I'm the Project Manager so I'm here to mess things up and tell you some new requirements . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: that's , we've got to design a remote which is only suitable for T_V_ . project manager: and the time to market will be too big , if we wanna have it for more functions . project manager: another point is we have to skip the teletext , because in the world of upcoming internet we think teletext is going to be a thing of the past . that's the the market we have to to to target , because we are going to develop a new product which is specially designed for the younger customers . So we have to find a market which is above forty plus but which will suit our remote control , and the other way round . marketing: So is there any discussion possible about the new product requirement ? project manager: we can see if we can find a way between the functions we wanna use and the market we wanna reach with our product . marketing: Yeah 'cause you're you're saying that teletext is gonna be an old feature and it's not gonna be used anymore anyway pretty soon . project manager: marketing: But I think if you're targeting people of forty plus , the chance that they will have a T_V_ with internet access within the next like twenty years is very slim . But if I s if I see this , it's I think we're just gonna go for another project manager: Yeah it's it is user interface: forty project manager: Standard remote . marketing: pretty project manager: No I think we can marketing: and not innovative project manager: I think we can do a lot with the design and the simple buttons marketing: remote control . if we put a lot of effort in those , we can make a remote control with just two or three buttons . Or just a remote which is suitable for the market we wanna reach because it is forty percent of the market . project manager: And if you look in Holland at the whole generation of forty plus , fifty plus , it it's the the biggest share of the of the whole population now . marketing: And besides that , they're not very critical so they don't really care what the remote control is like . project manager: But don't you think that if we make a remote which is typically made for this market , that people think the people think that's the the device I've looked for although I didn't realise it . marketing: People of forty plus , they want it to work , but as soo as soon as it works it's okay with them . industrial designer: I think that if we're If we put our marketing right we can sell this just like I don't know if you've heard about it in the news , the the elderly mobile phone ? marketing: So project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah if we if we make a remote control just l with that idea in mind , we could make tons of money , I think . industrial designer: We don't have to focus on on on the on the design then but on functionality . project manager: I simply think user interface: project manager: that the new products we are gonna make , spef specifically design , are designed for younger people , so maybe we can focus ourself on the elderly people . project manager: No we we haven't voted yet , so user interface: project manager: I think teletext can be can be a function as well . But only if if it won't higher the the cost , because I don't know if it will be a lot more money to implement teletext as well , but I don't think it will be a problem . Or is teletext a user interface: But deaf people need teletext for for subtitles . So I suggest marketing: I think it'd definitely be a bad idea not to include teletext . Maybe we can make that another point of advantage in our remote control , if we make a k a button ex for example for big subtitles , which is instantly on the remote control . marketing: But I don't think that's really an issue any more 'cause Well might be . user interface: If it's only for televi marketing: But it , if it's only for T_V_ you're not gonna need a lot of buttons anyway . marketing: You need a one to zero button , next channel , previous channel , user interface: Yeah . But do you need user interface: So we can s we can skip the display , marketing: I think if you if you only l user interface: so we don't need it . project manager: Maybe c we can user interface: marketing: Think if you're gonna include teletext you do . marketing: 'Cause if you should , if you want to switch from channel one to like thirty five , you don't wanna push the next channel button thirty five times . project manager: No , maybe we can implement the scroll button ? Or a joystick like ? user interface: . marketing: That's true but I don't think there are many T_V_s that can switch channels that fast . And so you would need like the T_V_ would need an a function where you can actually view all channels and scroll through it . industrial designer: And besides that it's If we're gonna focus on elderly people they'll have to adapt . Yeah they can see how much buttons there are going to be on on the display , and if it's too much we can reconsider it . marketing: But I don't think I think if you're gonna make a remote control only to operate a T_V_ , you there's not much you can gain on having as few buttons as possible . 'Cause I think there are pretty many remote controls that can only operate a T_V_ , which already only have the minimum number of buttons . And if you have less buttons you can do a lot more with marketing: That is true but I think there's simply not much to gain on the competition when you when you're making a remote control only for to operate only the T_V_ . marketing: 'Cause if you have a a remote control only to operate a T_V_ there's simply not a lot of buttons required . There's not a lot of functions required so most existing remote controls simply don't have a lot of buttons either . marketing: which was one of the arguments to make it only for the T_V_ because we didn't have the time to market a lot . Well yeah I think , mean we obviously need a good way to position all the buttons and But I don't think we should spend very much time in that . Do you think the docking station will is allowed in the budget we have ? industrial designer: It should be possible yes . marketing: industrial designer: So we're just gonna focus on the extras ? project manager: I think so . marketing: Yeah I think maybe we should do some research into what elderly people like to have in a project manager: Yeah . I don't know if that will rise the cost too much , because industrial designer: Y i I think we'll have to choose between the docking station or the screen , 'cause project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: it's marketing: I think since a lot of people indicated that a new remote control is hard to learn , and we're focusing on elderly people here which tend to have a hard time understanding new devices , it might be a good idea to have just a little screen on it , which would explain a button if you press it . marketing: And it wouldn't have to be touchscreen or a very expensive screen , project manager: Based . I think that's a good idea as well , because elderly people don't mind if it's a titanium cover or just a plastic one . project manager: So I think we nee marketing: I think probably elderly people would be a little bit more careful with their remote controls than youngsters . project manager: what do we want ? If we want a with for example the the telephone for elderly people , we can marketing: I think project manager: target the real elderly people . marketing: I think that would be a If we should do something like that it would be a , I think it would be really good for for the image of the company . project manager: So that's the marketing: If we're able to really bring an innovative product . Are we industrial designer: Well I don't think they have different television sets project manager: Okay . You could I think we n it would be a lot easier to project manager: Should marketing: adapt it to different cultures . what we're going to do for the next meeting is the Industrial Designer will do the components concept , User Interface Designer the user interface concept , and the trend-watching . So just keep in mind the things we've said about the target group , requirements , and the trends which are going on

The team discussed the importance of design in relation to the target market, with Marketing asserting that functionality was more important to the older demographic. This viewpoint was supported by other team members. There was a disagreement regarding the pricing strategy, as Marketing questioned the profitability of the proposed markup and preferred a higher percentage. Marketing also emphasized the need for a stylish appearance and proper consideration of the budget. The Industrial Designer raised the issue of the remote's suitability for right-handed individuals, but Marketing suggested using finger scrolling instead of thumb scrolling to address any potential ergonomic concerns. The Project Manager agreed with this suggestion, and the group decided to conduct further investigation.

Question: What were the marketing's thoughts on the potential cost pressure of implementing the battery status display? What was the final decision on the company sign discussed by the group? What was decided in the last meeting? What were the key points discussed at the end of the meeting when summarizing the entire meeting? What were the responsibilities of the participants in this meeting? Article: I don't know if if everybody knows me , so I'm Bart , marketing: My name's Frank . They'll record our actions and you'll have wires and microphones that will record your voice . there are also some microphones there but th you don't have to pay a lot of attention on those , because it will disappear when you don't attend to it . So is there a project documents folder ? There are some notes in it already I see , some documents . Well I don't know if you've noticed , but we're working for Real Reaction . We put fashion in electronics , we make it work , we put a lot of effort in design and in the product itself . marketing: project manager: maybe I can sit down , then I can take some notes or Let's see . project manager: I dunno it's not a lot of work , but just if you hear something you can write down , just write it down . No ? user interface: ? marketing: Can't say I paid much attention to it , project manager: I can see if it works this way . project manager: Real Remote is not really the company we're we are , but it's just a little fault . project manager: okay , what are we going to do ? our project aim is as you can see a new remote control . The Industrial Designer is going to work on the working design , components design and a bit of the look and feel design . the User Interface Designer is going to do the technical function design , user interface concept and user interface design . And the marketing expert is doing a little bit of user requirement specification , trend watching and project product ev evaluation . We are going to work with a lot of high-tech tools here , so it's ab it's handy if we have a little bit of training first . N these functions we don't have anything to do with , only undo , you can undo a little piece of drawing . It's really funny because you can draw with it on this page in the think it is form of . But all you will found that already because there are a lot of documents in it already , so it will be okay . And these are available on the smart boards as well , so if you have a document you wanna show , just open it from the folder . It's what I just said , it's save , print , move back or forward one page . marketing: project manager: the only thing we have to look after is that we use different colours , and different line width . Because if you hold it like this , the sensors will get blocked and then the drawing won't get good . 'Cause if you're going to draw like really fast then the pen won't hold up . user interface: project manager: These are not very much , but , see you have to do it real slow . project manager: Ah I was trying to draw a dolphin , user interface: project manager: but I think his nose has to be a little bit marketing: user interface: project manager: But it's close . I think that's it because if you wan ar are going to do it like this then it will be a stripe . project manager: Is your cat , or did you find him on the street ? industrial designer: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: Well , it's supposed to be a cat . So everybody knows how to work with the white board now ? So if you have any ideas or if you wanna draw anything on the white board , just ask marketing: Yeah . marketing: project manager: as you can see , we for our remote control , a selling price is twenty five Euros . that's the least we have to get from our remote controls , so we have to work together to reach our aims . we can do it international , so we have to focus on different kind of users , different kind of cultures , and different kind of trends as well . Our production cost can be maximal twelve and a half Euros , so that's also a point we have to keep in mind , that we won't make remote controls with small televisions inside , and stuff like that . Selling price twenty five , profit aims fifty million , but more important is the int international market we're trying to focus on . marketing: So just on a side note , why is it my laptop is only giving me a black screen ? user interface: ? project manager: maybe you have to say the magic word . But so does everybody has experiences with remote controls , and not the ordinary mote controls , but also a little bit different ones ? Like you can use for other ? marketing: user interface: . marketing: Well , we have a kind of broad T_V_ at home , and a D_V_D_ player , so we got like a lot of remote controls , one for the T_V_ , one for the video recorder , one for the D_V_D_ player . marketing: And I think it's it would be best to just make one remote control that can operate them all . And you can program I think eight different devices in it , and you can use it for your television , anything else . project manager: And it also operates on infra-red , so you have to got the little device inside your room , and then you can operate it from the third or th or second floor . marketing: Oh project manager: So that's pretty handy when you have a video recorder or D_V_D_ player downstairs and you've got a link to your T_V_ on the second floor . but only the I think that if you can put different kind of devices in one remote control , it makes it a lot easier as well . project manager: And other functions for a remote control ? Maybe we can make it user interface: user interface: you never no know , marketing: So user interface: I w project manager: Waterproof . But they'll also really drag up the production costs , so think we'll have to see about that too . project manager: No ? user interface: project manager: Okay , then I'll put the minutes from this meeting in the project folder , and then we can all work <doc-sep>project manager: and everybody's name and what your function is ? marketing: Yeah , that's a good plan . my role is industrial designer and my responsibilities are deal with the technical-functional designs and specifications of user interface and dealing with user interface design . project manager: Yes y opening , acquaintance , tool training well , the tools are , I think , we already I guess the tool is really our the computer , as far as I can see . project manager: we get ins each of us will get instructions and we'll take it from there . That is it's gonna be individual work and then at the meeting we'll discuss what we have come up with . Does anybody want to go and see how the white board works ? So that in case we have to , in the next meeting , present something on the white board . marketing: See if I r See if I remember how to draw a kitty cat or a rabbit or something . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: And remember you have to press so it works . project manager: And you're Francine , right ? Would you like s like just to see how it feels , so that you have a little idea ? user interface: Yes , I'm Francina . project manager: In marketing: Am I supposed to wipe off that or project manager: No , no . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: project manager: Here's the project finance which , of course , we all have to think about when we design this thing . project manager: So these are all things , of course , to remember with the budget and when you design to materials , cost , etcetera . Now , the discussion I guess is does anyone of you have experience with remote control ? marketing: Oops . project manager: I exp I s 'cause we we use 'em we use 'em , right , everyday . project manager: And now having used a remote control for years does anybody already have like an idea like things you didn't like with it , things you would like to change , things you would like to improve with this thing ye any first ideas ? Would you like it to be smaller , bigger , industrial designer: . project manager: have more have more buttons on it or maybe clearly better marked buttons , you know , things like that ? user interface: Yeah , I industrial designer: Yeah . Like the remote control which we use for T_V_ , it shou it should be used f for some other purpose also , like controlling the temperature inside the house or for air-conditioners , or for heating system . project manager: So it should be a multi-functional gadget that would control all your household machines basically . marketing: We certainly can try to I agree with her that to market something successfully it should do some more things . project manager: It should be something new it should be s it it should do something different than than just what we have . All the almost all the remotes project manager: Like trendy no like f for earlier we saw maybe it should be something trendy you know . project manager: so yeah shapes right , you know , like kidney shape feels better in your hand or something , you know . marketing: I think another thing that would help is if it beeps when you clap , project manager: Yes . project manager: That is true , user interface: project manager: because they put a newspaper or they put it behind a plant or , we you know , whatever . project manager: And and they suddenly the phone rings and they want to turn the T_V_ off and they say , where the hell is my my remote control yeah ? marketing: industrial designer: project manager: Well or yeah or if it's really , if it's really in a dark spot that it gives out a a sound or a signal . marketing: So some industrial designer: Yeah , some beep or something like that , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Or a b marketing: so , so it's really the beep or , or a light should blink . industrial designer: so that we can go project manager: So if lost If lost signal with b throw signal , you know . industrial designer: Yeah , maybe it should have a light so that we can , we can just recognise where it is . project manager: I'm just saying throw signal meaning just whether it's a beep or whether a light or industrial designer: Beep or it's a light , maybe it's a light . marketing: And do you think a good c c clue for that is that it would respond to a clap or it would respond to your voice or it would respond what what should you have to do to make it beep or blink ? project manager: Okay , my my idea is maybe that the minute it's really hidden , in in other words if it's like in a dark spot , meaning you know like a newspaper is on top , a sweater is on top or it it's behind a plant , at that moment it's it's like , it's like , what you call it a light s sensors , you know ? marketing: project manager: In in that moment it has a sensor , i it it gets a certain darkness , it ge has a sensor and it gives out a signal whether that be a light signal or a beep , marketing: Okay so user interface: Yes . project manager: right you have to have some kind of sensor and I I think voice or clapping it's not specific enough . I know there are the lamps and stuff , you know , you can clap on and off , marketing: project manager: but I think they only work to certain degree and marketing: But it could be someplace really obvious and you still wouldn't be able to find it . project manager: What with industrial designer: Yeah , of course , that didn't user interface: Then , in that case marketing: Well , because you're s because you're silly . marketing: it could be on well , i if it were like on top of your bookcase and you usually kept it on the coffee table industrial designer: marketing: project manager: Okay we have marketing: you know , well maybe we have to move along , okay . project manager: yeah , we have to move along , but I think we have some good good points to start with here . I think you all did you get notices on your computer for this ? Okay so well , you got the notice industrial designer: Me yeah . The working design , I guess that's the function I_D_ who is this ? The industrial designer That's you . project manager: industrial designer: working design , yeah , it's it's mainly technical-functional design . project manager: Then And then the technical funct you are the technical function , industrial designer: Yeah , functional design , project manager: so so you are the working design . project manager: And the marketing manager is coming up with some user requirement specification , like friendliness , and what we just discussed in general . user interface: project manager: And , you know , specifi you you will get specific instructions for that . project manager: I think basically basically you will get instructions to work with and if you have any questions , I guess , you can user interface: Okay <doc-sep>It's not as interesting as it should be because we just had the meeting , marketing: project manager: but I'll show them . I've put a f a file in the project management folder , which says exactly what kind of decisions we should take . this because of our last model was very functional , but it people didn't like that , so our new mo model must be very good-looking . project manager: marketing: such as an L_C_D_ screen , speech acknowledgement , as we talked about earlier . marketing: So we have to have something like that , like we project manager: L_C_D_ and our our fronts . industrial designer: Easy to use ? project manager: Well , easy to use s is a bit contradictionary with the first marketing: Yeah ? industrial designer: I think that's your ta user interface: project manager: Functional is not an issue , and then easy to use . industrial designer: you can make a very complicated remote anyway , so ease of use It's not a very comp complicated device . But the most important thing is that it looks great and people say wow , that's real great great concept . project manager: user interface: marketing: The group we are targeting is very pleased with fruit and vegetables . industrial designer: marketing: So we we we might cons consider in front of in in that sort of way . project manager: Well the the handy thing about our fronts is that we can follow these trends e ev every year . And the materials ? I have heard several things , so I I'll have to change that on the way . project manager: Well maybe it it it is , industrial designer: We should move to something project manager: but it doesn't look strong . Y Hard plastic i is of course pretty pretty tough , but it doesn't have a really really tough look . it's generally the case that senior and wealthy people above forty five years old like , as you said , particularly the traditional materials as such as wood and materials such as that . industrial designer: And then we have young and dynamic people , which is of course our group , the people we aim at . Soft materials is of course agai again a bit a contradiction with our material choice of what you said , that it should be hard an and and and and strong looking . And if also a finding but not very ap applicable here , that sports and gaming devices such as discmans for jogging and that those kind of devices , gaming devices , should define the characteristics of the device . But since we don't have a really a sports or gaming device , so we don't really have to consider that . project manager: Sports , they're that are accessible on on your L_C_D_ window user interface: Soccer fronts . project manager: All the results ? industrial designer: Well I also have several examples of styles , marketing: We keep coming back to the fronts . industrial designer: It looks like Well you know you recognise the shapes , project manager: industrial designer: it's very primary colours , bright colours and round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: You also see this device , it's not very round and Fruity of course . industrial designer: So to give you an idea of marketing: Well it's got a strong look , this . Although it's plastic , it's it's grey to to to give it iron look . Well we have to make a project manager: Well you can make th th th that middle ring can you you can make another colour . I don't think that's very practical , project manager: No , it isn't . industrial designer: Because if we make it grey or or silvery looking , it it does make it a lot more does make it looking a lot more stronger . industrial designer: 'Cause if you look at this , it it doesn't look very very strong , marketing: Yeah but the industrial designer: becau But this is plastic , and and this too , but marketing: But it doesn't have to look strong . project manager: So , if you ti industrial designer: Well user interface: And it it doesn't have to be strong , also . project manager: Well marketing: Nah yeah the feel project manager: You you Maybe you should have some some coloured titanium or something . But solar energy is not very practical inside a house , because you don't have a have a lot of sun . marketing: industrial designer: And kinetic and and and dynamos are are not very practical , I think , for for a simple remote , marketing: industrial designer: that's a bit , oh , that's a bit That's a bit much . If you use the curved case , a curved case , double curved then you can't use titanium . project manager: What do you exactly mean with double curved ? industrial designer: Now this to give it a more modern look . project manager: Double curved ? industrial designer: I'll draw it , project manager: It it mean user interface: Yeah . marketing: industrial designer: And it makes it gives it a more u user friendly shape , than if you have . No otherwi no difficult scroll things or some things like that , because it makes more complex and expensive . And , as we agreed , we don't use a speaker or a sensor or speak speech controlled device . But we do use an L_C_D_ screen , so we we do have to consider of we have to use a more advanced chip , which is more complex and expensive . But It's worth the trouble I think , project manager: Well user interface: The buttons can be made of an a soft material . project manager: marketing: user interface: there are new developments in speech recognition systems , and they are already being used on coffee machines . user interface: it's not really speech recognition , it's more like you can talk to the chip , record the message and record an answer , and then once you talk to the remote , then he will a answer with the the prerecorded message that you left . So if I say hi Mike , and you have recorded hi Mike back , then you will get that . That's a bit user interface: But i it's just a marketing: But that that makes it cheap . marketing: It's it's just a an extra function , project manager: But it has no functionality for our remote at all . user interface: No marketing: No but user interface: but that's the gadget they want , or the gimmicks . user interface: Well , as I said earlier I think the L_C_D_ screen should be positioned at the lower end of the remote . project manager: user interface: the buttons for screen width and general settings and and that kind of stuff marketing: user interface: we can also do let that kind of functions be shown in the L_C_D_ screen , instead of extra buttons . project manager: So you put a menu in the L_C_D_ ? user interface: I think young people and yeah w well every user would like that . the buttons should be positioned positioned the same way as they are on a , well , conventional remote , I think . And I drew an example , industrial designer: user interface: but it did not work quite the well the way I wanted it to do . user interface: ? Well I have the I can draw it again , industrial designer: Can you draw it now ? user interface: and I know what I did wrong . marketing: How do you give input to the menu on the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: with the the up and down and and well buttons and the marketing: Alright . industrial designer: Those are the the cha the channel buttons of course ? user interface: Yeah just the numbers . industrial designer: And then below is the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: These these will be bigger in the the real design . user interface: This must be the Okay button used to interact with the L_C_D_ screen . user interface: And with this you can , yes , go to through the menus project manager: Yeah . user interface: and that can the video button should be an apart button , marketing: You've project manager: Yes . project manager: And what's the menu button ? user interface: it's marketing: And you you need a you need a speaker . user interface: ? marketing: For the user interface: This button can also be the Menu button , we use in the menus industrial designer: project manager: But how did How do you get out of the menu then ? Yeah . user interface: Well we we can add another button here , but project manager: Maybe I you could j just do an an exit with Okay . project manager: Yes , well but bec because when you push Menu you get in , industrial designer: Yeah ? Yeah ? project manager: and then you have to push Okay when you get to a choice . That's you you should have user interface: No no , we we we should add a extra Menu button industrial designer: No . project manager: Or you can put in the L_C_D_'s window an option Get Out . user interface: Ah once you have an extra Menu button , you don't need that that extra option . user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: marketing: Or don't user interface: if we decide to to implement that , maybe we should . industrial designer: Why would you put it then , and where is the recording the microphone ? user interface: Well they that could be anywhere . user interface: Well the speaker and the microphone , I think , are the same little hole thingy . industrial designer: but we could d do , but it's perhaps more expensive , the speaker on the back or something . user interface: Well i there are a all already being implemented in in coffee machines , so they won't be very expensive . And oh I think as you can see so , the L_C_D_ screen does look better at the lower end , or at the bottom . project manager: Yes ? user interface: You can But I did not like it very much , but marketing: user interface: Well these are quite obvious , very ugly remote . user interface: No , well th marketing: Nei They're n they're not trendy . user interface: this is for children but th industrial designer: Tho Yeah those marketing: It doesn't look strong . user interface: W but with the colours i it's a bit the way we're going to . industrial designer: But it it must not look too childish of course huh ? project manager: It's it's all too much buttons . I think we should , if it's possible , one with colours , but marketing: Nah th It's too expensive . user interface: I don't know project manager: Well , that's too expensive I think . project manager: It still has t marketing: You can make the the underside , you can make it more round , where the L_C_D_ is . user interface: Well marketing: I dunno if you know the No Nokia telephone , with the round thing at at the bottoms , s something like that . It's just a half round half half circle at And then it falls exactly over the hand , and that's very nice . All the the materials from the case , the electric cable that's all your your side of the story . now from the user interface , your package ? where No well , that's more like the buttons where they have to come . marketing: Materials are the most , most impor project manager: So as you said , fruity is in , well sells good . so if we go through them industrial designer: Copy paste this story into a into a Word document , and then put the answers after the subjects . industrial designer: Well we have to decide all these things ? user interface: Yeah but all these examples are of a coffee machine . project manager: Yeah well Why should I industrial designer: W we can override them ? marketing: project manager: Yeah . I suggest Well what do I suggest actually ? project manager: What what kind of properties should it have ? Well we just listened . user interface: Why don't we use titanium or or a hard , yeah , some kind of metal for the the the whole remote except the front . industrial designer: Yeah but the non-removable elements of the of the remote , so not the front , could be titanium , user interface: Yeah . user interface: And I don't know if you can make steel just any way you want it to . user interface: Well any colour industrial designer: According to my sources , it's it's totally possible to make an entire Titanium is available , and we can make an entire remote out of it , if we want . marketing: So , we're going for a titanium back and a plastic front ? project manager: I've user interface: . project manager: So material , hard plastic for the front ? industrial designer: Yeah , for the front and then titanium for the back . marketing: But then you have the problem , when you have a titanium back , you can't switch it . industrial designer: Well but marketing: You know ? industrial designer: The titan titanium isn't isn't v very Yeah , i it doesn't curves . Titanium is very No no no , but you know b Titanium is very basic colour , marketing: Yeah , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: and it doesn't really matter if we have a purple front on it or a orange front . industrial designer: And even if it does doesn't match , it will People like colours that don't match . industrial designer: Excuse me ? marketing: user interface: The electrical cable does industrial designer: project manager: It's from our coffee industrial designer: Yeah copper i just a ba basic user interface: No we don't use an electrical cable . industrial designer: Yeah in project manager: industrial designer: Yeah well inside the remote control we use a couple of project manager: Of course . project manager: Well marketing: project manager: all the all the inside work of our remote is standard work . user interface: and I will project manager: Well you can put that in into the shared folder , user interface: The shared folder . And what do we ? user interface: project manager: We thing that fruit and bright colours are industrial designer: Yeah the the the front w marketing: I think we can launch a couple of packages . marketing: Yeah but if you if you launch five different packages like iPod mini user interface: Yeah , right For the initiative launch . project manager: We should not give them the m the most lovely front when they buy it for the first time . user interface: Well you can you can give them s s three or so , industrial designer: The most boring fronts possible . industrial designer: Yeah but you you can have some basic colours , and then we come with the special patterns on them , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Red red , blue and green you give them or something , industrial designer: and and marketing: Yeah . this fruit and bright colours , yeah well I think we'll have to in the next half an hour , we'll have to s s specify the different types we want to launch , when we well introduce our remote . industrial designer: we still have to make We have still have to make the es the the real basic design . project manager: Well I'll have to , before I get another warning for five minutes , I'm going to get Where is my mouse ? where is my mouse ? industrial designer: marketing: Lost my mouse . industrial designer: How Yeah yeah , but how do I user interface: But bu we stay we stay here or something ? project manager: Yes well we'll get it to hear that I think . Th they're saying SMARTboard and that's it marketing: You can take the SMARTboard . And take it to our rooms and project manager: so you can you you are going to make a prototype , and y Well that's includes specifying the buttons etcetera . well you will go and do something else on the project user interface: industrial designer: Some Some non functional tasks . project manager: what are you going to do ? I don't know what product evaluation exactly means , but you'll get the specifications . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: No but project manager: How long do we still have ? industrial designer: Well , can we talk about something else ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah ? user interface: Will we use round buttons or square ones for the for the numbers ? industrial designer: Round I think . user interface: And these these s these buttons are more triangle-ish shaped project manager: Why does marketing: Curvy . industrial designer: But now I see the marketing: And this must be volume I think , project manager: Heh ? marketing: and this programme . project manager: We can't get user interface: Well most of the time up and down is programme and left and right are volume , I think . user interface: Yeah , it depends , but If you turn up the volume , you always see this thingy go up . industrial designer: Well we We we j we'll just give them an marketing: Yeah , that's right . industrial designer: project manager: So what are we going to do ? I as Project Manager ha don't have a clue . I think a logo , our company logo , and the slogan should be or could be project manager: Also the slogan ? On the industrial designer: Yeah , why not ? If there's enough space , you can put user interface: I I'd say only the logo . project manager: And well you c On the back , you can put h At the bottom , you can put the logo with the industrial designer: Right corner , or maybe here in the middle ? user interface: the text ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: yeah , at the back ? marketing: But the logo the logo shouldn't be exchangeable , when you get off the front . industrial designer: Yeah it it should be hard on the on the on the board , project manager: Yeah well marketing: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , user interface: Yeah , but then you must really yeah push it in or something . industrial designer: I l I like the idea of the of the slogan on the on the on the thing . user interface: industrial designer: But am I the only one , or user interface: Yeah , on the backside . industrial designer: No not on the front , user interface: On the back Yes , you you can , yeah , push that in , industrial designer: but on the backside . industrial designer: I think it's a nice idea , to make it more recognisable , that the next to the logo you have the slogan . project manager: Yes , slogan from company on the back with logo industrial designer: But we'll we'll take that with us into the design . industrial designer: Do you do you see a bit of the of the of the titanium ? O on the front ? project manager: Five minutes left . industrial designer: maybe if we make this this this lower part titanium , user interface: Yes we could industrial designer: the front is the the upper part , and the the bit with the with the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: of between we can do but But then you have two parts of front , two fronts that user interface: No , they have two fronts , marketing: No no no no . industrial designer: This enti entire bottom ? marketing: Else you you get problems with the L_C_D_ . user interface: No , you can you can just And then not a straight line but some sort of wave or something . industrial designer: it's marketing: Yeah , project manager: What ? industrial designer: Yeah yeah . industrial designer: That's a bit too much , but project manager: No that's nothing . project manager: Well I think we can , I just It's marketing: It's not relaxing . project manager: Yeah , o user interface: the fourth one is empty , isn't it ? marketing: project manager: Oh user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: You have to empty one huh ? project manager: Oh , we have a one . marketing: industrial designer: What are you doing chief ? project manager: So , you can draw a Yeah . user interface: Yeah I think we have to wait ? industrial designer: Yeah project manager: Well I'll get a I'll get the message . marketing: No user interface: industrial designer: But I don't Do we have to stay here , marketing: project manager: No , I think industrial designer: or I think we have to return first . Well we have b you have to have a bit of humour in the in the discussions too , marketing: You just have to push harder . industrial designer: project manager: We know you'll you'll you'll hate it but industrial designer: But th youth doesn't care about functio functionality , so marketing: No . project manager: Well , that's not bad , is it ? industrial designer: Well they marketing: No . project manager: So is it user interface: Yes , but you you get really close to the screen with your hand , industrial designer: user interface: and I don't think that's industrial designer: marketing: . user interface: industrial designer: Where's the good old chalk board with the the green board with the , how do you call it , chalk , yeah . industrial designer: Maybe if i if that thing is recalibrated , we can draw a thing quick , and then before it goes off again . Alright now we know what to do , so user interface: We'll stay here ? project manager: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Maybe w maybe we maybe w m Can we get email here ? project manager: No , get away <doc-sep>marketing: project manager: A minute please , my laptop is oh , there it is , thank you . At the functional design meeting the plan is that each one of you , so not me but only you will present the the things you worked on the last half hour . I will take minutes and will put the minutes that I have at the end of the session in the shared folder . Also the minutes of the previous session are also in the shared folder now , so you can read that now or afterwards . I had an email from the from the management board marketing: project manager: I don't know if you a al also received it , but there were four points which I think are very important . First one is they think that teletext teletext becomes outdated and internet will be the the main focus . the remote control shou should onl only be used for the television , so it not gonna it's not gonna be a multi-purpose remote control , so that's one thing to keep in mind . user interface: marketing: project manager: second , and I think that's important for the Marketing Expert , the current customers are in the age group group of forty years and older , but with this new remote they will would like to reach a group younger than forty . and I think to keep in mind , but not really for now is that they want the the the slogan and the and the logo to to be recognised more in the remote . marketing: project manager: So , we have forty minutes , so I think not more than ten minutes per presentation each , and please use all the the the facilities so that you have either SMARTboards , the the Word files , what you whatever you want . , as you can see here , the market share for the first audience is about sixty percent sixty five . and some interests from the from the age groups , it seems like the young users of remote controls really like the fancy new technology stuff , like an L_C_D_ screen on the remote control , speech recognition . , and when you see the audience , the age is going up Yeah , they don't really want it anymore , at least the new technologies . First point is , seventy five percent of the users find the most repo remote controls very ugly , and eighty percent of the users would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy . , persons were asked what the buttons were they use most , how much an hour , project manager: Switching channels , yeah , that's pretty pretty normal , that's what you do with a remote control . , I think it's good that we know what the user want wants , at least the these three points have to be very clear . project manager: But it's strange that the the manage board the management board said that the teletext will be outdated by the internet . Yeah , okay , but at the moment teletext is Yeah , th the best thing you can get on T_V_ , like getting information . marketing: So , when you ask people , what do they use , they use teletext and not the internet on a remote control . marketing: That's a ne i it It's a new technology , project manager: Yeah . , yeah , people from sixteen to forty five watch a lot of T_V_ , more than people who are el elder . second point , we have to impro improve the most used functions , as I said here , switching channels , teletext and volume controls . Third point that came out of the of the questionnaire , people used to get lost off the remote controller , so maybe it's an idea for us to design ex kind of placeholder on side of the , yeah , of the T_V_ project manager: Yeah , that's a cool idea . industrial designer: When you mentioned improving functions , what what do you mean by that what what are you think about ? marketing: not not the r not the functions , industrial designer: the funtionability . marketing: but it came out that a lot of buttons weren't even used on a remote control . So you can have a remote control full of buttons , a hundreds hundreds of buttons , but if you don't use them , yeah it's project manager: Yeah . marketing: j just to t to get it done if necessary , user interface: marketing: but the most used buttons have to be bigger or industrial designer: Could you use perhaps one button for multiple functions , like example pressing it in longer makes it switch to an different function for example . marketing: Just to get less buttons on the remote control , to make it easier and quicker to learn . Well what I did was I dissected current remote controls and I viewed how how they w looked , how they worked , what kind of components are involved , and how they are connected together . And after that I put up a scheme about how these things are organised and I'll show it to you in in a in a few seconds . And I'll explain a bit about how it works and how we could build one and why I think several possibilities that we discussed in the earlier meeting falls off . well what I did was I I checked remote controls and the remote controls of today are all infrared , not like all probably know . And the thing about that is the remote controls have to act as a T_V_ or a stereo or something , and those have a transmitter that's also focused on infrared , so if we want to build a remote control with Bluetooth for instance then the T_V_ should have Bluetooth too in order to communicate , so that would mean extra cost for the user and thus that's that wouldn't mean a a cheap remote control for us . Furthermore they all have a a very simple structure , so that would probably mean lower costs and i that could mean for us a good thing 'cause well we we should be able to build a relatively cheap a cheap remote . Well as I mentioned ready , we have some Bluetooth Well it may be possible , but I figured it wouldn't be possible in within our budget , but that's not for me to decide , but that's maybe something for marketing to look into . F because well my personal opinion is is not to do Bluetooth or or radio waves , although marketing: What do you think about incorporating Bluetooth or a radio receiver in the place-holder next to the T_V_ , connected to the T_V_ ? industrial designer: Yeah , actually I have t marketing: So it's in the wrong product . Yeah , I actually I figured that would be that would be rather nice , but then you'd still have the the infrared function . industrial designer: but what I did think about was when you mentioned about the the cup-holder , is why not introduce a speech function like where is the remote . If somebody says , where is the remote , then it goes beep beep beep beep or something , user interface: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: I dunno , maybe maybe something to look into , I dunno what the cost that something like that would be . I figured that would be best , 'cause when the battery stops functioning we could just use you could just go out and buy a new one . So we didn't and we don't have to do all to be too complicated about that . the energy source is connected to the infrared button , but the infrared button works only via the chip and the subcomponent to the switch there is a switch between these . When the switch is pressed in a w on this this case it switches a button , when a button is prush pushed in , a electric current goes through here , and in immediately , a l a bulb lights up displaying to the user that something has happened . That's that's so the h user won't be thinking , well did the button be pressed , w what happened . Or I press button but nothing's happening on the T_V_ , so is is something wrong or something . w well the signal goes via chip that's translated into electric sig electronic signals and then it's processed and then it's sent to the infrared bulb where it will be received on the receiving end . Not too many gadgets and functions , just like you said well the most users n you have a lot of buttons and you u u use you don't use them , so why why should we invent w spend more time on those . So I think we shouldn't be spending time on teletext and st things like that , because when you want teletext on infrared you'd have to build in a receiver too , and so in order to receive the signals from what's on T_V_ and such . So I figure that would be spending too much money and time and marketing: yeah , maybe another problem , I think current T_V_s can even send infrared . industrial designer: Yes , but what should we s I I I f I agree with you , but should we spend money or and time on building a receiver into the remote control ? marketing: Huh . Like I said , use one button for instance for m multiple functions , or well just hide the few buttons o of switching it open or something , the usual stuff . And don't overbuild , we shouldn't make a big remote control for simple functions , but we we should stick to the basics . project manager: Tim and Janus don't talk to ten minutes , industrial designer: project manager: so take your time . user interface: marketing: project manager: If you take your time too long I will eventually industrial designer: project manager: warn you . user interface: marketing: user interface: Well , I'm going to give a presentation abut some of the technical functions of these design and usability functions . project manager: user interface: what's my opinion about what's most important to combine the design , technical possibilities and the user friendliness in one , so if you going to design a remote that looks good , that shouldn't weigh over the if it's possible to make , of course , but also the user friendliness , so tha that's that's some of the main points . And another one is the use of many functions will will make it more difficult , so use as as little functions as possible or at least don't display them all at once on the same remote . If you have fifty functions you don't want fifty buttons t to be shown at the same time , marketing: . user interface: 'cause when you visit an internet site you don't want fifty links to see , but maybe use a hierarch hierarchy structure . marketing: user interface: And well one of the ideas was maybe use touch screen , but s I don't know in how far that is possible , marketing: . user interface: since we are sticking to infrared and and the remote cannot receive anything , but we might consider that . If you you can use remote like this with all the functions , many functions , but Well , your thumb is a little bigger than th it than this . You have to be very careful what you push , marketing: user interface: and if you're looking for teletext you'll be searching for half an hour from yeah well , where is it ? Where the hell he here I guess and , yeah , when you have to use something else . well this was because of our last discussion , if multiple machines are used , create easy switch between the machines , but it's no longer applying . Well yeah , I prefer to use it only for T_V_ and n not to give too many options and and if possible , the buttons should give a dr direct action , not first select project manager: you you just said you wanted to to combine more functions in one , so user interface: Yeah , project manager: you you want to keep it simple , user interface: and so that's where the difficulties lie . industrial designer: Yeah , but project manager: but I think that if you want to do that , then you can't escape the the fact that there will be buttons which give s more options than one . Yeah , but user interface: Do we want to use a few options and might not be so or original , or multi-purpose as we thought , project manager: marketing: it's maybe an option if you use an L_C_D_ or a touch screen , that in the middle are the the main keys , like displayed on the user interface: marketing: yeah . Okay , just in the middle the general functions , like play , channel switching , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and then at the top or at the bottom , some menus like settings or that you can drop down . user interface: Yeah , but when all the questions I had Do we want to use a menu display on the T_V_ ? Or does have to f everything be in remotes ? 'Cause if you use a memory display on the T_V_ , you can simply push a more menu and then select the options you want to have and press okay . user interface: so that's my recommendation , if you use many options in one buttle button , display the menu on the T_V_ marketing: Nah . user interface: and don't use combination of t of two buttons at the same time or pressing buttons three times for five seconds , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , but marketing: I think so too , but and that's partly because a lot of T_V_s have different menus , and when you have a particular menu at your device , it could be that don't correspond to the menu what's actually on T_V_ . industrial designer: you d you have to keep in mind that several T_V_s don't even have a menu structure , or they have a very simple menu structure , so you have to keep in mind that not all d not our remote won't be able to work on all televisions . user interface: So if we have to stick with current technologies and well yeah , the restrictions of what's is on the market today , you should keep it s at this . especially the important buttons , if you want to switch channel , change your volume , use teletext , it it has to work at once and more advanced options may be put it s somewhere away on the remote , behind a little little thing or a touch screen . industrial designer: Not embed Yeah , but then with something like a touch screen could could make more menu up pop up or something . user interface: And yeah , if you want to s put on stand-by or change the channel , that should always be possible to do . If the user is pushing a button he should know if the television or n at least remote is reacting and not just that the batteries may be low . So maybe we should just ease down on the functionality to to keep it accessible on t because you all know , if there are a lot of function on the the television , some you you'll never know and never use , and therefore it's important marketing: Yeah . user interface: if you want to change the volume or channel that is always accessible and easy and other functions that are not so important well you we should consider just not using them or at least putting them somewhere on the remote where they're not in the way for the for the most important functions . , they have like a touch screen with really big pictures on it like call hang-up , and that's a big ad advantage I think , because one the one hand you make the remote control compatible for elder users just by scaling up the pictures or something . user interface: and for some design issues well , put a logo on it and maybe use it in some aesthetic aesthetic form . project manager: user interface: But th the important buttons m make them always accessible and pushable and clear industrial designer: user interface: and maybe use a touch screen , or if that's will become too difficult just like televi some o older telephones use a l maybe it's possible to to flip them open and just expand the number of options that are normally visible . marketing: Yeah okay , but but if you pick the the idea , the left idea user interface: Yeah . marketing: then what's gonna be displayed on the touch screen ? industrial designer: The extra functions . user interface: The extra functions , you you just see a menu from system functions or teletext functions , and you just choose one , marketing: Yeah , but l like menu functions or industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Wouldn't it be better to make just one big touch screen , one one small touch screen applet marketing: Yeah , I think so . industrial designer: and I'll just make let's say fifteen buttons on it , and we have three of those , actually just menus with sub-menus , with or sub-items , sub-functions . industrial designer: You just have a f a few selected buttons and a few menus , and with this idea you could actually make several you can also improve later on . project manager: So you think it's will be better to have a t kinda total touch screen . industrial designer: Yeah , I wou I would actually go for the project manager: Jirun ? user interface: Okay , I agree , but I think it's very important that they always make the same buttons accessible , so use just for special options a part of the touch screen . user interface: an elder parents or grandparent picks up the remote from the little child and who's all in the systems functions , you'll have to have the possibility to turn off the T_V_ or to switch the channel without well using all the menu structures to get back to the primary functions . marketing: like building in some kind of PIN code which allows parents to switch to all channels , user interface: Yeah . marketing: but children if children don't don't know the PIN code , they can't switch to violent channels or user interface: Yeah wh Is that possible to use or no ? industrial designer: That is possible , that well that actually depends on the television , marketing: Th there's just user interface: Well , yeah well , industrial designer: but I think I figure that would be user interface: does it have to depend on the television ? marketing: Ju just a simple log-in , something like that . industrial designer: y you s you see the fi thing is when you buy a remote , you you set the channels , the the channels are different on each te television , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: so if you lock on a remote , let's say channel fifteen , well channel fifteen on this television is different than channel fifteen on the other television , marketing: user interface: Well , I think that he means that maybe by some option make sure that remote control and the T_V_ match , and then after that you can use some s insert some passwords as being apparent that the children cannot use this change the settings of the T_V_ , like colour and then volume marketing: Yeah . user interface: and marketing: Yeah , th that kind of stuff , but maybe if you log in first as a parent , you address the the channels user interface: marketing: and like oh , that's channel fifteen , that's vi violent channel , user interface: Oh , something like that . marketing: m my ki my kids I don't want my kids to watch that , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: then you set the priority to only parents , industrial designer: project manager: Okay , yeah . user interface: Well b but make it a separate option in the menu , industrial designer: Yeah , that would b marketing: for example . user interface: so that it's it's dif dis displayed from displayed here , marketing: Yeah okay , but but yeah , that's just user interface: so parents marketing: that's an a an added feature . But let's not go too wide about the those things , that's that why we're here . project manager: It's it's a nice idea , but I think that's we wel later in the stage . project manager: yeah , a partial , because I think elderly people may be not used to a touch screen , so they want the the the normal functions like teletext , volume changing , to be , yeah , kinda traditionals marketing: Yeah . project manager: and the the the the other functions , the more difficult functions to be maybe on the touch screen , marketing: marketing: Yeah , but but if you display it on L_C_D_ screen with r r really big numbers user interface: Yeah , you can de display it on the on the old style . industrial designer: because well , it's just not the same when you touch a touch screen user interface: Yeah , okay . industrial designer: or when you touch a button , but well we have to look at what's our target audience . industrial designer: W we are aiming for younger people project manager: Yeah , that's true , yeah . industrial designer: So that's that's probably a marketing: And th those young people , yeah . Y you saw it in my marketing report , they like the new fancy stuff , project manager: marketing: so A touch screen , like Microsoft al already developed something like that for multi-media applications . project manager: I've added the this four things from the management board just to keep in mind . project manager: each time I I had a sort of summary on what you told and what you personal think . th the the main points in this in this meeting is I think how it's going to look with we must keep it simple , but have the opportunity to have more options and have them hidden or something , so they don't you don't have a big thing full of buttons or and the point that you wanna use one controller for hypothetically each television , so you must the the the the functions , know , like the menus or the the parental control must be all by the done by the remote control and not by the television . The menus are not identical for all th for all T_V_s , so you have to display it on one T_V_ . user interface: Well you can use when you how do you call it , s synchronized , the remote and the T_V_ , marketing: Yeah , but that's not possible . user interface: then there's always , there are always possibilities to change the colour and the brightness and the volume marketing: - , yeah . user interface: and well maybe we can look out if there's options that the remote in its memory can see what kinda T_V_ it is , from ah , it's a Philips , this and this and that , and then give the options that are capable the capable from the t project manager: Yeah , but you have an marketing: Add th that that's an opportunity . project manager: yeah , but you have an international market range , so you have I think a big range of user interface: Well there are universal d remotes project manager: Yeah . user interface: and they all have a functionality for all the T_V_s , so this wouldn't be a extra feature to incorporate the men menus of these . industrial designer: But they marketing: But project manager: And it's not too complex to do it . user interface: industrial designer: Well they they all have to be programmed to fit your T_V_ marketing: No . industrial designer: I actually use one of those when They are they are kinda kinda troublesome , but but the thing is whe when you start building something like this you have to build a receiver into the t into the remotes , because in order for the remote to process something from the T_V_ , like to synchronise and you have to send and receive , user interface: Yeah . user interface: no , you can just say the c marketing: He he he he me he means just just one other thing . marketing: with the current remote controls , the universal ones , you have to press yeah , you have to press a code for T_V_ . industrial designer: Oh , okay , yeah , sure , user interface: and you press code four five five on the in the remote industrial designer: Yeah yeah yeah . Now we just connect the T_V_ type to a set of options , in just just in the memory , user interface: Memory in the in the remote . marketing: so that if you yeah , like profile , so that if you touch in like one four one zero kind of T_V_ industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: I th don't think that's that takes a lot of storage space or some just varia variables . industrial designer: No , that wouldn't be user interface: Yeah , well industrial designer: Yeah , a few variables . user interface: if you look at the manuals from universal remotes , there are maybe three four hundreds T_V_s at maximum . If you have all of them , all the old and new T_V_s summed up , marketing: It is definitely po marketing: But , on the other hand on the other hand , if you have a remote and buy a new T_V_ that isn't incorporated in the remote project manager: We have five minutes to go . Well then you have to buy a new one , it's very good for marketing marketing: New remote ? user interface: Maybe , or an update , software update . marketing: maybe we can incorporate some kind of U_S_B_ or a firewire connection , so that you can connect it to the P_C_ and download the newest firmware from from the internet . Well the most most people have , user interface: Well , at industrial designer: but not not everybody user interface: you can go back to the shop industrial designer: and user interface: and they marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , ser o industrial designer: Yeah , maybe something like service cen marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Or you could well you could s actually look at the place-holder you talked about earlier , user interface: Well already digital information is sent t to the the standards , T_V_ connections , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: you can see what's programme is on on the new channels , so maybe j they we can send that information along with standard T_V_ industrial designer: Well then then it's be back to the building a receiving well if it's actually worth it to build it in , user interface: Receiving . industrial designer: but I dunno , it it would be bringing more costs with with it user interface: Difficult . industrial designer: and marketing: I I think it's most cheap or cheapest to just do the updates at the service centre or at the shop . industrial designer: Like when you when you buy a T_V_ you just ask well I'll marketing: It's it's it's not a lot of work , just one docking station where you put it in , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: And your vote ? user interface: Well , I was doubting about which one to take , but you've convinced me that if you di display buttons about the same as they would look on a normal remote all elderly people will know what to do . user interface: Break it , I don't get marketing: Yeah , th th th that i Yeah . I will put my minutes I have updated them so s they're updated in the shared folder too . marketing: Thirty minutes ? project manager: Thirty minutes , the marketing: How minutes ? project manager: Failure . the specifi specific instructions for the next meeting you will all will receive at the the the email . I don't think I can say much about it , so wait for your email and hopefully you get it done in the in the thirty minutes , and I w will see you after the lunch break and the thirty minutes . marketing: One question , project manager: Yeah ? marketing: how late do we have to get back be back here ? project manager: well thirty minutes . Thank you , that was a very good session I think , user interface: industrial designer: project manager: we we user interface: Yeah , is it possible to store this on the share documents or what marketing: Yeah , me too . project manager: Yeah , because all things are stored in smart board dot X_D_K_ marketing: Yeah , v project manager: and that's in marketing: But but you can open a from your pr from your laptop . user interface: Oh yeah , it's not connected to the project manager: You all have the the questionnaire again about the after work . user interface: The questionnaire , fill in we fill out d after lunch or project manager: well , it's it's simply filling oh no , it's it's also filling out no , I'd do it after lunch I think . user interface: We can leave the P_C_ on I think , yeah and return to the marketing: Yeah , of course . industrial designer: marketing: To my exave executive project manager: My executive big room with the with the panting <doc-sep>project manager: I think we're slightly ahead of ourselves from the last meeting , user interface: project manager: This is where we talk about properties , materials , user-interface and trend-watching . project manager: So I think we've touched on a few things to do with that already , but we'll just go over it . we had a couple of changes in our plans in that we couldn't use teletext , it wasn't gonna be a control for everything and that we had to incorporate the image of the company into it somehow . we have decided on a leaving out the voice recognition , we've decided on there being a flip design and a different shape from what's normal . We were thinking a shell , but something along those lines , just a different shape from what's normal , . project manager: and we were gonna think about the port and an alarm for getting it lost , user interface: project manager: things like that , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so shall we start with the first presentation ? marketing: Shall I ? user interface: Yep . Okay so we decided on our market and so this feedback from the marketing department is really about trend watching . the methods we used to decide on current trends and so on , market trends , were that we did our traditional our usual market research study with a hundred subjects and the the general feedback from them is that the most im w I'm sorry I'm slightly tongue-tied after lunch , user interface: project manager: It's okay . we decided on the most important aspect i required in a remote control device and we'll come to that later . Also with our company being forerunners in putting fashion into technology , we also looked at a fashion update using our consultants on fashion and design in Paris and Milan . so the general findings from that was in the market trends the most important aspect for remote controls were people want a fancy look and feel , rather than the the current functional look and feel of remote controls . They also also want a remote control to be technologically innovative , and of course , as we predicted , that it should be easy to use . Now I should point out that the first of those findings , fancy look and feel , is the most important , is twice as important as the second , technologically innovative , which is in turn twice as important as being easy to use . So possibly that the feature that we put first is actually third is still important , but it's third in order of preference for the the subject group we looked at . marketing: Okay , now the fashion update which relates to very personal preferences among our subject group , we found from our consultants in Paris and Milan who des attended all the design and fashion fairs there , that fruit and vegetables are going to be the theme for clothes , shoes and furniture . So should we be thinking of using something like that in our remote control design too ? There also seems to be a trend towards a spongy feel to materials , again in contrast to last year . So a lot of interesting feedback there , both from our market research departments and from our people in Paris and Milan . marketing: Unless anyone has any questions about that ? project manager: I don't think so , not yet . project manager: especially if you do them on too tight and you can't get the leverage on them to undo them . this is all about the design of the actual components and the availability of the components we have in stock at the moment . The the main idea of the whole thing is just so you sh you just press buttons and it should activate things on the T_V_ and we discussed last meeting that it should be easy to find . also in this study I've looked into the availability of some of the materials , 'cause some of the things that we looked at last time aren't un unfortunately aren't available . This is the chip called the T_A_ double one eight three five which is what's used in pretty much every remote control 'cause it sends out standard signals , based on your input and it's pretty much used for all all T_V_ remotes at the moment . marketing: industrial designer: There's actually no rechargeable option available , so we I saw the the standard double A_ and triple A_ which we thought were a bit bit too bulky at the moment , dynamo charging , I thought that that might be a bit silly to be to be honest , project manager: Wa can you explain that ? industrial designer: people won't it's it's basically like wind-up radio . marketing: project manager: How what kind of how l long can you get out of that , industrial designer: It might project manager: can you pick it up and then wind it for two minutes and then that's it for the night ? Or industrial designer: You Yeah , yeah , oh yeah I presu you wouldn't have to wind it for very long , but I don't I don't think it's really sort of necessary when you th you think of the next two options , like the the solar charging , 'cause most people have the light on in the room anyway so they could get when when you got T_V_ . project manager: That doesn't count though does it ? marketing: Does does light charge as as sunlight does ? project manager: I thought it was U_V_ like industrial designer: No . marketing: Artificial light ? industrial designer: Is it ? Alright i project manager: Any , any marketing: Has to be solar . Regarding those sizes , which one you think will be light because we we have to take into consideration size also , so maybe a standard triple A_ might take lesser space or and dynamo might take more space . industrial designer: Yeah it would the d yeah the dynamo would take more space 'cause you actually need a physical sort of handle to wind up . marketing: That's going to project manager: people who live in basement flats there's not that many people , but there are people . user interface: marketing: I know , industrial designer: But marketing: different parts of the world too , if we're if we're marketing internationally . industrial designer: and most people most people also watch T_V_ in the in the night anyway . project manager: but then it would be charging through the day , I think the point is that it charges through the day and then you've got it charged for the evening . industrial designer: The the kinetic charging which is like you get it in r you get it in wrist watches project manager: Yeah I've seen industrial designer: and you d you don't even notice it . the amount the amount of probably moving around you'd be doing all the time would would charge it up , I don't think you'd ever need to actually physically start shaking it up to make it work . user interface: And are these like what are the life of the kinetic battery , it like it runs for long time ? industrial designer: yeah it's it charges into some form of it's a smaller cell which it charges into and the si the size sort of a watch a watch battery , user interface: industrial designer: And that'll that would l would last for well I do I d I'm not entirely sure how long it would last but I've never seen one run out . user interface: We c project manager: But then if you think about a watch , it's on your wrist so it's on your whole bod it's on your body the whole time industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: so you're walking around , you're doing things , it is moving a lot of the time . If you'd industrial designer: Yeah and project manager: you switch the T_V_ on , then you put it on the side , then you pick it up to change it and then you put it on the side . industrial designer: Yeah but then again project manager: Is it really gonna be enough ? industrial designer: I I think it is because if you think about it , the watch , although it's only a tiny amount it's it's it's always moving for the whole day and they don't run out over night when you leave them on the side . industrial designer: And th for the same the same reason , you're only using it for a v incredibly short amount of time just to send the signal and then you're finished with it project manager: So it's not the draw on it isn't industrial designer: and you put it marketing: . industrial designer: no no I do I don't think the the draw on it would be marketing: marketing: Could I just ask referring back to solar charging , is that compatible with standard batteries ? industrial designer: . marketing: could people put standard batteries in but with a s you know they could leave it in the sunlight for solar charging industrial designer: Ye yeah I think I th g y you could have a dual power thing marketing: or the two things not compatible ? project manager: Like a dual kind of . industrial designer: but the the thing with the solar cells is you would need to put them on the case and they because , if you lie on a calculator they they're qui they're quite big and they all they all look i identical . What kind of price are we looking at for industrial designer: They're they're expensive , they don't user interface: It's twelve point f project manager: I presume the normal batteries are the cheapest ? industrial designer: Yeah the normal batteries would be the cheapest I'd presume then it would actually be the the solar charging ones , but the It's i I think they're not very resistant to dropping , project manager: Solar . industrial designer: 'cause if you drop stuff yeah if you if you have y project manager: Well they're not designed industrial designer: the size you'd need to charge a remote wouldn't be that big but if remotes always get thrown around and stuff , so . calculators you don't really throw around a lot whereas remotes you do , project manager: You do get a bit of wear industrial designer: they can t project manager: but don't calculators have a battery in them as well ? industrial designer: Yeah they do , they yeah they've got dual things , but they're the batteries are smaller I think . W w which one would last the longest , because we don't want customers to be like you know charging like a mobile phone every day . user interface: A remote control , like , industrial designer: W m yeah user interface: so we have to s look at the life also . industrial designer: so the Yeah the the s if you if you had something du using the standard batteries and the solar charging , I don't think you'd I think the it would d well you know how long the standard double A_s would last in or triple A_s would last . marketing: It would just detract from the attractiveness of the of the whole feature , industrial designer: Yeah I think i I think it would , yeah . project manager: Can we think about that ? 'Cause if we're doing the kinetic thing and it's industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: Shouldn't we do some market research on that first before we add it in because I I personally project manager: Well add it in to think about marketing: right , okay . project manager: because , where am I ? If it is the kinetic thing and it is small and it is portable and it is a different shape and the kinetic is something people don't do kind of industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: we're doing something original and different but if you wore it if it's something you could just clip on your pocket then you would have that less , you you wouldn't lose it so much . project manager: But then maybe that's looking at someone who's just sitting on their own rather than industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: It's not something that's come up in any of our focus groups and market research , project manager: No . industrial designer: my second part of my findings the mo most current remotes use this silicone P_C_B_ board which pr printed circuit board , which basically has these contacts that are really close together and then when you press down on the rubber button , it'll connect the circuit and each each switch is connected to two different legs on the chip and so sends a different message and that then gets translated by the chip into a code and then it's fired out of this L_E_D_ in the sequence of l on and off bursts . project manager: What kind of things do we have to consider there ? Can we what kind of size , does it come in varying sizes or is it just one size and we would have to fit the design of industrial designer: Well well this the thi the thing about is they they can be as big or as small as you want them to be because you can you can print circuit board like that that it's it's simply spaced like that so you can have fit the n the size of the nine buttons in . If you if you see how thin the tracks are , you could you could s you could put them virtually right next to each other and have a much smaller switch on each one , project manager: industrial designer: if you if you wanted to but the there is an option to do to do it like that , or you could have some sort of array of switches which I'll speak about in the next bit project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so that And then to yeah , so to conserve battery life the remote should be in a standby mode no while not being used . Now what I was thinking about that was 'cause sometimes when y when you have these things , they've got little lights on behind the buttons , so you can see what all the buttons are , like on a mobile phone , they do it more often than on a than on a T_V_ remote , project manager: industrial designer: but you could you could have lights behind the buttons and after like five or ten seconds of not being used I'd have that turned off , if we decided to go for buttons that could light up . industrial designer: the case material , I've a been sent what the factory can actually give us , the there's the plastic which I think we were gonna go for anyway as the main case case housing project manager: industrial designer: and the the main problems with the well you could go for wood but I think it would be a bit impractical . industrial designer: which to make it is expensive , and rubber , well you're saying that people like this spongy feel this year , so perhaps some something made of rubber , marketing: . industrial designer: but I was thinking more of the buttons , because the buttons which they've they've said that they've they've put across are what is used in some stress ball manufacture and it's meant to be anti R_S_I_ . industrial designer: I'm no I'm not sure how that would work because surely your fingers would still be moving over the short distances but that's what they said . the problem with the casing is that there's quite there's quite a few design restrictions that they've got on the shape of the case . If you go for titanium they can only do a standard box shape , whereas if you come to plastic they can they can be a little more they can they can do sort of curved shapes . But whether whether or not because we'd have it in two separate units user interface: Second thing is project manager: Hinged , yeah . user interface: yeah and second question is like , a mobile you can change the cover , you call it a skin or whatever . user interface: So in this case if you're looking at like a customer can change the colour like from green , parrot green to chilli red or something like that . user interface: So is that feature available in like titanium , industrial designer: Yeah I th user interface: or it's like only specific to plastic or industrial designer: . Yeah in in titanium I don't I don't think it would be available at all really , the ju just marketing: industrial designer: it w well you could make it available in the titanium , it was just it would be so expensive to buy a new case for it , because of the expense of how much titanium is is user interface: industrial designer: it's light and strong but I think it should be left for aircraft design rather than for for a remote . I've got a mobile phone myself which is titanium and it does mark very easily if you drop it . marketing: I was just wondering if we make the basic mould out of plastic but have like a rubber cover that goes over , industrial designer: Rubber , yeah . marketing: that would give the spongy feel , that also allows us to kind of have different fasciae for the phone . project manager: So instead of the fascia that comes off being plastic , the fascia that comes off would be the rubber , marketing: Like a rubber sleeve almost , yeah . user interface: Something like project manager: like those pens that you get with the grip , that you can you can pull that off . industrial designer: T marketing: Very cheap way of changing the look of it and people can just buy a new one if they want to . project manager: Well that's been really popular with mobile phones so I don't see why not . industrial designer: just just going back to the interface designs with the buttons , the I kno we were planning to do some sort of touch screen . industrial designer: Now what I was saying before about instead of having you could have just a bare P_C_B_ circuit board and I'm sure you could probably get it in different colours and so just by touching it with your finger it'd make the connection over if you had them close enough , that would be one option . the second option th they offer rubber buttons , but I thought that an L_C_D_ type of screen 'cause one they're incredibly thin and don't take up much space , two they you can have them in a sort of array and you can arrange the buttons on the screen in a sort of set thing and you could have them like a touch user interface: Sorry I didn't get the last part , you're talking of industrial designer: display . what what user interface: Just what you said I I didn't get the meaning of it completely , you're saying like industrial designer: Oh on the on the L_C_D_ screen you could becau you could fit it user interface: -huh . industrial designer: the problem with it basically is that it's flat and so you can't do lots of curve curved things with it , user interface: Okay . industrial designer: but you can you wouldn't have with the L_C_D_ you'd have the wires coming off , you wouldn't have that with the with the L_C_D_ , you'd only have that with the printed circuit board . industrial designer: With W also with the marketing: I don't s sorry to interrupt , I don't see why the curved thing is a problem , if we for example had a shell , once we open that industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: You could have a flat screen inside , yeah , marketing: yeah , so it'd be f yeah , yeah . industrial designer: but I'm just wondering whether we want an L_C_D_ screen inside . marketing: Have I misunderstood you ? industrial designer: It wouldn't be like full colour , it would just be black and white , marketing: industrial designer: so you wouldn't be pressing down on 'em , w or we could have rubber buttons which are made of this material which is anti-R_S_I_ . project manager: I think it would be good to have a contrast between , if the whole thing is gonna be this rubber thing it would be good to open it up and see something quite fancy looking inside . project manager: Now how would you distinguish , if you had it bare , how would you distinguish where you had to press , industrial designer: Yeah I hadn't I hadn't really thought of that to be honest . project manager: marketing: I just had another idea , I don't know if it helps with that , but just to do with the R_S_I_ . Is it possible , just as an option , when we open it up , people can use their fingers to press the button , or we have inside like a small pointer thing when people want to . industrial designer: Yeah you could , you could have some sort of stylus that you could pull out project manager: Like one of the palm pop thing . user interface: Absolutely , f for somebody who very often , if he would industrial designer: 'cause I had marketing: Yeah . user interface: a person who switches channels very often or does use a particular function very often will find it very irritating to use a industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and he might spoil the touch-pad very fast compared to a button like , if you keep punching with an pointer or whatever . marketing: Yeah just a thought they wouldn't actually need one and they could use anything they've got , couldn't they ? A pencil or a pen , so they wouldn't really need a project manager: Okay , we'll talk about that so if you finish your industrial designer: Yeah that's project manager: and we'll come back to that . industrial designer: yeah that that's the end of m my project manager: That's you , right okay . user interface: And just one small question before like you are , regarding the circuit , since we are hav having a flip-top , we can customise the two circuits for different type of buttons industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: like we are keeping the standard buttons on the top and the more complex buttons under this thing , so we can divide the circuit like you know . industrial designer: you'd you'd actually have two separate you'd have two separate circuit boards but they'd be joined by wires or like some cabling between them , user interface: Okay . marketing: I'll just raise another point while it occurs to me , it kind of applies to both our designers here , so I'm not sure how it would fit in . marketing: If we flip open , now you know how you've got some mirrors in nightclubs that are mirrors when you turn to them and you turn away and it gives like an advertising display , you seen those ? project manager: No . Is it possible that when we open our flip-top shell it's a little compact mirror and when you press a button it then goes onto the phone display th the remote control display thing . project manager: Well it's a remote control , you were sitting watching T_V_ are you gonna want to sort of open it and say oh shit I should go and have a shower and do my hair before I put the T_ marketing: Yeah . I know what you mean , it's with us using the ideas for a mobile ph industrial designer: marketing: it's with us using the ideas for mobile phones I kinda got sidetracked onto that I think , okay . marketing: trying to think of other features we can build in that wouldn't cost too much project manager: . industrial designer: you can you could do it , you could have a 'cause if you if you just put the full charge through an L_C_D_ display it'll completely blank it out , marketing: . industrial designer: but I don't know if you could get any mirror effect on it , I'm not sure about marketing: Oh I think forget about the mirror project manager: Okay , okay . First thing is basically on design we just took the input from the previous meeting , especially from the marketing and industrial design , to check on the customer needs and feasibility . Second is we checked into competitors , the picture here shows one of the standard models offered by competitors here . So y you generally see there's not much of variety and like marketing team said , people need trendy , they are bored of black and white . user interface: Like , some some people have a Here you see this ? This is on a I I I found th that only common feature is the ch channel control and volume control , rest other buttons , they are in a very disorganized and they are not consistent th with other models and all . user interface: Okay , and second as already discussed with William , we are going to have m maybe a G_ G_U_I_ interface in the f in the middle of the flip-top industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: and g graphic user interface marketing: Sorry what does that stand for ? project manager: Which means user interface: basically which is what we d do in computer , have icons or touch pad or whatever , marketing: Okay . user interface: which is industrial designer: If you if yeah if you have like buttons that appear on the screen in this L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Like you have on a l icons or something y you have is a good example of G_U_I_ graphic user interface . user interface: So basically not point or click Press any particular device , he just has to click on that particular icon to simplify . user interface: And on the top m repetitive buttons which are like volume or channel changing and all could be on the pointing device , that means the use of button . user interface: So we are having a combination of boards , so f on the s simpler board , on the top we have this button , rubber buttons , to keep frequently changing the channels . project manager: Can we swap that round so th that the ones that we use all the time are on the bottom part ? user interface: project manager: 'Cause if you're thinking about holding it you would be using your thumbs to press , just like a mobile phone . marketing: No you'd hold it you don't if you flip it open then you'd be Wouldn't you ? Isn't that the idea ? You us if we just use the shell as an example again , you open that , you've got your L_C_D_ display there and you've got the buttons there so you're holding it in the palm of your hand , yeah . That's what I was just saying , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah but you can do it with your thumb li user interface: But project manager: and then have the and then have the L_C_D_ at the top user interface: user interface: Okay and you mean to the project manager: so have the the volume and the programme , things like that , user interface: And the lower distance . Okay we had a latest finding of voice recognition , there was a mail which mentions that our division has developed a new speech recognition s feature . We have to check into the for financial f feasibility whether we can incorporate it this at a low cost , but for like we had g s response from the customers that they would like to have the feature of finding it . user interface: So it could be like , where is the remote , and the remote answers I am here . user interface: Some kind of thing or it gives a b bleep sound or some kind of sound marketing: . user interface: and if this can be incorporated this would be more you can say trendy also ? And technologically innovative also . My personal preferences would be like , as already marketing department , they want something to do with fruit so I wouldn't say the design should be like a fruit , but yeah we can take inspiration from fruit colours , like the vibrant colours , red chilli marketing: . user interface: tomato red or whatever and second thing is cer certain standard buttons we should have , like for example , i if you see the previous slide industrial designer: Well , yeah we user interface: I think most of the users would now be well acquainted with this cer central pattern , here , so we we we would not change h that particular pattern industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: I can't see that , is that play and stop and things ? user interface: This is central one , the one you project manager: Or is that volume and channel ? user interface: yeah volume and channel . So keep that m that standardised because that's the most common feature across all models , if you look at all the models , it's here . I'm not sure how long we've got left , but we need to make a decision about the things we've discussed . project manager: that means that there's no function for li the port , you know that it sits in , then pressing the button then having industrial designer: . industrial designer: Yeah I think project manager: It's a bi i it's like a g it's a gadget , it's a industrial designer: if Yeah it is it is qui it's quite a cool feature to have project manager: selling point . industrial designer: and also if they've got it if they've got these parts already in stock , then it won't be cheap to re-manufacture them , user interface: So do you reckon that's a good idea that , where's the remote , I'm here thing ? I think that would be quite fun . project manager: I think the only pitfall that we would have would be how much it's going to cost if that means we have to cut down somewhere else , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah to s th well it's it's not as expensive as it would be if it was full colour 'cause if we've just got a black and white one , marketing: . marketing: we've deci seem to have decided on that , did we decide on double A_ or triple A_ batteries ? user interface: . project manager: Do you want like a back-up ? marketing: No , one of the decisions we had to make was whether we had double A_ or triple A_ batteries 'cause they've still got to be charged this way haven't they ? industrial designer: K no the kinetic ones come come with a sort of w watch a battery that goes in a watch . industrial designer: So it's a lot smaller , so it would marketing: Got you on that okay , didn't realise . The buttons what did you give us as our The bare-board L_C_D_ or industrial designer: Yeah the well I think were we're going for the L_C_D_ on that one , on the buttons , user interface: industrial designer: on the on the on on the top one we're gonna project manager: On the top one okay you've got the touch industrial designer: yeah . project manager: okay and then industrial designer: On the bottom we were gonna have the rubber , the rubber ones , the anti-R_S_I_ ones . marketing: Sorry could you repeat that last part ? industrial designer: okay on we've got the flip the flip-screen , the top one is gonna be the L_C_D_ and the bottom one is gonna be the rubberised buttons . user interface: For the body design I think plastic , w yeah industrial designer: Plastic , user interface: we could use the body , project manager: For the inside . user interface: for the inside and rubber as a padding or for the grip , something like to add to the design . marketing: - , user interface: marketing: so we decided on a rubber casing for the plastic shell , a variety of designs , user interface: Plast right . and it is just although it's rubberised and spongy , apart from that we're just going to go for sort of vegetable and fruit colours , we're not gonna try and make it actually a vegetable or fruit design or anything else , like a shell that we discussed , industrial designer: no . user interface: It's project manager: we don't wanna be tacky if we've got a kind of different shape anyway marketing: Okay . project manager: the fact the m the material that we would be using would be cheap , so we could make it red , we could make it psychedelic , you know , we could make it black and white zebra stripes , marketing: project manager: but that's not really what we're focusing on , what we're focusing on is the m you know marketing: The feel . Is that going to be this image I've got in my head of something kind of shaped like that , maybe about that size , made of plastic , fits into the palm of the hand , rubberised cover that's spongy . Is that really going to fit fancy look and feel which was the major thing that people wanted , market research , user interface: I it's different . project manager: It's just different marketing: is that fancy ? project manager: it's just different from everything else and , I'm trying to imagine clean looking houses , marketing: . project manager: so you either want something that goes with that , which is what's on the market anyway , marketing: project manager: or you want something that contrasts as you know like you get clocks now that are more of a talking point than an actual clock because they're so interesting and industrial designer: . I'm just kind of pushing at that to see if you came out with anything else , but I totally agree . marketing: This would definitely be different enough , I just wondered if anybody could come up with something even more project manager: And you would just have an across the b you would have so many different options that you could do , you could have a plain black one , you could have sparkly pink glittery ones for your little marketing: Well the thing is the rubberised covers are going to be s relatively cheap to produce , that if in a year's time we we get feedback from the design fairs that show something else is coming it's so easy for us to just produce that and it can be slipped on , project manager: . project manager: And ones tha ones that have rubbery spikes marketing: which is another beauty of it . project manager: y you know , you could just go so far with it , industrial designer: You can you can just marketing: user interface: Acupressure , you could talk of acupressures . project manager: like a puffer fish , you could just , you could take it wherever , marketing: project manager: so I think that's quite a flexible thing . user interface: And finally the body should be retouchable , may maybe ch you can change the body or the case casing the case outside , project manager: Yes . user interface: it should be moulded it with the design in such a way you can change it every time . marketing: for the decisions that we've made , kinetic charging , the watch-type batteries , L_C_D_ display on th the top side of the flip top , rubberised buttons on the bottom side , we're gonna use fruit and vegetable colours for the rubber cover , the case itself is plastic . That's how far we've got , what else do we have to add to our decisions here ? user interface: Fine , we were talking of voice recognition also marketing: . user interface: because that we are not for how to look it remote control if it's lost . user interface: So , are we looking at voice ? marketing: Yes , it was just , there was just a cost issue with that , but it's a good idea we just need to check on the cost , user interface: Or maybe like William was suggesting in the last thing some devices you put on key chains . project manager: Have you user interface: sorry I didn't mention this , but we'll be incorporating in the design . marketing: 'Cause I took it from the feedback you gave in the last meeting from y from y your report , it's not just a case of having a little R_R_ hidden somewhere , they do want it to be obvious that it's our product project manager: Well they do , marketing: don't they ? project manager: but I think we can you could marketing: Since it's the only one of its kind on the market it's obviously gonna be ours . project manager: Obviously it'll have a logo on it just like everything , but everything else has a logo on it . The point is that it's got to stand out somehow differently but I think it does , without that marketing: Okay . Did we I know at the last meeting we spoke about a beeper , I think that was you talked about a beeper for a location , have we just rejected that in favour of voice recognition then ? project manager: Depending on how i industrial designer: Yeah , depending on the expense of it . project manager: we've got this memo saying that it's something that the company's looking into , so industrial designer: And they've got in stock , so yeah . project manager: that seems to make sense , but if it turns out that it's hugely expensive we'd have to cut down somewhere else , then it's worth thinking about . user interface: Again a questionnaire huh ? project manager: so I think we've probably got it says , closing we have forty minutes marketing: You got to go through . user interface: project manager: It's either that or we only had forty minutes to discuss what we just discussed and don't know how long that took

The main focus of the meeting was to keep the remote control design simple while incorporating more options and functions such as menu and parental control. The idea of a universal remote control that allows users to enter codes to set their TVs was suggested by the User Interface team. Marketing proposed that updates for the remote control could be done at service centers or shops. The Industrial Designer suggested implementing the company's logo, slogan, or sign on the remote to make it more recognizable. The Project Manager decided to place the slogan on the back with the logo, and the logo on the front when changing fronts. Teletext and voice recognition were excluded from the design, and a flip design with a unique shape like a shell was chosen. An alarm feature was also added in case the remote is lost. The target market for the remote control will be young business people.

Question: Summarize the group's discussion on the emphasis on the basic function, function extendibility, functional design, and user interface design of the product features. Article: Then I'm going to talk about the project management , what I'm going to do , and , of course , I'm doing the project management and secretary both , okay , to take the minutes of the meeting . And I have come up with the management come with the new proposal , okay , and I have to discuss a few points on this . the one is the teletext becomes outmoded , okay because if because of the computer systems and the new technology . So we don't need to consider really about the teletext all in our new project design . And the third point , it's very very important to establish our marketing or corporate image , okay , with this new project or new product . So I will invite Agnes , can you go to the third slide ? user interface: No , this is the third slide . user interface: Do you want the mouse , or do you want me to industrial designer: I'll do the notes . project manager: industrial designer: So well I I figured we should identify some user requirements , and from my experience , I wanna , and from research I did , the the device has to turn the television on and off the first time you press on the big button , you can't can't have like waffling on this point , you know . project manager: industrial designer: Really have It needs to be able y y have to be able to find it . So , I also , since we have to establish our corporate image on the basis of this new product , thought we better look at things that are popular and ex go beyond those , and , as I said in the first meeting , and then we might wanna talk eventually about the materials that are appropriate to use in in the construction , especially in the the the outside of the product project manager: industrial designer: so that it gives the appearance , and it is reliable , and so forth . I did a little history on the the remote controls and when they were invented and so forth , so , I guess this guy Zenith created the Flashmatic , which I kinda like the idea , 'cause it made me think of maybe the remote control made a big flash when you turn the T_V_ on and off , that might be interesting . And so it was highly directional flash light that you could turn the picture on and off , and the sound on and off , and change channels c so I think those are still requirements we have today , fifty years later . industrial designer: And it was really a pioneering innovation , but it was sensitive to the sun , so that it would get would start off by the you'd get it would easily cause problems . So , I in addition to looking at the the functional requir so all these devices are examples of where they represent examples that are available today which I think the one in the middle is r really something to keep in mind . And it would y you'd you could throw it at things if if the T_V_ didn't turn on and off , you could use it for something else . And since I'm not really Industrial Designer , I didn't really know what to do with this slide . But I just took some different schematics and I put them into this , and I guess this is what a slide might look like if you were drawing a circuit board . So , personal preferences , user interface: industrial designer: I think we could I I'm really thinking outside the box here , and I think that we should consider perhaps having an an an a a size a remote control that changes in size depending on the user preference . user interface: industrial designer: So something that's very very flexible and inflatable and then you could shrink it . I think it could either be you could go either one extreme , be very colourful , or you could make it clear , and kind of blend in with things , so you didn't have to have a problem with the th the decoration of the of the user's home . I think it needs to be waterproof , because sometimes they fall into cups project manager: industrial designer: and , you know , it might be out by the swimming pool or something like that . if you mi one of one of my requirements was about needs t to tell you when it's done its job or not , because half the time , I keep pushing on the remote control , and I don't know if it's actually understood my message , so I think it should give you some sort of an oral cue . So , marketing: industrial designer: that's those are my f preferences , and that's my presentation . project manager: Yeah , let me interrupt you if you can add other facility , other feature , like unbreakable . project manager: Okay , because especially today , you know , you have the family and the kids , user interface: project manager: okay , and the kids throw it and they they play with their remotes and . Okay , so if you can add the feature , okay , for your fabric whatever in your outline design okay , with unbreakable , okay , I think that will give a lot of advantage for our product , if I'm not wrong . project manager: Okay , thank you Christine , and any questions or clarifications , or any discussion on the functional design ? user interface: Do you have any preconceived ideas in terms of materials ? 'Cause , for example , in the unbreakable thing , doing something plastic would be harder , industrial designer: . user interface: whereas having something like , I dunno , steel or titanium isn't really economically viable . industrial designer: No , I haven't really I wanted feedback , I think we need to rate rank these , but we'll see what your personal preferences are and your thoughts . industrial designer: you know , nobody told me how mu what our financial objective is , so project manager: Yeah so industrial designer: It'd be hard to inflate something ou made out of titanium though . project manager: Yeah the the I'm sorry because the last meeting we supposed to discuss about the financial thing . marketing: I don't know , project manager: Okay , marketing: I think verbally we can we can pretty much sell . project manager: I will I will send you a mail , okay ? The project may be the the project aim , okay . Okay , that maybe Eddie will talk to you about how much the price and what's how much its cost for the manufacturing and how much it's going to be we sell in the market . This remote control , okay , it can be for like universal , to use for any T_V_ . Okay , and it will be slim , okay , and industrial designer: Not fat ? project manager: Not fat . But let's try it , okay , with the different the designs , okay , the functional designs . project manager: Okay ? So any other questions ? marketing: from her side , I don't think there's too many more questions . Thank you Christine for time being , marketing: If you can come to the project manager: so then Ed , so can you tell about marketing: Okay , from the marketing yeah , from the marketing side , just to to give an idea what the management is looking for , I was looking for a a remote control to have a s user interface: S 'scuse me for one sec . marketing: I have a sales price of twenty-five Euro , with a production price of twelve and a half Euro . For what I think from what we're trying to find , we're tr we're looking for , I don't think that price is exactly in the market . marketing: I'll explain myself here now in the sense that in a in the recent surveys , from the ages fr from fifteen to thirty-five , eighty percent are willing to spend more money for something as fancy as trendy . project manager: marketing: Twenty-five Euros , that's that's a preson reasonable price . Now if we're gonna take a risk , and push this up a bit , make it more expensive , project manager: Yep . But , I think there's one other thing interesting two things that are interesting is that from the fifteen to thirty-five year-old group , which always spends more money on trendy new things , speech recognition is requested . marketing: And we're talking between seventy-five to ninety percent of this group is willing to pay for speech recognition on a remote . That might be a possibility , even though it costs more , to be the first on the market to produce this . industrial designer: marketing: So maybe one word speech recognition commands , say remote , and there's a beep beep beep , and they can find it through , you know , ten tons of newspapers , magazines , whatever you have at home . project manager: marketing: But , in the cost that the management is looking for , that's not gonna be possible . But if it's trendy , if it's fancy , it's got some colour to it , if it's very easy easy to use , if it's got simple remote speech remote control , like I said , louder , softer , change channel , on , off , remote , it goes beep beep , I can find my my remote without spending half a day looking for it and getting all upset 'cause I can't turn the T_V_ on . So we're gonna have to look at it in a in this global idea , with the ideas of the industrial design . So what do you think about the design ? Do you think you can make it or industrial designer: D I'm sorry ? project manager: What do you think about the design , what he was talking about of the speech recognition ? marketing: Speech recognition . industrial designer: So might we can perhaps do it if the user is willing to spend some time in the training process , it could reduce th th the overall cost . And so , maybe what we'll have to do is add something where you can recharge it wirelessly so that y you know sen send power to it . So or maybe set it out in the sun and it , you know , gets , from the light , a a solar cell inside there user interface: . user interface: It seems also like with the speech recognition , yeah , it's a great feature , but if you're watching T_V_ , there's a lot of ambient sound , and it's words . It's actual speech , so then you have to make sure that the speech recognizer is good enough to filter out the T_V_ speech , and the the user's speech . user interface: But if someone on the screen is saying the same thing , all of a sudden , you have someone in a movie saying off and your screen dies , because they've triggered the remote control and it's turned off your T_V_ . So , I think if we can find a speech recognizer that can handle those types of problems , then yeah , it'd be a really good marketing gimmick . marketing: Because tha w with speech recognition th I'm not that good at that idea user interface: marketing: but th if it's a one-word recognition , 'cause I know with telephones and cars and things I've seen in the States , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Because I think s with speech recognition , if the the remote or like the telephone it has a exact word that it has to hear . If somebody's speaking on the se the television , they're not gonna stop and say remote , user interface: No , I think it's a great idea if we can design it to to suit those requirements . No because I this is this is years ago in the United States where we're driving down and he said call home , and the telephone called immediately user interface: Yeah . project manager: Well , what I can suggest to you , Christine , okay , if you need some the technical feedback , or some training , okay , about this facility , especially for the speech recognition , I can recommend you some companies like Intel or I_B_M_ , okay , because they're already in this speech recognition part , okay . Okay , and if you want , I can coordinate , okay , to get some information , okay , and you can let me know , okay , so what kind of the details you require okay , to add this feature in this project . And we need to know how much is the timeframe you need to develop , apart from what today . marketing: From from your side , you're gonna have to go back the management and s be more s precise . marketing: a risk , take a risk on the market ? Something that's gonna cost more , but could very easily s make a boom in the market ? project manager: Yes . project manager: but end of the day , you're the sales guy , so I will come back and sit on your head because you are going to give your sales projection , marketing: user interface: project manager: okay . It's of course it's good to tell the management how much it's cost us marketing: And , so I don't mind to convince , okay , the management to spend some more money on the project , okay , if you can make out of marketing: Obviously . project manager: Yes , okay I don't mind to convince the the management , user interface: project manager: okay . project manager: The management says , okay , so they they don't want certain facilities , which it's already worked , okay , they want something new , okay . I think like speech recognit definitely they will agree , I don't think they'll say no for that , okay . So if you have any new ideas , okay , for your you can always come up and you can tell me if you need any s special , okay , coordination , okay , between any technical companies , which you can hide their technology backup , okay , for your functional design or technical design , okay , then I am ready to do that . And what's your comments about user interface: well , maybe if I go through my presentation , you can sort of see what the user perspective is , and how it ties into the other two comments . So , basically , the method that we usually use in the user interface design is that we need to look at what people like and what people don't like about existing products . And then , what the good ideas are , and what the bad ideas are , and why they're bad and good , which isn't always as obvious . We seem to have intuitions about why things are good or things are bad , but when you look , technically , at how it works , sometimes that's not the case . Then we need to decide what functionalities we really want to keep , 'cause that'll feed into both Ed's work and Christine's work . and then what the remote control should look like , obviously , once we've got a good idea of what the functionalities are . So , in terms of the functionalities that we need , you obviously need to be able to turn the T_V_ on and off . You need to be able to control the volume and then control any menus on the T_V_ to regulate contrast or whatever . So , the problems that people have expressed is that there's too many buttons on remote controls , in general . often , you need to know specific button sequences to get certain functionalities done , which you don't necessarily always remember , especially if it's a functionality that you don't use very often . So , here we've got two examples where here on the left-hand side , you can see a remote control that has lots and lots of buttons . they're hard to see , and okay , they're labelled , but the labels don't necessarily tell you too much . Whereas , on the other side , you have a much simpler remote control that I think basically has the minimum functionalities that are needed . So , I would be inclined to go sort of towards this , in terms of design , rather than this . And if there's specific functionalities that require more buttons , then we can figure out how to do it with existing buttons . So my personal preferences are to keep the number of buttons to a limit , or to a minimum , sorry , make frequently used buttons bigger and more strategically placed , so like the on button being really obvious one , the channel changing and the volume , and to keep the design basically sleek and simple . so , that's pretty much it , an I don't know if you guys have any questions or industrial designer: Oh , it's , seems very understandable . industrial designer: and the only thing that I saw missing from your your research that we found was this ability to find the doggone thing when you need it . That's why we're all here at the table , so that if we think of it and our research indicates certain things and w we it's complementary . industrial designer: I also think that th f the the feel of it is , when you hold it , is something that was expressed more in in in in my design user interface: industrial designer: and that's logical and normal 'cause those are the parameters that an Industrial Designer's more thinking about , th th the look and the feel , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and , you're user interface: Oh , that's definitely a very important factor , especially to users who are gonna be buying the thing and then using it almost on an daily basis in a lot of cases , I think . project manager: So for anybody need any help , for time being , on this subjects , okay , so please come back to me , user interface: Oh project manager: and Christine , maybe I can try to help you to get some the technical the companies to help you for make a design slim , okay , and to add some features , like we are talking about , the speech recognition and all . user interface: Should we maybe make a decision about what features we actually want to include , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause we've thrown a lot of features onto the table , but do we actually want to incorporate all of them , or have we missed anything ? marketing: . industrial designer: Do you wanna go back and look at the closing slide , maybe that would provide some guidance ? user interface: Sure . industrial designer: it says user interf so I'm supposed to do the components concept , supposed to work on the user interface concept , user interface: I think we should do as many features as start with all of them right now user interface: I thought industrial designer: and eliminate them later in the process , that's my suggestion . And I'll send you the the minutes of meet industrial designer: You can object if you want to user interface: No , I I'm just thinking in terms of time , marketing: She's objecting . No , I was just thinking is it really practical to start designing something with features that we're just gonna end up throwing away ? , it takes a lot of time and effort for everyone to consider different features , and s if we spend that time and effort on features that we're not gonna use , maybe it's better to spend it on the f thinking more about features that we actually do want , but industrial designer: I think we should take that as an action item for after the meeting , marketing: Oh th we s we still have user interface: guess industrial designer: 'cause w our meeting time has run out . project manager: Okay , what we'll do is now we'll take for lunch break , okay , then we can discuss furthermore , okay , with our areas , and then we will come back again in the in the next meeting . So thanks for coming and I'll send you minutes of meeting , and please put your all information in the sharing folder so everybody can share the information <doc-sep>We're here to have a kick-off meeting for the design of a f for the beginning of new project remote control for the design for a new remote control . marketing: project manager: So I'm first going to do an opening then we get used to one anothers and we speak about this tool we're going to design and try to make a project plan , some discussion and then we talk of the next meeting . marketing: project manager: I think the important points we have to t talk about are it's functional design , it's conceptual design , and desail detailed design . project manager: user interface: It's gonna be not my favourite one but the one I can draw . project manager: industrial designer: user interface: And it's gonna be you'll try to guess . marketing: A r a rabbit , oh oh yeah , where is the carrot ? project manager: user interface: That's it . project manager: You want to go ? industrial designer: marketing: I am not very good at this kind of stuff . industrial designer: marketing: My favourite animal is project manager: industrial designer: You wa marketing: user interface: Wow . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: What about you project manager: yeah Christa Pavlov . project manager: So they have to be waterproof maybe ? marketing: It has to be wha baby proof project manager: 'Cause they eat she ate it . marketing: because even if she's not very tall she's high enough so that when she throw it away it's industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: But how gonna okay , just but it's monochrome it's n it's not like industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah even we can change colours , no ? Like the marketing: Oh like the phones , industrial designer: like the phones and these things we c yeah . project manager: Small also ? Don't you think industrial designer: Huh not so big like yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , not too much buttons and marketing: Should it be , y you know these remote controls where they are what they call a universal ret remote control project manager: marketing: so y you can decide that now it's the remote control for the television , then it's the remote control for the the sound system , or for your refrigerator industrial designer: . project manager: Yeah , industrial designer: marketing: whatever project manager: that's marketing: I dunno if it's project manager: marketing: Or if we should have a targeted re remote control . marketing: So colour , robustness , easy to use , size , project manager: So , I think there's marketing: yeah , size matters , yeah . Colour , size , sh project manager: So you you think it's better if small than bigger . marketing: But what would be different from this , from the others ? I dunno if industrial designer: maybe we can change the colours that at least the frame . marketing: I think one thing important for instance in this remote control if you remember when people use it they're they never find a good button in the right place . marketing: For some reason they they they click the off button when they want to use the industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: So there's a problem in the design of that kind of remote control somehow , project manager: . So , some kind of idea with cellular phone with a a screen that will tell you what marketing: I dunno . marketing: Too expensive for twelve Euro ? user interface: And n maybe not too expensive , project manager: And too expensive . marketing: So ma I prefer to have the off button at the top right , industrial designer: Ye yeah . marketing: so I would have my own design of the remote control because it's in fact just a a full touch screen remote control , industrial designer: . industrial designer: it it's like marketing: I don't know if it makes sense , but project manager: industrial designer: it's like two types no ? people are right handed or left handed so y because I am left handed I use like this , say if you're right handed you use like this marketing: Yeah , for instance , . industrial designer: user interface: so how many actions do we need to implement in it ? industrial designer: huh . user interface: On off ? industrial designer: Maybe I think even we can keep two switches and then we can only make one working . industrial designer: We can adapt only one switch , suppose here like we can make two switches and if I'm left-hander I use this switch to follow the main operations . user interface: if it's less than three then we can make it like a industrial designer: Two . marketing: Three buttons you mean ? user interface: like three mental states , project manager: Three option . project manager: Maybe if it's more , if there is a software inside industrial designer: project manager: that ask you three user interface: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: If it if we want a r universal remote control that we sa like we say before it may may need more than three three button , three possibilities , ye yeah . user interface: But for standard actions you usually what do you do , you change channels , you adjust volume , and nothing else . marketing: Yeah but for instance when you change channels you can have you can just go to the next one or go to channel twenty five . industrial designer: marketing: Because I'm only using three or four channels but industrial designer: Yeah . But they keep generally their t slash slash this thing and then the dash dash and then you can put yeah , you can only have one bit . I change channel like this , m I want to go to twenty five , and then to ten , -huh yeah . marketing: And then back to the one I was before , project manager: Also we can be here marketing: so there's whichever it was . project manager: marketing: Then you can watch what your ah you could also record your record your sequence of actions , industrial designer: . marketing: that becomes more complex , project manager: industrial designer: marketing: but you could look at what the other people have used there or remote controls . project manager: we're going to meet again in thirty minutes and I want you to work on these ideas and try to make a the ones , make to decide what what are the ones important and what are the one that we don't want . marketing: So what does M_E_ means ? M_E_ the user requirements ? Or that's that's for us ? user interface: Market Expert . user interface: marketing: Oh , of course yeah , the user requirement specifications , -huh , yeah <doc-sep>So basically we we are not decided if w we should go for a universal or specific remote control , but I have new new i inputs for about that topics . And basically we decided to to go to individual actions for each of you so Industrial Designer should wor was supposed to work on th on th on the working design . project manager: The U_I_ guy also work on that , yeah , and for the mar our Marketing Expert should deliver some specs . So , I just put d quickly Remo , but if you have any o other names that we co could decide for just to to keep something fun for our project we we should we could discuss quickly . marketing: I was thinking of the user interface: Especially if we're selling into the U_S_ market becasue there's a lot of Spanish speakers there . M_A_ ? M_A_ ? marketing: A*_N_ yeah D_O . marketing: It doesn't it doesn't sound cool for me , project manager: What does it mean ? Oh . marketing: but maybe for a Spanish for I for user interface: What does it mean in Spanish ? marketing: Control . 'Cause it also like in English it sounds like you know the man's tool you know because you know men like to have control of the remote marketing: But , yeah . project manager: So , let's go for Mando ? Yeah ? No objection ? industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . So user interface: And we could have some like you d you could have the fonts you know special , so you have man in like in in in one o in one font and then the O_ as like project manager: Okay , I think this is user interface: Although you don't wanna cut cut women out of the potential buyers though , project manager: Okay . user interface: do you ? So industrial designer: Yeah they are the most T_V_ watcher . marketing: But yeah project manager: I I think this is more a question of of look and feel . marketing: it project manager: Something that should be addressed later We should we should go to other for the other topics . We need to know who we're selling it to before we can really decide on a project manager: Yeah okay , so let's stick f to Man Mando for the name user interface: . So , who want to start ? user interface: project manager: So maybe we could start with the market , yeah . marketing: Okay so yeah I will I will give a brief outline about what I what I prepared for this meeting . I prepare a marketing report and we have to find the weaknesses and and the the improvements we could do to the current remote controls . And also I di I did a study with for the incorporation of new technologies it seems that the remote controls have been have remained the same for the last five , ten years . So and they they admit that the the they should s they would spend more money in a fancier remote control , which is which is good and it's interesting point . Also the people are worried about about the R*_S_I_ disease , which is if you repeat the sa the same movement , which is not a with a not very appropriate device , you you will have problems whe when you will get old . They are also they get angry very often because they lost the remote control very often , so I think it would be a good point to to l to to find a a solution to any beep any alarm or something incorporated to with the remote control every time it it get lost . marketing: And also I found that young people the the younger people are the more interested they are in incorporating new technologies in the in the remote control . marketing: So in my opinion the Mando this Mando shouldn't be very small because the smaller it is , the more like the the liklier it is to get lost . people also complain because they they they all have the same size of the buttons for buttons who w which are not very use like f memorising channels or or this kind of actions which are not very often but they they shouldn't they shouldn't have the same importance in the in the in the remote cont in the remote control . So it may be interesting to to think in a in both prototypes , for right and left handed people . user interface: Well th the on the thing is though , most remote controls are used by more than one person . So unless you're kind of targeting single people you know you're gonna maybe marketing: Yeah . marketing: I dunno I th Anyway I think it could be int interesting to to release some a a small fraction of of this remote controls . marketing: Sorry ? industrial designer: A universal design , which is which is good for both the hands . user interface: Still shaped for yeah for your hand but not for a particular hand , right ? marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah ? That's right , whether it's left hand or right hand , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: but but don't you think that the two points are clashing , one thing you are saying design should fit the hand shape and it should not be very small ? marketing: Sorry ? industrial designer: The first and the third point , they are clashing . user interface: Well it means like , this remote here is kind of is very thin and long so instead of having you know you might have it kind of a bit bigger industrial designer: - marketing: Yeah , like user interface: or , you know , with maybe some some finger molds or something . project manager: industrial designer: So it means design should be similar to the traditional ones ? user interface: industrial designer: Little sleek , longer ? user interface: industrial designer: And it should fit the hand . marketing: No no I was thinking of so like something project manager: Something with the shape of the palm ? industrial designer: - - user interface: You could even have some buttons like you know on the sides and everything , project manager: On the sides . project manager: And then finally marketing: And finally , the incorporation of a L_C_D_ or a speech recognition system in the remote control could also be interesting , but I don't know if the budget would be large enough . First I'm just wondering about the L_C_D_ stuff because because marketing: But most of yeah most of the young people to thirty to thirty years old were really interested in this kind of technology . project manager: Yeah , so maybe it's a good time for me to to bring you to some new new informations . We had the new requirements from the so from the head offices of the company , and so they wanted so they want to they would like to be restricted to T_V_ . project manager: so they want us to restrict the remote control to T_V_ only because of time limitations . So we have also to focus more on the internet aspects because well well te teletext is outdated now and finally , it should be clear that the corporate image , that means colours and logos of the co our company should be clearly inde identified in the product . So user interface: I was still I was still working on this twenty five Euro price point because I think actually having looked at some of the remotes out there , this is quite a low price if if we're maybe I can get to this in my presentation though , project manager: Yeah yeah . project manager: Okay so let's keep in mind about tha that that this last point about L_C_D_ and speech reco user interface: Yeah . I think even even if it was within budget do a speech reco rec system it might be a bit difficult because if you think if you're watching T_V_ you're gonna have a lot of this background noise from the T_V_ which might interfere with the project manager: Sorry , what is your ? user interface: participant three . You might have some background noise from the T_V_ which will make the speech recognition much harder , so . user interface: Oh you press a press a button to talk , and the the T_V_ the T_V_ sound turns off . Means you say you should say like does that , remote control being on or be on kind of thing , and then remote control comes in the picture for the speech recognition . user interface: Okay , so , could I describe the mouse maybe be easier to project manager: Sorry ? user interface: could I use the mouse , or project manager: yeah . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: Okay so while researching this this topic I first of all just thought of a couple of things that I would like to see in a remote , and just looked to see if they're actually available in any current remotes , and then also searched for which are the top-rated remote controls on Epinions dot com , which is a a you know a a customer written basically review site . So there's a pretty wide range of remote controls these days and and this remote control on the right here is is one of the more extravagant , but it's not really it's by no means you know on it's own in being so expensive . project manager: Looks like a P_D_A_ ? user interface: So yeah it doe it's well basically all the functions are controlled through through the L_C_D_ screen except for the really really kind of main functions , which have a couple of of their own buttons . and if you look at a lot of the universal remotes out on the market , I know we're working on television remote , but a lot of the universal remotes out there have have these L_C_D_ screens which kind of helps when you're using multiple devices I suppose because you can have multiple kind of functions d different functions on the screen at different times . But the thing that I find most interesting about this remote control , and it's kind of difficult to to see in the slide , but it has a scroll wheel on it , which is kind of like a mouse scroll wheel , which I think is it's a really kind of important design aspect is it's 'Cause the thing is what a what we the presen this presentation we had is what we want the remote control to actually do . user interface: the I think that a scroll wheel is actually pretty a pretty handy way of of changing the channel . 'Cause I know when I when I use the remote to change the channel I very rarely use the numbers on the on the pad . user interface: because most channels are you know two digit numbers and you have to press you know a special button to enter a two-digit number , and then two numbers , so that's just it's annoying . Now the the scroll wheel is is much more useful if you have an L_C_D_ screen , and this brings us to the the point you were mentioning before about the internet capability . user interface: One possibility , if we now we need to still talk about the price point because obviously a lot of this stuff can't be done for twenty five Eu Euro , but one possibility is to download program information into the L_C_D_ screen so that instead of actually saying I want to I want to go to channel thirty seven because I know this programme's on , you know , often you don't know what ch what channel it's on , or you don't know what's on . If you have a list of of programs on your L_C_D_ screen you just scroll to that program rather than to a channel . So if you think about it's kind of like a you know in mobile phones now you don't use you don't remember people's phone number , you remember their name and you go find that name and ring it . project manager: user interface: So this would be pretty kind of a handy thing to have , but we we really need t to discuss the price . So , there are there are cheaper this is another multi kinda purpose remote control where it's it's it's very simple , there's only a few buttons , but al each of those buttons does something different in a different context . So this is something else we might wanna consider , is really kind of limiting the number of buttons , because this is the top rating universal remote control on on Epinions . It it's really maybe worth thinking about limiting the number of buttons as much as as possible because really I think people want to be able to find the button they're looking for without even looking at the remote control . And was saying before about having different size buttons for different you know frequently used tasks , but I think also you know the location and and shape of the buttons is important , but also the number of buttons . So if you have too many buttons it it it increases the the difficulty of finding the one you want . user interface: Yeah well we will have a bit of a simpler task in that we're only doing a television remote control . I think maybe one option is to have you know a little flip-open door that that you have hidden most of the time , but contains the extra buttons like , say , the number buttons for instance . user interface: I I would if I had my perfect remote control , I'd probably just have no numbers at all on it because they're just in the way . Maybe you know I although I do also find flip-open doors a bit of a pain because sometimes they can break off or or whatever , but maybe a door that you can you can permanantly remove or permanantly have on would be good . user interface: but I think definitely you need to to keep the buttons down to a minimum , but not not let that kind of interfere with the functionality of of the device . marketing: H I think I think that the tr the transition to this to this new remote control shouldn't be very very abrupt very hard because w if people see a remo see the see a remote control without numbers they will think it's very difficult to learn very difficult to very different build very different to the traditional industrial designer: It does sampling out of the . If you if you have the right advertisement showing how how how easy it is and how you can , you know , navigate to a program without the numbers , then people might say that looks pretty easy . marketing: If y project manager: Okay , can you continue , please Mi ? user interface: So , but marketing: user interface: yep . okay , so , I think one of the really kind of useful things you can do with with internet connectivity would be to have this a programme driven interface rather than the channel number . So if we can have a higher priced remote control I think that would really be worth something that would be worth implementing . there's the L_C_D_ screen , which maybe maybe is too expensive , but I think also at the scroll wheel , I haven't mentioned it here , the scroll wheel could be used without an L_C_D_ screen , just for changing channel numbers easily . I think even that , project manager: user interface: that would be a fairly cheap thing , compared to an L_C_D_ screen , to implement , project manager: And the other thing , you say we need to we need to keep it just television , but I think one maybe one option , since this is supposed to be a kind of a fashionable device , is you know there's a certain kind of cool or wow factor that you can kind of you can have with technology , and maybe we wanna make it something that's extensible to do other tasks . Say you have like a little another little kind of base unit that can also receive signals as well as the television where you can , say , change the lighting in the room . You know that would be something maybe you could sell as an extra , so that it doesn't have to be part of the initial development , but , you know , later on you could you can you know you also , selling the potential of the device . Then you say potentially you can then do other cool stuff like change the lights , I dunno , close the windows , whatever , turn the heating on , and , I think that's something we may need to have as as at least as an optional extra to to kinda make our product cool , since we say we're putting the fashion in electronics . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: So most of the things which we are discussing about is speech recognition , that means on my own I project manager: This one ? industrial designer: yeah , it should be . industrial designer: Okay so the working design is user i interface could be of two types , one is the usual press buttons which are there so that the user feels that he is knoing doing some he is knowing about that technology . So he is pretty comfortable if he wants to get this , and on top of that there there could be a speech recognition technology also being sitting on the on the remote . So the old kind of users who don't want to have any changes , it can it can be useful for them , and the new users , as our Marketing Expert was saying , they can use the new gizmo which is speech recognition kind of thing . project manager: Okay , sorry to interrupt you , but we have seen before that there is a new way of interacting that use wheel . project manager: industrial designer: Means we can have , depending on the cost , how much we can afford , we can have different kind of interfaces . So if you go to the market and you say that buttons are there the people know what it is , project manager: industrial designer: and on top of that if we are having extra functionality people are willing to shell that twenty-five Euros money which we are thinking . So anyway that is the first , user interface could be of more than one type , and yeah that means we can do the on-line changes which which cannot be done now actually . And for voice , limited vocabulary automatic speech recognition system is required and we require a microphone also to be sitting there on the remote . project manager: Do you think that performance of such systems are enough to to target well of such technologies is enough ? industrial designer: yes , if it is limited vocabulary usually it's enough . industrial designer: Yeah we we can target , means we can target ninety five percent accuracy or somewhere ninety seven perc project manager: Well wh I imagine also that the microphone will be an ambiance a an ambience microphones user interface: . No it it could be little d yeah it could be project manager: So it could be s a few centimetres . user interface: Well one one other thing that that speech recognition could really blow out the price for is when you want to sell into other markets , though , industrial designer: That's right . user interface: because , I'm not sure exactly where we're gonna sell this , but I presume it's not gonna just be English speaking countries . user interface: So then you have to s you know , you have to train models for industrial designer: - it's more like , means there are different speech technologies which are existing so D_T_W_ could be kind of which is the easiest . So you have to store some templates on the on the on the chip itself , and it's just dynamic time warping where you try to find out what it is , instead of having a model which has to be trained and being a micro-controller . We are having a power button and the switch , which is not much , user interface: industrial designer: and then we are having the which is to indicate whether the power is on or not . And then there are two kind of things which can be so one is the button interface which has not been shown because because of lack of time . So now where the A_S_R_ decoder is sitting , similarly there are different kind of interfaces which could be there . So there is A_S_R_ decoder which could be there , and then there could be another scroll button scroll scroller , and then there could be buttons , and all of them they will just do the decoding and put it in the math put it in the proper message format . And then there is there is the chip which is sitting , the green one , and it converts it into bit codes , and that bit codes are sent by the infrared device to the receiver . So this was the my personal preference was that we can have A_S_R_ sitting there on the remote control . project manager: user interface: You know I guess you could actually train the remote control as you're using it by saying you know turn volume up , and you press the press the button industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: like s people teach sign language to kids f well , by speaking and doing industrial designer: Yeah but as soon as you try to put the microchip kind of thing or something the price will go up . project manager: So your your opinion is that we should go for special condition technologies ? industrial designer: Because yeah the reason is that if we go into the market means though I don't have much idea , but as he the Marketing Expert presentation was marketing: I'm sure if you can sell a a speech recognition remote control for twenty five Euros everyo everyone will s will buy it . user interface: Actually I'm not so sure industrial designer: So if we go with just the user interface: because I'm the marketing: I'm sure . user interface: you know if I was using a remote control to , say , turn the volume up because I can't hear it very well , I don't really want to you know drown out what people are saying by talking you know when I'm when I'm instead of pressing up on on a remote control . You know if there's some there's some dialogue all of a sudden that I can't hear , I'm trying to actually find out what's being said , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Okay so marketing: Yeah but you know the the average frequency of pushing buttons , it's about user interface: Well it depends if it's a remote control th marketing: it's about eighty eighty eighty pushes per hour , or something like that . user interface: Maybe if the remote control is something that y you don't actually have to pick up anymore , that would be a a useful feature of the speech recogntion . marketing: user interface: If you can leave it sitting on the table and you don't actually have to find it , then that could be . project manager: so if I if I kind of summarise everything we've de we we said . We need we need to have remote control which is fanc fancy , which is which is easy to to hand not too small , not too big . We should bring new technologies for young peoples , and as we have also requirements to to use to to push thr toward the internet . And also , a very interesting things I I I've seen on on on the one of the comp o our competitor is this wheel that we can use to navigate . So so my feeling is that re regarding costs budget we have an an an target price , it's not possible to go s to go to L_C_D_ and also to go to automatic speech recognition technologies . Because in fact as we are targeting T_V_ in fact we can use T_V_ screen as a screen to feedback to to give some feedback informations about what we could have . If we we don't unless we have some input some video input to the T_V_ or we have control over the T_V_ then we can't actually display that . Like if we if we produce the T_V_s then then yeah we can put you know menus up up there , but otherwise we need to actually have some kind of something sitting in between the video signal and the and the T_V_ to superimpose those those menus . project manager: don't we have contacts with people on T_V_ or or well systems that exist that we can use ? user interface: Well this is this is another que we still haven't really defined the remote . Are we still you say we're focusing on T_V_ , but is it still a kind of like a universal remote in that it's a replacement remote control , or is this something for our own line of of televisions ? project manager: Yeah . 'Cause even if we have contacts we can't really produce a remote control that can bring up menus on other other companies' T_V_s . What's what cou what could be the cost of well , could we fit the the targets in terms of cost if we go s to L_C_D_ on the remote control ? user interface: For twenty five Euro ? I think it's impossible . user interface: I think it would be good to know if there is any leverage in that any leeway in that that twenty five Euro because for twenty five Euro I think all we can really do is provide a very basic remote control , and that seems to be kind of against the philosophy of our company which is you know putting the fashion into electronics . So I would I would like to know if there's any chance of of increasing the marketing: user interface: of increasing the unit price . project manager: So you mean yo you mean we we should target something maybe which is which would be more expensive but re really fancy in terms to in terms to had to have really an added value ? marketing: What would be user interface: Yeah . project manager: so regarding the automatic speech recognition , I think this is marketing: Wha but what would be one question , what would be the goal of putting an L_C_D_ in a remote control ? user interface: Well th marketing: What what kind of information ? user interface: 'Cause you can have things like the programme name instead of the channel numbers , like an interactive programme guide . marketing: Yeah but mo most of the T_V_s nowadays show the show the project manager: They have tele teletext . marketing: the n project manager: Th th you have a teletext sin signal that you can that you can that you can get thr through the channel . project manager: They have t most of them have teletext , but we want to get rid well one of our requirements is to to move to teletext to to the use of internet . marketing: So what would what would appear in the in the L_C_D_ ? user interface: So you could have the name of the programme , you could have the start time you know where it's up to . project manager: The ti the start time , all the p all the programmes you could have o user interface: You could have a l even a little image of you know the c you know the the m the main actors or something marketing: Okay . user interface: so you can quickly just kind of even without reading project manager: Well I don't know if this information is available from teletext , also . project manager: Well because for the same reason that we cannot informations on the T_V_ . project manager: So so that mean w w we need an in an extra internet connection to use the remote control , if you want to browse , in addition to the T_V_ , or or it should be a special T_V_ connected to marketing: But Yeah . user interface: Well I I think if we're gonna I think we would definitely need the internet connection because even with y I don't think you could even get teletext information from the T_V_ onto the remote control , especially if we don't control the T_V_ . industrial designer: what kind of market we are targeting ? Is it that we are targeting the replacement remote market , or what ? So the remote has gone bad and the person wants to buy a new remote or because the cost of L_C_D_ thing could be as high as the T_V_ itself . project manager: Yeah , well people go to buy another remote control when they broke n broke their , user interface: If it's a really small T_V_ maybe . project manager: and they want to go t for universal one , and they take the fanciest they can have . So the com the the the committment is the following , we don't go for speech recognition technology . project manager: It is up to you to go through this this way and to to report report me back next meeting . So marketing: I think that the speech recognition technology would be cheaper the than the L_C_D_ . industrial designer: It's it's cheaper as compared to the L_C_D_ . Maybe it's cheaper , but we have no marketing: Because with the L_C_D_ you need more requirements . user interface: marketing: But user interface: Well the thing is I think I think the type of peop marketing: for the speech recognition you you don't need anything . user interface: I think the type of people that are gonna want to buy a very stylish rem r remote control with lots of new technologies are the kinda people that are gonna have you know a wireless internet connection maybe , or a you know . marketing: But then we should move to another target b because at twenty five Dollars , industrial designer: Means th yeah twenty five Euros is yeah , that's right . marketing: it's user interface: Can we can we increase the the price point of this remote control ? 'Cause otherwise we need project manager: Okay this is this is an open question for you . But I'm definitely not keen on to to marketing: To move to another target ? project manager: no no no , I'm no I'm definit definitely not keen on going to speech recognition technologies . I that work user interface: It's kind of hard to guarantee that you're gonna project manager: It's real yeah . project manager: you have to work on user interface , and you have to go through a trend watching <doc-sep>user interface: ? marketing: industrial designer: I'm afraid I'm a bit too slow . project manager: we're supposed to develop a new remote control , that's both original , trendy and user-friendly . project manager: then we do some in individual work , then we have a meeting to discuss the results , etcetera etcetera . project manager: Okay and in the format menu you can select colour and line width , etcetera etcetera . industrial designer: Different pen widths , how do you do that ? user interface: project manager: with the format menu . project manager: And what's that supposed to be ? industrial designer: Are you serious ? marketing: Should it be one project manager: Oh yeah . marketing: so y you must save it at the end project manager: Yeah marketing: and then project manager: you can press the next button , which is yeah . user interface: industrial designer: How much time do we have to draw anyway ? project manager: Yeah . project manager: What is it ? industrial designer: marketing: user interface: It's a it's a giraffe . Yeah I see a long neck user interface: Yeah , that's a project manager: but marketing: It's more like a dinosaur . user interface: industrial designer: Is this part of our a acquai or introduction to each other ? project manager: Yeah sorry , introduction and get acquainted marketing: project manager: and industrial designer: Alright . user interface: project manager: Yeah it's a bit slow , marketing: It's not that fast . user interface: 'Cause it's so project manager: You were slow too user interface: 'cause it's green . marketing: So some other line width industrial designer: Do you have a turtle pet ? project manager: user interface: marketing: No . marketing: Yeah ? project manager: Yeah not exactly legs but More like fins marketing: industrial designer: Stumpy stuff . user interface: marketing: or project manager: There's a a gum , marketing: Yeah ? Alright . industrial designer: And why did you choose this animal ? marketing: So project manager: He said it was slow . marketing: A cat who had an accident or project manager: Why a cat ? industrial designer: yeah I dunno . Yeah I'm not so good at drawing with this kind of project manager: The pen , industrial designer: st Oh shit . It's my favourite pet animal , 'cause they're cute , they're independent and cuddly , I dunno . industrial designer: Or do I need to use more colours and project manager: I think it's okay . Okay industrial designer: So we have to s project manager: now it's time for some discussion . project manager: did any of you already do some work on this part or industrial designer: Well I started making an overview for myself , what I had to do , 'cause we have three design steps and in every step I have a s specific task to perform or whatever . industrial designer: So I had to , I dunno , make an overview for myself about what I have to do , project manager: industrial designer: and kind of let it work in to get ideas about well how I have to fill it . And do you have any ideas about the product so far ? industrial designer: Well I started I started with the first phase , I think was the functional . industrial designer: And let's see I had to focus on the working design , which you said . industrial designer: and we ye use button presses to activate or deactivate certain functions on the T_V_ . Yeah I kept it global 'cause that it activates or deactivates specific functions , user interface: Okay , yeah . project manager: and what did the Marketing Expert do ? marketing: well from a marketing perspective , well the function des design phase consists out of the user requirements . marketing: what needs and desires are to be fulfilled ? So there are a few means to reach that by by doing research to see what existing products are there out in the market . marketing: especially what are their shortcomings ? Are there any new functions which can be added to our product ? project manager: For example for well what kind of applications do current remote controls support , and what are f featur features of current and future televisions ? project manager: Yep . What w what would they like to see on a new remote control ? especially for future users , project manager: Okay . marketing: I'm thinking of early adopters , because they they use new technology first , project manager: marketing: and they play with a lot of tools and stuff so maybe they have some good ideas to to add . project manager: but have you any idea so far as what the user requirements are ? marketing: No n not specifically . user interface: I got some requirements marketing: and project manager: Yeah ? user interface: it has it has to be user-friendly . user interface: really easy to use buttons , not not very small buttons , but not the the also the big big buttons , but just normal buttons . project manager: what do you mean by that ? user interface: the distance from your television to your remote control has to be , yeah yeah , quite a big distance . project manager: user interface: Are you going to put the the notes on the project manager: Yeah , in the project folder . industrial designer: Well no I'm just a bit wondering what we're gonna do the next session ? user interface: Yeah . Because then we have a user interface: After that we are going to the conceptual project manager: Yeah . project manager: Y you do some individual work , marketing: We're just working the three phases . And then I have to prepare I have to defend our design , user interface: project manager: so make it good . marketing: Better make it industrial designer: I am gonna work on the conceptual design already 'cause yeah it's fairly important to know what kind of components we want to put in . industrial designer: Do we , is it gonna be a multimedia control centre ? Do we want to be able to use the video recorder with it ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: I would first m industrial designer: So if I don't know what components to put in , it's kind of hard . marketing: Yeah project manager: You can always add a few marketing: well like l li like some like some some remotes who are out there , which I know , there's one button which is very easy to switch between devices . marketing: So you can switch to your video project manager: marketing: and then the same buttons control your video . marketing: And another function I'll think of switch to your media centre , because that's getting very popular . industrial designer: Yeah so marketing: And then use your Windows media centre under your T_V_ with the same remote control . industrial designer: Yeah I I know what you mean , but you'll ne need several other buttons for a video player . industrial designer: And and for a t teletext you need additional buttons as well , marketing: No . project manager: We could just start with the assumption that's only for T_V_ and video <doc-sep>marketing: So do we need to re-train Mike on how to put his mic on ? project manager: We may do . industrial designer: Think s marketing: Okay , can he get it all by himself this time ? project manager: I dunno , I'm feeling like a big boy . Pro marketing: industrial designer: Probably not , 'cause he's 'S been listening to too much . We're gonna all do a presentation , and then hopefully we're gonna make some decisions now . you've got a printed a printed circuit board here , and you've got all these buttons which kinda press down little rubber nubbies into these little holes that activate marketing: project manager: We've all broke a remote control ri s yeah . industrial designer: marketing: I've user interface: So you've also got you've got your chip here , your batteries here , and some sorta electronics . industrial designer: Yeah there's a thingy and a dingy and project manager: You press this and it does th user interface: Well marketing: Yeah y do jabber user interface: so you've got here's here's a transistor , and this amplifies your signal , industrial designer: user interface: you've got the L_E_D_ here on the end of the on the end of the printed circuit board . user interface: So we've got a i in this in this drawing he in this example here , this is a eighteen pin chip I dunno . You can use a basic battery , which we've already discussed , th our tech department also said we have the option of doing some kind of hand dynamo where maybe you crank it or something like that . user interface: I don't know if that's really marketing: I I gotta I gotta flashlight , and user interface: I don't know we got some qu crazy guys down there in that department so industrial designer: project manager: Okay . user interface: So that's the next bullet is the the kinetic provision of energy , marketing: And that's on the camera . user interface: we've got solar cells , which I don't think is a very good idea because you could not use your remote at night which doesn't make a lot of sense . project manager: Okay so we basically have battery versus cradle here ? user interface: M battery versus cradle I think is yeah . project manager: It's actually a novel thing because you could sell it a as a novelty , just to be actually serious for a minute here , user interface: Yeah . project manager: you could user interface: Well it is it is more it is more eco-friendly than the than the cradle 'cause you're still using power off the grid with the cradle . Our material choices are a plastic latex ty or plastic , a rubber latex type thing , wood , or titanium . If we go with titanium we're gonna be limited in the amount of shapes we can do because it's tough to shape the titanium , and Yeah pers project manager: Wood wood would ge would give us a little bit of a marketing niche , wouldn't it . user interface: I I can't see anybody wanting to use a wooden remote , it's just anti-technology really , you know . We can we can o we can accentuate whatever whatever product you put in there we can find a way to accentuate it . user interface: And what we may be able to do , and I think this might be the best option is to combine some a couple of these . my recommendation personally would be to do some kind of a plastic inner shell with a like a rubber outer shell , to make it to mak like a thick plastic inner shell and a t kind of a to have that rubber outer shell to make it more durable , and also maybe i I think it feels a little better than the plastic . user interface: Yeah marketing: And if you make it from that super rubber , when you drop it on the floor it can bounce right back up in your hand . user interface: The advantages of working with plastic and rubber is w we we'll have a lot more options just in terms of shape industrial designer: marketing: user interface: because you can extrude plastic in basically any shape you want . So and then we can cover you know the breakable bits with rubber yeah so project manager: Okay . user interface: But basically these are curved and double-curved I I believe that the tech department , in their in their message to me , that they were referring to the number of th curves in the bottom . user interface: but that's what they told me , uncurved , flat , curved , or double-curved . industrial designer: user interface: I would guess this like this pen would be kinda like a double-curved , where it's curved on m m multiple axes , right ? I think curved means just curved in one axis and double-curved is curved in two axes project manager: Okay . project manager: I think it might mean something like that sorta shape because a double curve rather than a marketing: - yeah that's yeah that's what I see . okay , with the interface we have the following options , we can u we can use push buttons , we can use a scroll wheel with an integrated push button , and L_C_D_ display , marketing: Ooh . so these are all options that the user interface guy can has at his disposal to put together a user interface . A simple chip , which is the least expensive , but I have no numbers to give you , project manager: user interface: a regular chip , which is like the medium porridge the medium expense project manager: D do we have actually any concept of what the difference is between a simple chip and an advanced chip ? user interface: Yes the difference is , with a simple chip a simple chip will operate oh why doesn't this scroll up ? Previous previous , okay . user interface: an advanced chip is required to to operate the L_C_D_ display , and it didn't say specifically , but I I have a hunch that a regular chip is gonna be the scroll wheel and the multiple scroll wheels . project manager: Technical functions or interface concept ? user interface: I think industrial designer: Oh interface concept . user interface: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Well that doesn't bo bode well for it for it tats as well . It it it you'll be you know be affected by the by the other speech and user interface: If the T_V_ is working , yeah . project manager: user interface: That's just it'll if somebody says up in the middle of a television show , it's gonna change the channel . industrial designer: Yeah and and fighting for the remote would not be fun anymore , user interface: So industrial designer: and I think that's one of the things we wanna keep . project manager: But what if you actually had to press a button to make it recognize ? So if you pressed it and went , up ? industrial designer: That kinda would r d user interface: Well then why don't you just press the up button ? project manager: Man yeah . project manager: But if it's just one thing with a button that you can just go Up . user interface: Even still there's gonna be interf th there's there still will be interference from the T_V_ . user interface: It might not be it might not be completely confusing , but I think you'll still y it's still marketing: user interface: I don't think it's practical at all . industrial designer: Yeah so taking that away , our the the the rubber but rubber buttons are the more reliable project manager: You guys know your stuff . industrial designer: it's the the ones that would al would allow us to to market our product as being you know less prone to damage and more resistant to things like spillage of liquids over it or you know mistreat misuses as it happens to remote controls . Well , we wanna small r remote control one side because we want it to be cool and designed , but apparently market shows that bigger s bigger remotes get less lost , user interface: That I would believe . user interface: industrial designer: But yeah I think we we need to compromise between those two and somehow we'll do that . so the the what I would propose is something more or less in the direction of what is to yo the right of that slide but without with a l a less complicated design , so the numbers , the volume control , and channel control , and teletext access . the volume and channel control can just become those the the four button array as in if it was a round dial . industrial designer: And if you just think about it as the one to the right but with the numbers and the four buttons plus maybe a centre one with teletext . project manager: So we're suggesting doing a sorta scroll wheel thing for the volume ? industrial designer: Ye no it's not user interface: That's not a scroll wheel . industrial designer: i i it's just four buttons that are on a cross , project manager: Nah . user interface: Instead of play , stop , rewind , and fast forward there , that's up , down , louder , and quieter . industrial designer: Yeah yeah so I think we w we go for something mid-sized , so something looks good marketing: industrial designer: and is not too prone to get lost . When I s when I see the when I see the product I I I I don't wanna buy it . There's nothing about that product that makes me wanna choose that product over other products that are out there . user interface: Are you talking about the picture ? That's not our that's not our b design , marketing: Yeah yeah . user interface: that's just a that's just something he a a graphic he used to show you the layout of what the layout of the buttons might be like . Okay 'cause 'cause right now I don't have too much to say about how to market this product because we don't have a product to market yet . marketing: And from from talking to Mike is that we have we have we can market a more expensive product now . marketing: And and so yeah I'm a I'm a little bit stuck right now in that what w what is it that I'm gonna market ? without special or increased marketable features I don't believe the product has a consumer demand . I like the idea of of the scroll makin there are so many people making these products at this price right now . What are we gonna do to make this one special and unique ? user interface: What's special and unique about a scroll ? marketing: well I don't project manager: It's cool . I say that it's different I what I'm looking for as marketing is m give me something different . I give me a lower price , give me a higher price , give me some new technology , don't give me the same thing that everybody else is putting out there on the shelf it's f at the same price . project manager: I'd I'd say though that we if we did make the decision to go with the cradle though , the then we have that as well , marketing: What i if when when we have project manager: but wi with a similar marketing: yeah when we when we have something like the cradle or or something give that's as as a marketing standard I need something to market , to make this product unique . user interface: Well right I think the two big th points that we have so far are the having the cradle and also having the the actual design of the case itself having like this like rubber shell maybe with a plastic interior , marketing: Yep . Just remember when I made up this report I didn't have the information that we're discussing here . marketing: And and so so yeah when we have a cradle , when we have some kind of design , so what I'm saying is , from my perspective , I don't have a product to market right now . my personal preference is that we make some adjustment in the cost , either lower or develop an integrated new technol technology . That's that is the next step , there's technology and then there is technology , which we're moving into the next phase . industrial designer: marketing: And so we're gonna have some new technology to enhance the marketability . Yeah again I'm not sold on the product because we don't have a product in my opinion yet . project manager: So now marketing: If you if you give me if you give me a cut-out of what everybody else has then I need to I need to find a lower cost . project manager: So our big questions here really are cradle or not cradle ? Do we go basic or do we go for features ? d does anyone really wanna do anything with the scroll wheel or should we ditch that off-hand first ? user interface: Well my question is what would the scroll wheel do ? Function-wise , what does that do that project manager: Oh but that was in your presentation so wh what would you imagine it doing ? marketing: Yeah wh wh what's the wh user interface: Yeah . Well it's it's just another way to do the exact same thing that the buttons do . project manager: 'kay industrial designer: But would we marketing: Okay now what I see with the scroll wheel is everybody has buttons . So from a marketing standpoint I have I have another door to walk through when we have something that's unique . marketing: If it creates something more complex or more expensive , then I don't know if that makes it a marketing necessity . But again , from a marketing perspective I want as much new and different about this thing as possible because we're we're co it's a very competitive market . project manager: What I understand about scroll wheels is they're they're quite expensive to to make . project manager: So I d user interface: Th they are gonna be more expensive , but on the other hand , it it is an alternative if if you think that's gonna sell some some you know if if we're gonna make up the extra cost by extra sales I think maybe it's worth it to do it , but I would just use if I was gonna do this I would just use the scroll wheel for s channels up and channels down . user interface: No we can we can do multiple scroll wheels but project manager: Well I d I like the idea of basically focusing the my personal preference is focusing the p the product on the idea of the the case the the dock to put it in to to charge it . project manager: And if we we keep the rest in a format that is durable because th th the whole product's gonna need to be more durable th thus because you're not going to be ditching it as often . I think we got some exclusivity in that , you know , we got something that nobody else has right now , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and and that means we can we can make some adjustments in the retail or wholesale price if we need to and it also can create it's own demand from it's uniqueness . project manager: So our big decision then is like how do we do like we have to decide on the details and we have to decide on well n not exactly the details , but d do we have What type of casing ? I personally like what you were saying about the plastic with the rubber . project manager: user interface: I'm thinking yeah something like kinda almost like these pens , you know , where there's you have plastic bits and then it's not really rubber but just kinda like a fused the plastic with rubber on the outside . Just a very thin sorta sheet for a a grip , sorta thing or for user interface: Well no ma yeah maybe a bit more then th is on here but ju just as a kind of an inspiration , these pens I think are are kind of project manager: Okay . So then if we d d do we want to do anything more basic with the more advanced with the user interface in terms of do we want to go for buttons , or do we want if we're ditching the scroll wheels do we want to go L_C_D_ ? Do we want to give do we want to have anything else on it ? industrial designer: It's only a T_V_ . user interface: Or from from my perspective I think L_C_D_ is a mistake because this is a universal remote and all you're doing it's you're not gonna get any information back from the television , so the only information you can display on this remote is what channel you just sent it at last and there's just not a lot of information , you know , there . user interface: So I I don't see any reason for having an L_C_D_ 'cause it's an increased cost . Yeah right now there's right now there's nothing coming out of the T_V_ to receive , so you know unless technology changes and information starts coming out of the a cable box or something there's no s I don't see the , user interface: Right . project manager: Okay so the question is now I guess we need t to decide on well y you guys basically have to now go and figure out the details of this thing . marketing: project manager: So , what we need to know in terms of marketing and project management are are there any other questions that we need to answer now before you guys can go and build this ? marketing: project manager: What what overall things have we not decided on ? user interface: Well we have to I think for me it's still not exactly clear exactly what the inter user interface is gonna be . There's the scroll wheel , in or out ? What do you guys like in the user interface ? project manager: I think maybe in terms of marketing , is that gonna make enough of a difference to justify the cost ? marketing: Again . Well I think it's it's the more uniqueness you can bring to the product , the easier it is , I believe , for me to market . And so we can go with the same thing , but we're gonna be com competing in a in a broader market than if we go with something unique . You know the other thing I thought about was you know , do we go to something like this ? Make a remote that doesn't look like a remote . It's just another it's just a an idea , and I don't know user interface: Well I dunno about like the flip-phone idea , because I think , as far as durability th it's not a big well maybe when it's closed . marketing: what I see one of the things one of the things you brought up in an earlier presentation is , when you got children , their their stuff gets inside the circuitry , they get dirty , they get messy with drinks and stuff . marketing: And what I keep throwing out there I just keep throwing out ideas to try to make this thing look or act or in some way identify itself as unique or different . project manager: Yeah and I guess th th the question th th that you're being asked right now is whether is the dock enough of a unique feature to be able to go out and sell that a a as a a very different product , or do we really need the scroll wheel as well ? marketing: Oh okay project manager: Because the scroll wheel comes at quite a cost . I think if you can have the base station with a with a locator , I think those are two very strong features , user interface: Well marketing: if that's something that can be integrated without a bunch of extra cost . user interface: The The locator's gonna require a radio transmitter , which will marketing: project manager: That's gonna n is that gonna need a better chip as well ? user interface: we're probably gonna have to go with a like a medium chip , s I would imagine . marketing: So it's just I I think that's user interface: It should be a really simple signal though so marketing: I know personally that would be a very attractive feature , is to have a have a button I can push to find my remote control . project manager: And it's presumably gonna need a little speaker in it or something like that as well to beep . project manager: But I guess a little tiny speaker is gonna be quite cheap , it's not gonna need q quality , is it ? It's user interface: Oh yeah yeah . marketing: Or maybe you can like have a a smell-o-rama , you know you push a button and it s puts out a stink . project manager: marketing: You can industrial designer: Maybe not marketing: project manager: Makes your living room more fresh as you watch . I think that user interface: So the scroll wheel , in or out ? project manager: pr my personal preference is out . I don't think the cost is justified for a little bit more uniqueness when we already have that , and I don't s think it's obvious and natural how it would be used . Yeah I think we have like and it's not very usable and it will bring down the robustness of the whole thing , project manager: . marketing: user interface: I don't know exactly what the increased cost is gonna be , but I think he does have a point , i it might push somebody over the edge when they're looking at our at our remote versus something else , when they see this one has a scroll wheel to go up and down on the channels . project manager: But then that that surely d depends a little on the T_V_ marketing: W project manager: because some T_V_s are quite slow at changing channels from like so user interface: Sure . project manager: if you've got a scroll wheel and you s you have to scroll scroll it really really slowly just so that you're actually keeping in pace with the T_V_'s ability to to change channels . project manager: You scroll it a bunch of times and you wait for it to user interface: Well I think wh what it would be is like like the m like this , where it's maybe you know a digital wheel , right , where it's where it's quantized into you know certain project manager: . That's where you user interface: That was that was my my intuition of what the scroll wheel would be . marketing: user interface: It's just it's basically it it's just a f look and feel thing . marketing: I I think there's you know that there are so many people today that are that are surfing are television surfers , and I see the scroll as a as a great mechanism for surfing . project manager: Yeah if you're just sitting there going marketing: Instead of going button-to-bu you just j you'd j j j j j j . user interface: Now just just so you know though you did bring up a point which is very valid , is a lot of T_V_s won't re the T_V_s won't respond exactly the same . Some of them are gonna be kinda slow switching , so you may like queue up like fifteen channel changes , and it'll be like flip , flip , flip . user interface: But project manager: You could basically make it so that it'll it's just gonna be sending a signal to the T_V_ yeah the T_V_'s ge so if you send about five flip channels , if you did that it's gonna flip once . user interface: Yeah it just might be frustrating where you can't make it go as fast as you want , project manager: Other than click click click . user interface: but I think once people get used to it I I do like the idea of the scroll wheel though . project manager: And if we're marketing it as a high niche product , then we're gonna be selling it to people who are buying good T_V_s as well , yeah , presumably . marketing: Now the the only thing I I on the interface side of it , is that I I I see the dilemma . But if we have the option of of scrolling at any particular speed , or the option of jumping direct , okay . marketing: So I can go presuming I have , on my television , something that tells me what channel I'm on , I can scroll direct from channel five to channel thirty two . So I don't know that really that's that's gonna be a a d problem , 'cause the television can go automatically from channel five to channel thirty two with the push of a button . marketing: So ca can we can we create that kind of interface within a scroll system ? You understand what I'm saying ? user interface: I think I know what you might be getting at , or or project manager: Oh I see so if maybe if we had an L_C_D_ up the top that just did a number on it , right ? And then it that basically marketing: Oh no we could read it from the television . user interface: Well , what about this what about if you can programme in your favourite channels into this scroll wheel and you can just like roll through your favourite channels , project manager: . user interface: and it c it project manager: You'd need a display on the th the thing . user interface: Why ? It'll tell you when you flip the channel on the T_V_ . You say programme start , and then type in marketing: Put user interface: 'cause you still have the typing you know you'll still have the keypad where you can type 'em in manually . user interface: So programme start , zero , one , enter , zero , five , enter , thirty eight , enter , programme end . project manager: and that just basically flips between it and it'll go it sends out zero , five , and then thirty six , and then zero , one again . project manager: That's not gonna be too expensive because that's gonna be you're gonna be able to nab that off of computer mouse manufacturers really . user interface: Oh well we also have to determine in some manner how to switch between modes , between going through your favourites list and just hitting up one , up two . marketing: Or we go directional up we go we go this we go this we go this way for one , we go this way for the other . project manager: Yeah people are gonna have their favourite sorta , whether they do that or whether they marketing: Ah-ha okay . user interface: I think we'll need a we'll need a mode switch , but then if we have a mode switch we're gonna need some kinda indicator project manager: Just the lights behind the buttons . user interface: to which , an L_E_ an L_E_D_ project manager: You could have back-lit buttons maybe . And if we're making back-lit buttons period , do we want that just for the mode indicator or maybe to indicate what button you're pressing at the time , so that you know if it's actually pressed or not . Just so you know I think it was my understanding that before we were gonna stay in the mid-market range . project manager: Yeah well we don't have it's not that we have more money , marketing: Didn't you say so ? project manager: we can push up the the price . marketing: So I don't know I don't know whether having user interface: I just wanna make sure everybody's on board with it . So we really need to be sure as to what we can push the cost up to , though we haven't got to a stage where we're ready to pin down the price of components . But I'd say what sorta price are we looking to be able to sell something like that , and what sorta price can we make it for ? marketing: Well I think th I think the design and technology has to come back and say , okay to create this product we see it's gonna cost us this much for this volume , because we do have a volume target of of fifty million profit . project manager: Yeah no I I think that's where we really should be more flexible than anything else because as we said in the last meeting , our management is really looking for us to push our brand . project manager: so I think the the profit expectation for this one product is maybe not as important as being able to marketing: Okay I'm I'm okay with that . I guess what I just want to me the next step is for these guys to come come in with the design proposal w with the cost estimate attached , and then we have to take this to the next level . project manager: But th what's our ballpark as to what we'd be able to sell something like this for ? user interface: Well y yeah . Let's let's try and think now , how much would you pay for marketing: We have to find cost . user interface: with all these features how much would you pay if you went to the store , and you were in the market f to replace your T_V_ remote , how much would you pay for that ? project manager: But you've gotta think who our target market is because I I'm not our target market . project manager: I'm a student , but on the other hand I would think , with my Project Manager salary , I would think yeah I could probably afford this user interface: If industrial designer: user interface: Then you could probably afford this . If I had a cool new T_V_ and this was r looking really slick and it had the dock and it had the scroll wheel , which I think's a really cool idea , that would sell me on it a little . I do I don't think I'd go over a hundred Euro certainly , that would be way too much , user interface: Oh no no . project manager: but the I would be happy paying over forty for it , I guess , but not much user interface: I would say thirty five to forty . marketing: Because one of th one of the things we're marketing about this product is that this is the last one you will ever need to buy for your television . industrial designer: Okay so we'll come up with something between thirty five and fifty that is rug rubber , robust , with scroll wheel , with the new facilities of the scroll wheel like favourite stuff , favourite channels , and and with a cradle , and yeah and the locator . The next meeting starts in thirty minutes , although does it ? It starts at three twenty one , the next meeting . marketing: Well I have Is my three twenty one is the next meeting ? project manager: The the ne next meeting is three twenty one yeah . project manager: Okay are there any other questions with regards to what this thing's gonna do , look like , how it's gonna work that need to be addressed before we really look at this in a lot of detail ? user interface: I don't think so <doc-sep>Now hopefully we've all got a better idea from than we did f leaving the last meeting as to what it is we are up to now . you should know that I'll be taking minutes during all the meetings , as I was struggling to our last time and that'll be easier for me now because I'm not actually giving the whole presentation . the additional points are just the stuff that we sent and that I forwarded on from upper management having a few bright ideas to make our lives painful . Here's the additional points I just wanted to put those in there to see if you guys had any comments on them . project manager: So does anyone have any overall marketing: Well what comes up for me is that if we're gonna if we're gonna be marketing a product that is going to be having no teletext , people are very comfortable with the idea of having teletext and using teletext , and so we're not we're gonna be a new product without something that people are very comfortable having right now . What are we gonna have that makes this thing better than project manager: Well tha that first point could also be an op opportunity because in seeing that teletext is becoming outdated , some sort remote control that can work with the Internet there is the opportunity that's presented , I guess . marketing: So what I'm talking about is I see that one side we're eliminating something so we have to come up with another side which is , what are we gonna be targeting our market that identifies our product as better than because it doesn't have teletext it has ta-ta-ta-ta-ta . So we're really probably , in terms of marketing , are looking for that's that's a cost winner rather than a fantastic new feature product . industrial designer: So we're gonna be removing the teletext out of any T_V_ that we people use our remote with . project manager: But there's also the potential for mark there's a market here for our lost teletext . project manager: For example someone that just goes to the shop that wants a replacement wants it as cheap as possible . marketing: That's what I'm that's what I'm talking about is is that we have to find something that is gonna be very attractive about this product 'cause somebody , some people are gonna be hap unhappy 'cause it took they can't ac access their teletext . 'Cause we're talking about eighty percent or ninety percent or ninety-five percent of the televisions out there are are teletext . marketing: So so it's it's not that I'm criticizing the product at all . It's just when we eliminate that then what do we bring ? What are we bringing in to take the place of this , project manager: 'kay . industrial designer: So then the double R_ will be our our project manager: On the product yeah . Can you handle that black and yellow ? user interface: I think one of industrial designer: I tho I tho I thou I think Rol Ro Rolls-Royce might mind , but don't worry . user interface: I think w , yeah , one of the things that we should also keep in mind when we're doing this our company's slogan is we put the fashion in electronics , right . So I think our kind of our target here is to have some kind of very like sleek nice look remote and we want it to be functional as well , but I think one of the main selling points is that we don't want it to be clunky like like this thing here . We want something that looks nice and it's fashionable and so marketing: So you have this ? project manager: Nah . But click it on off ? user interface: so you all know me , I'm the Industrial Designer . And we've some basic components that our remote is gonna need , just basically every remote'll need 'em . we have to decide on our our user interface , which is his department , but the in user interface is also a major component . we need a programmable digital signal processor to to take the input from the user and translate that into into electronic signal , which we pass to the infra-red L_E_D_ , which you aim at the television which and it receives that signal . And we also need to have the if we want a universal remote we need to have encryption codes for the different makes of T_V_s . So we need to know all the different you know all the different signals and so that'll require some memory as well . You ha the v the power source is in the upper right-hand corner there , and you can see that we have the user interface here which is connected to the chip which does all our signal processing , and then passes that signal on to the infra-red L_E_D_ and that signal is then emitted and received by the television at the photo-transistor . So those are the basic components that need to go into this and everything else is pretty much open to move around . marketing: Now is would this be considered just a standard user interface: I think any des marketing: This is not this is not cutting edge technology we're talking here . user interface: Yeah this is just this is just a basic layout of ev of all the components that w w are gonna be absolutely necessary f to have a working remote . We can add things in like if we wanted some voice recognition , that that you can kinda say would would fall under the user interface and the digital signal processing chip . project manager: Do we have an idea of costs of different components ? user interface: well the most the most costly components are gonna be the chip and the th it could als basically the user interface and the casing are gonna be expensive as well . user interface: the L_E_D_ and the the transistors and everything else are you know they're they're pretty cheap . So depending on what we want our functionality to be , the chip could be expensive or it could be cheap . user interface: depending on the n amount of memory we need in there and stuff like that and h and h you know how much power . user interface: but and I think a significant part of the cost could be the actual the actual casing itself and and you know the the b the buttons and things like that , I think . project manager: And you wanna get industrial designer: When we're fighting over it's also more lot more fun . project manager: View a slide show , that's what you wanna do , yeah ? Just go up to view . you guys know me , Pedro , and what I found is we want to do fashion and I think , honestly , we should keep technology low and just simple basically and try to aim for design . If basically a case will will cost the same if it looks good or bad so we ma we have to make it look good . project manager: industrial designer: And although mo most people will buy s televisions and everything for that have loads of loads of little functions and everything and they mostly end up using simple functions and little things and most the people won't won't get too mad of actually having to go the to the s to the television to , for instance , tune in their the stations . So as for what I would recommend for the the interface design , and I will change the colours on the on the logo , but we should go for the user-oriented device , so simple controls and good ergonomics . and although I th I th I'm still here recommending the teletext so I'll remove that , I guess , but we should go for the project manager: But I t I think what the the management recommendation was less that there's a worry that teletext will become outdated rather than we shouldn't have it . So I I still think if it's cheap enough functionality-wise to include , it really should be in there . project manager: Because otherwise we're just going to even if it's necessary or not , if you if you're given the choice between a t a remote with teletext or without when it really if it i if it isn't more expensive for us to k make because as far as I understand it , it can be operated with the same set of buttons , yeah ? So it should be in there . I in the very beginning it said with the with the advent of computers there's gonna be the it's gonna be out-moded teletext . How does how does computers and teletext h how why is one eliminating the need of the other ? I don't understand that . project manager: Well maybe what we're getting into here is the the idea of Internet through the T_V_ for example . industrial designer: Yeah the they're basically aiming at saying that you would use you know a couple of years ago teletext to be the easiest way to check like for the scheduling and the next programme and stuff like that user interface: Scheduling . marketing: Yeah 'cause , yeah , I just I don't see the cross-over between computers and television . I do see the cross-over in some sense , industrial designer: Yeah , but it's not happen yet . marketing: So so if we make the cross-over and we're gonna view television on computers then we're then we're losing the the necessity of the remote . S user interface: Unless you have a project manager: Well there there is a for example on digital T_V_ systems you have you can press a button and you can buy things in adverts , user interface: Yeah . project manager: A a family member of mine has got a system where you just you can Yeah , and there's other features for example on other systems where you can pause live T_V_ and things like that . They're just features from the Internet from computers are are coming into the T_V_ sort of under the covers , but you still use it through a teletext . project manager: So now the things to think here are that that there's gonna be more functionality , potentially that we can handle . And all of those require the other commands with more complexity and more software and user interface: I think a lot of that's proprietary anyways . If if it's , for example , a trainable one then we're just simply having like an up , down , left , right , an okay button or something like that might might do as well in future proofing it . industrial designer: Yeah but we would increase the price to try to make it a trainable one , so project manager: . One way the other teletext was there but I guess we can remove it or , you know , make two separate interface designs . user interface: I think if it's possible you should try to you know have a talk with management about that . marketing: I I don't see the logic in elimination of teletext , I just I I project manager: Yeah , and neither do I in fact . industrial designer: project manager: I'll communicate that back to those guys there a a and th the message really we wanna be sending to them is that , although teletext may become outdated w there's no l logic in not having it in there anyway i if it doesn't affect the price . project manager: but I I think what they're pushing us towards here is in terms of thinking of ways to future-proof our system for future systems that have something else other than teletext maybe . project manager: I dunno I'm industrial designer: Yeah but we're not putting some there's no no putting anything in in the place of teletext . marketing: So so w we can't go and pump a whole bunch of technology into this thing project manager: Yeah . So if we drop if we are gonna choose to drop teletext , again what are we adding to the product that makes it marketable ? project manager: . So if we're keeping it basic we're loo loo what we're looking to sell it basically is it's just being very easy to use , looking exceptionally good , that sort of thing . marketing: I don't I don't see it , and to me if I'm gonna market a product for b for beauty for for design I'm gonna I'm gonna try to market it at a much higher price . So I would market this product it at eighty-nine Euros and come up with some really beautiful exterior design or something th but but I don't think we have that flexibility . project manager: But i if design if design is cheap and functionality is basic , then twenty-five Euros is probably a high price for a commoner garden stan standard T_V_ so the place remote the then the place we're going to justify that cost is through through design through making it a a sleek elegant high-priced basic remote . Does that make sense , huh ? marketing: No I no I I understand what you say , project manager: . marketing: but what I'm what I'm , okay we probably need to move along , project manager: Yeah we probably should . marketing: but my my concern is trying to find a marketing niche for this product , project manager: We we're doing alright for time . marketing: and if I'm coming in with a with with twenty-five Euros , which is mid-market price , then what am I going to give these people for this ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: No just I I would I would advocate for continuing teletext and those would be the basic commands . as for , you know , the the case design maybe I'll come up with more concrete ideas . Right now it's just the idea of simplicity and slickness , cute and small user interface: Right . I'm just thinking you know with all these universal remotes that are out there , how many people how many people actually use every feature that ar you know i like these trainable remotes and things like that , where , you know , it's just so confusing to do to use all these functions . Where I think the largest portion of the market is just gonna you know they lost their T_V_ remote , they need another one that'll work with their T_V_ . They want something that looks nice , that that that isn't gonna break when they drop it , that you know that maybe it's it's ergonomic , it feels good in your hand , something like that . user interface: I think that's gonna be where you're gonna find the biggest , you know , market share . project manager: So we are looking for something that looks good and just works , rather than looking for any special features . Is that user interface: I think the more bells and whistles we add , it's just gonna cut into our into our profits . user interface: Because I think as we as we add costs for things like for like if we add the voice recognition and things like that , I think you know what percentage of the of the of the market is actually gonna use that ? project manager: . marketing: Oh P Pedro , I just want to say quickly I I would really like it when you can come up with some more bells and whistles , eh . industrial designer: marketing: You know sell things come to my mind is something that's voice-activated . I know we're getting into some , I hope , some big money on this thing , but project manager: I think that's probably a question more for for this guy here , yeah . marketing: 'Cause and I think of voice-activated I think of of how many times I've I've lost my my remote and I can't find it . So some way that I can I can find my remote by clapping my hands or something user interface: I'm trying to find some bells and whistles 'cause when they talk about tel taking out teletext , it's like , what are we gonna put in ? What makes this thing attractive ? And it's only for televisions . So we everyth our our competition out there has got these these multiple adaptors where they can use 'em for their V_C_R_s , their D_V_D_s , their their televisions and we're coming out with one remote for television only . marketing: I I I don't s I really have to say I don't see the market niche for this product . I'm I I go along with this , because this is what we're given to try to market , but I I don't see the market niche for this product without without some really sort of something really special to identify it as as unique in the market . industrial designer: I think technology we'd we we're not in the price range to do it . We don't have the money to do it towards t f technology so we should we should aim at design . marketing: Okay well , so so that's up to you then to to make this box in something that's absolutely extraordinary . Does any of the the features that Pedro's spoken about here have any implications we might not have thought about on in terms of just pure functionality ? In terms of making it work or the cost of that or user interface: I don't I think all these things are pretty standard . marketing: Well you know for marketing f marketing for me is and how do I go here ? Okay . user interface: No no no marketing: Is that right ? user interface: you just get off that . Yeah , what for me is it I d I don't know what I'm marketing right now , okay , 'til you spoke and when I wrote this , I don't know what I'm marketing . I just know that I I was identified as a a we identified ourselves as a as a developer , as a manufacturer , and as a as a distributor t to other wholesalers . And so the th the twenty-five Euros that we've identified as the sale price is a wholesale price rather than a retail price . so what I did is I I decided that that this this needs to be a product in a in a sense can market itself . So I say inspiration , so having something beauty , something attractive , something that in a sense will sell itself . cutting edge technology , I don't think we're gonna have that , these were ideas I was putting together , unless we come up with some New Age product a as far as the casing is concerned . I I wanna make this thing something that I can identify as special in some way , so maybe we can have some I I talked about environmentally sensitive , maybe we have a product that can be identified in some way as advantageous in a home . I wanted to talk about who we are as a as a corporation , that we're new , we're aggressive , we're competitive , we're we're trying to provide a product from a new perspective rather than from an old corporate line . marketing: we're kind of in the middle of the market , but what I'm seeing is that the market is ready for I I identified new technology , but again , because what I see is budget restrictions and limitations , I don't know that we can bring any new technology into this thing . user interface: And it's kind of along the s lines of environmentally sensitive , and it may even fit into ergonomics , and even kind of address the issue of losing losing the remote , what we were saying it's a common issue . user interface: what we can do is , well you know that batteries throwing a aw remotes run through batteries like crazy . Well maybe not a solar remote but instead what about if we had like a power cradle ? marketing: But solar user interface: Like a a cradle that is is there to hold the remote when you're not using it , so you'll always know where the remote is 'cause you have to put it back there to charge the remote , and we can , instead of having instead of having , you know , replaceable batteries we'll just have a power cell that stays there for the life of the remote . And also you can I I think it's a good opportunity for the user design or for not just for the user design , but also for the just for the look and feel of the remote as as a whole . You know you could have some kind of neat little , you know , a sexy design for d a cradle and the remote itself . marketing: But boy , we can sell this thing , because there's no batteries , it's environmentally sensitive , i we can identify it as a safer product in some form . I really see project manager: Now the the question is can we make this for less than twelve-fifty per ? marketing: But the cost i No no . project manager: We we well do we necessarily have to change the end cost because Can we dl can we do that without changing it twelve-fifty per product , if we basically can sell more based on this ? marketing: There's I don't see it anyway . user interface: Well marketing: I my reaction is no , but user interface: what I can do is I can d look into ho well Pedro and I can look into how much this might increase our our costs project manager: user interface: and you can look into what kind of effect an increased cost is gonna have on our on our final numbers . project manager: Yeah we we can certainly push for a more expensive product if that's gonna be marketing: Well , see I I see I I'm an advocate to make this an exclusive product . Let's make this thing really exclusive , environmentally sensitive , high-tech design , ergonomics , all of this . If you don't have one , hey what kind of remote do you have ? Oh you've got one of those , oh fantastic , I want one of those too . user interface: I just don't know about that , because in order to do that in order to price it at that kind of level I think we'd need to have every functionality that all the other competitors are offering like being able to operate , you know , the D_V_D_ player and , you know , the stereo system and all that . And additionally we're m maybe not supporting teletext project manager: Nah , I think we can say with certainty now that we are supporting teletext . marketing: user interface: But I do think there are some basic features that we don't have that a lot of other remotes are going to have . marketing: Yep , one one thing I don't understand is h they've they've given us this package , okay . I don't think it's our place to create their product for them , maybe it is . I don't know what kind of role we have in this in the corporate ladder , but to me it's like , okay , you have got your here's our ideas , okay . marketing: And then let them look at those ideas and they say , yeah well , we can we can raise the price twenty percent , you know we like this idea , this idea no , but to me it's it's about a choice , do we follow their directives or do we make presentations back and and then and then discuss ? beca I I do not I do not see the market niche for the product that they're handing f handing us right now . I think our market niche is basically people who need who have lost their remote or who've broken their remote and don't wanna send back to the manufacturer , they just wanna run out to the store and get a remote , and then they're gonna look on the shelf and they're gonna see ours is the nicest looking remote . These aren't I I think that it project manager: And and th to get to back to another point , sorry for cutting in but , I th I think it's important to remember that that this remote has to work with multiple T_V_s , yeah , 'cause it's selling on its own . project manager: It's not going to be specifically for Hitachi T_V_s or or whatever . project manager: So technologically , if I understand it , T_V_s T_V_ remote's working exactly the same way as video remotes and D_V_D_ remotes . All you need to do is train them to the individual one , all you need to do is is know the the f like some four-digit code . marketing: project manager: So saying that it works with all T_V_s is equivalent to saying that it'll work with D_V_D_s and other things . industrial designer: Yeah y y you you wouldn't marketing: They've identified this product limita project manager: We have done this . marketing: That's why I say I don't I don't see the market niche for this . marketing: If we if w if we were going to have a product that worked for D_V_D_s , V_C_R_s and everything , then I can see the market niche , project manager: marketing: And it's like whoa we ha in my opinion we have to go with something that's extremely exclusive to make this thing marketable , user interface: Well here's project manager: And I I'd marketing: because who wants just a television remote ? project manager: sorry . user interface: If you're in the market for this ultimate remote , you're not gonna go for just a television remote . If it can't control if it can't control your your D_V_D_ player and a al if y if you can't get that all-in-one ultimate remote , that just you can throw all your other remotes away . marketing: That's why I say I quest I q I question the marketability of the product . user interface: So that's what I'm saying project manager: The the one thing that that that you said really struck a chord with me here in that we're we're carrying the corporate identity with the product , but we're actually looking for a large profit at the same time where I'd be inclined to go back to upper-level management and say like let's just cut down our profit expected on this product because we are actually branding our company here . We're trying to get mind-share about Real Reaction to to the people who are gonna buy consumer electronics . We want people to eventually say , oh that's that's Real Reaction that's a good m make . And and we're gonna make it we're gonna win mind-share by either being a fantastic product industrial designer: project manager: or for it working , it just being good , reasonable-priced , and solid . So if we can make if we can put an emphasis here on it not breaking I think that's in itself an extremely big thing . marketing: W okay if you if you drop the cost , now if you make if you make go to the other side of the cost scale , and you make it less expensive , then all of a sudden now we're going into an a a new market area . So we can say low-cost good design , beautiful , wa-da-da-da-da-da . project manager: Is twenty-five Euros a mid-market price for a remote ? marketing: project manager: Okay . marketing: for for multi for a multi-function remote , that's a mid-market price . In a discount right now you can buy 'em on sale sometimes for about about eighteen , nineteen Euro , project manager: Okay . marketing: and that's for the multi-functions , D_V_D_ , V_C_R_ , catch-alls . And and they have 'em in a little box in the middle , and and this is the consciousness that most people have about replacement remote controls . We have to have something that will change people's thinking to identify this as advantageous , and I don't know what that is . project manager: Well I'd be inclined to say , if we can make the design better than any comparable remote while reducing the cost , then that's the way we really should play it . If we can take it down to you know fifteen rather than twenty-five and make a low profit-margin on it , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Or my d project manager: And I can communicate this to to the more senior people within the company here to to get a reaction . user interface: What about the idea that I had with the cradle ? How do you feel about that ? project manager: Well how does everybody feel ? user interface: Or how does everybody feel ? marketing: I I well we g we're talking about the other end now . user interface: No , but I that's the thing I I don't think it's necessarily the other end . marketing: I like the idea , but we have t we have to find out project manager: The other the o the problem with that in my mind I just think off-hand as a as a consumer , would I wanna buy that ? And I think maybe not because I've got a remote and I'll take it to different chairs , I'll take it to different user interface: It i if it is gonna be somewhere that you put it down then it needs to be at the side of your armchair , user interface: Right . So it's very good for some people but it's not a like user interface: Well it lasts it would last for several hours on its own power , but when you're done with it you put it back in the cradle . project manager: You have to d shift down the side of the couch to find it and put it back and user interface: project manager: I d I d I d I think it it in my mind it doesn't seem like something that oh I'd really want because of that fact . You know if we're gonna go in this direction , to me we're going to the other side of the cost range . marketing: Are we gonna make this selling selling the cost as a high high-tech environmentally sensitive whatever , or are we gonna go to the lower side of the range ? Again I don't see our market niche in the middle for our product yet . project manager: So what do we think maybe we should Pedro , do you have any opinion on it ? industrial designer: we should keep it simple , medium-low cost mar cost area and make it look good . marketing: W a question I have in in a 'cause I I I think I agree with you on , we gotta make it a box . marketing: Can can can we have multiple designs ? Have a modern , have a traditional , have a you know , and so so instead of them all looking the same , people can have maybe four or five different designs they can choose from . I don't know what that creates cost , or user interface: Well the the problem with that is we may end up with a whole bunch of inventory of a of a poor design you know . industrial designer: Yeah , complicated but user interface: but what we could do is some kind of well Yeah we we need to , have a few designs to look at and then come up with something that I think we all agree is , you know , the best fit . I think w what's really important is it has to look good , it has to feel it has to feel good in your hand , project manager: Yeah . user interface: it has to be durable , it has to a and I think it's really important that it doesn't look cheap . I think I think we have to make sure people look at it an and feel like it its like a quality remote . marketing: What ab what ab what about a a remote that's that doesn't maybe look like a remote ? Just an idea . Maybe that could be part of our design exclusivity , is we make a remote that doesn't even look like a remote it it opens like a telephone . user interface: Or what if it looks like a pen ? marketing: Doesn't matter , yeah . user interface: A pointer ? marketing: It That's the thing , I'm gonna keep thumping on . I really un unless you guys are die-hard against the fact that it's possible like it reduces the usability of the remote b and the fact that you can't lose it on your own , I think it still might be a good idea to investigate having like a power cradle . user interface: Because I really think i in a certain sense it almost like for me I would want to have that just , because I know at the end of when I'm done watching T_V_ that when I'm done , oh I better go find the remote and put it back where it belongs . project manager: there's al there's also remote controls I remember that that worked , this hasn't been done in a while I think , but th as a as a watch . user interface: As a watch ? project manager: Yeah , there is remote control watches , user interface: 'kay . project manager: but I think they're a sorta eighties thing , so it might not be easy to market in it but the the technologies came along and it might be cheaper to make now . marketing: One thing I just thought about when you were saying that , is that the p our target market is gonna be someone who has lost or broken project manager: user interface: That's what I was saying . So how many remotes do they wanna buy ? Can we p can we sell them a remote that can maybe guarantee they will not need to buy another one ? user interface: Exactly . marketing: And so with with with this kind of system or locator or something , to to think about , how have people been been losing or breaking their remote ? user interface: user interface: And also presumably they've marketing: And and then and then design the product , maybe some component of the product that can identify this as the last one you'll ever need to buy . project manager: Well if if we're going down that then we can we don't need to go the user interface: Exactly . project manager: it it strikes me that the locator feature might actually be quite expensive to make . project manager: Whereas actually just putting it in a power cradle might not be too expensive at all because that's just done with mobile phones user interface: True . project manager: you can just n we we have said we have actually similar products that we can take from and potentially cut costs there . project manager: need to look into whether we can do that but I think we we have some m mobile phone-based products checking quickly our Internet . marketing: It's just it's that I think it's telling us to stop our meeting . marketing: So we have the c we probably have have on-line in our in our system , we have the ability to create this , we're talking about . project manager: without it being too In fact we can cut costs through using the manufacturing that's already gonna be in place here . marketing: If if we can create this we have probably five or six or seven really strong marketing characteristics . user interface: I think one of the things that we can put right on the box is , never buy another battery

The team discussed whether the remote control would have multimedia capabilities, as this would determine the functions to be incorporated. The Project Manager suggested starting with a basic design and expanding on it in future meetings. The Industrial Designer proposed that the remote control should be able to turn the TV on and off, control volume and menu, change channels directly or through channel surfing. The outer case should be flexible, inflatable, and waterproof, with the ability to change in size based on user preference. The remote should also provide oral cues to confirm understanding. The group aimed to optimize button and switch designs, adjust their number and size, filter out unnecessary functions, and replace buttons with screens for better usability. They agreed that the product should be visually appealing and branded with the company logo. While considering removing teletext, they decided to keep it due to its popularity. Marketing suggested designing an all-in-one ultimate remote control. Speech recognition was abandoned due to potential sound interference, but the group adopted the idea of rolling through favorite channels. The remote should be both fancy and easy to hold, with a suitable size and shape. New technologies and internet connectivity were to be incorporated, with a wheel for navigation. However, implementing LCD and automatic speech recognition technologies within the budget was deemed impossible.

Question: Summarize the discussion about finance and production finance. Article: Okay the agenda we're gonna do an opening and then I'll talk about the minutes from the last meeting , what we d discussed , then we'll have the prototype presentation and a look at the evaluation criteria . So , starting off with the last the last one , oh I don't have it here , but we talked about energy , we're gonna use a kinetic battery , we want to use a simple chip , because we're not gonna need a a shuffle , we're gonna need a scroll , we're choosing a latex case w in fruity colours that's curved and we're using push buttons with a supplement of an on-screen menu . user interface: Right , do you wanna start ? industrial designer: Right , well we made three different prototypes and I guess we'll start with with this one . it's you hold it sort of either like like this in your left hand or you switch it over and it's easily adaptable to either hand . You can push the buttons with your thumb like a mobile phone , or you can push them with your index finger of your other hand , or even there's a whole variety , you can hold it like this and press it with your same index finger . We have our up and down buttons , which are also gonna be our channel selectors , and we have our little menu button here . If you push if you're just pushing these normally , they're the menu buttons , if the volume buttons rather . If we press select three times , the menu with the other features and pro possibly also with your T_V_ channel choices shows up , and you have your five presets down here . industrial designer: or shall I present the Martian ? user interface: Okay , project manager: The little lightning bolt in it , very cute . user interface: What We call that one the rhombus , marketing: I could project manager: The v the rhombus rhombus ? user interface: the rhombus . user interface: this one is known as the potato , it's industrial designer: user interface: it's a marketing: user interface: how can I present it ? It's an ergonomic shape , so it it fits in your hand nicely . the red ones are for changing channels , channel up and channel down and that's moves between your favourite channels that you've selected . this middle button here brings up the on-screen menu and when you're working in the on-screen menu you use the other four buttons to navigate around the menu system and the middle button to select and that's basically it , that's the potato . project manager: on , off ? user interface: that would be one of your channels , basically , project manager: Okay . user interface: so like channel zero would be t to switch switch the machine off , project manager: Yeah we turn it off . marketing: Could the middle button of the on-screen menu function as a power button ? user interface: not really , industrial designer: user interface: it would make it hard to turn the machine off , to turn your T_V_ off . project manager: industrial designer: And then you have on the sides to make it a little bit more three-dimensional , you have your channel changing , volume changing buttons and your menu button right here in the middle . So , that's for your consideration as well , plus it's an interesting talking point to have standing up . industrial designer: We figured it could stand up like this on your table , if you wanted it to , if I made the bot the bottom flat . marketing: Sorry , what's the yellow one in the middle , industrial designer: the menu select button . basically , in terms of making decisions , what we'd need to do is first of all decide on a form which of the three different shapes we want , then decide what kind of button layout we want , how many buttons , and then to choose what colours we want to make the buttons and if we wanna put any text on the device , like label on the buttons or put a brand name or or a logo on it or whatever . industrial designer: We were we were thinking that normally we'd go for fruity colours , but maybe we're also thinking that your sort of middle aged man , for an example customer , might not want a fruity coloured remote , so m maybe we'd have one version that's a bit toned down , project manager: 'kay . Yeah , something still a little bright to make it hard to lose , but user interface: Would Yeah , but we don't want it to look like a kids' toy . I don't know if you picked up your email , but the f the feature that we considered for it not getting lost . Well we were we were talking about that a little bit when we got that email and we think that each of these are so distinctive , that it it's not just like another piece of technology around your house . industrial designer: So we're we're not thinking that it's gonna be as critical to have the loss marketing: But if it's like under covers or like in a couch you still can't see it . project manager: It's really Would it be very difficult to just have an external device that like I dunno , you tape to your to your T_V_ that when you press it you ha a little light beep goes off ? Do you think that would be conceptually possible ? industrial designer: I think user interface: I think it would be difficult technologically , project manager: user interface: because if your if your remote's lost it's probably under the settee and in that case you can't you can't send an infrared sing signal to it to find it , project manager: . user interface: s so it's I'm not quite sure how it would work project manager: That's true , 'kay . user interface: and then I wonder if it's if it's more just a gimmick then anything else . ho how many times do you really , seriously lose your remote control and would would a device like that actually help you to find it ? industrial designer: There might be something that you can do in the circuit board and the chip to make it make a noise or something , but it would take a lot more development than we have this afternoon . Okay 'cause well , the designs are very bright , so you're right , they're gonna stick out , but industrial designer: So d do people have a preference as far as feel and functionality ? . marketing: I feel like this is simil or it's sort of what already exists so if we're trying to think of something sort of like new and fun , even though this is like what you're init I'm initially drawn to , just 'cause it's like comfortable and like not different . I sort of like this one , like I I don't know why , it just it's like small but still sort of like cute looking , I dunno . But I also like the b the side buttons on that one , like I think that's kind of neat . marketing: But I dunno how much any of this has to do with the fashionable , sort of cool looking thing that we also need to focus on . project manager: Could we maybe have like an extra button on the top for on off ? So then w we wouldn't have to have like a dual function ? industrial designer: yeah , user interface: Yeah , it's possible , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: project manager: why don't we do a product evaluation using your criteria , if you've developed some ? marketing: Well do we w like I think we're supposed to have one that we do it for . marketing: That was industrial designer: So where marketing: I was a little vague on what exactly I'm supposed to do , but let me I have to like write something on the whiteboard , so . Do you need this industrial designer: project manager: or just write on the white board ? marketing: No , I actually don't have like a PowerPointy thing , project manager: Okay . project manager: It's kind of like like a joystick kind of thing , industrial designer: Ooh . project manager: Oh it does , industrial designer: project manager: it's kind of like industrial designer: user interface: It's like a deformed foot , I dunno . project manager: There it could have a stem like that , 'cause I do l kind of like the stem . industrial designer: is that where people are leaning then , the potato ? I like the idea of the project manager: I think I'm leaning towards the potato . in that like i withing menus there are submenus , and so how do you get back to the main menu ? industrial designer: . industrial designer: Well that on the iPod , for example , you just every time you wanna go back you hit the menu button again and it brings you back one level . project manager: But that has a menu button separate from a select button , whereas if this one's both the menu and the select button ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: This is , it's the up and down buttons are used for scrolling up and down for a list of choices . industrial designer: maybe it can be one of those , if you press down and hold for two seconds , then it brings you back one level or something . Well , as long as we have that in mind as we're designing it still , 'kay . marketing: Okay , so which one are we sort of roughly looking at to address whether or not it meets our s necessities , the yellowy one is that industrial designer: The potato ? Are we leaning towards the potato ? user interface: Potato . marketing: So basically what we need to do is some of the things that we've talked about before we need to make sure that that remote actually does conform to the things that we said it was going to . marketing: So what we sort of wanna do is that we each need to separately rank each of the following things and then I'll tabulate an average just to make sure that it does meet that . marketing: So we'll just go through them one at a time and we'll just go around and each of you can tell me on a scale of one to seven with one being really extremely true and seven being not true at all , or false , if the remote that we've created conforms to the following criteria . So like in my opinion the for now at least , the yellow one is probably somewhere in the middle so I'm gonna say it's like a three . marketing: What does each of you project manager: I I kind of think it's it's unique enough that I'd give it a one or a two . Alright , and same sort of scale for functionality , is it functional ? I think it's extremely functional , I'm gonna give it a one . marketing: One ? user interface: I think it's it's functional , it's also pretty basic , so I'll give it a two . I think it'll get everything done , I think it might be a little confusing at first , I don't know if that's gonna be a later one . Well there's some other ones , I will address that , project manager: Okay , then I'm gonna give it a two . Not really , not so much , 'cause we we don't have the L_C_D_ screen , we don't have fancy chip . Other than what it looks like , I dunno if it's really project manager: Well , the kinetic battery . But it project manager: But they'll notice it after like a year , marketing: but we know it's there . marketing: And if it's made of like latex , that whole idea , that's pretty cool . 'Cause it we could've picked a lot of features that would've made it really industrial designer: Yeah . I I would say that it's Yeah , like fancy versus creative it's it's different . Everyone else ? user interface: I'd say it's technologically it's not it's not unique , it's it's just it is just pushbuttons , so I I'd give it a four . marketing: Next , is it easy to use ? Just so you know , easy to learn will be separate , project manager: 'kay . we next wanna see if it has a spongy quality industrial designer: user interface: marketing: and if indeed it's made of latex or rubber I it's spongy all the way . user interface: Yeah marketing: Iain , what do you give it ? user interface: I'd I'd give it a one . marketing: Alright and the next is , does it integrate some notion of fruits and vegetables ? industrial designer: user interface: . marketing: Well , is it gonna be yellow ? industrial designer: It it might be , 'cause that's our corporate colour , isn't it ? project manager: That's right , yeah , corporate colour , we didn't keep that in user interface: Yeah . project manager: if we I know it would make it a little less c a little more confusing , but if we had all the buttons in black , and a design in and the outside in yellow , that'd be our corporate one and we could also have alternative colours , one a more conservative one , one that's more fruity . user interface: Yeah , project manager: and can we have like an R_R_ inscribed on the bottom or something ? industrial designer: If we had a yellow Sure . industrial designer: So marketing: Alright , so I think it it's industrial designer: it was inspired by the potato , so I think it's pretty fruity . industrial designer: That's a much more trendy than a potato marketing: What are what's everyone's numbers ? industrial designer: one . industrial designer: marketing: Alright , and does the design match the appropriate behaviour ? Remember earlier we discussed that people don't use a lot of buttons , that they use the channel flipping and the volume the most . I think we really took that into account a lot , so I'm gonna give it a one . marketing: Okay , also we talked earlier about R_S_I_ and wanting to prevent any sort of like Carpal Tunnely kind of thing . Do we think that the latex sort of grip appropriately takes that into account ? I think I'll give it a two , 'cause I almost feel like no matter what you do , something is gonna happen . project manager: And if it's repetitive movement it is gonna be only four buttons that you're constantly pushing , but marketing: worth the risk , I think . project manager: I like how it fits in the hand though so I I'd go with a two . Because older people that aren't used to like texting with the thumb might find it a bit at first , project manager: . I just got mine , I still haven't read the instruction book and I'm doing okay , so project manager: . industrial designer: The menu system and the the fact that multiple buttons are used for different things might be a bit confusing , but I think if it's one it's one of those things that it might take you five minutes to figure out , but you'll have it afterwards . user interface: I think it it's probably a little harder then most remotes to learn , because you have to you have to use the menu system and you have to tell it what your favourite channels are industrial designer: Oh , good point . user interface: once you've , yeah once you'd learned how to use it , I think it is a lot easier . It's a pretty high learning curve , it'll be easy once you've done it , but industrial designer: user interface: Yeah . Alright , also earlier we had something about losing it and so now we're not addressing that at all , so project manager: We we industrial designer: project manager: I think we can kind of say we addressed it with colour , but marketing: Okay , so in terms of not losing it , do you think that on a scale of one to seven , how easy or hard is it to lose ? I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a four , 'cause I think that you can still if it's in between somewhere where you can't see it , you're kind of not gonna find it , project manager: industrial designer: I'd say I'd give it a three , I guess it depends on how tidy you are normally . user interface: I'll give it a five 'cause i it would be easy to lose something like that , yeah . marketing: Alright , we also said simplicity , how w how well does it address just being simple ? industrial designer: Simple to use or simple in design ? Do you know ? marketing: I think overall , 'cause we had said before our two main things were simplicity and fashion , industrial designer: marketing: so those are the next two things we're gonna look at . marketing: it like wants to be simple but it's not like totally totally simple , so I'm gonna give it a two . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: It's hot , it's a mango , come on . marketing: how fashionable can you make a remote ? I think it's bringing technology and fashion together real really well . user interface: industrial designer: I don't think it's quite as fashionable as my robot remote project manager: I do like the little Martian one . marketing: And does it meet our like demographic need sort of for international appeal , that whole thing ? Just that it would se serve our audience . marketing: Alright , did anyone have any other features that they think were important that we didn't talk about ? project manager: Well we didn't we didn't address the fact that it does need to b have a corporate logo , so let's let's make sure we keep that in mind that we ha that one of our colours concepts is corporate and has an R_R_ on it . marketing: And so we're gonna do that , so it will address it , project manager: I have an Excel sheet that we're actually gonna calculate the cost , so let me exit out of this first . marketing: Well don't we need plastic , and industrial designer: No , we we the plastic is the plastic for the inside is assumed . project manager: The wood ? industrial designer: Oh , I guess it was rubber rather than latex . marketing: Do we have more than one special colour ? project manager: Yeah , we're using we're gonna need at least two special colours . marketing: Well , but we know that we're having at least three colours , project manager: So let's y say three . marketing: so industrial designer: Well , are we talking about on each colour combination or are we , you know , we'll like we'll have yellow and black . That I thi industrial designer: Or or is white and black , then two more or project manager: I thought that would be under yours . project manager: Maybe the R_R_ will be in colour as well , industrial designer: Alright . Oh , we'll do we wa Are the buttons in special colour , special f I didn't get information on project manager: Oh , marketing: Oh wait . So the case material will just have one colour , right , industrial designer: Well , project manager: but then the buttons will be in special colours ? industrial designer: does it marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: but if we're making multiple varieties of this is where I'm getting confused . project manager: Okay , so each unit will only have one colour on their industrial designer: Alright , and each button s project manager: but the case is could have up to thr the buttons could ea could be up to three colours , 'cause that how it's designed there . project manager: Special form ? They're all kind of just push button , industrial designer: No , project manager: right ? industrial designer: I think they're fine . project manager: Special material ? industrial designer: Material , we want them rubber as well probably , yeah . Oh do I have to do it per button , do I ? industrial designer: No , I don't think so . project manager: Yeah , what can we reduce ? industrial designer: Okay , let's have our buttons all be one colour . Okay , it's the kinetic battery that's kind of expensive , but we have a simple chip , single curve , marketing: project manager: case material is rubber and it's a special colour , industrial designer: Yeah . How did it get more expensive , what did you just change ? project manager: What ? industrial designer: It was it was thirteen and now it's fifteen . marketing: We industrial designer: user interface: What was our target price again ? project manager: Twelve point five . Satisfaction with for example the room for creativity , leadership , teamwork , the means , any new ideas found . So I guess what we're gonna talk about here is just evaluating how we created this project , the information we got on the news , how we used it , if we were able to , you know , use our creativity with the information , how how well I guess I led it , the how well we worked together as a team , the digital pens , the whiteboard . user interface: in that we've achieved almost all of the design goals that we've set industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: I think we could've done even better with a little bit more information , project manager: industrial designer: like what's a single-curved case , how many colours , what do colours count project manager: industrial designer: things , but given given what we had I think that we did we did really well . marketing: Yeah , if I'd had more market research on the fruits and vegetables , maybe we could've taken that into account . industrial designer: Do you think we could user interface: marketing: No , I thought the pen was a little distracting for me personally , like its heaviness , and like just being so conscious of like turning the pages , I dunno . marketing: That was the last one , like I chose not to do a PowerPoint 'cause I didn't think it made sense to , so I liked that I had the option to do that and just to take my own notes and that whole sort of thing . marketing: project manager: I don't think anybody dominated it , which I thought was really good , like each of us was able to like each of you had your information and I I tried to facilitate it without like taking over , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: Should we have that somewhere on the packaging ? I have a little R_R_ . project manager: I know , industrial designer: project manager: let's think of it like a little jingle . industrial designer: marketing: I like the R_R_ , that's gonna be etched in . Hopefully not with just my fingernail at some point but it's quite a useful little gadget . What did we find for new ideas ? project manager: new ideas found ? industrial designer: People should really base their remotes on fruits and vegetables . user interface: industrial designer: That was marketing: Yeah , I didn't even know they existed . industrial designer: I I knew you can get watches that had them , like really quite expensive watches that just never need a battery , 'cause you're always moving your wrist . so , this is the great product kids , I think we've created something really interesting and that we have a market for it , especially if we can produce it at twelve point three industrial designer: Yeah . Make sure in your questionnaire to put down criticisms of both the process and the the final results and . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: If we could choose more than one , that would be my second choice . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: I'm afraid I would user interface: That's cool . industrial designer: It started because I wanted to have it as st as a stem user interface: Break the stem off . industrial designer: Is it started as a pear , but then it started looking more and more like a Martian project manager: Oh industrial designer: when I put the user interface: marketing: Kind of looks like a penguin , like with no eye . user interface: industrial designer: So are are project manager: user interface: That was bound to happen.$ marketing: Oh , sad . Anything else to say ? marketing: Nothing will come up until after our meeting's supposed to be over , project manager: Alright . project manager: I got more master classes , anybody else wanna like take a master's class ? industrial designer: It's really funny that you got spam in your work emails . marketing: industrial designer: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: marketing: No the first one that you sent like I didn't realise that it was a joke and I was like why did she send this to us ? project manager: Oh industrial designer: marketing: It's very it's very work relevant , project manager: It is . project manager: Yes definitely industrial designer: Let's see , project manager: I'm very sad that I didn't get any links to the corporate website . industrial designer: what did I get through the corporate website ? It's just inspiration about circuit boards . project manager: I love Excel , marketing: Here , like , basically project manager: it's one of my favourite programs . marketing: it's like inspiration , basically I'm gonna give you two sentences on fashion and that kind of thing , see . industrial designer: Yeah , my inspiration from from last time is the in interior of a remote control being taken apart bit by bit , talking about circuit boards . industrial designer: Now I have all about circuits and chips and transponders and I wrote it all down , because I thought it would be relevant , like all the different parts of the inside of a remote control , but then they're like , you don't actually need this you just need to talk about the case . marketing: That's like mine it was like , would you prefer an L_C_D_ screen or a multifunction remote control ? And then it didn't have like any kind of table , like awesome , I'm glad they asked that question and didn't report the result . industrial designer: and user interface: We didn't we didn't use the whiteboard that much . project manager: Although I don't see how we could have very l at least for me user interface: industrial designer: I yeah . If I'd gotten pictures of the different parts of the case , the different looks of the case , I would have probably drawn them up , project manager: . industrial designer: but marketing: 'Cause we weren't like voting on anything and I think usually , like whiteboards are good , you know like crossing out ideas , or like if we had had like a brainstorming period . industrial designer: Yeah , we could've put our brainstorming stuff up there rather than just talking about it , project manager: project manager: And with and with the PowerPoint that we can all look at , like you can do all those things pretty much on PowerPoint industrial designer: I think if you had a larger group marketing: Get crazy . marketing: And these might've made us more willing to like take notes than to like write up them here , project manager: . industrial designer: We if we were all gonna stay in here all the time , then having the notes up on the whiteboard would've been alright , project manager: project manager: Now when you were creating your prototypes here , did you work together or did you like do separate projects ? user interface: we we worked together , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: but we were making like we sort of made different shapes and then discussed how the how the buttons might work , project manager: industrial designer: So it was a bit of both really , we just kind of started out by each taking a colour of clay and just fooling around with it and I came up with that rhombus shape project manager: industrial designer: and he came up with the sort of potatoey , mangoey shape , and then just went from there really . user interface: I think we did well in first of all giving our meetings the time , project manager: It's kinda fun . user interface: and second we actually we we did a good job of making firm decisions at the ends of the meetings . user interface: I know what happens sometimes is that you tend to sort of have meetings and then people sorta drift away without anything actually really being decided . user interface: But I think here we got we got clear and and decisive decisive points at the end of the meetings , so that we we knew where to go on from there . industrial designer: Yeah , I was quite worried at the end of the last meeting that we weren't getting we didn't really have enough information to make firm decisions , project manager: I'm not usually a very decisive person , so it helped to have people say this needs to be done in five minutes . project manager: I found that we did we could have used another five or ten minutes sometimes in the meetings . project manager: Yeah I think the last time we had a lot of information , but at the same time not quite enough , industrial designer: Yeah , project manager: you know what , industrial designer: Yeah . And I I felt the first two meetings , that I was coming in with no information , project manager: . industrial designer: and not sort of made me really like , ooh I don't know , throwing together PowerPoint out of no no information and then last time it was like the opposite . project manager: It was interesting what came out like later , like as I was doing the when I was doing the breakdown on the agenda that they gave me , that more points came out from your presentation even . I'm a little I am a little disappointed that we didn't do a something for losing the remote , because that was kind of a big point . that was something like in order to talk about that we would've had to have actual knowledge about circuit boards and things like project manager: About yeah . marketing: Well the problem was , even when we just were creating from the Excel file , there wasn't like a option to select to somehow have it included , project manager: marketing: There was no way for us to have project manager: Considered the re industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Well marketing: project manager: it's interesting that they industrial designer: I think we really got into it , I got into it as the day went on and I got really like , ooh I'm designing a remote control , I dunno if that's just me , project manager: - , yeah . industrial designer: but project manager: It was interesting though that they put that fifty percent of people say they have frustration with losing their remote and yet they didn't provide us with information to we weren't provided with information to discuss that . project manager: I know that like people people have like things they can put on their keys that you press it and it'll beep , but I but I'm sure that would require some kind of technology industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: that I just don't know what it is , but industrial designer: I think there are some of those like infomercial remotes that have things so you won't lose them . we were talking about it and like i in my household at least , there's only about two places that the remote is ever project manager: . industrial designer: 'cause there's only one T_V_ and there's only like three chairs . marketing: That's like saying you're never gonna lose your keys , and I always do , anyway . marketing: like you just will forget that or you like put it down somewhere that like made sense and then not remember , project manager: . project manager: It d yeah , it depends on how organised you are personally , but industrial designer: Yeah , or like I guess what the setup of the house is too . industrial designer: But , I am notorious for losing my keys , project manager: industrial designer: I just I guess I've just never lost the remote . industrial designer: You you're taking stuff from a bag and putting them in the refrigerator and then go back to my room . marketing: I always do that , leaving it in my coat , and then like using a different coat . industrial designer: But I guess it's 'cause we don't carry remotes around that much . Maybe with our little robot one we could've had him have a robot , alien , pear , whatever he is , have a little voice like , I am located marketing: industrial designer: Oh a G_P_S_ system , internal G_P_S_ . project manager: Or or like some crazy like electro-magnet , that you push it and it'll go zoom to the T_V_ and stick there . user interface: project manager: industrial designer: Just if you like you'd have a remote for your remote , that'll . project manager: Well , but if you could attach them to the T_V_ , then you can . I decided to you know how I sent you the email saying that PowerPoint minutes will be complimentary , rather than like repeating them . project manager: Just gonna make I'm making full minutes , so that it'll include all of the agenda and all that . project manager: But I didn't have like information to sloth through either , so industrial designer: Yeah , I guess How much of your PowerPoint was already done for you , every meeting . Yeah , I didn't even think about adding slides , 'cause I would just get slides with titles on them project manager: . project manager: Well , the thing was they would provide y an agenda with s like several points , but it wouldn't have a slide for each point . project manager: I know personally when I do PowerPoint , that's what I do and so I had it once , even if it was just like the title of it , like the three presentations , and I would do your three . marketing: You have you have to have the slogan on it or can it just be like project manager: The slogan on it ? industrial designer: No , no , definitely not . industrial designer: No , I don't think we need to user interface: project manager: I think we just need the the R_R_ , industrial designer: I think the R_ and R_ , especially if the yellow and black one . project manager: Yeah , I was just kinda going by the web page , 'cause they didn't give me any clear , like yellow , grey , or . marketing: project manager: Wasn't it interesting that I thought it was interesting that our market marketing expert did not agree with the marketing marketing: Yes . project manager: the marketing choices , industrial designer: user interface: project manager: you know , like industrial designer: marketing: I will project manager: that was a bit of a conflict . marketing: I just feel like if you're really doing like a a really big market evaluation , you wouldn't just have like one set of source , industrial designer: marketing: it's kind of an they were so not backed up , it would just be a sentence like we did a survey , this is what people said . industrial designer: I guess it i it sort of a grey , isn't it ? Yellow and grey , but then the slogan's in blue <doc-sep>project manager: as you may have noticed I user interface: industrial designer: project manager: created separate folders because it was tending to get a little busy in our shared project documents folder . project manager: I don't know if everybody put their own documents in the right folder , which is for now the detailed design meeting . user interface: Didn't we just do that ? industrial designer: Yeah , save in the folder . project manager: Oh no , this is just one big document , so you can leave that wherever it is . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: what are we going to do ? I've opened it already . I'm still going to take some minutes , and if I'm right , you two are going to give a prototype presentation ? industrial designer: Oh , sorry . And then we have to look at something which is less nice , the finance aspect , whether we can afford what we have designed , user interface: Oops . project manager: and if we can we can commence the final part which is the production or project evaluation , how did we work together and what are the results , and how happy are we with those . And the R_ and R_ logo , it just says R_ and R_ now , but industrial designer: Okay ? user interface: Any questions so far ? marketing: Big microphone . user interface: Oh y you perhaps you should make it a bit big , so people know it's there and industrial designer: Do not forget it . using the scroll button on sides y I user interface: You push the scroll button industrial designer: Yeah , you push the scroll button user interface: and it's claps out if there's a industrial designer: and a drop down menu or a pull out menu comes out and you get you get the options becoming available . industrial designer: So you can scroll down too with the scroll button , as you can see oh , it's here , just push it in , the menu comes out like this and i it all becomes visible . And you could also touch it so that it comes out , industrial designer: Yeah , that's c user interface: and and use the the the scroll thing as a with your fingers . industrial designer: Okay , it's also nice to see that we made a small menu , the options menu becoming available when pressing the scroll button , and the opportunity to use the teletext , whi which is used which should still be used and we think that it's very handy to put it not under the options menu , but in Yes . project manager: So a separate button for for text , industrial designer: In a separate button , yeah . Would you like to make any comments about next user interface: well , this is the total interface that f of the L_C_D_ screen . just when you are one and you go to two , you can or if you go to five , you can go back to one with that button . marketing: user interface: And this is the the on off knop , the stand by knop . You can see very clearly now that the teletext and options menu isn't taking much it's taking much part of the screen , so it's very when you when you use it , doesn't become irritating to see . industrial designer: 'Cause if you put it on the top you always get see the the options menu . industrial designer: project manager: And I just missed when I was typing The R_R_ stands for ? industrial designer: user interface: That's the logo of the project manager: Logo , okay . It's th th right now it's only R_ R_ , but marketing: project manager: Okay well industrial designer: Full screen . 'Kay , my task was this time to put up a questionnaire by which we can evaluate the design of the remote control by the questions we requirements from the of the users . Questionnaire with seven point scale from one to seven , from true to false , user interface: Right . marketing: like question , is remote big enough , we can say it's true or it's false by steps . marketing: The three important things of refa are from th of this year is are , industrial designer: Sorry , user interface: industrial designer: you used the PowerPoint marketing: is the remote control fancy enough , user interface: Yeah . Is the design fancy enough ? user interface: Well marketing: Project Manager , what do you think ? project manager: Well it's looks fancy , especially with the green colour . project manager: Only what happened to the single curve we spoke about last meeting ? user interface: It oh it's in the background . industrial designer: Now the single curved idea was Yeah , okay , you ge user interface: Y you should make a sideways view . user interface: So it would be something like this from the side , but with a bit of curve here , industrial designer: it works . industrial designer: That's not very i it's also very handy if you make a side curve way to make the the remote control very thin at the bottom at a bottom at a bottom . make it rather thick on the top , because on the top it has the screen , which takes in some space , and the batteries can be located over there , user interface: Yeah . So you just make the back of this part a bit bigger , industrial designer: so user interface: so that it lays a bit o industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: Isn't going to be a little bit heavy at the top ? industrial designer: user interface: Yeah , that's a bit of problem maybe . marketing: With two batteries , the whole print plate and t and top , and if you're holding it quite a lot I think user interface: Yeah . I think yeah , the battery should be in here , because it's just nothing , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Okay , but we have to rate these things now ? user interface: 'Cause otherwise I think i marketing: Yeah , we have to rate . user interface: I if you don't make it green , then the elder people won't won't like it . marketing: I think Yeah , I have to agree , all the colour colours don don doesn't matter that m that much now , user interface: Yeah . project manager: Well I think especially because of the microphone and the L_C_D_ screen also . marketing: Yeah , I n used I wouldn I should use that one , but it doesn't industrial designer: user interface: But it's a one Maybe marketing: Okay , no it's two ? True is a one . marketing: Very true , is it very true or isn't that true ? project manager: Well I'd say two on a scale user interface: Well they think it's very true , but industrial designer: It's very true , because we designed it to be very fancy , marketing: Yeah , I think two . user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: so user interface: but industrial designer: It's very fancy , I think . user interface: We should perhaps industrial designer: Have you ever seen a remote control like this ? project manager: No , okay well , that's true . marketing: Then ? project manager: That doesn't matter that much , so make it a one . project manager: Yeah user interface: because it has an L_C_D_ screen , a mi microphone . project manager: m industrial designer: And the scroll is rubber , user interface: It's from rubber . Also huh -huh the buttons , are they easy to find ? That was a big requirement of the old people . industrial designer: With the ones marketing: Are all the buttons easy to find ? Not only this buttons , all the buttons . user interface: but if you touch the options then it's industrial designer: Take a harder look , yeah , sure . marketing: I think th it's industrial designer: It's easier than the regular remote control . marketing: easy t project manager: Yeah , and you use these buttons the most , marketing: Yeah , I think this is easy now . I think th I think the options buttons are not the the easiest way to to project manager: huh ? So industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: No they're not , but they're they're they are easy to find . industrial designer: Yeah , they are a lot easier to find than th than on the regular remote controls marketing: I would rate it a user interface: Oh . project manager: So industrial designer: So you have t you have to use the the the manual to understand most project manager: which marketing: But that's that's vantage of L_C_D_ screen , you can have text . project manager: Two , three and industrial designer: It's not perfect , but marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: And why is that ? marketing: I personally think , because I d I don't think i maybe it's easy to use , it has to be easy to find right away . I I think if you have the button at the right , I don't think you can find the option button that easy . user interface: Yeah , but you don't have t have to use the button on the right . marketing: Yeah , okay , but you have y then you have here s written option on here , the teletext button , user interface: Yeah . user interface: You can touch options project manager: A two , okay , user interface: and it's comes out . project manager: It's the box below it , industrial designer: the next question the next question . user interface: I think it's industrial designer: I think it's the most useful remote control ever to be manufactured . project manager: Okay , you're very enthusiastic about your own design , marketing: Also if you're sixty years old project manager: huh ? industrial designer: Yeah , but because it has the regular controls , li as you can see in the screen now , and you don't have all the other options always on your screen . You want these options to marketing: Also project manager: As well for the for the older people ? industrial designer: sure . marketing: Yeah , as well as your if you're fif sixty years old , you're holding one of those things in your hand user interface: Yeah , but Yeah , but they they don't want the extra options , right ? marketing: No , but we're going to th make this f for a all kind of people , user interface: So project manager: And would it be easy for them to use the speech recognition ? user interface: Yeah , okay , marketing: so it it it has to be user interface: but so they could I think it is . project manager: Because that might marketing: If you read the manual , user interface: Yeah , alright . user interface: Because it it's not it's not it's it's not difficult . industrial designer: because a lot of user interface: You say you say record to to the to the speech recognition , industrial designer: Channel one , channel four , yeah . industrial designer: project manager: Yeah , well maybe that would make it even more easy to use for them . marketing: So industrial designer: Because all the people who can't user interface: I would make it two . industrial designer: That's definitely our user interface: Oh nee , oh seven is it ? It is . project manager: but I think you should make it one scale with with one being good and seven being bad , marketing: Yeah , I think isn't , this has to be something like isn't overwhelmed . project manager: because otherwise we can't calculate anything from the results , user interface: It's not overwhelmed . project manager: because we designed for that , huh ? marketing: Remote control has colours that different that meet different target groups . project manager: Yeah , and I though w we had about single colours , marketing: That's true . project manager: but you can also make a wood colour , not just one single colour but a wood-like thing , user interface: Yeah . project manager: can't you ? marketing: Also with rubber ? user interface: I think you can . project manager: Whether it looks like wood , it isn't w it isn't wood marketing: Yeah , okay . project manager: but user interface: It it feels like rubber , project manager: You can make a print on rubber , user interface: but project manager: can't you ? Yeah . project manager: So that's a one then , user interface: Well but then when you scratch it it does come off . marketing: Yeah ? project manager: huh ? marketing: That's a one ? user interface: So that's a bit industrial designer: Yeah , it is it is harder to marketing: Okay . project manager: Do you have many questions ? marketing: I have industrial designer: to like project manager: Oh , okay well marketing: user interface: Oh we have time . marketing: The material used is spongy , user interface: What ? marketing: that that's that's a one , that's m rubber . marketing: Yeah , user interface: Oh marketing: I th think it's not the most spongy thing . user interface: but not it's not very spongy , because it's hard rubber . industrial designer: because you want to make it rather flexible but not too flexible , user interface: Hard but Yeah . marketing: Y you can't you can't lose it if you're sixty years old . If first time see the thing you didn didn't adjust set the microphone , and then you lose it , then you have lost it . user interface: Yeah , it it is there's the project manager: Yeah , industrial designer: Isn't hard to lose . user interface: it's a six , you think ? industrial designer: Isn't hard to lose , yeah . marketing: Or if you're you're sixty years old , your demands project manager: Yeah , but a har A hard to lose is good . Yeah , so then this is it is almost true , industrial designer: This project manager: A two . marketing: Nah , the material isn't that user interface: It's it's much more younger . project manager: Well I think it's it's a lower number , so better because w we designed it for young people especially , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , project manager: didn't we ? user interface: I think it's a two marketing: but I user interface: but marketing: Okay , okay . project manager: What do you think ? marketing: I think because project manager: Questions ? industrial designer: A two ? I think it's two . user interface: What did marketing: Because younger peoples are cr critical and they wanted a lot of features on this thing . industrial designer: Well , n not exactly but if it had some games on it or something like that , user interface: Yeah bu but industrial designer: but it's for a remote control I think it i it would satisfy those needs . You could call to your industrial designer: Yeah , the speech possibility , user interface: yeah , and the screen , industrial designer: the colours . marketing: It's three features , basically , project manager: with marketing: the L_C_D_ touch screen is feature . user interface: aren't the features the microphone's feature and that you can change the channel's feature , and that you can change the volume is feature , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Enough features ? marketing: So I've chos I shou I think it's it's it's a one . I think once you've 'cause you have the channel features b you have the screen features , audio features , the you have all buttons on it which you'd like , microphone extra , L_C_D_ screen extra , scroll thing extra . marketing: Has user interface: it's not the colour , so maybe you should make two , but it has R_ and R_ . user interface: Yeah , project manager: Yeah , user interface: but not R_ and R_ yellow I think . Well m th but the logo is on on the front , industrial designer: Okay , true , yeah . project manager: so a two , yeah , user interface: One d on i it's the colours and the marketing: X_ marks spot . project manager: that's marketing: And the menu is avail that is available is easy to use . industrial designer: I think it's easier to use than a regular remote control , because when you push on the options menu , you get the the the various options entirely explained . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Instead of just finding out what an icon means on a button . Yeah , user interface: And you can navigate easier , because wi with the you have to push the the the arrows and with a normal T_V_ remote . Well industrial designer: marketing: Let's go th for inhalation of air] user interface: Menu . project manager: Oh , well that's that's pretty good , user interface: We only have twos . project manager: let's see oh , it isn't asked to save but it did already industrial designer: Yeah . Well , the next part might be a little bit difficult to do in a group , but I am willing to try it . marketing: project manager: Because we are going to look at the finance and I have a nice Excel sheet to do that . and we're going to calculate the production costs , and if they are under or at twelve Euro fifty , user interface: Yeah . project manager: we're good , and if they're not we're going to re-design , user interface: Yeah . project manager: but we have to do that very very quick I think , user interface: So we're going to erase features or something . I don't know if I user interface: Do you have the cost project manager: put the Excel sheet in the user interface: or Let's hope . I think it's user interface: We're going to be here at eight o'clock . industrial designer: user interface: We're goin still going to be here at eight o'clock . user interface: it was in my my information , so industrial designer: It i It wasn't too much . user interface: Well , if it doesn't work project manager: maybe I could ask one of you to fill it in , so that I can also take minutes , user interface: I want to fill it in , but project manager: and maybe the other can use that thing to count numerous functions . user interface: But you should direct marketing: Count it ? Li like write it be project manager: Well we have to count some things and we have to think about some things . user interface: The number of marketing: project manager: No , count number of functions , because for every button you have to pay industrial designer: Oh okay . project manager: and there are different screen shots , so or different different screens , industrial designer: Well I dra marketing: Ah , okay , cool . industrial designer: Danny , Danny , I'll do that , marketing: Huh ? Yeah ? Oh , yea yeah , you design it . industrial designer: because I draw the project manager: so user interface: We've got a battery , one or t two batteries , or not ? nee one battery , with two small batteries . project manager: Yeah , but it's it's more about the energy source , huh ? Do you use a hand dynamo , a battery , kinetic or solar cells ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: Electronics , simple chip industrial designer: Hand marketing: We have user interface: advanced chip , right ? marketing: No , we have sample speaker . marketing: But b al but we also have sample speaker , do user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . industrial designer: But it isn't three dimensional , user interface: Oh the the industrial designer: it isn't curved in a l marketing: This one is user interface: it's not going to work people . industrial designer: No no no , project manager: rubber indeed ? industrial designer: single curved is like this . that's the only curve you made , marketing: Yeah , bu what industrial designer: not th curved like that . user interface: Thirteen ? marketing: There are two curves , right ? Oh , okay I understand , I understand . user interface: With a scroll wheel , industrial designer: Huh ? user interface: right ? Is he integrated ? industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: we gotta integrate scroll wheel and push button , because when you push it and you w it won't just pu makes possible to s user interface: Oh yeah , right , we want it to it's not it's not no . user interface: Oh , we don't have any buttons , so marketing: Eighteen and a half , user interface: Yeah , we need to marketing: damn . industrial designer: Yeah , if you can't push it you have to tap the the options window button here and then scroll down with the d with with the button . user interface: Yeah , but if you would i it is a new feature , it it's something special . industrial designer: Okay , so we don't exactly need the single We don't need a curve . marketing: But w d wha user interface: No , the curve doesn't really industrial designer: 'S possible to lose curve . marketing: Was that does that mean to it , single curve ? industrial designer: Yeah , that's meant with scr with s curve . industrial designer: If you make it a flat one , s n it's no curve , you got no curves . marketing: So we don't user interface: So we still marketing: Yeah , we also have to industrial designer: Is it possible to make user interface: Could could we do it on a regular chip on print or something ? marketing: No , otherwise we don't have an L_C_D_ screen . user interface: No ? Ma y you just can't do that , or industrial designer: No . project manager: And what did you change ? You changed the scroll wheel user interface: We changed th project manager: and user interface: Yeah , and the single curved to uncurved . Yeah , so that does doesn't doesn't that mu I think project manager: point , so maybe you should should user interface: No . marketing: That that's user interface: Yeah , but it's t marketing: Yes , four points . user interface: Yeah , but it is it it is a new feature , project manager: Or can't you ? user interface: it is something special . industrial designer: Yeah , becau when you lose the marketing: Yeah , but what what else what else do you want to scrap ? user interface: I don't know . project manager: Or make it on a hand dynamo , but I don't think that will work . industrial designer: marketing: Ma make it with wood instead of rubber ? industrial designer: No , that's no . industrial designer: Make it w when you made it a remote control of wood ? user interface: We could make it titanium instead of rubber . project manager: Yeah , but a wooden remote control only helps for old people we discussed , user interface: Oh . Oh can I ask something ? project manager: yes ? user interface: What is special colour ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: this , we have to have that one too ? industrial designer: It isn't . user interface: Th then we still have too much marketing: Yeah , okay , user interface: if we use the industrial designer: But m yeah , course , marketing: three . industrial designer: but user interface: Yeah , we we scrap that one ? industrial designer: What we'll have . marketing: Yeah , but a wood user interface: Make it marketing: we can make it brown , dark brown , not wood . user interface: Yeah , but it's it's special colour , is it a all kind of colours ? industrial designer: Yeah , special colours , fruity colours . marketing: Normal colours , yellow user interface: You have to add something to the rubber to make it green . marketing: Yeah , but then I d I don't think we can ever make to a twelve and half . user interface: Yeah , you can , you should you have to lose marketing: But then we have to scrap L_C_D_ display , we have to scrap user interface: No , it is the scroll wheel , I guess . No then we have to scrap everything we got because how many colours we gonna make ? industrial designer: If we lose the scroll wheel and make it totally depending dependent on the touch screen marketing: Five ? Then we have two . industrial designer: Okay , if you lose if you lose the user interface: It was such a great idea . industrial designer: You lose this one , you got eleven point five marketing: They can add two colours . how ma the colours like l she told , is that all the colours we add or industrial designer: How d how many colours ? user interface: What do you mean ? industrial designer: Special colours , all the colours you want , because you want to make p marketing: Yeah , but we we we are we have yellow , red , black , titanium . industrial designer: Yeah , but when you use more than one colour , it's a special colour . user interface: But I think when you use the colour that's not originally the rubber then you use special colour , industrial designer: I suppose . marketing: Yeah b Yeah , but we're gonna make it yellow red , and then you add you have two special colours on top of the one we have now . project manager: Yeah , but isn't it per remote that you pay ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: I then I think I p I don I don't think they me mean they're special project manager: Half ? user interface: Oh right , yeah . industrial designer: You don't need four of those four of those special colours in one in one remote . industrial designer: project manager: Because of thing user interface: Or not ? project manager: Yeah , well you can at least make it curved again . project manager: Because that was very important , user interface: It's too bad for the speaker . project manager: huh ? So it's curved , it's still that so we we dropped the speech recognition together with the speaker . user interface: Should we change that tha that that's a one if not , marketing: yep . user interface: or not ? Could you copy it ? project manager: And the rest is the same , user interface: And make it project manager: huh ? Am I right ? marketing: Y yea the scroll wheel is dropped . user interface: Would you ? industrial designer: Twenty minutes ? user interface: By the Perhaps you can save this one , and then copy or something . industrial designer: Okay , so you had this list at start ? project manager: ? No , I hadn't . and did you try to make a new design , or what were you trying to do ? user interface: Yeah , I tried to copy that one , but it didn't work . project manager: Oh , you can arrange industrial designer: You can only re erase ? user interface: Erase . user interface: When you saw th li Earlier when we selected it , w I couldn't erase anything . user interface: project manager: Well but that's also useful for the evaluation , because I think we have a prototype now marketing: Evaluation drops . project manager: which we can afford and we only need to draw a little bit to get a good design . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: project manager: Let's see , we can save this now . what did you think about the process ? How satisfied are we ? industrial designer: Deadlines were sometimes very short . marketing: I think we it should be b it would be better if we worked a little bit together . user interface: Yeah , you had information I didn't have marketing: something he said user interface: and then marketing: yeah , and you had information I also had , user interface: Oh right . marketing: so some some things I had in my presentation , they already told , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: And for me it sometimes was a surprise who was going to present what , huh ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: So yeah , that I don't think that is the best way to work at for such project . industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , no , or maybe session of five minutes together or something , and then work separate . industrial designer: but but why not work here together , for example ? user interface: Yeah , you could industrial designer: Why should we be separated from each other in those difference different rooms ? user interface: Yeah . Then you can work together too by mail or by , I dunno , chat , something , project manager: No . I don't think that was the best way , but industrial designer: But the technology was fantastic . user interface: I I don't really like the board , it doesn't really work great . industrial designer: Work now ? marketing: Yeah okay , but I don I do I think becau that's because industrial designer: Perhaps it is e user interface: It does work , but sometimes it doesn't erase or it doesn't industrial designer: Yeah , perhaps it is easier to get one of those dig digital pens or so and to and lay it next to that keyboard over there . project manager: So you don't think the SMARTboard is is really useful user interface: But project manager: or user interface: Well industrial designer: It's useful , but not m user interface: it is useful , marketing: Yeah , it is useful , but user interface: but it doesn't really work all the time . user interface: Th the pen doesn't industrial designer: Because when you put this pen on the screen for exam and line is d being drawn at at two or three centimetres below . But industrial designer: The project because of the deadlines you didn't had the time to have , you didn't have time to to make a very qualitati qualitative presentation . industrial designer: So you used this the different PowerPoint presentations in which you put your material in the Oh . project manager: the means , we discussed the smart board , and what about this digital pen ? user interface: I I I used it , marketing: I didn't use it at all . project manager: Yeah , well industrial designer: But I didn't I project manager: I use it as a a normal pen and and and only you use it to get it on the computer , user interface: Yeah , I used it to y to project manager: huh ? user interface: Yeah , it did work pretty well . user interface: I don't think why you would want to use it actually , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: To make some designs , marketing: It is it is industrial designer: it is very easy . user interface: It's a bit industrial designer: Yeah , it's too big , it's too fat . industrial designer: project manager: Okay , and what about the teamwork ? user interface: I think it was great , marketing: Team work was okay . project manager: but that was it was our assignment , marketing: With some things that was only problem , user interface: Yeah , but it was because we didn't marketing: but project manager: huh ? user interface: Yeah . project manager: and maybe I should walk out of the room when you discuss this point , the leadership . project manager: And creativity ? Well , when we look at this I'd say we have been creative , user interface: industrial designer: project manager: huh ? But user interface: Well . industrial designer: Yeah , or the room for project manager: There was room for industrial designer: it was the idea to be creative , so user interface: Yeah . user interface: but industrial designer: The information was sometimes a little bit too late marketing: Little bit lo yeah . industrial designer: or marketing: it it it took a lot of time before you got your ema user interface: You just sit there for ten minutes . user interface: project manager: You did ? Well , user interface: Oh industrial designer: project manager: I didn't have time for that . user interface: did you ? Is it on there ? Is it on there ? marketing: Wha user interface: I didn't find the didn't look but project manager: At some times I Sometimes I received like like five emails at at one moment , industrial designer: Was searching and searching . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: I always user interface: I got like one email after ten minutes or something . marketing: So does this I think lik oh and information was a bit low I think , sometimes , user interface: And it not a lot marketing: in in in in the beginning I didn't understand what what to do . industrial designer: No , w I didn't know user interface: I didn't know marketing: Yeah , like I with with the remote and I never new we have t we had to yeah made a made a rec a remote control . user interface: And I didn't know what to do for the first ten minutes before we got here , marketing: Yeah , so user interface: so I went , right . project manager: And I was working and working and work user interface: Just looking at the screen and industrial designer: No . project manager: but after all we can say we are satisfied , but it it could've been better . industrial designer: First of all I didn't think that we were able to make an L_C_D_ screen first point , user interface: Yeah . user interface: Yea so tha actually you could make an L_C_D_ screen but no mic , or it could make mic but no L_C_D_ screen , when you look at that . project manager: And what were the other points to to improve this whole process ? marketing: user interface: I dunno . project manager: And so more time w might have improved the the quality of work , marketing: So project manager: is what you say . Yeah , but that It's now half past four half past three , so user interface: Yeah , but it's just the the off hours between that you will work alone . project manager: I just got my warning for the last five minutes , so I'll move on to I guess my last slide , user interface: You did ? Well marketing: project manager: yes , which is the closing . I don't know if that's the best way to when it isn't is it when it is too expensive to quickly re-arrange it and say , okay , this is it , user interface: Oh , right . project manager: but we had to do it , user interface: Well project manager: huh , because we have to have a design , and that is within the budget . Maybe we should re-evaluate the product , but we did that before , and we also evaluated the project . At least I am , with the results , user interface: project manager: so celebration , well , for the three of you , user interface: Yeah . marketing: project manager: But well , thank you very much for your co-operation , marketing: project manager: and I had a very nice day so far . user interface: I I think we have to fill in a questionnaire again , project manager: Yeah I have t user interface: but project manager: I think we also have to go to our own rooms again , but well user interface: We do ? industrial designer: . But maybe you can try to make a screen shot of this , so I can try to include it in the final report . user interface: Yeah , but it's it isn't a picture or , well , is it ? project manager: I know , we should remove this , industrial designer: You s file save as the J_ PEG J_ PEG . marketing: Can you find it as a J_ PEG ? user interface: No , industrial designer: No . marketing: Celebra user interface: How big do you want the images ? marketing: Or shouldn't I ? industrial designer: Let's have some fun

The group agreed on a target price of 12.5 Euros and set a cost limit of under 12.5 Euros for the remote control. To meet these requirements, they decided to use one kinetic battery, single electronics, and a single-curved rubber case with a maximum of three colors. Additionally, they opted for six buttons in one color. Initially, the cost of the remote control was 18.5 Euros, which exceeded the company's budget. As a result, the design had to be changed and functions had to be eliminated to bring the cost down to 12.50 Euros. The new design featured a different shape and omitted functions such as scroll and microphone. The remote control also transitioned to a single curve shape and used a rubber material without a solar cell for the battery.

Question: Summarize the architecture, modules, and importance of SmartKom. Article: professor f: So the what w we h have been doing i they would like us all to read these digits . grad b: OK and the way you do it is you just read the numbers not as each single , so just like I do it . So we 're gonna try to finish by five so people who want to can go hear Nancy Chang 's talk , downstairs . professor f: And you guys are g giving talks on tomorrow and Wednesday lunch times , phd a: Yes . OK so , do y do you know what we 're gonna do ? grad b: I thought two things we 'll introduce ourselves and what we do . And we already talked with Andreas , Thilo and David and some lines of code were already written today and almost tested and just gonna say we have again the recognizer to parser thing where we 're working on and that should be no problem and then that can be sort of developed as needed when we get enter the tourism domain . phd a: S grad b: and There one of our diligent workers has to sort of volunteer to look over Tilman 's shoulder while he is changing the grammars to English phd a: Either we do a syllable concatenating grammar for the English generation which is sort of starting from scratch and doing it the easy way , or we simply adopt the ah more in - depth style that is implemented in the German system and are then able not only to produce strings but also the syntactic parse not parse not the syntactic tree that is underneath in the syntactic structure which is the way we decided we were gonna go because A , it 's easier in the beginning phd a: grad b: and it does require some some knowledge of of those grammars and and and some ling linguistic background . Johno , are you gonna have some time t to do that w with these guys ? grad e: Sure . And an Yeah , so I I actually wanna f to find out about it too , but I may not have time to get in . grad b: the the ultimate goal is that before they leave we we can run through the entire system input through output on at least one or two sample things . And and by virtue of doing that then in this case Johno will have acquired the knowledge of how to extend it . grad b: And also Ralf has hooked up with David and you 're gonna continue either all through tonight or tomorrow on whatever to get the er parser interface working . grad b: They are thinning out and thickening out lattices and doing this kind of stuff to see what works best . grad d: Yeah , very much professor f: OK , before before you got put to work ? grad d: Yeah professor f: Great . OK , so that 's Sort of one branch is to get us caught up on what 's going on . Also of course it would be really nice to know what the plans are , in addition to what 's sort of already in code . professor f: and we can d I dunno w w was there a time when we were set up to do that ? It probably will work better if we do it later in the week , after we actually understand better what 's going on . professor f: So when do you guys leave ? phd a: we 're here through Sunday , grad d: Oh phd a: so All through Friday would be fine . professor f: Oh , OK , so OK , So so anyt we 'll find a time later in the week to get together and talk about your understanding of what SmartKom plans are . professor f: grad b: Should we already set a date for that ? Might be beneficial while we 're all here . I can do earlier in the day on Thursday , or most of the time on Friday , not all . grad b: Thursday morning sounds fine ? professor f: Wha - but , Johno , phd a: professor f: what are your constraints ? grad e: Thursday afternoon doesn't work for me , but grad b: Neither does Thursday morning , no ? grad e: Thursday morning should be fine . professor f: Eleven ? Eleven on Thursday ? grad e: I was just thinking I w I will have leavened by eleven . grad b: but David is here and he 's actually knows everything about the SmartKom recognizer . grad b: OK so facing to to what we 've sort of been doing here well for one thing we 're also using this room to collect data . grad b: no not meeting data but sort of sort ah our version of a wizard experiment such not like the ones in Munich but pretty close to it . grad b: The major difference to the Munich ones is that we do it via the telephone phd a: OK . grad b: even though all the recording is done here and so it 's a sort of a computer call system that gives you tourist information phd a: and part of that is sort of trying to find out whether people change their linguistic verbal behavior when first thinking they speak to a machine and then to a human . grad b: and we 're setting it up so that we can we hope to implant certain intentions in people . For example we have first looked at a simple sentence that " How do I get to the Powder - Tower ? " OK so you have the castle of Heidelberg phd a: OK . grad b: and so What will you parse out of that sentence ? Probably something that we specified in M - three - L , that is @ @ " action go to whatever domain , object whatever Powder - Tower " . grad b: And maybe some model will tell us , some GPS module , in the mobile scenario where the person is at the moment . And we 've sort of gone through that once before in the Deep Mail project and we noticed that first of all what are I should 've brought some slides , but what our So here 's the tower . And our system led people here , to a point where they were facing a wall in front of the tower . There is no entrance there , but it just happens to be the closest point of the road network to the geometric center Because that 's how the algorithm works . So we took out that part of the road network as a hack and then it found actually the way to the entrance . But what we actually observed in Heidelberg is that most people when they want to go there they actually don't want to enter , because it 's not really interesting . grad b: And so what a s you s let 's say a simple parse from a s from an utterance won't really give us is what the person actually wants . Does he wanna go there to see it ? Does he wanna go there now ? Later ? How does the person wanna go there ? Is that person more likely to want to walk there ? Walk a scenic route ? and so forth . There are all kinds of decisions that we have identified in terms of getting to places and in terms of finding information about things . And we are constructing and then we 've identified more or less the extra - linguistic parameters that may f play a role . And we also want to look closely on the linguistic information that what we can get from the utterance . That 's part of why we implant these intentions in the data collection to see whether people actually phrase things differently whether they want to enter in order to buy something or whether they just wanna go there to look at it . And so the idea is to construct suitable interfaces and a belief - net for a module that actually tries to guess what the underlying intention was . And then enrich or augment the M - three - L structures with what it thought what more it sort of got out of that utterance . So if it can make a good suggestion , " Hey ! " you know , " that person doesn't wanna enter . That person just wants to take a picture , " cuz he just bought film , or " that person wants to enter because he discussed the admission fee before " . Or " that person wants to enter because he wants to buy something and that you usually do inside of buildings " and so forth . These ah these types of these bits of additional information are going to be embedded into the M - three - L structure in an sort of subfield that we have reserved . If not you know , then that 's also something that we can't really at least we want to offer the extra information . grad b: t s Ultimately if you have if you can offer that information , somebody 's gonna s do something with it sooner or later . grad e: What was he saying ? grad b: for example , right now I know the GIS from email is not able to calculate these viewpoints . So that 's a functionality that doesn't exist yet to do that dynamically , phd a: grad b: but if we can offer it that distinction , maybe somebody will go ahead and implement it . Surely nobody 's gonna go ahead and implement it if it 's never gonna be used , so . What have I forgotten about ? Oh yeah , how we do it , professor f: Well th grad b: yeah that 's the professor f: No no . I s I see questions on peoples ' faces , so why don't phd a: Oh professor f: let 's let 's Let 's hear phd a: Well the obvious one would be if if you envision this as a module within SmartKom , where exactly would that Sit ? That 's the d grad b: so far I 've thought of it as sort of adding it onto the modeler knowledge module . grad b: but it could sit anywhere in the attention - recognition basically this is what attention - recognition literally sort of can phd a: Well it 's supposed to do . phd a: Well f from my understanding of what the people at Phillips were originally trying to do doesn't seem to quite fit into SmartKom currently so what they 're really doing right now is only selecting among the alternatives , the hypotheses that they 're given enriched by the domain knowledge and the discourse modeler and so on . Is there other other things that cuz we wanna not Pa - pass over any you know , questions or concerns that you have . phd a: Well there 're there 're two levels of of giving an answer and I guess on both levels I don't have any further questions . phd a: the the two levels will be as far as I 'm concerned as standing here for the generation module grad d: Mmm . phd a: and the other is is my understanding of what SmartKom is supposed to be professor f: Right . phd a: and I I think that fits in perfectly professor f: So well , let me Let me s expand on that a little bit from the point of view of the generation . professor f: So the idea is that we 've actually got this all laid out an and we could show it to you ig Robert didn't bring it today but there 's a a belief - net which is There 's a first cut at a belief - net that that doesn't it isn't fully instantiated , and in particular some of the the combination rules and ways of getting the the conditional probabilities aren't there . professor f: There are only three possibilities and the what one would like is for this , knowledge modeling module to add which of those it is and give it to the planner . professor f: But , th the current design suggests that if it seems to be an important decision and if the belief - net is equivocal so that it doesn't say that one of these is much more probable than the other , then an option is to go back and ask for the information you want . For the debugging we 'll probably just have a a drop - down menu and the while you 're debugging you will just OK . But for a full system , then one might very well formulate a query , phd a: professor f: give it to the dialogue planner and say this , you know ar are you know you are you planning to enter ? Or whatever it whatever that might be . So that 's under that model then , There would be a a loop in which this thing would formulate a query , phd a: Yes . professor f: OK so , th that , We probably won't do this early on , because the current focus is more on the decision making and stuff like that . professor f: But While we 're on the subject I just wanted to give you a sort of head 's up that it could be that some months from now we said " OK we 're now ready to try to close that loop " in terms of querying about some of these decisions . So my suggestion then is that you look into the currently ongoing discussion about how the action plans are supposed to look like . And they 're currently Agreeing or or in the process of agreeing on an X M L - ification of something like a state - transition network of how dialogues would proceed . D did you know this Robert ? grad b: Michael is doing that , right ? phd a: Well Marcus Lerkult is actually implementing that stuff and Marcus and Michael together are leading the discussion there , yeah . professor f: And it may be that that we should early on make sure that they have the flexibility that we need . But they Have I understood this right ? They they govern more or less the the dialogue behavior or the action phd a: grad b: It 's not really what you do with the content of the dialogue but it 's So , there is this this this nice interf grad d: No , it 's it 's also a quantrant grad b: i Is it professor f: So there 's ac so there th the word " action " , OK , is is what 's ambiguous here . professor f: So , one thing is there 's an actual planner that tells the person in the tourist domain now , phd a: OK . professor f: per tells the person how to go , " First go here , grad d: So that 's that form of planning , and action , and a route planner and GIS , all sort of stuff . No , in SmartKom terminology that 's called a function that 's modeled by a function modeler . That 's simply a functionality that you give data as in a query and then you get back from that mmm , a functioning model which might be a planner or a VCR or whatever . professor f: I think tha I think it 's not going to I think that 's not going to be good enough . So I think the idea of having a , you know , transition diagram for the grammar of conversations is a good idea . professor f: OK ? And I think that we do hav definitely have to get in on it and find out OK . But I think that when so , when you get to the tourist domain it 's not just an information retrieval system . professor f: Right ? So this i this is where I think this people are gonna have to think this through a bit more carefully . professor f: So , if it 's only like in in the in the film and T V thing , OK , you can do this . professor f: y y your I d I think the notion of this as a self contained module you know th the functional module that that interacts with with where the tourism g stuff is going probably is too restrictive . professor f: Now I dunno how much people have thought ahead to the tourist domain in this phd a: Probably not enough , an another more basic point there is that the current tasks and therefore th the concepts in this ac what 's called the action plan and what 's really the dialogue manager . professor f: Yeah phd a: is based on slots that have to be filled and the kind of values in these slots would be fixed things like the a time or a movie title or something like this professor f: phd a: and I 'm not sure if if complex slots of that type are really being taken into consideration . phd a: So that 's that 's really something we professor f: Could you could you put a message into the right place to see if we can at least ask that question ? phd a: phd a: nothing 's being completely settled there grad b: rea yep phd a: so this is really an ongoing discussion grad b: - phd a: and that 's grad b: yeah and it might actually OK ah also because again in in Deep Map we have faced and implemented those problems once already phd a: grad b: And mmm You don't know OK th I 'll I 'll talk to Michael it 's what I do anyway . Who How far is the the the M - three - L specification for for the la natural language input gone on the the I haven't seen anything for the tourist path domain . grad b: right ? together with the usual gang , Petra and Jan grad d: Mmm . Yeah , there 's a meeting next next week I think grad b: OK because That 's Those are the I think the the true key issues is how does the whatever comes out of the language input pipeline look like and then what the action planner does with it and how that is specified . I didn't think of the internal working of the the action planner and the language the function model as sort of relevant . But the internal workings of of the whether you know there 're dialogue action planners that work with belief - nets that are action planners that work with you know state automata . it does matter because it does have to keep track of you we are on part six of r a route that consists of eight steps and so forth phd a: Right . OK , so that , for example , the i it 's the action planner is going to take some spec and s make some suggestions about what the user should do . What the user says after that is going to be very much caught up with what the action planner told it . professor f: If the If the parser and the language end doesn't know what the person 's been told OK th it 's you 're making your life much more difficult than it has to be . professor f: Right ? So if someone says the best t to go there is by taxi , let 's say . OK , there 's all sorts of dialogues that won't make any sense which would be just fine . professor f: phd a: That would b but that I think that that point has been realized and it 's it 's not really been defined yet but there 's gonna be some kind of feedback and input from the action planner into all the analysis modules , telling them what to expect and what the current state of the discourse is . professor f: Yeah , but this is not the st this is not just the state of the discourse . professor f: OK so it z and s , It 's great if people are already taking that into account . professor f: I think you 're gonna need We talked about this several times that that the the input end is gonna need a fair amount of feedback from the planning end . phd a: professor f: In in one of these things which are are much more continuous than the just the dialogue over movies and stuff . phd a: And even on on a more basic level the the action planner actually needs to be able to have an expressive power that can deal with these structures . And not just say the dialogue will consist of ten possible states and th these states really are fixed in in a certain sense . professor f: ? phd a: You have to professor f: Would there be any chance of getting the terminology changed so that the dialogue planner was called a " dialogue planner " ? Because there 's this other thing The o There 's this other thing in in the tourist domain which is gonna be a route planner phd a: That 'd be nice . professor f: Huh ? So , s So what would happen if we sent a note saying " Gee we 've talked about this and couldn't we change this th the whole word ? " I have no idea how complicated these things are . phd a: and I think this is just for historical reasons within , the preparation phase of the project and not because somebody actually believes it ought to be action planner . So if there is resistance against changing it , that 's just because " Oh , We don't want to change things . professor f: Yeah , but that 's not g eh tha That ha has all the wrong connotations . I think you can't it 's fine for looking up when T you know when the show 's on TV . You go to th but I I I I think it 's really really wrong headed for something that you that has a lot of state , it 's gonna interact co in a complicated way with the understanding parts . Yeah I think just the the spatial planner and the route planner I showed you once the interac action between them among them in the deep map system professor f: Right . grad b: so a printout of the communication between those two fills up I don't know how many pages phd a: grad b: and that 's just part of how do I get to one place . Markus phd a: Wh - where 's ? grad b: Is he new in the in the ? phd a: Yeah , he 's he started I think January . grad b: Is he gonna continue with the old thing ? phd a: No , no he 's completely gonna rewrite everything . grad b: Yes I was just that 's my next question phd a: grad b: whether we 're we 're gonna stick to Prolog or not . grad b: OK But I do think the the function modeling concept has a certain makes sense in a in a certain light phd a: Yeah . grad b: because the action planner should not be or the dialogue manager in that case should not w have to worry about whether it 's interfacing with something that does route planning in this way or that way phd a: grad b: and it cant sort of formulate its what it wants in a in a rather a abstract way , you know f " Find me a good route for this . grad b: It doesn't really have to worry ab how route planner A or how route planner B actually wants it . It 's tricky because one could well imagine I think it will turn out to be the case that , this thing we 're talking about , th the extended n knowledge modeler will fill in some parameters about what the person wants . One could well imagine that the next thing that 's trying to fill out the detailed , route planning , let 's say , will also have questions that it would like to ask the user . You could well imagine you get to a point where it 's got a a choice to make and it just doesn't know something . grad b: professor f: And a I a a good design would would allow that to happen . professor f: If if you know if if you can't make it happen then you you do your best . phd a: Yeah but that doesn't necessarily contradict an architecture where there really is a pers a def well - defined interface . But but what it nee but th what the point is the in that case the dialogue manager is sort of event driven . So the dialogue manager may think it 's in a dialogue state of one sort , phd a: professor f: and this one of these planning modules comes along and says " hey , right now we need to ask a question " . phd a: Sure , professor f: It could be y phd a: ye yeah I I think that 's that 's the concept that people have , professor f: Yeah , yeah it it phd a: yep . phd a: And and the the underlying idea of course is that there is something like kernel modules with kernel functionality that you can plug certain applications like tourist information or the home scenario with controlling a VCR and so on . So wouldn't That 's an additional reason to have this well - defined interface and keep these things like tourist information external . phd a: But of course the the more complex grad b: Yeah , there is another philosophical issue that I think you know you can evade phd a: yep . grad b: but , at at least it makes sense to me that sooner or later a service is gonna come and describe itself to you . and that 's sort of what Srini is working on in in in the DAML project where you you find a GIS about that gives you information on Berkeley , phd a: Yeah . grad b: and it 's it 's gonna be there and tell you what it can do and how it wants to do things . and so you can actually interface to such a system without ever having met it before and the function modeler and a self - description of the external service haggle it out phd a: . grad b: and you can use the same language core , understanding core to interface with planner - A , planner - B , planner - C and so forth . grad b: Which is , you know , utopian completely utopian at the moment , but slowly , you know , getting into the realm of the contingent . And language input for example , is of course crucial you know also when you do the sort of deep understanding analysis that we envision . Then of course , the , you know what is it poverty of the stimulus , yet the m the less we get of that the better . and so we we 're thinking , for example how much syntactic analysis actually happens already in the parser . Yeah , are there currently is no syntactic analysis but in the next release there will be some . grad d: unless professor f: How 's it grad d: and it 's you can access this professor f: S so y we we looked at the e current pattern matching thing . , So what are what are the plans roughly ? grad d: it 's to to integrate and syntactic analysis . So then an utter more than one utterance is There there 's often pause between it and a segmentation occurs . professor f: So , the So the idea is to have a pa y y a particular grad d: yeah professor f: Do you have a particular parser in mind ? Is it partic d have you thought through ? Is it an HPSG parser ? Is it a whatever ? grad d: No no it 's I think it 's it 's totally complicated for it 's just one one person professor f: OK . grad d: and so I have to keep the professor f: Oh , you have to do it . grad d: ah and so things must be simpler professor f: I see , grad d: but , Miel syntactic analysis with finite state transducers . grad d: Yeah , the problem is th that it has to be very fast because if you want to for more than one path anywhere professor f: OK . grad d: what 's in the latches from the speech recognizer professor f: So , So there was a chunk parser in Verbmobil , that was one of the branchers . And I know one of them was a chunk parser and I don't remember who did that . grad b: A Alan ? grad d: I think it 's that might , at Tuebingen I thought . grad d: was Do you know something about that ? phd a: Tubingen was at least involved in putting the chunks together grad d: In Tub - at phd a: I can't quite recall whether they actually produced the chunks in the first place . phd a: Or wh grad d: Oh from from Stuttgart , professor f: There w That 's right . They w They had There were This was done with a two phase thing , where the chunk parser itself was pretty stupid grad d: yeah , also professor f: and then there was a kind of trying to fit them together that h used more context . Yeah professor f: Right ? phd a: Well you s and and especially you did some some , l was a learning - based approach which learned from a big corpus of of trees . phd a: And yes the it the chunk parser was a finite - state machine that Mark Light originally w worked on in while he was in Tuebingen professor f: Right . professor f: But is that the kind of thing y It sounds like the kind of thing that you were thinking of . yeah that 's In this direction , yes professor f: What ? grad d: Yeah , it 's in in this direction . grad b: From Michael Strube , I 've heard very good stuff about the chunk parser that is done by FORWISS , which is in embassy doing the parsing . grad b: So this is sort of came as a surprise to me that you know , embassy s is featuring a nice parser but it 's what I hear . grad b: And they 're doing chunk parsing and it 's I I can give you the names of the people who do it there . But But given th the constraints , that you want it to be small and fast and so forth , my guess is you 're probably into some kind of chunk parsing . And I 'm not a big believer in this statistical you know , cleaning up It That seems to me kind of a last resort if you can't do it any other way . professor f: There is this this one that they did at SRI some years ago Fastus ? grad d: professor f: a grad d: yeah , I 've I 've looked at it but but it 's no not much information available . I found , professor f: ah ! grad d: but it 's also finite - state transducers , I thought . grad d: and professor f: And of course it was English oriented , grad d: Yeah , and and Purely finite - state transducers are not so good for German since there 's professor f: w Right . grad d: The word order is is not fixed professor f: Yeah , I guess that 's the point is is all the morphology and stuff . Also it 's it 's Yes , the choice between this processing and that processing and my template matcher . grad d: professor f: So what about Did y like Morfix ? a a e y you 've got stemmers ? Or is that something that grad d: yeah but it 's all in the in the lexicon . So it 's professor f: But did you have that ? grad d: Yeah th the information is available . So , but grad d: So professor f: So y you just connect to the lexicon grad d: Yeah professor f: and at least for German you have all all of the the stemming information . grad d: It professor f: Did we look at the German ? I don't remember . professor f: So w wha phd a: n Well I think I think there 's some misunderstanding here professor f: i phd a: it 's Morphix is not used on - line . phd a: s so the lexicon might be derived by Morphix grad d: What ? phd a: but What what 's happening on - line is just a a retrieval from the lexicon which would give all the stemming information professor f: Right . professor f: What I didn't reme grad b: We threw out all the forms professor f: Huh ? grad b: because , you know , English , well professor f: Oh OK , so it yeah , s s I thought I 'd grad d: professor f: So in German then you actually do case matching and things like in the in the pattern matcher or not ? grad d: Not yet but it 's planned to do that . grad d: Yeah professor f: Have we looked at the German ? Oh , I haven yeah that 's getting it from the lexicon is just fine . In terms of if you 're trying to build some fast parser and so forth and You really might wanna do it in a significantly different way . So you 've you guys have looked at this ? also ? in terms of You know , w if you 're doing this for English as well as German Do you think now that it would be this doing it similarly ? grad d: Yeah , it 's I think it 's yes , it 's it 's possible to to do list processing . grad b: Well there 's m I 'm sure there 's gonna be more discussion on that after your talk . grad d: - , grad b: We 're just gonna foreshadow what we saw that grad d: yeah . grad b: and professor f: Now actually , Are you guys free at five ? Or Do you have to go somewhere at five o ' clock tonight ? W in ten minutes ? grad d: Ah phd a: I think we 're expect grad d: mmm . professor f: That 's good , because that will tell you a fair amount about The form of semantic construction grammar that we 're using . professor f: so So I th I think that probably as good an introduction as you 'll get . professor f: It won't talk particularly about how that relates to what Robert was saying at the beginning . So we talked about the fact that There 're going to be a certain number of decisions That you want the knowledge modeler to make , that will be then fed to the function module , that does , route planning . And then one half of this we talked about at little bit is how if you had the right information , if you knew something about what was said and about th the something about was the agent a tourist or a native or a business person or young or old , whatever . That information , and also about the , what we 're calling " the entity " , Is it a castle , is it a bank ? Is it a s town square , is it a statue ? Whatever . But the other half of the problem is How would you get that kind of information from the parsed input ? So , So what you might try to do is just build more templates , saying we 're trying to build a templ you know build a template that w somehow would capture the fact that he wants to take a picture . But from our point of view this is also a research project and there are a couple of people not here for various reasons who are doing doctoral dissertations on this , phd a: professor f: and the idea that we 're really after is a very deep semantics based on cognitive linguistics and the notion that there are a relatively small number of primitive conceptual schemas that characterize a lot of activity . But also , importantly for Lakoff and these guys is all sorts of metaphorical things are also characterized this way . professor f: and so s So , what we 're really trying to do is to map from the discourse to the conceptual semantics level . professor f: So another one of these primitive , what are called " image schemas " , is goal seeking . professor f: And that all sorts of things , particularly in the tourist domain , can be represented in terms of source , path and goal . So the idea would be could we build an analyser that would take an utterance and say " Aha ! th this utterance is talking about an attempt to reach a goal . The goal is this , the pers the , traveller is that , the sor w where we are at now is is this , they 've mentioned possible obstacles , et cetera . So if you can do this , then the notion would be that across a very large range of domains , you could use this deep conceptual basis as the interface . professor f: And then , The processing of that , both on the input end , recognizing that certain words in a language talk about containers or goals , et cetera , and on the output end , given this kind of information , you can then make decisions about what actions to take . professor f: And Nancy is going to Her talk is going to be not about using this in applications , but about modeling how children might learn this kind of deep semantic grammar . Would it be highly ambiguous if and then there would be another module that takes that highly underspecified deep semantic construction and map it onto the current context to find out what the person really was talking about in that context . or or a professor f: Well that 's that 's that 's where the belief - net comes in . professor f: So part of what you 'll get out of this will be the fact tha w if it works right , OK , that this is an agent that wants to go to this place and that 's their goal phd a: professor f: OK , phd a: th professor f: part of it comes from the ontology . professor f: And the idea of the belief - net is it combines the information from the dialogue which comes across in this general way , phd a: professor f: you know this is a this is a goal seeking behavior , along with specific information from the ontology about the kinds of objects involved phd a: Yeah OK , Yeah , yep yep yep yep professor f: and about the situation about " Is it raining ? " I don't know . professor f: And so th the coupling to the situation comes in this model from , at th at th at the belief - net , combining evidence from the dialogue with the ontology with the situation . professor f: But Nancy isn't gonna talk about that , phd a: Yeah , oh yeah , I see , professor f: just about the phd a: yeah yeah , really . phd g: Is it i in , then , your place , in five five - A ? phd a: Alright .<doc-sep>grad b: Could I hit hit F - seven to do that ? on the Robert ? grad a: I 'm grad b: Oh , the remote will do it OK . grad b: Cuz I 'm already up there ? grad a: in control here . grad b: So , we were Ah ! grad c: Johno , where are you ? grad b: OK . grad c: Should you go back to the first one ? grad b: Do I wanna go back to the first one ? grad c: Well grad b: OK . grad d: I 'm sorry I grad c: Well , just to grad b: OK . It 's basically talks about It just refers to the fact that one of main things we had to do was to decide what the intermediate sort of nodes were , grad d: I can read ! I 'm kidding . grad a: But if you really want to find out what it 's about you have to click on the little light bulb . grad b: Although I 've I 've never I don't know what the light bulb is for . grad a: Do you wanna try ? grad d: Ach u grad b: I 'd prefer not to . Is that the idea ? grad a: Why are you doing this in this mode and not in the presentation mode ? grad d: OK . grad b: Because I 'm gonna switch to the JavaBayes program grad a: Oh ! OK . grad b: You want me to Wait , what do you want me to do ? grad c: Can you maximize the window so all that stuff on the side isn't doesn't appear ? grad a: No , It 's OK . grad b: Well I can do that , but then I have to end the presentation in the middle so I can go back to open up grad c: OK , fine . grad b: So then the features we decided or we decided we were talked about , right ? the the prosody , the discourse , verb choice . Whether the and this i we actually have a separate feature but I decided to put it on the same line for space . " Nice walls " which we can look up because if you 're gonna get real close to a building in the Tango mode , right , there 's gotta be a reason for it . And it 's either because you 're in route to something else or you wanna look at the walls . The context , which in this case we 've limited to " business person " , " tourist " , or " unknown " , the time of day , and " open to suggestions " , isn't actually a feature . can I just ask the nice walls part of it is that , in this particular domain you said be i it could be on two different lines but are you saying that in this particular domain it happens the that landmark - iness cor is correlated with grad b: Oh grad c: No . grad b: I either could put " nice walls " on its own line or " open to suggestions " off the slide . grad c: Like you could have a p grad d: And and By " nice " you mean grad c: You Like you could have a post office with you know , nice murals or something . grad b: Or one time I was at this grad d: So " nice walls " is a stand in for like architecturally it , significant grad b: But see the thing is , if it 's grad c: Architecturally appealing from the outside . grad b: Yeah but if it 's architecturally significant you might be able to see it from Like you m might be able to " Vista " it , grad a: grad b: Yeah , versus , like , I was at this place in Europe where they had little carvings of , like , dead people on the walls or something . grad b: But if you looked at it real close , you could see the the in intricacy of the of the walls . grad a: The grad d: Something you want to inspect at close range because it 's interesting . grad b: Robert ? grad a: Well there there is a term that 's often used . And I was just wondering whether that 's the same as what you describe as " landmark - iness " . There 's landmark for , touristic reasons and landmark for I don't know navigational reasons or something . Tourist - y landmarks also happen to be Wouldn't couldn't they also be They 're not exclusive groups , are they ? Like non - tourist - y landmarks and grad a: Or it can be als grad b: direct navigational grad d: They 're not mutually exclusive ? grad b: Yeah . grad b: OK , So our initial idea was not very satisfying , because our initial idea was basically all the features pointing to the output node . grad b: And , so we Reasons being , you know , it 'd be a pain to set up all the probabilities for that . If we moved onto the next step and did learning of some sort , according Bhaskara we 'd be handicapped . grad c: Well usually , you know , N If you have N features , then it 's two to the N or exponential in N . So then our next idea was to add a middle layer , right ? So the thinking behind that was we have the features that we 've drawn from the communication of some Like , the someone s The person at the screen is trying to communicate some abstract idea , like " I 'm " the the abstract idea being " I am a tourist I want to go to this place . " Right ? So we 're gonna set up features along the lines of where they want to go and what they 've said previously and whatnot . Right ? but the middle thing , we were thinking along the lines of maybe trying to figure out , like , the concept of whether they 're a tourist or whether they 're running an errand or something like that along those lines . So then the hidden variables hair variables we came up with were whether someone was on a tour , running an errand , or whether they were in a hurry , because we were thinking , if they were in a hurry there 'd be less likely to like or th grad c: Want to do Vista , grad b: Right . grad c: right ? Because if you want to view things you wouldn't be in a hurry . grad b: Or they might be more likely to be using the place that they want to go to as a like a navigational point to go to another place . right now it 's still kind of in a toy version of it , because we didn't know the probabilities of or Well I 'll talk about it when I get the picture up . " Verb used " is actually personally amusing mainly because it 's it 's just whether the verb is a Tango verb , an Enter verb , or a Vista verb . grad c: Yeah , that one needs a lot of grad d: And are those mutually exclusive sets ? grad b: No . grad c: But that would 've made the probably significantly be more complicated to enter , grad d: Got it . grad c: so we decided that for the purposes of this it 'd be simpler to just have three verbs . Why don't you mention things about this , Bhaskara , that I am not that are not coming to my mind right now . grad c: OK , so Yeah , so note the four nodes down there , the sort of , the things that are not directly extracted . The " closed " is also not directly extracted I guess , from the grad b: Well i it 's grad c: . grad d: From the utterance ? grad b: it 's so it sort of is grad c: Actually , no , wait . grad b: because it 's because have the the time of day grad c: It is . grad c: Right , so f Right , but the other ones , the final destination , the whether they 're doing business , whether they 're in a hurry , and whether they 're tourists , that kind of thing is all sort of you know probabilistically depends on the other things . So we haven't , managed Like we don't have nodes for " discourse " and " parse " , although like in some sense they are parts of this belief - net . grad c: But The idea is that we just extract those features from them , so we don't actually have a node for the entire parse , grad d: grad d: So some of the the top row of things What 's what 's " Disc admission fee " ? grad c: whether they discuss the admission fees . So we looked at the data and in a lot of data people were saying things like " Can I get to this place ? " grad d: Oh . So that 's like a huge clue that they 're trying to Enter the place rather than to Tango or Vista , grad d: - huh . grad b: There were there 'd be other things besides just the admission fee , but you know , we didn't have grad d: So there are certain cues that are very strong either lexical or topic - based , concept cues grad b: From the discourse that Yeah . And then in that second row or whatever that row of Time of Day through that So all of those Some of them come from the utterance and some of them are sort of either world knowledge or situational things . grad d: " Unmark @ @ Time of Day " grad c: Yeah , I m grad a: Yeah . I would actually suggest we go through this one more time so we we all , agree on what what the meaning of these things is at the moment and maybe what changes we grad b: Yeah , th OK . so one thing I I 'm you know unsure about , is how we have the discus the " admission fee " thing set up . So one thing that we were thinking was by doing the layers like this , we kept things from directly affecting the mode beyond the concept , but you could see perhaps discus the " admission fee " going directly to the mode pointing at " Enter " , grad a: grad b: right ? Versus pointing to just at " tourist " , grad d: grad b: But we just decided to keep all the things we extracted to point at the middle and then down . That 's because we 're talking about landmarks as touristic landmarks not as possible grad b: Right . grad c: Disc - " admission fee " is a binary thing , " time of day " is like morning , afternoon , night . grad b: That 's how we have it currently set up , grad a: Yep . grad b: but it could be , you know , based upon hour grad c: Yeah . Normally context will include a huge amount of information , but , we are just using the particular part of the context which consists of the switch that they flick to indicate whether they 're a tourist or not , I guess . grad c: So Right , grad d: Right ? grad c: so it 's not really all of context . Similarly prosody is not all of prosody but simply for our purposes whether or not they appear tense or relaxed . grad a: The the So the context is a switch between tourist or non - tourist ? grad c: and grad a: Or also unknown ? grad b: Or un unknown , grad a: OK . Unknown , right ? grad d: So final dest So it seems like that would really help you for doing business versus tourist , grad c: Which is th Which one ? grad d: but OK . so the the context being , e I don't know if that question 's sort of in general , " are you " the ar ar are do they allow business people to be doing non - business things at the moment ? grad c: Yeah , it does . So then you just have some probabilities over grad c: Everything is probablistic , and There 's always grad d: OK . " Verb used " is like , right now we only have three values , but in general they would be a probability distribution over all verbs . grad c: " nice walls " is binary , " closed " is binary " final destination " , again Yeah , all those are binary I guess . grad c: Yeah , anything with a question mark after it in that picture is a binary node . Right ? grad c: Which things ? grad a: Nice walls ? grad b: Wi grad d: grad b: It is binary but it doesn't have question mark because it 's extracted . grad a: So we can either be in a hurry or not , but we cannot be in a medium hurry at the moment ? grad c: Well , we To do that we would add another value for that . grad c: And that would require s updating the probability distribution for " mode " as well . grad d: So , of course this will happen when we think more about the kinds of verbs that are used in each cases grad a: Yeah , yeah . grad d: but you can imagine that it 's verb plus various other things that are also not in the bottom layer that would that would help you Like it 's a conjunction of , I don't know , you know , the verb used and some other stuff that that would determine grad c: Right . grad a: well the the sort of the landmark is is sort of the object right ? the argument in a sense ? grad d: Usually . I I don't know if that 's always the case I I guess haven't looked at the data as much as you guys have . grad a: that 's always warping on something some entity , grad d: grad a: and maybe at this stage we will we do want to sort of get modifiers in there grad b: . grad a: because they may also tell us whether the person is in a hurry or not grad b: I want to get to the church quickly , grad c: Yeah . Do we have anything else to say about this ? grad c: We can do a little demo . grad a: No , then it wouldn't be a demo I was just gonna s grad c: We can do a demo in the sense that we can , just ob observe the fact that this will , in fact do inference . grad c: So we can , you know , set some of the nodes and then try to find the probability of other nodes . grad c: just I don't know , say they discussed the admission fee grad b: OK . grad c: and the place has nice walls grad b: I love nice walls , OK ? I 'm a big fan . grad d: it 's starting to grow on me grad b: And the time of day is night ? grad c: Yeah , no wait . grad b: One thing that bugs me about JavaBayes is you have to click that and do this . grad c: So that is the probability that they 're Entering , Vista - ing or Tango - ing . grad c: And grad d: So slightly biased toward " Tango " ing grad c: Yeah . grad b: If it 's night time , they have not discussed admission fee , and the n walls are nice . The reason I say the demo doesn't work very well is yesterday we observed everything in favor of taking a tour , and it came up as " Tango " , right ? Over and over again . grad c: Like , we totally hand - tuned the probabilities , grad d: Yeah . We were like " , well if the person does this and this and this , let 's say forty percent for this , grad d: OK . grad a: Yeah but it it grad d: Maybe the bias toward " Tango " ing was yours , then ? grad b: Yeah , grad c: Yeah . grad b: that 's that 's at grad c: It 's So we have to like fit the probabilities . grad d: So , the real case ? grad a: However you know , it The purpose was not really , at this stage , to come up with meaningful probabilities but to get thinking about that hidden middle layer . grad a: And grad b: We would actually I guess once we look at the data more we 'll get more hidden nodes , grad a: grad b: No , I think we should have exponentially more middle nodes than features we 've extracted . Whether you 're It 's whether It 's not grad d: And are th grad c: I think it 's more like " Are you are tourist ? are you in Ham - like Heidelberg for a " grad d: Oh , so , I thought that was directly given by the context switch . What if the context , which is not set , but still they say things like , " I want to go , see the the the castle and , et cetera . " grad a: Is it grad b: Well the I kind of thought of " doing business " as more of running an errand type thing . grad a: So if you run out of cash as a tourist , and and and you need to go to the AT grad b: So i wi th grad d: OK . grad a: " How do I get to the bank ? " grad d: I see . grad c: And that 'll affect whether you want to enter or you if you kinda thing . grad c: Yeah , I think this context node is a bit of a I don't know , like in d Do we wanna have Like it 's grad d: Are you assuming that or not ? Like is that to be if that 's accurate then that would determine tourist node . grad c: If the context were to set one way or another , that like strongly , says something about whether whether or not they 're tourists . grad c: So what 's interesting is when it 's not when it 's set to " unknown " . grad a: We - what set the they set the context to " unknown " ? grad d: OK . grad c: Right now we haven't observed it , so I guess it 's sort of averaging over all those three possibilities . grad a: And if we now do leave everything else as is the results should be the same , grad b: Oops . grad c: Well no , because we Th - the way we set the probabilities might not have Yeah , it 's it 's an it 's an issue , right ? Like grad a: Pretty much the same ? grad c: Yeah , it is . So the issue is that in belief - nets , it 's not common to do what we did of like having , you know , a d bunch of values and then " unknown " as an actual value . What 's common is you just like don't observe the variable , grad d: Yeah . grad c: But We didn't do this because we felt that there 'd I guess we were thinking in terms of a switch that actually grad b: We were thi Yeah , grad a: grad b: We were th grad c: But I don't know y what the right thing is to do for that . grad a: Why don't we Can we , How long would it take to to add another node on the observatory and , play around with it ? grad c: Another node on what ? grad b: well it depends on how many things it 's linked to . If we create something that for example would be So th some things can be landmarks in your sense but they can never be entered ? So for example s a statue . grad a: So maybe we wanna have " landmark " meaning now " enterable landmark " versus , something that 's simply just a vista point , for example . grad a: Yeah ? , a statue or grad c: So basically it 's addressing a variable that 's " enterable or not " . grad b: Also you know , didn't we have a size as one ? The size of the landmark . grad c: What ? grad b: Cuz if it 's grad c: . grad b: For some reason I had that OK , that was a thought that I had at one point but then went away . grad c: So you want to have a a node for like whether or not it can be entered ? grad a: Well , for example , if we include that , yeah ? grad c: Yeah . grad a: accessibility or something , yeah ? " Is it Can it be entered ? " grad c: . In the sense that , you know , if it 's Tom the house of Tom Cruise , you know , it 's enterable but you may not enter it . grad a: Yeah ? and And these are very observable sort of from the from the ontology sort of things . grad b: Way Does it actually help to distinguish between those two cases though ? Whether it 's practically speaking enterable , or actually physically enterable or not ? grad a: y y If If you 're running an errand you maybe more likely to be able to enter places that are usually not al w you 're not usually not allowed to m grad d: It seems like it would for , determining whether they wanna go into it or not . grad b: Well I can see why grad d: Cuz they grad a: Let 's get this b clearer . grad b: Whether it 's a Whether it 's a public building , and whether it 's actually has a door . grad a: This is sort of grad b: So Tom Cruise 's house is not a public building grad d: grad b: OK , sh explain to me why it 's necessary to distinguish between whether something has a door and is not public . Or , if something It seems like it 's equivalent to say that it doesn't have a door a and it grad a: grad b: Or " not public " and " not a door " are equivalent things , grad a: Yeah . So we would have What does it mean , then , that we have to we have an object type statue . grad a: And then we have , for example , an object type , that 's a hotel . It 's the hotel Zum Ritter , which is the only Renaissance building in Heidelberg that was left after the big destruction and for the Thirty Years War , blah - blah - blah . - And lots of detail , c and carvings , engravings and so forth , grad b: Excellent . So I guess your question is so far I have no really arg no real argument why to differentiate between statues as statues and houses of celebrities , from that point of view . Let Let 's do a Can we add , just so I can see how it 's done , a " has door " property or ? grad b: OK . grad c: What would it , connect to ? Like , what would , it affect ? grad a: I think , it might affect Oh actually it 's it it wouldn't affect any of our nodes , right ? grad c: What I was thinking was if you had a like grad a: Oh it 's it affects th The " doing business " is certainly not . grad b: You could affect Theoretically you could affect " doing business " with " has door " . grad a: right ? grad c: Yeah , I don't know if JavaBayes is nice about that . It might be that if you add a new thing pointing to a variable , you just like it just overwrites everything . Whew ! grad c: Well that 's fine , but we have to see the function now . grad b: This grad c: What would be nice if it is if it just like kept the old function for either value but . grad b: Oh wait , it might be Did we w Yes , that 's not good . grad a: Maybe you can read in ? grad c: Ha - So have you used JavaBayes a lot ? grad d: Yes . Really I ha I 've I haven't used it a lot and I haven't used it in the last you know many months so grad c: OK . grad c: Like , we looked at sort of a page that had like a bunch of grad d: Yeah . grad c: in a way this is a lot of good features in Java it 's cra has a GUI and it 's grad d: grad c: What ? grad b: Maybe it did a little bit of learning , grad c: OK . grad a: What is the c code ? Can w can we see that ? How do you write the code grad b: The c grad a: or do you actually never have to write any code there ? grad c: Yeah . grad b: Oh man , grad c: Like , there 's the grad b: I didn't n Is there an ampersand in DOS ? grad c: Nope . grad c: It 'll ask you what you what it wants what you want to open it with and see what BAT , I guess . grad c: That 's Oh ! grad b: Maybe it was just grad a: Oh . grad b: I like I like Word Pad because it has the the returns , grad a: Wordpad ? I grad b: the carriage returns on some of them . grad b: You know how they get " auto - fills " I guess , grad a: Mmm grad b: It just basically looks like it just specifies a bunch of grad a: grad b: It just that it 's grad c: But they 're not very friendly . grad b: Yeah the ordering isn't very clear on grad c: So you 'd have to like figure out Like you have to go and grad d: Right . grad c: it 's not grad b: We were doing it grad c: Yeah we can maybe write an interface th for entering probability distributions easily , something like like a little script . I actually seem to recall Srini complaining about something to do with Entering probability so this is probably grad c: The other thing is it is in Java grad d: Yeah , it 's Yeah . grad b: Or grad a: Do you have the true source files or just the class ? grad b: I don't know if he actually grad c: Yeah . we do grad b: Does he grad c: I I saw directory called " source " , grad b: Oh . grad c: I think it might it might be simpler to just have a script that , you know It 's , like , friendly , grad d: The d the data tables . grad a: But if th if there is an XML file that or format that it can also read it just reads this , right ? When it starts . grad b: Yeah I know there is an I was looking on the we web page and he 's updated it for an XML version of I guess Bayes - nets . grad c: The JavaBayes guy ? So but , e he doesn't use it . So in what sense has he updated it ? grad b: Well th you can either you ca or you can read both . grad b: Because Well at least the I could have misread the web page , I have a habit of doing that , but . grad a: So you got more slides ? grad b: Do I have more slides ? yes , one more . E That 's maybe , I don't know If grad b: that 's future future work . grad b: And of course if you have a presentation that doesn't have something that doesn't work at all , then you have " What I learned " , as a slide . grad b: I know what I like about these meetings is one person will nod , and then the next person will nod , and then it just goes all the way around the room . So this means grad b: Should I pull up the net again ? grad d: Yeah . grad d: So a more general thing than " discussed admission fee " , could be I I 'm just wondering whether the context , the background context of the discourse might be I don't know , if there 's a way to define it or maybe you know generalize it some way , there might be other cues that , say , in the last few utterances there has been something that has strongly associated with say one of the particular modes , I don't know if that might be grad a: I think we grad d: and and into that node would be various various things that that could have specifically come up . grad a: I think a a sort of general strategy here You know , this is this is excellent because it gets you thinking along these terms is that maybe we ob we could observe a couple of discourse phenomena such as the admission fee , and something else and something else , that happened in the discourse before . And maybe there are two So maybe this could be sort of a separate region of the net , which has two has it 's own middle layer . Maybe this , you know , has some kind of , funky thing that di if this and this may influence these hidden nodes of the discourse which is maybe something that is , a more general version of the actual phenomenon that you can observe . So things that point towards grad b: So instead of single node , for like , if they said the word " admission fee " grad d: Exactly . grad b: " admission fee " , or maybe , you know , " how much to enter " grad d: Yeah . Yeah ? And then maybe there are some discourse acts if they happened before , it 's more for a cue that the person actually wants to get somewhere else and that you are in a in a in a route , sort of proceeding past these things , so this would be just something that where you want to pass it . ? Is that it ? However these are of course then the the nodes , the observed nodes , for your middle layer . So this again points to " final destination " , " doing business " , " tourist hurry " and so forth . we have a whole region " in a e grad d: That 's a whole set of discourse related cues to your middle layer . grad d: Right ? grad a: So e because at the end the more we add , you know , the more spider - web - ish it 's going to become in the middle and the more of hand editing . They ra may have there own hidden layer that points to some of the the real hidden layer , or the general hidden layer . grad a: And the same we will be able to do for syntactic information , the verbs used , the object types used , modifiers . grad b: One thing that 's kind of been bugging me when I more I look at this is that the I guess , the fact that the there 's a complete separation between the observed features and in the output . grad b: For instance if the discourse does grad d: What do you mean by that ? grad b: well for instance , the " discourse admission fee " node seems like it should point directly to the grad d: - huh . grad b: or increase the probability of " enter directly " versus " going there via tourist " . Like we could add a node like do they want to enter it , which is affected by admission fee and by whether it 's closed and by whether it has a door . And if it if you do it If you could connect it too hard you may get such phenomenon that like " So how much has it cost to enter ? " and the answer is two hundred fifty dollars , and then the persons says " Yeah I want to see it . " Yeah ? meaning " It 's way out of my budget " grad b: There are places in Germany where it costs two hundred fifty dollars to enter ? grad a: nothing comes to mind . But i you know , i we can Something Somebody can have discussed the admission fee and u the answer is s if we , you know , still , based on that result is never going to enter that building . So the discourse refers to " admission fee " but it just turns out that they change their mind in the middle of the discourse . you have to have some notion of not just there 's a there 's change across several turns of discourse grad b: Right . grad d: so I don't know how if any of this was discussed but how i if it all this is going to interact with whatever general , other other discourse processing that might be happen . grad b: What sort of discourse processing is are the How much is built into SmartKom and grad a: It works like this . The first thing we get is that already the intention is sort of t They tried to figure out the intention , right ? simply by parsing it . And this m won't differentiate between all modes , yeah ? but at least it 'll tell us " OK here we have something that somebody that wants to go someplace , now it 's up for us to figure out what kind of going there is is is happening , and , if the discourse takes a couple of turns before everything all the information is needed , what happens is you know the parser parses it and then it 's handed on to the discourse history which is , o one of the most elaborate elaborate modules . It 's it 's actually the the whole memory of the entire system , that knows what wh who said what , which was what was presented . It helps an an anaphora resolution and it and it fills in all the structures that are omitted , so , because you say " OK , how can I get to the castle ? " Oh , how how much is it ? " and " yeah I would like to g let 's do it " and so forth . So even without an a ana anaphora somebody has to make sure that information we had earlier on is still here . so whenever the , person is not actually rejecting what happened before , so as in " No I really don't want to see that movie . I 'd rather stay home and watch TV " What movie was selected in what cinema in what town is is going to be sort of added into the disc into the representations every di at each dialogue step , by the discourse model discourse model , Yeah , that 's what it 's called . and , it does some help in the anaphora resolution and it also helps in coordinating the gesture screen issues . So a person pointing to something on the screen , you know , the discourse model actually stores what was presented at what location on the s on the screen grad b: . grad a: so it 's a it 's a rather huge huge thing but we can sort of It has a very clear interface . We can query it whether admission fees were discussed in the last turn and and the turn before that or you know how deep we want to search grad b: OK . How deep do we want to sear , you know ? but we should try to keep in mind that , you know , we 're doing this sort of for research , so we we should find a limit that 's reasonable and not go , you know , all the way back to Adam and Eve . You know , did that person ever discuss admissions fee fees in his entire life ? And the dialogues are pretty pretty you know concise and Anyway . grad d: So one thing that might be helpful which is implicit in the use of " admission fee discussion " as a cue for entry , is thinking about the plans that various people might have . This person is , finding out information about this thing in order to go in as a tourist or finding out how to get to this place in order to do business . , because then anything that 's a cue for one of the steps would be slight evidence for that overall plan . They 're in in non in sort of more traditional AI kinds of plan recognition things you sort of have you know , some idea at each turn of agent doing something , " OK , wha what plans is this a consistent with ? " and then get s some more information and then you see " here 's a sequence that this sort of roughly fits into " . grad d: I I don't know how you know you 'd have to figure out what knowl what knowledge representation would work for that . grad a: You know ? and it it 's fifty steps , grad d: grad a: huh ? just for buying a ticket at a ticket counter , you know , and and maybe that 's helpful to look at it to look at those . W when we talked we had the example , you know , of you being a s a person on a ticket counter working at railway station and somebody r runs up to you with a suitcase in his hands , says New York and you say Track seven , huh ? And it 's because you know that that person actually is following , you know You execute a whole plan of going through a hundred and fifty steps , you know , without any information other than " New York " , huh ? inferring everything from the context . , even though there is probably no train from here to New York , right ? grad d: Mmm . Right ? Is that t San Francisco , Chicago ? grad b: I think grad a: Is that possible ? grad b: One time I saw a report on trains , and I think there is a l I don't know if I thought there was a line that went from somewhere , maybe it was Sacramento to Chicago , grad a: grad d: The Transcontinental Railroad , doesn't that ring a bell ? grad b: Yeah but I don't know if it 's still grad d: I think it has to exist somewhere . grad a: Well it never went all the way , right ? you always had to change trains at Omaha , grad d: Well most of the way . grad a: right ? One track ended there and the other one started at five meters away from that grad d: . grad a: yeah ? Has anybody ever been on an Amtrak ? grad d: I have . grad c: What ? Why ? grad b: I just They seem to have a lot of accidents on the Amtrak . grad a: But you know , I don't know whether it 's which ones are safer , you know , statistically . Yeah , they 're Yeah , it 's way better grad a: yeah I used Amtrak quite a bit on the east coast and I was surprised . grad a: ? grad c: I I want to see what it does with " landmark - iness " . grad d: So by the way tha that structure that Robert drew on the board was like more , cue - type - based , right , here 's like we 're gonna segment off a bit of stuff that comes from discourse and then some of the things we 're talking about here are more you know , we mentioned maybe if they talk about , I don't know , entering or som you know like they might be more task - based . grad d: So I I don't know if there There 's obviously some m more than one way of organizing the variables into something grad a: I think that What you guys did is really nicely sketching out different tasks , and maybe some of their conditions . grad a: One task is more likely you 're in a hurry when you do that kind of s doing business , grad d: grad a: and and less in a hurry when you 're a tourist tourists may have never have final destinations , you know because they are eternally traveling around so maybe what what what happened what might happen is that we do get this sort of task - based middle layer , grad d: grad a: and then we 'll get these sub - middle layers , that are more cue - based . So , I suggest w to for to proceed with this in in the sense that maybe throughout this week the three of us will will talk some more about maybe segmenting off different regions , and we make up some some toy a observable " nodes " is that what th grad b: Refined y re just refine the grad a: What 's the technical term ? grad c: OK . For which ? grad a: For the nodes that are observable ? The " outer layer " ? grad c: Just observable nodes , grad b: The features , grad c: evidence nodes ? grad b: I don't know , whatever you grad a: Feature ma make up some features for those Identify four regions , grad c: Yeah . grad a: maybe make up some features for each region and and , and middle layer for those . And then these should then connect somehow to the more plan - based deep space grad c: Yeah . grad c: Yeah , this is totally like The probabilities and all are completely ad - hoc . but , they 're even like like , close to the end we were like , you know we were like really ad - hoc . grad c: Right ? Cuz if it 's like , If it 's four things coming in , right ? And , say , some of them have like three possibilities and all that . So you 're thinking like like a hundred and forty four or something possible things numbers to enter , grad d: And That 's terrible . grad b: Some of them are completely absurd too , like they want to enter , but it 's closed , grad d: That 's Well grad b: it 's night time , you know there are tourists and all this weird stuff happens at the line up and you 're like grad c: Yeah , the only like possible interpretation is that they are like come here just to rob the museum or something to that effect . grad d: In which case you 're supposed to alert the authorities , and see appropriate action . Yeah , another thing to do , is also to , I guess to ask around people about other Bayes - net packages . grad d: Sorry , Wednesday , grad b: Who 's talking on Wednesday ? grad c: Maybe we can ask him about it . grad b: I haven't J Jerry never sent out a sent out an email , did he , ever ? grad c: No . grad d: Ben ? grad a: Ben , then , grad d: I think it 's Ben actually , grad a: Ben . I actually , have , also we can , start looking at the SmartKom tables and I will grad b: Right . grad b: Do you want to trade ? grad a: no I I actually made a mistake because it it fell asleep and when Linux falls asleep on my machine it 's it doesn't wake up ever , so I had to reboot grad d: Oh , no . grad a: And if I reboot without a network , I will not be able to start SmartKom , because I need to have a network . grad b: grad a: So we 'll do that t maybe grad c: But . But once you start sart start SmartKom you can be on You don't have to be on a network anymore . grad b: Why does SmartKom need a network ? grad a: it looks up some stuff that , you know , is is that is in the written by the operating system only if it if you get a DHCP request , so it you know , my computer does not know its IP address , you know ? grad b: Ah . grad a: And I don't have an IP address , they can't look up they don't know who localhost is , and so forth and so forth . grad a: She 's willing to do it , meaning be the wizard for the data collection , also maybe transcribe a little bit , if she has to , but also recruiting subjects , organizing them , and so forth . Jerry however suggested that we should have a trial run with her , see whether she can actually do all the spontaneous , eloquent and creativeness that we expect of the wizard . And I talked to Liz about this and it looks as if Friday afternoon will be the time when we have a first trial run for the data . grad c: So who would be the subject of this trial run ? grad a: Pardon me ? grad c: Who Will there be a Is one Is you one of you gonna be the subject ? Like are you grad a: Liz also volunteered to be the first subject , which I think might be even better than us guys . grad a: If we do need her for the technical stuff , then of course one of you has to sort of jump in . grad c: Well I just figured it has to be someone who 's , familiar enough with the data to cause problems for the wizard , so we can , see if they 're you know good . that 's what we wanna check , right ? grad a: grad d: Well , in this case it 's a p it 's a sort of testing of the wizard rather than of the subject . grad c: Isn't that what it is ? grad d: It 's grad a: yes w we we would like to test the wizard , but you know , if we take a subject that is completely unfamiliar with the task , or any of the set up , we get a more realistic grad c: I guess that would be reasonable . grad d: I 'm sure if we , You think there 's a chance we might need Liz for , whatever , the technical side of things ? I 'm sure we can get other people around who don't know anything , if we want another subject . So , is it a experimental setup for the , data collection totally ready determined ? grad b: I like that . grad a: I think it 's it 's it 's experimental setup u on the technical issue yes , except we st I think we still need a recording device for the wizard , just a tape recorder that 's running in a room . grad a: But in terms of specifying the scenario , we 've gotten a little further grad d: grad a: but we wanted to wait until we know who is the wizard , and have the wizard partake in the ultimate sort of definition probe . So so if if on Friday it turns out that she really likes it and and we really like her , then nothing should stop us from sitting down next week and getting all the details completely figured out . So the ideal task , will have whatever I don't know how much the structure of the evolving Bayes - net will af affect Like we wanna we wanna be able to collect as much of the variables that are needed for that , grad a: Mmm - yea - some . grad d: right ? in the course of the task ? Well not all of them but you know . grad a: Bu - e e e I 'm even This this Tango , Enter , Vista is sort of , itself , an ad - hoc scenario . So we wanted just to collect data , to get that that that elicits more , that elicits richer language . grad a: And we actually did not want to constrain it too much , grad d: And then maybe we 'll discover the phenomenon the phenomena that we want to solve , you know , with whatever engine we we come up with . So this this this is a parallel track , you know , there they hopefully meet , grad d: OK . grad a: but since grad d: It could it could be used for not just this task . grad a: It should tell us , you know , what kind of phenomenon could occur , it should tell us also maybe something about the difference between people who think they speak to a computer versus people who think they speak to a human being grad d: So it may get us some more information on the human - machine pragmatics , that no one knows anything about , as of yesterday . And secondly , now that of course we have sort of started to lick blood with this , and especially since Johno can't stop Tango - ing , we may actually include , you know , those those intentions . So now I think we should maybe have at least one navigational task with with sort of explicit grad d: grad a: not ex it 's implicit that the person wants to enter , grad d: grad a: and maybe some task where it 's more or less explicit that the person wants to take a picture , grad d: grad a: Whereas , you know , if we 'd just get data we 'd never know what they actually wanted , we 'd get no cues . grad b: So is this the official end of the meeting now ? grad c: Yep . grad c: So what 's " Economics , the fallacy " ? grad a: Ma grad b: I just randomly label things . grad c: Oh , really ? grad a: Maybe we ought to switch off these things before we continue

The action plans for SmartKom will be represented in XML as a state transition network, and the term 'dialogue planner' will replace 'dialogue manager'. Prolog will be completely phased out and replaced by Java code. The dialogue manager will have the capability to change states and transition from being event-driven to answering questions from a planning module. SmartKom will have a well-defined core interface, with domain-specific information kept external. Additionally, a syntactic analysis component for chunk parsing will be added to the system. Although SmartKom does not code for intentions as specified in this task, it provides a discourse model that can be useful for feature detection through querying and anaphora resolution.

Question: Summarize the role of the National Police Chiefs' Council in out-of-court disposals and provide an overview of the discussion surrounding this topic. Article: Item 2 this afternoon is our eleventh evidence session on the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. I'm very pleased to welcome Barry Hughes, who is Chief Crown Prosecutor for Wales; Kwame Biney, who is senior policy advisor, CPS; and Iwan Jenkins, who is head of the complex casework unit, Crown Prosecution Service Cymru Wales. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions from Members, and the first ones are from Siân Gwenllian. I would like to start just by looking in general at how the law currently stands, and how do you think the law as it currently stands today, and specifically in terms of reasonable punishment—how does that protect children. barry hughes: Sorry, can I just be clear? How does the law as it presently stands protect children? sian gwenllian am: Yes. barry hughes: We have a range of offences created by the criminal law, going back to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 in the middle of the century before last, which provide for offences of assault against a variety of people, including, in particular, Acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which provides for offences that are specific to children. But the more general criminal legislation, such as the Offences Against the Person Act, does provide specifically for adults and children alike not to be subject to physical assault. In respect of children in particular, you'll be aware that we have section 58 of the Children Act 2004, which does make it a defence for a person accused of assaulting a child to argue that it was a case where they were acting only so as to impose reasonable punishment upon the child. sian gwenllian am: Well, a review was undertaken by the Government back in 2007 that stated that retaining the law in its current form—that that would be the best thing to do because there's no evidence that it's not working satisfactorily. You are suggesting perhaps towards the end of your answer that there could be some change that's happened since 2007. barry hughes: I think the law should reflect contemporary society and the law is evolutionary in nature, and should be evolutionary in nature. And just as if we go back 50 years there are types of behaviour that we might all have contemplated back then as being socially acceptable, many of those types of behaviour are not now, and the law has changed to reflect that. We don't need to go back a very long way to find, for example, that there was no such offence as raping one's married wife, and the law has changed to reflect the fact that that is simply not acceptable. And from what I've seen of the research, and I think back to the 2007 review, to which you've just referred, there is evidence within that review already that opinions are changing. And I've seen research more current than that that suggests that young people find it less acceptable to use reasonable punishment in chastising a child than do people of an older generation. Of course, as we move forward in time, the people who are young now are going to be the older adults of the future. We have heard evidence as a committee that this proposed law would provide a much clearer legal framework—that is, to take out this reasonable punishment defence, that then would make things much clearer for parents and professionals. Does the CPS have a view on that? barry hughes: I think it will make things clearer. I'm not sure it will make them much clearer, because if we get into some of the—. And when it comes to prosecuting, it's often the case that things aren't just black and white; there are multiple shades of grey in between. We know that the Children Act did introduce a degree of clarity, in that it removed the defence of reasonable chastisement for offences of causing actual bodily harm, causing grievous bodily harm, causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and various incidents of child cruelty under the Children and Young Persons Act. There were a series of Court of Appeal cases that sought to clarify the law, but that was at a time, at the end of the 1990s, the start of the 2000s, when we had the European convention on human rights and we had a quickly developing body of case law. A decision was clearly made back then in the early 2000s not to include common assault in the same category as actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm et cetera. As we wind forward some 15 years, I have seen the research that suggests that some people see that the present legislation, and the way in which section 58 applies to reasonable chastisement for common assault of children—some people have interpreted that as saying that smacking is acceptable. I don't think that it is what it says, but there is a degree of confusion around that. And the reason why I say it's not as simple as that is, going back to my words a couple of minutes ago, it's rarely a case of being black and white; there are these degrees of grey. sian gwenllian am: What are the areas of grey that you refer to? Can you give a few examples? barry hughes: If you take an example—so, one of the examples that I've heard discussed has been a child—a young child; let's say a five-year-old child by the side of a road—who darts to go out in the path of moving traffic. Now, technically, taking hold of the child at that point is an assault, because it's an unwanted imposition of physical force. But no-one's going to say that's anything like an assault that should come to the criminal courts. At that point, the parent then seeks to admonish the child, tells them off and smacks the child on the legs. But so much depends upon the circumstances, whether this is something that happens frequently with the child, the size of the child, the parent, the force of the slap, the way in which it's imposed. As we move towards the other end of the spectrum, we might have repeated smacking, shouting, maybe hitting the child over the head as well. There'll be a point at which it crosses the threshold from something that needs to be reported to the police, and the police would take some form of action, and then, as we move through the tiers, it'll reach a stage where the police think this is a case that should be prosecuted and they would bring it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision. And the absolute other end of the spectrum here is one where we decide it's an offence that we think is so serious that it should be charged and brought before a criminal court. That would be very much towards the serious end of the spectrum of the type of behaviour that I've just described to you. Does that help to illustrate that, at one end, it's relatively white and the other end it's relatively black, but in the middle we have the shades of grey? sian gwenllian am: But that would mean that there could be more prosecutions at the softer end. So, you are probably aware, but forgive me if I just explain quickly anyway, when we approach a file of material evidence submitted by the police we apply the code for Crown prosecutors, which has a two-stage test. The first stage is whether there's sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction, and the second stage is—. If there isn't enough evidence, we don't go on to consider whether it's in the public interest, because we wouldn't put an offence before the courts if we didn't think there was a realistic prospect of conviction. So, to return to the point, if we have an offence where, let's say, there is a light smack at the time, the police apply the same code before they bring a case to us. We don't always agree with the police; generally we do, but we don't always agree. So, if a police officer takes witness statements in relation to that case—the light smacking on the leg—at present it's unlikely that would come to the CPS, because they would look at it and say, 'Reasonable chastisement provides for a defence.' If that defence is removed, then obviously there is a greater possibility that it would be referred to the CPS. I would like to think—and I think this is what will probably happen in practice—that the police would take a view that the evidential test may have been satisfied because the defence had been removed, but it wouldn't be in the public interest to prosecute. It may be that the police decide that it is—it may have been two smacks, three smacks, so it moves towards the end of the spectrum that would suggest that matters are becoming rather more serious. We would then apply independently the same test, and we would probably conclude that the evidential stage was met in that instance because the defence no longer exists, which takes us on to considering the public interest. In the circumstances that I've described, every case is going to be unique on its own facts, but in the circumstances that I've described, if it is just a light smack and it's a one-off and there's no history of this, it would probably be the sort of offence we'd decide it wouldn't be in the public interest to prosecute. sian gwenllian am: But isn't it creating a new grey area in terms of the police now having to decide whether repeated smacking is in the public interest to at least refer it to you to decide about that? Do you know what I'm saying? barry hughes: If this Bill goes through, then it will remove a defence, which will make it likely that the police will give this more consideration for referral to the CPS than beforehand, but it doesn't necessarily mean they will refer it, because it will depend on the facts of each individual case. lynne neagle am: We've got some questions now on the divergence between the law in England and Wales from Dawn Bowden. The Assembly doesn't have any legislative competence to impose duties on the CPS, as you know, in the absence of the Secretary of State's consent. What are the implications for implementing the Bill in Wales for that? barry hughes: Can I give you two examples? One of the implications is this—and it's fairly obvious but it's still worth stressing—that the removal of the defence would mean that there would be more cases that would pass the evidential stage in Wales than there would be in England, because the defence would still apply there. That, therefore, raises issues in particular in terms of awareness of criminal offending for people from England who travel to Wales, because it's fairly evident that there would be a defence available in England that is not available in Wales. One of the examples that we talked about was if you consider a family on its way from England into Wales, travelling to Barry Island for a holiday, and troublesome children in the back of the car, harsh words and a small smack on the leg delivered while they're on the M4 going past Bristol would be subject to a defence. By the time we come over to this side of the water, there would be no such defence for the same journey, for the same act. The second example that I'll give you is that we already have within the United Kingdom a certain degree of divergence of laws, and the example I'll give to you is this: drink driving. In England and Wales, the limit for having micrograms of alcohol in your breath is 35 µg in 100 ml of breath. As you drive into Scotland, you're probably okay to drive if you've got 34 µg; by the time you get into Scotland, you won't be. And the consequences for you are significant, because of course it's an offence in Scotland, and not an offence in England, but the punishment, namely disqualification, applies everywhere in the United Kingdom. So, we already have a degree of divergence of law, and the CPS recognises this. In our code, we have a specific provision that takes account of the potential divergence of Welsh law. So, would you see the necessity for a memorandum of understanding, for instance, or it being useful in these circumstances, or are you quite satisfied that the current guidance code would cover that? barry hughes: Well, it's yet to move from a Bill into an Act, so we'd need to make sure that happened. We know there would be a period of time, perhaps as much as two years, or maybe a little more, while that takes place. In terms of how we'd approach it within the Crown Prosecution Service in Cymru-Wales, my approach would be along the lines of working with Kwame and his colleagues to make sure that the guidance that we issue nationally suits both England and Wales. And when it comes to the practical application of the legislation in Wales, we would almost certainly work on the basis that the number of offences—and we might want to get into the number of potential offences, but my take on it is the number of offences is likely to be very small and we would probably have two or three specialists trained in this so that any case that comes through goes to people who've got a close network and can talk with each other— dawn bowden am: And that would be primarily around the public interest issue. So you're obviously a key stakeholder in terms of this legislation and you're clearly very au fait with it and all its implications. What's actually been your involvement with the Government as they've been developing this legislation? barry hughes: My own personal involvement? dawn bowden am: Or the service's. I met with a Minister and a Deputy Minister—I met with Huw Irranca-Davies a little while ago, and I met with Julie Morgan a few months ago—to discuss the overall implications, and then officials on both sides have been engaging with each other. It hasn't been a very close-knit involvement, but we have had enough involvement so that we've felt we've been able to offer views on how we would deal with the legislation. I don't feel that it's been too much, nor do I feel we've been left on the side at all. Now, we've just talked about the divergence of criminal law, and this is probably the first time that there's been an obvious divergence between English and Welsh law, and so we were then talking about the guidance, weren't we, and whether that needs amending to reflect it. But I think you were saying that you felt, within the existing guidance, it could be dealt with, so you don't see a need to update or amend the guidance. barry hughes: I think we would need to update the guidance, and it goes back to the application of the evidential stage, before the public interest stage. On the evidential stage, I doubt that we'll need to do much, other than to make people aware that the defence is not available in Wales in the same way that it is in England, and we might have some light-touch guidance around that. When it comes to the public interest stage, that's a little more specialist and I think we would need to develop more with respect to that. dawn bowden am: And are you satisfied that your staff in Wales—well, and in England, actually, across the border—will be sufficiently aware of the divergence in this area of law? barry hughes: Not as of the present day. [Laughter.] dawn bowden am: But you would expect that to be something you would— barry hughes: Yes, I have no doubt. To an extent, actually, I think I would say that staff in Wales are aware of this already, because in my role as chief Crown prosecutor, I publish a monthly blog and we talk about the things we're doing, so staff are aware. I've discussed with staff and they've seen my blog and we've put it on our website: there have been engagements with the Welsh Government that this is a piece of work in which we're interested and that is under way. I think most staff would probably be aware that we are involved in this and that it is something that, at present, may well happen. And does that mean that there would also be a similar need for the CPS in England to be aware of the changes? barry hughes: They would need to be aware, but not to the same extent. So, in my office in Cardiff, for example, because we work digitally, I have about 30 to 35 prosecutors who work for the CPS in London, and they work exclusively on London cases. But there are times when some of those prosecutors will prosecute at courts in Wales, and then there may be an interchange; they'll come to work for us on secondment, or they'll come to work for us permanently. We'd need to make sure that those people were brought up to speed on the fact that there are some aspects of Welsh law that diverge from English law. My final question, Chair, is just whether you think there are any other significant cross-border issues that arise from this potential legislation. It boils down to the fact that there's a defence in England for assaults upon children that isn't available in Wales if this Bill goes through, and then it's dealing with the consequences of that. Oh no, that's right—obviously, this Act is on a particular trajectory at the moment, and it's due to be introduced before the end of this Assembly. Do you think it would be better for us as scrutinisers of this Act if we could see the draft changes to CPS guidance on the public interest test before we make our final decision? barry hughes: I honestly don't think that would necessarily be helpful. What we would envisage is that we would simply want to take the present public interest factors, which are set out, in my view, very clearly in the code for Crown prosecutors, and we would provide a degree of detail around those that relates more specifically to the issues that we're discussing here. And we'd need to work that up as we go along, and I think you'd run a risk of putting the cart before the horse, if I may put it like that. suzy davies am: It's just that, personally, I think the public interest test is critical in all this, and it would really help us to understand what it could look like before we commit to a particular course of action in supporting or not supporting the Bill, that was all. sian gwenllian am: My point is about the criminal law in Wales and England diverging in this particular instance, and we've been told that this is probably the first time it's happened. Can you think of any other examples where that divergence has happened and does it actually set some kind of precedent in motion? barry hughes: There are other offences in Wales that don't exist in England, but they don't crop up very often. So, to give you examples, there is an offence of putting an electronic collar on your pet—let's not stretch that into children. But putting an electronic collar on your pet that administers a shock is an offence in Wales; it's not an offence in England. There are also offences around the picking of cockles in west Wales, which is not an offence—. So, you can see there are some, but I would argue that the fact that you drive across the border into Scotland and commit an offence that you won't commit in England is possibly more significant for the general public. Of course, the topic we're discussing here is of real relevance for the general public, and you have heard evidence, I know, already, that comes from people who are quite strongly in favour and people quite strongly against it. One of the ways in which I've approached this is looking at it from the perspective of what the law is there for, which is to set out, in essence, what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. It doesn't necessarily mean we need to use the law for that, but it signifies how society views a certain behaviour. I like to look at it from the perspective of the person who is being affected by this, namely the child, and the change in the law here would afford children a degree of protection that they don't presently have, but which they do have when they attain the age of 16.FootnoteLink So, I looked at this—. I've had considerable dealings over the years with offences against residents in care homes, and you'll have seen Winterbourne View, you'll have seen recently up in Durham, where we have adults who need to be looked after because of issues with their mental capacity, and sometimes, the carers become frustrated with them and they admonish them. In much the same way as children are vulnerable and are looked after and can be sometimes quite annoying—but there is a level of protection for an adult striking a child lightly under the present law that is not available to the same adult for striking that child when they turn 16. sian gwenllian am: Do you think that what we're doing in Wales will be emulated in England at some point? barry hughes: Well, it's certainly going through in parallel in Scotland, and there are a great many other countries around the world that already have this, including a large number of European countries. Who knows? Trying to get any legislation through Westminster at the moment—who knows? Not tomorrow, I'd say. Can I just begin by asking you to help the committee out here in understanding how the burden of proof is going to work if this defence is removed? Because the issue of whether something is punishment or not is going to disappear, providing that it's clear that contact with a child has happened. Is that going to work on the presumption that that's an unlawful contact? Is that something the prosecution will still have to prove, or will it be for an accused parent to say, to use your example, 'I was just dragging them out of the traffic or stopping them putting their hands in the fire'? barry hughes: I understand your point. So, if we remove the defence of reasonable chastisement, in a sense that alters some things but it doesn't alter the basic responsibility of the prosecution, which is to establish its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And if the defence raise an argument and say, 'Well, look, that was a lawful act; I was only doing what I thought was reasonable in the circumstances', it's for the Crown to disprove that. barry hughes: And we've got to disprove that to the criminal standard, which is beyond a reasonable doubt. I can see the potential for individuals who feel strongly about this to look to contest the matter, to not admit any wrongdoing at all and to take the matter to trial, and it would be our responsibility to disprove that. Obviously, when we're talking about CPS guidelines and all the rest, we've already come some distance down the process, haven't we? Have you got any views on what might be done to prevent cases even coming as far as arrest? Because one of the things that we have to consider is that once you're arrested, that is recorded somewhere and will appear in things like DBS checks in the future, even if it goes no further. Do you have any views on how intervention might work better earlier on, even at the point of the knock at the door? barry hughes: From the perspective of the CPS, I'm not sure I can help you there. Unlike in many other jurisdictions, we have no power whatsoever to direct the police, so if the police decide not to investigate—. I routinely get letters from members of the public outraged that the police have decided not to investigate their particular neighbour dispute or something, and they want us to do something about it and we can't. suzy davies am: Thank you for that, because I thought that was important to get on the record as well. We're looking at a period of a couple of years after this Act passes—if it does—for implementation. Is there anything at the moment that you think perhaps you still need to do as an organisation towards being in a position to practically implement this law? barry hughes: I think we need to maintain the type of dialogue that we've built up with the Welsh Government and colleagues there. We have other members of my staff who are involved in the other work streams that feed through to that, and I believe that that involvement will ensure that we are sufficiently interconnected; that we can liaise, in turn, with Kwame and his colleagues in the headquarters to respond to things as they develop. So, I think we've got a network of contacts built up here that is adequate for the purpose—at least, 'adequate' might sound a little— suzy davies am: Sufficient. suzy davies am: So, you're confident, by 2022, then, that you'll have changes to the CPS guidelines that are good to go, if you like. Bear with me a second—thank you very much—in your written evidence, you did welcome the indication from the Welsh Government that this reasonable period after Royal Assent would be necessary. Apart from the CPS guideline changes, which you'll be working through, is there anything else you think you might be needing to do apart from just keeping in touch? I'm just thinking: are there any practical and possibly financial implications for your workforce in this? barry hughes: If this legislation goes through, there will be minor financial consequences for us and I don't see any significant financial consequences in the period between now and the Bill becoming law other than the time of ourselves in discussing this today. And what about afterwards, then? Because one of the pieces of thinking behind this Act is to collect data to see whether this change in the law actually works. Do you want to talk us through a little bit about how that might affect you? I don't know who to ask on this. Well, I think that we are going to need to maintain a clear record of any cases that are referred to the CPS from the police and that will—. Normally, we do this through our case management system, which is England-and-Wales wide, and you'd put a flag on. So, for example, domestic abuse, there's a flag for that, and assault on a child, there's a flag for that. Trying to get that through on a system that covers all of England and Wales—it's quite expensive, unbelievably; it wouldn't happen. My take on it: I've seen and spoken with Matt Jukes about this, from South Wales Police; I have seen the justice impact assessment; I've seen the research that's been fed through from New Zealand; and I've seen our own response to a freedom of information request and the papers that the CPS put into the review that you mentioned earlier in 2007. I would be very surprised if we were to prosecute anything other than low single figures a year, if that much. We may have more referrals from the police, but I doubt it would be double the figure we prosecute, even. There are out-of-court disposals and there are all sorts of diversions that you will have discussed, and I know you've discussed, with the police and the police and crime commissioner. So, the numbers will be very small, which means we would be able to keep a clear track on those and, obviously, we would wish to keep the situation under review, and we'd reach a period of time after whatever—12, 18 months, maybe 24 months—where we'd look back to see how we are doing. And I'd like to think that we will be doing that in consultation with interested parties and stakeholders. So, for offences such as racially aggravated offending, whether it's criminal damage or offence against the person, we will bring together interested parties, by which people from outside the CPS, quite often third sector agencies that represent vulnerable groups. That, in turn, helps us shape and improve the way that we prosecute these cases and I can foresee that, after this legislation came in, we might get 18 months, two years down the road, and I can see us sitting in a room with some of the cases we've prosecuted, maybe cases we've decided not to prosecute, with the police and interested parties from both sides, to have a discussion about how we're doing with it all. suzy davies am: That's really helpful to know because, of course, one of the difficulties of dealing with the culture change, which is what the Minister's effectively after here, is that we are still talking about it in the context of criminal legislation. And what I'm hearing from you is that the chances of somebody who's currently protected by the defence and is not part of a bigger case where there's serial smacking or other difficulties in a family, for example—the chances of them getting to you in the first place are pretty low, and then the chances of them passing even the current public interest tests are pretty low. In which case, my question is: why are we bothering with this law rather than concentrating on a new piece of law, possibly through the civil system, which would achieve the culture change better? Maybe that's not a question you feel that you can answer, but you can see why I'm asking the question. In other words, there is a greater degree of protection for children, and I think the value that would derive from this legislation is the message that it sends out. I go back to what I was saying to you right at the start, about the evolution of the law, and the way we've seen many other countries around the world adopt a very similar approach to that being proposed by the Welsh Government is, in my view, an evolution of the law. So, yes, there may not be many more prosecutions, but there won't be fewer than there are presently, because there's a greater degree of protection for children. lynne neagle am: Before we move on, can I just ask—? The Children Act 2004 applies to a child up to the age of 18— barry hughes: Sixteen. barry hughes: I'm reasonably confident that it's 16.FootnoteLink lynne neagle am: Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to put on record about the factors that the CPS would be taking into consideration when applying the public interest test in respect of this Bill? barry hughes: Can I give you an example, which might illustrate the way in which things could be different? This is one, which—I give credit to Iwan for this, because he thought of it. If we take an adult with a small child—say, a four-year-old—in a supermarket, and the child is pulling cans off the shelves, it's quite annoying, and they keep doing it and keep doing it. The parent remonstrates, and the parent ends up finding that verbal admonishment is inadequate, and smacks the child lightly on the legs, which does the trick and the child stops. Presently, if someone in that supermarket were to report that to the police, I think the police would probably conclude that that is covered by the defence of reasonable chastisement. In other words, the evidential stage wouldn't be passed; you don't get on to consider the public interest. But if we have that same parent in there the following week, and you have the same happen again, presently, the defence would apply. If that defence didn't apply at all, and we had a sequence of three offences, the public interest test would kick in, if I may put it like that, pretty quickly, because it would be repeated behaviour. So, that would be the distinction between how things are now and how they would be in the future, because the defence would not be available, so the public interest test would then come to the fore that much more quickly. So, when we apply the public interest test, the essence of it is about proportionality, and trying to come up with an approach that is proportionate to the offending. We look at the age of the offender, the age of the victim, we look at the circumstances, we look at the impact upon the victim, we look at the impact that's likely in relation to the suspect, and there is, within the code, a long list of matters that we take into account. If someone's got previous convictions for doing something wrong, it's more likely they're going to be prosecuted the next time. Mostly, it's reasonably obvious; the more serious an offence, the more likely you are to be prosecuted. vikki howells am: Thank you, that's really useful, and— lynne neagle am: Just before you move on, can I ask you a question? This morning the committee was meeting with groups of parents who are opposed to the Bill and groups of parents who are for the Bill, and one of the parents this morning was querying where the interests of the child would come into the public interest test. Can you just clarify for the record how the best interests of the child would be taken into account in considering whether to go forward with a prosecution? barry hughes: Normally, if there were an assault by someone else upon a child, outside the family, we would tend to take views from the parents of that child. In circumstances where both parents, arguably, are the suspects, we probably wouldn't be asking them. We would find another way, and we would talk with the police to ensure that we are informed about how the child feels about what has happened. I can foresee real difficulties in circumstances where we have parents who are separating where the children are being used, effectively, in divorce proceedings, for example, where we might have one parent saying there was a really bad impact upon the child and the other parent saying there wasn't. We'd want to find a way to cut through that to work out really from the police how does the child feel about that. So, we would tailor it to the circumstances of the particular incident to assess how the child feels about it. It's not determinative, nor is it determinative in cases where we prosecute for adult defendants inflicting some form of assault upon adult victims. In the same session this morning I thought this was an interesting question raised by a parent, on the rights of the child side of things, where if a parent offers a child two forms of punishment because that child has done something that they know they shouldn't have, and they're given the option of, 'You can have a quick smack and a cwtch, or you're going to your bedroom for quarter of an hour', and the child is allowed to choose and the child chooses the smack, what happens then? I'm not offering any views on the fact that this choice has been given, but it was put to us today about how would that fall in the law once it were changed. There is a body of law that— suzy davies am: A child can't consent to assault. barry hughes: Yes, you can't consent to a serious assault, apart from in certain—. So, for example, tattooing is a serious assault on one level, but you can consent to a tattoo. I can think of one case where a man branded his initials on a woman's buttocks, but she consented to it and the Court of Appeal held that they could consent to that. I can also think of a series of cases, which I won't get into here, that involve sadomasochistic behaviour between adults, some of which was really serious, and involved people willingly applying themselves to things that no sane person would do. And the Court of Appeal in that case, a case called Brown, said, 'No, that's going too far—you can't consent to that.' Then, you may have seen there was a case from the midlands recently where a gentleman operating a tattoo parlour was also involved in body surgery—splitting people's tongues. So, there is again—I referred before to the spectrum of offending, and there is a clear spectrum of offending that you can realistically consent to and then you get to offending you can't consent to. When it comes to much lesser assaults, the law is more unclear as to what you can consent to. I've got one further series of questions around out-of-court disposals, which you've already mentioned briefly. In your written evidence, you say there's ongoing work exploring diversion rather than prosecution in respect of this Bill. Firstly, could you tell us a bit more about the work that is being done to explore this as an option? barry hughes: We've been working with the National Police Chiefs' Council. She is responsible for developing the police approach to out-of-court disposals and simplifying the range of out-of-court disposals. There is quite a range, and life would be simpler and clearer to have fewer types of disposal with more clarity about what each one of them involved. I must say, this is primarily a matter for the police, because there are a great many offences or reports of crime that do not reach the CPS because they are dealt with by way of an out-of-court disposal. There's a document called the director's guidance on charging, which is issued by the director of public prosecutions, which sets out offences the police may charge and offences the CPS may charge. Offences that the police refer to us for a charging decision will generally be offences where they feel that there should be a prosecution rather than an out-of-court disposal. There may be cases where it's genuinely very difficult to assess what's the best approach, in which case we will have a conversation with them, a meaningful conversation, about what's the best way to approach that particular case. There will also be cases, and we see these not that rarely, where the police will bring a case to us for a prosecution on the basis that satisfies the evidential stage and satisfies the public interest stage, and we take a different view on the public interest stage. So, we might say—for example, it involves a 15-year-old youth—we  think that diversion from the criminal justice system is a better disposal and we decide not to prosecute. We aren't responsible for administering the out-of-court disposal or indeed monitoring compliance with that disposal, if, for example, it has conditions attached, such as repayment of the damage caused to a window or a front gate. That's not our responsibility—that will fall to the police—but we can decide that an out-of-court disposal is a more appropriate disposal than a prosecution. One final question on that then: creating a body of out-of-court disposals that are specific to this Bill—how would that actually work in practice do you think, given the fact that the Assembly's legislative competence to make provision on the face of the Bill is limited? barry hughes: The way I might see it is that, clearly, policing's not devolved, the CPS is not devolved—the way I might see this is that, within Wales, you could build an infrastructure that provides for a range of out-of-court disposals. You can't direct the police or the CPS to point people towards that, but, if you build a good infrastructure, it's more likely that people will be pointed in that direction. vikki howells am: And who would build that infrastructure, in your opinion? barry hughes: Somewhere within Wales—Welsh Government, local authorities, the police working in partnership. If I could just ask about awareness raising, then: you mentioned the Bill in Scotland, but that Bill includes a duty on the Government to raise awareness of the change. Do you think that's right or should this committee be saying that there should be a similar duty imposed in Wales? barry hughes: I'm not sure it's for me to say whether there should be a duty or not. I can, however, say that I think the greater the level of awareness, the more likely it is that the Act, if passed, will achieve its intentions. And, in your written evidence, you mentioned the fact that there's no indication of any plans for awareness raising in England and that if a person from England is being prosecuted in Wales as a result of this change, a question could arise about the lack of knowledge about the different provisions that apply in Wales. Can I ask what approach the CPS currently takes in Wales if a law is unintentionally broken by someone who's come from outside the UK, for example? barry hughes: It's straightforward: if someone comes to this country and commits an offence here—by this country, I'd say England or Wales; I'd treat them as one for these purposes—if someone comes from abroad and commits an offence that isn't an offence in their country, but is an offence here, then I'm afraid that ignorance of the law is no defence. So, raising awareness is important, and I saw, and I was pleased to see, that the media publicity surrounding this proposed legislation, which is now going through, reached as far afield as New York and had widespread media coverage across England and Wales, and I think the Government would be well placed here to take advantage of that willingness of the media to explore something, which is potentially divisive, and I think you've probably seen some of that. Anything like that is a good story, and a good story gets out there, which means you're more likely to make people aware of it. sian gwenllian am: Yes, we've discussed some of these already, but, for example, under the new law, or the proposed law, would one unintended consequence be that, if someone living in Wales who can't use the reasonable punishment defence—would their life prospects be different compared to those people in England, who will be able to use that defence? I think you've mentioned that in your written evidence. A simple answer: if somebody in Wales is convicted—so, if it goes towards the end of the spectrum that is serious, which results in a prosecution—. It may be—the sort of circumstance I can see happening here is somebody who takes a principled stand and declines any form of out-of-court disposal and says, 'Prosecute me'. So, let's say it comes to court and let's say they end up being convicted of assaulting their child—in circumstances that would not have happened in England—then they would have a criminal conviction they wouldn't have in England, and that, inevitably, has an impact upon their life prospects. And do you think that that would be an isolated incident? barry hughes: Yes, truly, I believe, an isolated incident. I've said before that I would be very surprised if we even had referrals that reached double figures on these cases. When the CPS was asked to conduct a survey across all of England and Wales—this was the review in 2007—it spanned just over a two-year period, and there were 12 cases that were brought up at that stage. Now, I have to say, I don't think that's entirely reliable, but it is indicative. We had a Freedom of Information Act request at one stage, which threw up something like three cases in a year. So, if you think about that as being all of England and Wales—and we make up about 5 per cent of the volume of criminal prosecutions nationally—you can see why I might say the numbers are likely to be small, for the reasons we've explored about getting past the evidential stage into the public interest. In terms of thinking about another kind of unintended consequence, in terms of managing performance and all of the targets that the police need to reach, are we perhaps going to see some people going through the criminal justice system in an inappropriate way and contrary to the interests of the child, because we need to reach some target in terms of performance measures? barry hughes: I have to say I think that extremely unlikely. Clearly, we prosecute if we think that there's a reasonable prospect, a realistic prospect, of conviction and it's in the public interest, but we have no targets. And I would also say, because the numbers here are likely to be so small, any assertion of looking to meet targets—it's a tiny, tiny fragment of a drop in the ocean. sian gwenllian am: What about—? There is a target for unsolved crimes, or unsolved offences. What if they fall into that category? Is that an unintended consequence? barry hughes: I'm talking about something I don't have great knowledge of here. There was, at one stage, a series of targets for the police that bore down upon cases that secure what was called a sanction detection, which counted for Home Office figures. Some individual constabularies may still have targets, but, as far as I'm aware, we don't have a suite of national measures. And, in my experience, the police are much more sensible these days than they may have been 20 years ago, in terms of trying to get cases charged in order to meet some notional target. We've mentioned this, namely the risk of malicious reporting against parents involved in private family law cases. Is that going to increase if we change the law? barry hughes: There is greater potential for it to increase. I think the numbers, again, will be tiny, and dwarfed by the number of cases where we have to deal with the fallout between a relationship breakdown between partners—whether they be living within the same house or living in different houses. Getting into the subtleties of the father, say, smacking the child in a way that was reasonable chastisement or was not reasonable chastisement is probably part of a much bigger piece here. It's not something that would cause me concern, simply because we already have a well-developed approach to dealing with the way in which we evaluate the evidence from parties who may well have a particular position that they want to reinforce, sometimes through exaggeration of basic facts and sometimes through fabrication. sian gwenllian am: Are there any other unintended consequences that come to your mind if we introduce this law? barry hughes: No, I think we've had a pretty helpful canter through most of the circumstances here that might happen. sian gwenllian am: Finally from me, therefore—another issue, in a way—the European convention on human rights. Would not introducing the new law mean, at some point, that Wales could get itself into difficulty because there is a breach of the human rights convention? And therefore England as well, at some point. How to approach that one? In the 2007 review to which we've referred already, the Government, the then Government, set out its position that it believes that section 58, in the way that it was drafted, is compliant with the European convention. If Wales implements this legislation and it becomes part of the law, then, arguably, Wales would be more in compliance with ECHR than not, and England would be less so. But nonetheless, at present, I haven't seen any demurral from the position that was expressed in 2007, which is that they consider that the position that's been adopted with section 58 is compliant with the legislation. It may well be tested by case law; that's the way it's likely to happen. Some of the changes in this arena were driven by case law—so, that case I referred to, Regina v H, which was heard back in 2001 in the Court of Appeal, was significant in helping shape the direction of travel towards section 58. sian gwenllian am: And that case law not necessarily would have to happen within the UK—that case law could come from other countries within the European Union. barry hughes: It could, but I would be a foolish man if I were to say what impact European jurisprudence might have upon us. [Laughter.] suzy davies am: [Inaudible.]—like common law jurisdictions would be. Suzy's touched on this mildly, but, in written evidence, you say that you do not consider that the costs of prosecuting cases made possible by the Bill will be of great significance to the Crown Prosecution Service, and you're basing that, from your evidence here today, on the low numbers of prosecutions. So, we've been asked by individuals, and we've had consultation responses from individuals, who've argued that there is no point creating legislation if people are not prosecuted for breaching it. What's your answer to that? barry hughes: There is a huge body of legislation out there that outlaws certain offences, and I think probably about—. From memory—please never hold me to this—but, from memory, there are something like 10,000 criminal offences; we probably prosecute 5 per cent of those in any given year. I've been prosecuting for 32 years now; there are some offences that I've never come near and probably never will. But, nonetheless, the fact those offences exist sets out in terms what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. Well, they're not something that we do, but it sets out what's tolerant—what's tolerable, sorry, and what isn't. So, the fact that we might not have many prosecutions is, for me, not a reason not to say that we shouldn't signify that certain behaviour is or is not acceptable. Clearly, we don't wish to criminalise everything—that would be a nonsense—or to attempt to set the boundaries by almost micromanaging what individuals do and don't do. And then the explanatory memorandum says there is a shortage of registered intermediaries who assist child witnesses during police interview and when giving evidence in court. Is this a potential barrier to implementing this proposed law, and are there any other potential barriers you want to raise? barry hughes: No. There was a shortage of registered intermediaries in Wales, and I know that the Ministry of Justice have taken action to deal with that, and we have had a number of people who are now in a position to act as intermediaries. Now, of course, if they were to decide not to do that anymore, we may have a problem, but, in turn, we would be looking to recruit more people into those positions. So, yes, it has the potential to serve as a barrier, but in practice, I don't think it would be a barrier. I think, particularly given the very low numbers we're talking about, we would be able to manage it. Can I thank you for attending, the three of you, and for your answers, which have been fascinating and very clear and most helpful to the committee? You will be sent a transcript following the meeting to check for accuracy. Paper to note 1 is a letter from me to the Business Committee requesting an extension on the deadline for the Bill, which has now been agreed. Paper to note 2 is a letter from myself to the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services requesting some further information from CAFCASS Cymru on the Bill. Paper to note 3 is a letter from myself to the Minister for Education regarding Diamond reform implementation ahead of our scrutiny session on 4 July. Can I propose in accordance with Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.

Barry Hughes introduced the National Police Chiefs' Council and their work on out-of-court disposals to their cooperated organizations. The discussion then shifted to the possibility of creating a specific body of out-of-court disposals for the Bill. Lastly, there was a brief conversation about the duty of awareness raising. The National Police Chiefs' Council played a key role in developing the police approach to out-of-court disposals and streamlining the range of options available.

Question: Summarize the discussion on relative agencies, workload, and the concerns of Julie Morgan and Karen Cornish regarding the relationship with other agencies, heavy workload for social workers, and the shortage of registered intermediaries. Article: Item 2 this afternoon is our eleventh evidence session on the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. I'm very pleased to welcome Barry Hughes, who is Chief Crown Prosecutor for Wales; Kwame Biney, who is senior policy advisor, CPS; and Iwan Jenkins, who is head of the complex casework unit, Crown Prosecution Service Cymru Wales. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions from Members, and the first ones are from Siân Gwenllian. I would like to start just by looking in general at how the law currently stands, and how do you think the law as it currently stands today, and specifically in terms of reasonable punishment—how does that protect children. barry hughes: Sorry, can I just be clear? How does the law as it presently stands protect children? sian gwenllian am: Yes. barry hughes: We have a range of offences created by the criminal law, going back to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 in the middle of the century before last, which provide for offences of assault against a variety of people, including, in particular, Acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which provides for offences that are specific to children. But the more general criminal legislation, such as the Offences Against the Person Act, does provide specifically for adults and children alike not to be subject to physical assault. In respect of children in particular, you'll be aware that we have section 58 of the Children Act 2004, which does make it a defence for a person accused of assaulting a child to argue that it was a case where they were acting only so as to impose reasonable punishment upon the child. sian gwenllian am: Well, a review was undertaken by the Government back in 2007 that stated that retaining the law in its current form—that that would be the best thing to do because there's no evidence that it's not working satisfactorily. You are suggesting perhaps towards the end of your answer that there could be some change that's happened since 2007. barry hughes: I think the law should reflect contemporary society and the law is evolutionary in nature, and should be evolutionary in nature. And just as if we go back 50 years there are types of behaviour that we might all have contemplated back then as being socially acceptable, many of those types of behaviour are not now, and the law has changed to reflect that. We don't need to go back a very long way to find, for example, that there was no such offence as raping one's married wife, and the law has changed to reflect the fact that that is simply not acceptable. And from what I've seen of the research, and I think back to the 2007 review, to which you've just referred, there is evidence within that review already that opinions are changing. And I've seen research more current than that that suggests that young people find it less acceptable to use reasonable punishment in chastising a child than do people of an older generation. Of course, as we move forward in time, the people who are young now are going to be the older adults of the future. We have heard evidence as a committee that this proposed law would provide a much clearer legal framework—that is, to take out this reasonable punishment defence, that then would make things much clearer for parents and professionals. Does the CPS have a view on that? barry hughes: I think it will make things clearer. I'm not sure it will make them much clearer, because if we get into some of the—. And when it comes to prosecuting, it's often the case that things aren't just black and white; there are multiple shades of grey in between. We know that the Children Act did introduce a degree of clarity, in that it removed the defence of reasonable chastisement for offences of causing actual bodily harm, causing grievous bodily harm, causing grievous bodily harm with intent, and various incidents of child cruelty under the Children and Young Persons Act. There were a series of Court of Appeal cases that sought to clarify the law, but that was at a time, at the end of the 1990s, the start of the 2000s, when we had the European convention on human rights and we had a quickly developing body of case law. A decision was clearly made back then in the early 2000s not to include common assault in the same category as actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm et cetera. As we wind forward some 15 years, I have seen the research that suggests that some people see that the present legislation, and the way in which section 58 applies to reasonable chastisement for common assault of children—some people have interpreted that as saying that smacking is acceptable. I don't think that it is what it says, but there is a degree of confusion around that. And the reason why I say it's not as simple as that is, going back to my words a couple of minutes ago, it's rarely a case of being black and white; there are these degrees of grey. sian gwenllian am: What are the areas of grey that you refer to? Can you give a few examples? barry hughes: If you take an example—so, one of the examples that I've heard discussed has been a child—a young child; let's say a five-year-old child by the side of a road—who darts to go out in the path of moving traffic. Now, technically, taking hold of the child at that point is an assault, because it's an unwanted imposition of physical force. But no-one's going to say that's anything like an assault that should come to the criminal courts. At that point, the parent then seeks to admonish the child, tells them off and smacks the child on the legs. But so much depends upon the circumstances, whether this is something that happens frequently with the child, the size of the child, the parent, the force of the slap, the way in which it's imposed. As we move towards the other end of the spectrum, we might have repeated smacking, shouting, maybe hitting the child over the head as well. There'll be a point at which it crosses the threshold from something that needs to be reported to the police, and the police would take some form of action, and then, as we move through the tiers, it'll reach a stage where the police think this is a case that should be prosecuted and they would bring it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision. And the absolute other end of the spectrum here is one where we decide it's an offence that we think is so serious that it should be charged and brought before a criminal court. That would be very much towards the serious end of the spectrum of the type of behaviour that I've just described to you. Does that help to illustrate that, at one end, it's relatively white and the other end it's relatively black, but in the middle we have the shades of grey? sian gwenllian am: But that would mean that there could be more prosecutions at the softer end. So, you are probably aware, but forgive me if I just explain quickly anyway, when we approach a file of material evidence submitted by the police we apply the code for Crown prosecutors, which has a two-stage test. The first stage is whether there's sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction, and the second stage is—. If there isn't enough evidence, we don't go on to consider whether it's in the public interest, because we wouldn't put an offence before the courts if we didn't think there was a realistic prospect of conviction. So, to return to the point, if we have an offence where, let's say, there is a light smack at the time, the police apply the same code before they bring a case to us. We don't always agree with the police; generally we do, but we don't always agree. So, if a police officer takes witness statements in relation to that case—the light smacking on the leg—at present it's unlikely that would come to the CPS, because they would look at it and say, 'Reasonable chastisement provides for a defence.' If that defence is removed, then obviously there is a greater possibility that it would be referred to the CPS. I would like to think—and I think this is what will probably happen in practice—that the police would take a view that the evidential test may have been satisfied because the defence had been removed, but it wouldn't be in the public interest to prosecute. It may be that the police decide that it is—it may have been two smacks, three smacks, so it moves towards the end of the spectrum that would suggest that matters are becoming rather more serious. We would then apply independently the same test, and we would probably conclude that the evidential stage was met in that instance because the defence no longer exists, which takes us on to considering the public interest. In the circumstances that I've described, every case is going to be unique on its own facts, but in the circumstances that I've described, if it is just a light smack and it's a one-off and there's no history of this, it would probably be the sort of offence we'd decide it wouldn't be in the public interest to prosecute. sian gwenllian am: But isn't it creating a new grey area in terms of the police now having to decide whether repeated smacking is in the public interest to at least refer it to you to decide about that? Do you know what I'm saying? barry hughes: If this Bill goes through, then it will remove a defence, which will make it likely that the police will give this more consideration for referral to the CPS than beforehand, but it doesn't necessarily mean they will refer it, because it will depend on the facts of each individual case. lynne neagle am: We've got some questions now on the divergence between the law in England and Wales from Dawn Bowden. The Assembly doesn't have any legislative competence to impose duties on the CPS, as you know, in the absence of the Secretary of State's consent. What are the implications for implementing the Bill in Wales for that? barry hughes: Can I give you two examples? One of the implications is this—and it's fairly obvious but it's still worth stressing—that the removal of the defence would mean that there would be more cases that would pass the evidential stage in Wales than there would be in England, because the defence would still apply there. That, therefore, raises issues in particular in terms of awareness of criminal offending for people from England who travel to Wales, because it's fairly evident that there would be a defence available in England that is not available in Wales. One of the examples that we talked about was if you consider a family on its way from England into Wales, travelling to Barry Island for a holiday, and troublesome children in the back of the car, harsh words and a small smack on the leg delivered while they're on the M4 going past Bristol would be subject to a defence. By the time we come over to this side of the water, there would be no such defence for the same journey, for the same act. The second example that I'll give you is that we already have within the United Kingdom a certain degree of divergence of laws, and the example I'll give to you is this: drink driving. In England and Wales, the limit for having micrograms of alcohol in your breath is 35 µg in 100 ml of breath. As you drive into Scotland, you're probably okay to drive if you've got 34 µg; by the time you get into Scotland, you won't be. And the consequences for you are significant, because of course it's an offence in Scotland, and not an offence in England, but the punishment, namely disqualification, applies everywhere in the United Kingdom. So, we already have a degree of divergence of law, and the CPS recognises this. In our code, we have a specific provision that takes account of the potential divergence of Welsh law. So, would you see the necessity for a memorandum of understanding, for instance, or it being useful in these circumstances, or are you quite satisfied that the current guidance code would cover that? barry hughes: Well, it's yet to move from a Bill into an Act, so we'd need to make sure that happened. We know there would be a period of time, perhaps as much as two years, or maybe a little more, while that takes place. In terms of how we'd approach it within the Crown Prosecution Service in Cymru-Wales, my approach would be along the lines of working with Kwame and his colleagues to make sure that the guidance that we issue nationally suits both England and Wales. And when it comes to the practical application of the legislation in Wales, we would almost certainly work on the basis that the number of offences—and we might want to get into the number of potential offences, but my take on it is the number of offences is likely to be very small and we would probably have two or three specialists trained in this so that any case that comes through goes to people who've got a close network and can talk with each other— dawn bowden am: And that would be primarily around the public interest issue. So you're obviously a key stakeholder in terms of this legislation and you're clearly very au fait with it and all its implications. What's actually been your involvement with the Government as they've been developing this legislation? barry hughes: My own personal involvement? dawn bowden am: Or the service's. I met with a Minister and a Deputy Minister—I met with Huw Irranca-Davies a little while ago, and I met with Julie Morgan a few months ago—to discuss the overall implications, and then officials on both sides have been engaging with each other. It hasn't been a very close-knit involvement, but we have had enough involvement so that we've felt we've been able to offer views on how we would deal with the legislation. I don't feel that it's been too much, nor do I feel we've been left on the side at all. Now, we've just talked about the divergence of criminal law, and this is probably the first time that there's been an obvious divergence between English and Welsh law, and so we were then talking about the guidance, weren't we, and whether that needs amending to reflect it. But I think you were saying that you felt, within the existing guidance, it could be dealt with, so you don't see a need to update or amend the guidance. barry hughes: I think we would need to update the guidance, and it goes back to the application of the evidential stage, before the public interest stage. On the evidential stage, I doubt that we'll need to do much, other than to make people aware that the defence is not available in Wales in the same way that it is in England, and we might have some light-touch guidance around that. When it comes to the public interest stage, that's a little more specialist and I think we would need to develop more with respect to that. dawn bowden am: And are you satisfied that your staff in Wales—well, and in England, actually, across the border—will be sufficiently aware of the divergence in this area of law? barry hughes: Not as of the present day. [Laughter.] dawn bowden am: But you would expect that to be something you would— barry hughes: Yes, I have no doubt. To an extent, actually, I think I would say that staff in Wales are aware of this already, because in my role as chief Crown prosecutor, I publish a monthly blog and we talk about the things we're doing, so staff are aware. I've discussed with staff and they've seen my blog and we've put it on our website: there have been engagements with the Welsh Government that this is a piece of work in which we're interested and that is under way. I think most staff would probably be aware that we are involved in this and that it is something that, at present, may well happen. And does that mean that there would also be a similar need for the CPS in England to be aware of the changes? barry hughes: They would need to be aware, but not to the same extent. So, in my office in Cardiff, for example, because we work digitally, I have about 30 to 35 prosecutors who work for the CPS in London, and they work exclusively on London cases. But there are times when some of those prosecutors will prosecute at courts in Wales, and then there may be an interchange; they'll come to work for us on secondment, or they'll come to work for us permanently. We'd need to make sure that those people were brought up to speed on the fact that there are some aspects of Welsh law that diverge from English law. My final question, Chair, is just whether you think there are any other significant cross-border issues that arise from this potential legislation. It boils down to the fact that there's a defence in England for assaults upon children that isn't available in Wales if this Bill goes through, and then it's dealing with the consequences of that. Oh no, that's right—obviously, this Act is on a particular trajectory at the moment, and it's due to be introduced before the end of this Assembly. Do you think it would be better for us as scrutinisers of this Act if we could see the draft changes to CPS guidance on the public interest test before we make our final decision? barry hughes: I honestly don't think that would necessarily be helpful. What we would envisage is that we would simply want to take the present public interest factors, which are set out, in my view, very clearly in the code for Crown prosecutors, and we would provide a degree of detail around those that relates more specifically to the issues that we're discussing here. And we'd need to work that up as we go along, and I think you'd run a risk of putting the cart before the horse, if I may put it like that. suzy davies am: It's just that, personally, I think the public interest test is critical in all this, and it would really help us to understand what it could look like before we commit to a particular course of action in supporting or not supporting the Bill, that was all. sian gwenllian am: My point is about the criminal law in Wales and England diverging in this particular instance, and we've been told that this is probably the first time it's happened. Can you think of any other examples where that divergence has happened and does it actually set some kind of precedent in motion? barry hughes: There are other offences in Wales that don't exist in England, but they don't crop up very often. So, to give you examples, there is an offence of putting an electronic collar on your pet—let's not stretch that into children. But putting an electronic collar on your pet that administers a shock is an offence in Wales; it's not an offence in England. There are also offences around the picking of cockles in west Wales, which is not an offence—. So, you can see there are some, but I would argue that the fact that you drive across the border into Scotland and commit an offence that you won't commit in England is possibly more significant for the general public. Of course, the topic we're discussing here is of real relevance for the general public, and you have heard evidence, I know, already, that comes from people who are quite strongly in favour and people quite strongly against it. One of the ways in which I've approached this is looking at it from the perspective of what the law is there for, which is to set out, in essence, what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. It doesn't necessarily mean we need to use the law for that, but it signifies how society views a certain behaviour. I like to look at it from the perspective of the person who is being affected by this, namely the child, and the change in the law here would afford children a degree of protection that they don't presently have, but which they do have when they attain the age of 16.FootnoteLink So, I looked at this—. I've had considerable dealings over the years with offences against residents in care homes, and you'll have seen Winterbourne View, you'll have seen recently up in Durham, where we have adults who need to be looked after because of issues with their mental capacity, and sometimes, the carers become frustrated with them and they admonish them. In much the same way as children are vulnerable and are looked after and can be sometimes quite annoying—but there is a level of protection for an adult striking a child lightly under the present law that is not available to the same adult for striking that child when they turn 16. sian gwenllian am: Do you think that what we're doing in Wales will be emulated in England at some point? barry hughes: Well, it's certainly going through in parallel in Scotland, and there are a great many other countries around the world that already have this, including a large number of European countries. Who knows? Trying to get any legislation through Westminster at the moment—who knows? Not tomorrow, I'd say. Can I just begin by asking you to help the committee out here in understanding how the burden of proof is going to work if this defence is removed? Because the issue of whether something is punishment or not is going to disappear, providing that it's clear that contact with a child has happened. Is that going to work on the presumption that that's an unlawful contact? Is that something the prosecution will still have to prove, or will it be for an accused parent to say, to use your example, 'I was just dragging them out of the traffic or stopping them putting their hands in the fire'? barry hughes: I understand your point. So, if we remove the defence of reasonable chastisement, in a sense that alters some things but it doesn't alter the basic responsibility of the prosecution, which is to establish its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And if the defence raise an argument and say, 'Well, look, that was a lawful act; I was only doing what I thought was reasonable in the circumstances', it's for the Crown to disprove that. barry hughes: And we've got to disprove that to the criminal standard, which is beyond a reasonable doubt. I can see the potential for individuals who feel strongly about this to look to contest the matter, to not admit any wrongdoing at all and to take the matter to trial, and it would be our responsibility to disprove that. Obviously, when we're talking about CPS guidelines and all the rest, we've already come some distance down the process, haven't we? Have you got any views on what might be done to prevent cases even coming as far as arrest? Because one of the things that we have to consider is that once you're arrested, that is recorded somewhere and will appear in things like DBS checks in the future, even if it goes no further. Do you have any views on how intervention might work better earlier on, even at the point of the knock at the door? barry hughes: From the perspective of the CPS, I'm not sure I can help you there. Unlike in many other jurisdictions, we have no power whatsoever to direct the police, so if the police decide not to investigate—. I routinely get letters from members of the public outraged that the police have decided not to investigate their particular neighbour dispute or something, and they want us to do something about it and we can't. suzy davies am: Thank you for that, because I thought that was important to get on the record as well. We're looking at a period of a couple of years after this Act passes—if it does—for implementation. Is there anything at the moment that you think perhaps you still need to do as an organisation towards being in a position to practically implement this law? barry hughes: I think we need to maintain the type of dialogue that we've built up with the Welsh Government and colleagues there. We have other members of my staff who are involved in the other work streams that feed through to that, and I believe that that involvement will ensure that we are sufficiently interconnected; that we can liaise, in turn, with Kwame and his colleagues in the headquarters to respond to things as they develop. So, I think we've got a network of contacts built up here that is adequate for the purpose—at least, 'adequate' might sound a little— suzy davies am: Sufficient. suzy davies am: So, you're confident, by 2022, then, that you'll have changes to the CPS guidelines that are good to go, if you like. Bear with me a second—thank you very much—in your written evidence, you did welcome the indication from the Welsh Government that this reasonable period after Royal Assent would be necessary. Apart from the CPS guideline changes, which you'll be working through, is there anything else you think you might be needing to do apart from just keeping in touch? I'm just thinking: are there any practical and possibly financial implications for your workforce in this? barry hughes: If this legislation goes through, there will be minor financial consequences for us and I don't see any significant financial consequences in the period between now and the Bill becoming law other than the time of ourselves in discussing this today. And what about afterwards, then? Because one of the pieces of thinking behind this Act is to collect data to see whether this change in the law actually works. Do you want to talk us through a little bit about how that might affect you? I don't know who to ask on this. Well, I think that we are going to need to maintain a clear record of any cases that are referred to the CPS from the police and that will—. Normally, we do this through our case management system, which is England-and-Wales wide, and you'd put a flag on. So, for example, domestic abuse, there's a flag for that, and assault on a child, there's a flag for that. Trying to get that through on a system that covers all of England and Wales—it's quite expensive, unbelievably; it wouldn't happen. My take on it: I've seen and spoken with Matt Jukes about this, from South Wales Police; I have seen the justice impact assessment; I've seen the research that's been fed through from New Zealand; and I've seen our own response to a freedom of information request and the papers that the CPS put into the review that you mentioned earlier in 2007. I would be very surprised if we were to prosecute anything other than low single figures a year, if that much. We may have more referrals from the police, but I doubt it would be double the figure we prosecute, even. There are out-of-court disposals and there are all sorts of diversions that you will have discussed, and I know you've discussed, with the police and the police and crime commissioner. So, the numbers will be very small, which means we would be able to keep a clear track on those and, obviously, we would wish to keep the situation under review, and we'd reach a period of time after whatever—12, 18 months, maybe 24 months—where we'd look back to see how we are doing. And I'd like to think that we will be doing that in consultation with interested parties and stakeholders. So, for offences such as racially aggravated offending, whether it's criminal damage or offence against the person, we will bring together interested parties, by which people from outside the CPS, quite often third sector agencies that represent vulnerable groups. That, in turn, helps us shape and improve the way that we prosecute these cases and I can foresee that, after this legislation came in, we might get 18 months, two years down the road, and I can see us sitting in a room with some of the cases we've prosecuted, maybe cases we've decided not to prosecute, with the police and interested parties from both sides, to have a discussion about how we're doing with it all. suzy davies am: That's really helpful to know because, of course, one of the difficulties of dealing with the culture change, which is what the Minister's effectively after here, is that we are still talking about it in the context of criminal legislation. And what I'm hearing from you is that the chances of somebody who's currently protected by the defence and is not part of a bigger case where there's serial smacking or other difficulties in a family, for example—the chances of them getting to you in the first place are pretty low, and then the chances of them passing even the current public interest tests are pretty low. In which case, my question is: why are we bothering with this law rather than concentrating on a new piece of law, possibly through the civil system, which would achieve the culture change better? Maybe that's not a question you feel that you can answer, but you can see why I'm asking the question. In other words, there is a greater degree of protection for children, and I think the value that would derive from this legislation is the message that it sends out. I go back to what I was saying to you right at the start, about the evolution of the law, and the way we've seen many other countries around the world adopt a very similar approach to that being proposed by the Welsh Government is, in my view, an evolution of the law. So, yes, there may not be many more prosecutions, but there won't be fewer than there are presently, because there's a greater degree of protection for children. lynne neagle am: Before we move on, can I just ask—? The Children Act 2004 applies to a child up to the age of 18— barry hughes: Sixteen. barry hughes: I'm reasonably confident that it's 16.FootnoteLink lynne neagle am: Okay. Is there anything else you'd like to put on record about the factors that the CPS would be taking into consideration when applying the public interest test in respect of this Bill? barry hughes: Can I give you an example, which might illustrate the way in which things could be different? This is one, which—I give credit to Iwan for this, because he thought of it. If we take an adult with a small child—say, a four-year-old—in a supermarket, and the child is pulling cans off the shelves, it's quite annoying, and they keep doing it and keep doing it. The parent remonstrates, and the parent ends up finding that verbal admonishment is inadequate, and smacks the child lightly on the legs, which does the trick and the child stops. Presently, if someone in that supermarket were to report that to the police, I think the police would probably conclude that that is covered by the defence of reasonable chastisement. In other words, the evidential stage wouldn't be passed; you don't get on to consider the public interest. But if we have that same parent in there the following week, and you have the same happen again, presently, the defence would apply. If that defence didn't apply at all, and we had a sequence of three offences, the public interest test would kick in, if I may put it like that, pretty quickly, because it would be repeated behaviour. So, that would be the distinction between how things are now and how they would be in the future, because the defence would not be available, so the public interest test would then come to the fore that much more quickly. So, when we apply the public interest test, the essence of it is about proportionality, and trying to come up with an approach that is proportionate to the offending. We look at the age of the offender, the age of the victim, we look at the circumstances, we look at the impact upon the victim, we look at the impact that's likely in relation to the suspect, and there is, within the code, a long list of matters that we take into account. If someone's got previous convictions for doing something wrong, it's more likely they're going to be prosecuted the next time. Mostly, it's reasonably obvious; the more serious an offence, the more likely you are to be prosecuted. vikki howells am: Thank you, that's really useful, and— lynne neagle am: Just before you move on, can I ask you a question? This morning the committee was meeting with groups of parents who are opposed to the Bill and groups of parents who are for the Bill, and one of the parents this morning was querying where the interests of the child would come into the public interest test. Can you just clarify for the record how the best interests of the child would be taken into account in considering whether to go forward with a prosecution? barry hughes: Normally, if there were an assault by someone else upon a child, outside the family, we would tend to take views from the parents of that child. In circumstances where both parents, arguably, are the suspects, we probably wouldn't be asking them. We would find another way, and we would talk with the police to ensure that we are informed about how the child feels about what has happened. I can foresee real difficulties in circumstances where we have parents who are separating where the children are being used, effectively, in divorce proceedings, for example, where we might have one parent saying there was a really bad impact upon the child and the other parent saying there wasn't. We'd want to find a way to cut through that to work out really from the police how does the child feel about that. So, we would tailor it to the circumstances of the particular incident to assess how the child feels about it. It's not determinative, nor is it determinative in cases where we prosecute for adult defendants inflicting some form of assault upon adult victims. In the same session this morning I thought this was an interesting question raised by a parent, on the rights of the child side of things, where if a parent offers a child two forms of punishment because that child has done something that they know they shouldn't have, and they're given the option of, 'You can have a quick smack and a cwtch, or you're going to your bedroom for quarter of an hour', and the child is allowed to choose and the child chooses the smack, what happens then? I'm not offering any views on the fact that this choice has been given, but it was put to us today about how would that fall in the law once it were changed. There is a body of law that— suzy davies am: A child can't consent to assault. barry hughes: Yes, you can't consent to a serious assault, apart from in certain—. So, for example, tattooing is a serious assault on one level, but you can consent to a tattoo. I can think of one case where a man branded his initials on a woman's buttocks, but she consented to it and the Court of Appeal held that they could consent to that. I can also think of a series of cases, which I won't get into here, that involve sadomasochistic behaviour between adults, some of which was really serious, and involved people willingly applying themselves to things that no sane person would do. And the Court of Appeal in that case, a case called Brown, said, 'No, that's going too far—you can't consent to that.' Then, you may have seen there was a case from the midlands recently where a gentleman operating a tattoo parlour was also involved in body surgery—splitting people's tongues. So, there is again—I referred before to the spectrum of offending, and there is a clear spectrum of offending that you can realistically consent to and then you get to offending you can't consent to. When it comes to much lesser assaults, the law is more unclear as to what you can consent to. I've got one further series of questions around out-of-court disposals, which you've already mentioned briefly. In your written evidence, you say there's ongoing work exploring diversion rather than prosecution in respect of this Bill. Firstly, could you tell us a bit more about the work that is being done to explore this as an option? barry hughes: We've been working with the National Police Chiefs' Council. She is responsible for developing the police approach to out-of-court disposals and simplifying the range of out-of-court disposals. There is quite a range, and life would be simpler and clearer to have fewer types of disposal with more clarity about what each one of them involved. I must say, this is primarily a matter for the police, because there are a great many offences or reports of crime that do not reach the CPS because they are dealt with by way of an out-of-court disposal. There's a document called the director's guidance on charging, which is issued by the director of public prosecutions, which sets out offences the police may charge and offences the CPS may charge. Offences that the police refer to us for a charging decision will generally be offences where they feel that there should be a prosecution rather than an out-of-court disposal. There may be cases where it's genuinely very difficult to assess what's the best approach, in which case we will have a conversation with them, a meaningful conversation, about what's the best way to approach that particular case. There will also be cases, and we see these not that rarely, where the police will bring a case to us for a prosecution on the basis that satisfies the evidential stage and satisfies the public interest stage, and we take a different view on the public interest stage. So, we might say—for example, it involves a 15-year-old youth—we  think that diversion from the criminal justice system is a better disposal and we decide not to prosecute. We aren't responsible for administering the out-of-court disposal or indeed monitoring compliance with that disposal, if, for example, it has conditions attached, such as repayment of the damage caused to a window or a front gate. That's not our responsibility—that will fall to the police—but we can decide that an out-of-court disposal is a more appropriate disposal than a prosecution. One final question on that then: creating a body of out-of-court disposals that are specific to this Bill—how would that actually work in practice do you think, given the fact that the Assembly's legislative competence to make provision on the face of the Bill is limited? barry hughes: The way I might see it is that, clearly, policing's not devolved, the CPS is not devolved—the way I might see this is that, within Wales, you could build an infrastructure that provides for a range of out-of-court disposals. You can't direct the police or the CPS to point people towards that, but, if you build a good infrastructure, it's more likely that people will be pointed in that direction. vikki howells am: And who would build that infrastructure, in your opinion? barry hughes: Somewhere within Wales—Welsh Government, local authorities, the police working in partnership. If I could just ask about awareness raising, then: you mentioned the Bill in Scotland, but that Bill includes a duty on the Government to raise awareness of the change. Do you think that's right or should this committee be saying that there should be a similar duty imposed in Wales? barry hughes: I'm not sure it's for me to say whether there should be a duty or not. I can, however, say that I think the greater the level of awareness, the more likely it is that the Act, if passed, will achieve its intentions. And, in your written evidence, you mentioned the fact that there's no indication of any plans for awareness raising in England and that if a person from England is being prosecuted in Wales as a result of this change, a question could arise about the lack of knowledge about the different provisions that apply in Wales. Can I ask what approach the CPS currently takes in Wales if a law is unintentionally broken by someone who's come from outside the UK, for example? barry hughes: It's straightforward: if someone comes to this country and commits an offence here—by this country, I'd say England or Wales; I'd treat them as one for these purposes—if someone comes from abroad and commits an offence that isn't an offence in their country, but is an offence here, then I'm afraid that ignorance of the law is no defence. So, raising awareness is important, and I saw, and I was pleased to see, that the media publicity surrounding this proposed legislation, which is now going through, reached as far afield as New York and had widespread media coverage across England and Wales, and I think the Government would be well placed here to take advantage of that willingness of the media to explore something, which is potentially divisive, and I think you've probably seen some of that. Anything like that is a good story, and a good story gets out there, which means you're more likely to make people aware of it. sian gwenllian am: Yes, we've discussed some of these already, but, for example, under the new law, or the proposed law, would one unintended consequence be that, if someone living in Wales who can't use the reasonable punishment defence—would their life prospects be different compared to those people in England, who will be able to use that defence? I think you've mentioned that in your written evidence. A simple answer: if somebody in Wales is convicted—so, if it goes towards the end of the spectrum that is serious, which results in a prosecution—. It may be—the sort of circumstance I can see happening here is somebody who takes a principled stand and declines any form of out-of-court disposal and says, 'Prosecute me'. So, let's say it comes to court and let's say they end up being convicted of assaulting their child—in circumstances that would not have happened in England—then they would have a criminal conviction they wouldn't have in England, and that, inevitably, has an impact upon their life prospects. And do you think that that would be an isolated incident? barry hughes: Yes, truly, I believe, an isolated incident. I've said before that I would be very surprised if we even had referrals that reached double figures on these cases. When the CPS was asked to conduct a survey across all of England and Wales—this was the review in 2007—it spanned just over a two-year period, and there were 12 cases that were brought up at that stage. Now, I have to say, I don't think that's entirely reliable, but it is indicative. We had a Freedom of Information Act request at one stage, which threw up something like three cases in a year. So, if you think about that as being all of England and Wales—and we make up about 5 per cent of the volume of criminal prosecutions nationally—you can see why I might say the numbers are likely to be small, for the reasons we've explored about getting past the evidential stage into the public interest. In terms of thinking about another kind of unintended consequence, in terms of managing performance and all of the targets that the police need to reach, are we perhaps going to see some people going through the criminal justice system in an inappropriate way and contrary to the interests of the child, because we need to reach some target in terms of performance measures? barry hughes: I have to say I think that extremely unlikely. Clearly, we prosecute if we think that there's a reasonable prospect, a realistic prospect, of conviction and it's in the public interest, but we have no targets. And I would also say, because the numbers here are likely to be so small, any assertion of looking to meet targets—it's a tiny, tiny fragment of a drop in the ocean. sian gwenllian am: What about—? There is a target for unsolved crimes, or unsolved offences. What if they fall into that category? Is that an unintended consequence? barry hughes: I'm talking about something I don't have great knowledge of here. There was, at one stage, a series of targets for the police that bore down upon cases that secure what was called a sanction detection, which counted for Home Office figures. Some individual constabularies may still have targets, but, as far as I'm aware, we don't have a suite of national measures. And, in my experience, the police are much more sensible these days than they may have been 20 years ago, in terms of trying to get cases charged in order to meet some notional target. We've mentioned this, namely the risk of malicious reporting against parents involved in private family law cases. Is that going to increase if we change the law? barry hughes: There is greater potential for it to increase. I think the numbers, again, will be tiny, and dwarfed by the number of cases where we have to deal with the fallout between a relationship breakdown between partners—whether they be living within the same house or living in different houses. Getting into the subtleties of the father, say, smacking the child in a way that was reasonable chastisement or was not reasonable chastisement is probably part of a much bigger piece here. It's not something that would cause me concern, simply because we already have a well-developed approach to dealing with the way in which we evaluate the evidence from parties who may well have a particular position that they want to reinforce, sometimes through exaggeration of basic facts and sometimes through fabrication. sian gwenllian am: Are there any other unintended consequences that come to your mind if we introduce this law? barry hughes: No, I think we've had a pretty helpful canter through most of the circumstances here that might happen. sian gwenllian am: Finally from me, therefore—another issue, in a way—the European convention on human rights. Would not introducing the new law mean, at some point, that Wales could get itself into difficulty because there is a breach of the human rights convention? And therefore England as well, at some point. How to approach that one? In the 2007 review to which we've referred already, the Government, the then Government, set out its position that it believes that section 58, in the way that it was drafted, is compliant with the European convention. If Wales implements this legislation and it becomes part of the law, then, arguably, Wales would be more in compliance with ECHR than not, and England would be less so. But nonetheless, at present, I haven't seen any demurral from the position that was expressed in 2007, which is that they consider that the position that's been adopted with section 58 is compliant with the legislation. It may well be tested by case law; that's the way it's likely to happen. Some of the changes in this arena were driven by case law—so, that case I referred to, Regina v H, which was heard back in 2001 in the Court of Appeal, was significant in helping shape the direction of travel towards section 58. sian gwenllian am: And that case law not necessarily would have to happen within the UK—that case law could come from other countries within the European Union. barry hughes: It could, but I would be a foolish man if I were to say what impact European jurisprudence might have upon us. [Laughter.] suzy davies am: [Inaudible.]—like common law jurisdictions would be. Suzy's touched on this mildly, but, in written evidence, you say that you do not consider that the costs of prosecuting cases made possible by the Bill will be of great significance to the Crown Prosecution Service, and you're basing that, from your evidence here today, on the low numbers of prosecutions. So, we've been asked by individuals, and we've had consultation responses from individuals, who've argued that there is no point creating legislation if people are not prosecuted for breaching it. What's your answer to that? barry hughes: There is a huge body of legislation out there that outlaws certain offences, and I think probably about—. From memory—please never hold me to this—but, from memory, there are something like 10,000 criminal offences; we probably prosecute 5 per cent of those in any given year. I've been prosecuting for 32 years now; there are some offences that I've never come near and probably never will. But, nonetheless, the fact those offences exist sets out in terms what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. Well, they're not something that we do, but it sets out what's tolerant—what's tolerable, sorry, and what isn't. So, the fact that we might not have many prosecutions is, for me, not a reason not to say that we shouldn't signify that certain behaviour is or is not acceptable. Clearly, we don't wish to criminalise everything—that would be a nonsense—or to attempt to set the boundaries by almost micromanaging what individuals do and don't do. And then the explanatory memorandum says there is a shortage of registered intermediaries who assist child witnesses during police interview and when giving evidence in court. Is this a potential barrier to implementing this proposed law, and are there any other potential barriers you want to raise? barry hughes: No. There was a shortage of registered intermediaries in Wales, and I know that the Ministry of Justice have taken action to deal with that, and we have had a number of people who are now in a position to act as intermediaries. Now, of course, if they were to decide not to do that anymore, we may have a problem, but, in turn, we would be looking to recruit more people into those positions. So, yes, it has the potential to serve as a barrier, but in practice, I don't think it would be a barrier. I think, particularly given the very low numbers we're talking about, we would be able to manage it. Can I thank you for attending, the three of you, and for your answers, which have been fascinating and very clear and most helpful to the committee? You will be sent a transcript following the meeting to check for accuracy. Paper to note 1 is a letter from me to the Business Committee requesting an extension on the deadline for the Bill, which has now been agreed. Paper to note 2 is a letter from myself to the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services requesting some further information from CAFCASS Cymru on the Bill. Paper to note 3 is a letter from myself to the Minister for Education regarding Diamond reform implementation ahead of our scrutiny session on 4 July. Can I propose in accordance with Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.<doc-sep>I have received apologies for absence from Jack Sargeant, and I'm very pleased to welcome Vikki Howells, who is substituting for Jack this morning. Item 2 this morning is our last evidence session on the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill, and I'm really pleased to welcome back Julie Morgan AM, Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services; Karen Cornish, who is deputy director of the children and families division; and Emma Gammon, who is the lawyer working on the Bill. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions because we've got lots of ground that we want to cover, and the first questions are from Janet Finch-Saunders. Of those individuals who responded to our written consultation in a personal capacity, nearly 70 per cent do not support this Bill. We also heard a clear message from the parents we met last week who oppose this Bill that, as parents, they understand clearly the difference between child abuse and a light smack from a loving parent. How would you like to respond to that? julie morgan am: Thank you very much, Janet, for that question. I think I'd like to start by saying that child abuse is not the issue that the Bill is trying to address. What the Bill is trying to do is prohibit all forms of physical punishment, and that is in order to protect children's rights and to ensure that children have the same protection from physical punishment as adults. But I do understand that people have different views, and that's why this process has been so important—for us to hear what your views are and what parents' views are. I know that, often, people use different euphemisms really to make light of physical punishment. I've heard expressions used such as a 'light smack' or a 'loving smack' or a 'tap', and really there can be different interpretations of what is a 'light smack', what is a 'loving smack', and that doesn't really cover the issue of the frequency of such actions being taken. But I would say that, however mild it seems to be, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recognises that any physical punishment of children, however minor, is incompatible with their human rights, and why should a big person hit a little person? That's been the sort of mantra, really, that has taken me through supporting this legislation—that it just seems wrong to me that there is something in the law that could mean that there could be an excuse for that happening. I believe we shouldn't have anything in the law that defends the physical punishment of children, and I don't think we should be defining acceptable ways of hitting or punishing children, because I think it does send a confused message to children. It says, 'It's okay for me to hit you, but don't you hit anybody else.' I think it causes confusion. So, I'm confident that updating the law will make it much clearer for parents and people working with children—and, of course, I'm sure, as you'll have heard from the evidence you've taken, that people who work with children are overwhelmingly in support of this legislation, and the representative surveys that we've carried out show support for the Bill's principles. Last week, during the workshop, a few parents—predominantly all of them, actually—said that they use a gentle tap or smacking as part of a toolkit of ways to deal with challenging behaviour or, sometimes, for the safety of the child or, indeed, to carry out the parenting of a child. How do you intend to work with parents going forward, given the finite resources that social care and social services have? I know from the responses we've received to the consultation that parents themselves who have to parent 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are really, on the scale of things, very upset about this. How do you intend to try and get your message across to those parents on removing what they consider to be part of their toolkit when raising children? How do you intend to deal with that aspect? julie morgan am: Well, first of all, I want to say, as I've said in most evidence sessions, that I completely accept that bringing up children is hard. It's very difficult; many of us have done it and we know how tough it can be. There's a whole range of other ways that you can help parents bring up children, and advice you can give them of different methods to use. But, the clear message of this Bill is that we don't want any physical punishment; we don't think it's the right thing to do, and we believe that we are supported by many people in that view. Several consultation responses refer to statistics from Sweden, which they say show that child-on-child violence actually increased by 1,791 per cent between 1984 and 2010, following the ban on physical punishment in 1979. What is your view on these figures and how can we be certain that this Bill won't lead to other long-term negative outcomes in Wales? julie morgan am: Well, I'm aware of the debate surrounding the interpretation of the different statistics from Sweden. What's happened, really, in the academic research is that different academics are focused on different figures to support their views, and the methodological ways of doing it makes it quite difficult to have causation. I was very encouraged that a recent study of 88 countries concluded that if a country prohibits corporal punishment, the result is association with less youth violence, and this is one of the largest cross-national analyses of youth violence, with more than 400,000 participants. So, there is other evidence, very widespread evidence, which looks at a whole range of people, that is in contrast to the Swedish evidence. But, evidence in this field is mixed and we have considered a wide range of research and reviews, but ultimately the decision is one that is based on our commitment to children's rights. lynne neagle am: Do you want question 3? janet finch-saunders am: I can do it, yes. The Bill's explanatory memorandum says that 'there is no definitive evidence that "reasonable" physical punishment causes negative outcomes for children'. However, we have heard from Equal Protection Network Cymru that international evidence could not be clearer and that they found the Wales Centre for Public Policy's report, on which the explanatory memorandum is based, very confusing and very frustrating, and that it didn't tie in with what they knew. How would you respond to those viewpoints? julie morgan am: We were very keen to get as balanced research as we possibly could, and we didn't want to just put forward views that we thought agreed with our point of view. So, we were trying to give a balanced point of view, but we did commission the Wales Centre for Public Policy to do an independent literature review and we're honestly reporting to you what they said. But they did make it clear, again, which I think I've said in previous evidence sessions, that all physical punishment, under all conditions, is potentially harmful to children. And certainly, there is no peer-reviewed research that says that physically punishing a child is going to improve things, has favourable outcomes. So, I understand what Equal Protection Network Cymru are saying, because there is a lot of very strong evidence, but we're giving you the evidence that we had from the research that we commissioned. I've just got a couple of questions on this balance between the steps that will be needed to implement this Bill and the impact that it'll actually have. You've probably heard in evidence that we've received that there are still some concerns out there about how agencies might address malicious reporting; some detail about how the public interest test might be applied further along the line; what's going to happen with out-of-hours provision from social services, and so on. There are still, from our perspective, quite a few things that are unknown about the effect on our public services in particular of the implementation of this Bill. Would you agree that perhaps we should know a little bit more about that before we proceed with supporting the Bill? julie morgan am: Well, it's very difficult, bringing in this legislation that hasn't been done before. It's very difficult to gauge the impact, and we've covered that, I know, in previous discussions. And I think it's an interesting point to make that, in Ireland, they introduced similar legislation through an amendment to a Bill, and had no detailed preparation for bringing in the Bill, and in fact there's no evidence that this has caused any difficulties, and no significant negative impacts or increase in workload. But in any case, we have our implementation group, which is going to address many of these issues. You see, I think we do have to take a balance between assuming this Bill is going to go through and what we can actually do. We can't presume that the Assembly will accept this Bill, so we have to be staged in what we do. But we had the first strategic implementation group on 14 May, and we had representatives from the police, the police and crime commissioners, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Association of Directors of Social Services Cymru, the Association of Directors of Education in Wales, the Welsh Local Government Association, the legal profession and the third sector. They're all there, and they're all very keen to make this legislation work and to look at the implications of it. I'd just like to say how grateful I am for all those organisations giving their time and commitment. They've set up four work streams, looking at parenting advice and support; data collection, evaluation and monitoring; operations, procedures and processes; and out-of-court disposals and diversions. These groups will be taking forward this work and will be looking at many of those issues that you've mentioned, and will also be updated on the progress of the awareness strategy that we will be bringing in. I'm really confident that the legislation will be implemented in a very practical and workable way, because we do have the commitment of all these agencies, and there's been a huge amount of preparation done in the Welsh Government to prepare for this in a way that, I have to say, hasn't been done in some of the other countries—as I mentioned, in Ireland. So, as much preparation as could be done is being done and has been done, but we really now see that the implementation group is taking forward all these issues, and obviously those agencies that are taking part in the implementation group are, on the whole, in support of the principles of this Bill. suzy davies am: Well, thank you for that, Minister, but the way I look at this is that you've already said that, if this Bill passes—and it will pass; it's in enough manifestos to pass, so the question is what type of Bill is going to pass—and if there is a gap of, let's say, two years before anything is implemented, and the implementation group is doing the work that you've described—and we're very relieved to hear that—why is this Bill being introduced now when that implementation group hasn't really come up with a strategy that could help persuade people about what implementing this Bill would look like in real life? You're asking the Welsh public to take a bit of a chance on this. julie morgan am: I think we have, as far as possible, looked at international evidence where this legislation has been introduced. It's different for different countries, so I know it's difficult to get anything that's absolutely linked. As the team who have been working on this have worked through the preparation for the Bill, lots of issues have arisen as they've done that, and so you have to do that, I think, alongside the actual practical implications with the groups that are coming together, and I think the point at which we've done that is probably just about right, really. I hope this isn't going on to somebody else's questions, but accepting what you say, would you then be open to accepting amendments to the face of the Bill that would clarify the position for the Welsh public on certain things that may be of concern to them, which have been fed through to us? I'm not suggesting anything specific, but—. We want to keep it as simple as possible, but I'm certainly prepared to consider any issues that come up, and I think that's been the case all along. It's just what's going to work as a bit of law here, isn't it? And then just finally from me, and you've made the point to a degree, that, of course, not all countries are like Wales. If we look at Ireland, and New Zealand's the one we've been looking at an awful lot, which are the most similar, their work hasn't really been in place for that long, and one of the things that, I think, you're going to need to be able persuade us of is that if the culture change to which we've already referred is going in one way anyway, and if it continues to go in that direction, that this Bill will have had a causal effect. I'm trying to establish whether the culture change is going to happen anyway, whether or not we pass this legislation. julie morgan am: Well, it does look as if a culture change is happening in any case, but the culture change will never really move, I think, as most of us want it, if there is legislation that does appear to condone the use of physical punishment, and having this reasonable punishment in law means that happens. So, I think, passing the legislation by itself will certainly not do everything— suzy davies am: No. And I think the research has all shown you've got to have an awareness campaign running along with it. And in the other countries we've looked at, I don't think an awareness campaign was actually carried out because we are planning a really big awareness campaign because we think it's absolutely fair to the Welsh public, as you said, that they absolutely know what we're doing and everybody's aware of it. Well, can I just finish—? julie morgan am: I know the point you're making. julie morgan am: But if you've got a bit of legislation there on the Bill, it will always mean that for a very minority group of parents, they will feel that they have got the right to use physical punishment against their child, and I just think it's something we should get rid of. And, of course, the other point that I don't think we say enough about is that it's not just parents; it's people in loco parentis who are working in leisure centres or religious establishments or any of those unregulated settings who also have this defence. So, it's last bit in the jigsaw, really, to have it quite clear that we want to treat our children with respect and dignity and I think this will move us towards that. I think what I was trying to get to is: how are we going to prove that this piece of legislation has worked effectively? It's about the data capture, I guess. suzy davies am: What are you going to do to make sure that you acquire evidence in the future to show that this has worked, or potentially not worked? I'd be surprised if that was the case, but—. Because, of course, that has an implication then on the resources for the various people you'll be asking to collect the data. I think that's very important because we need to know what is the effect of the legislation we'll be bringing in. We have got ongoing monitoring and we've got ongoing monitoring surveys looking at what are the views of the public. So, yes— suzy davies am: It'll be directly linked to the Bill, then, rather than that broad culture change. julie morgan am: The monitoring, asking the views of the public, is generally about issues related to the Bill. The views of parents about whether this legislation— suzy davies am: Sorry, I don't want to labour this point. suzy davies am: Basically, we need a question, 'Has this Bill stopped you smacking your child?' That's the core question. Well, we are in the surveys asking how many people feel that they do smack their child, but this is any physical punishment, actually, not just smacking— suzy davies am: And it's for the future, not for now. We're going to move on to explore some of the issues around social services now with questions from Dawn Bowden. Morning, Minister. When the Association of Directors of Social Services Cymru came in, they were saying to us that they would encourage people to report any instances, anything that they see around somebody smacking a child. That leads on to the question about whether in fact social services, then, would change their thresholds for intervention if there were more cases being referred to them. Are you fairly confident, are you certain, that that wouldn't happen, or do you think there is a danger that social services might actually say, 'Well, actually, if we're getting all these referrals, we need to think again about when and if we intervene', and the thresholds could become a bit lower? julie morgan am: Well, as you know, social services already receive and investigate reports of children being physically punished—any sort of range of physical punishment—and they use standard procedures to determine how to proceed, but that's done on a case-by-case basis; it's made on the individual case element. And if this legislation is enacted, a significant proportion of the incidents of physical punishment will not require any response under the child protection procedures, and we do not expect the threshold of significant harm to change. And I know you took evidence from the ADSS, and I know Sally Jenkins gave evidence, who is one of the lead practitioners, and I understood she said: 'In terms of thresholds for children's services, we would not be anticipating a huge number of referrals to us. We recognise that's likely to happen.' So, I think— dawn bowden am: So, it's the threshold for intervention that's the key, really, isn't it, rather than—? julie morgan am: Yes, they don't see that changing. The police, when they came in to give evidence, talked about the need for the multi-agency safeguarding hubs. Do you think the implementation of the Bill, and its effectiveness, is going to be dependent on us having consistently effective multi-agency safeguarding hubs right the way across the country? julie morgan am: No. The effective implementation of the Bill does not depend on MASHs, as we call them for short, because bodies, social services, already work closely with the police on a day-to-day basis, really, and they have indicated their willingness to do so, and there are already well-established mechanisms in place that enable this joint working to take place. I know that the MASHs are only in certain areas, and I know that it's—. I think they're probably very good to have, actually, and very good to help the work, but it's certainly not dependent on them. dawn bowden am: Okay, but it would be something that you would be wanting to see developed, that eventually we would have these MASHs right across the country? julie morgan am: At the moment, there are three MASHs in the south Wales police force, and one pilot MASH in the Gwent police force, but they don't operate in exactly the same way. And I know that other areas have considered having MASHs, but haven't actually brought any in. And a multi-agency strategic group, which is led by South Wales Police, has been set up, and it will consider the effectiveness of MASH arrangements in Wales, so it's very possible there will be more MASHs, but I want to reiterate that we're not dependent on MASHs in order to have the close working. dawn bowden am: Yes, because the key point from the police's point of view, I think, was that they provide a single point of contact, so it's very simple, isn't it? It's a single point of contact, and I think they were quite concerned that having that single point of contact might actually reduce the level of unnecessary police prosecutions—well, the police don't prosecute, but charges and so on. julie morgan am: I think they are very effective and very much to be welcomed, but it's certainly not essential. karen cornish: I was just going to say that it's probably worth saying that looking at how agencies work together will be one of the things, again, that will be looked at very carefully on the task and finish group, looking at processes and procedures. We're very alert to the fact that there are different organisations, different services, and that bringing them together, working in as consistent a way as possible, is really, really important. As the Minister has said, social services, the police and others are already committed to working together, and, actually, we just want to make sure that we develop those working practices in the best way possible, recognising that not every area will have a MASH, and reiterating, again, what the Deputy Minister has said—that the effectiveness of the Bill is not predicated on a MASH in every area, but it is important that all those organisations do work together in a consistent and appropriate way. And they've talked about the fact that the social worker's workload is already very stretched, and you'll be aware of that, Minister. And I think they were getting a little bit concerned about whether a whole raft of new cases are going to land on what is an already extremely heavy workload, and how effectively they could deal with that. Would you say that those concerns, in terms of the impact of this Bill, are unfounded, or are we just saying that this is an unknown quantity at this stage, and we're going to have to wait and see? julie morgan am: Well, first of all, if I can just pay tribute to the work that social workers do. julie morgan am: Because, obviously, they’re going to be essential to the successful implementation of this Bill. [Laughter.] But they do do a hard job, which isn’t always recognised, I think, by the public. So, I do take this point very seriously, but, obviously, the professionals who have given evidence—many of them have said they don’t see there being a big rise of referrals. Jane Randall, National Independent Safeguarding Board—I think she came to you—said: 'there's no expectation that there's going to be a huge increase in the number of referrals…I think it would be dealt with within their existing resources.' , there may be an increase in reporting of incidents, initially, maybe from individuals in the community and organisations such as schools. And I think it could have an impact on the initial stages of social services activity, which I think others—I think Sally Jenkins said that maybe there’d be an increase, a small increase, at the beginning. But as we expect the awareness raising and the ongoing support that we’ll be giving to parents—we do feel that the incidents of physical punishment will be falling over time. But I know that social workers are stretched, and are hard-pressed—and I think that was some of the evidence given to you by the British Association of Social Workers. But I think it’s important to remember that they are also very strongly in support of us carrying out this legislation. So, we’re going to work very closely with social services—obviously, key members of our implementation group—and we will collect relevant data for a period before the actual implementation, in order to get a baseline. We want a baseline, and we are working with a small number of social services to try to get the baseline of where it is, and to see what happens when the Bill is implemented. So, I don’t think, really, we have to fear that social services would be overwhelmed, but we must be prepared, and we must get this data and monitor it closely. And social services clearly having to make judgments every day—they will be making those judgments quite quickly and turning them around. dawn bowden am: The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, when they spoke to us, also had—there was a similar kind of concern raised. But do you think there is any danger at all that it could divert CAFCASS staff, if we have a high volume of reporting, particularly given that we’ve got a 26-week limit in which to deal with those cases? Is that something that causes you any concern at this stage? julie morgan am: Well, CAFCASS are confident that they can deal with the cases that they have. As you know, there's been a big increase in the numbers that CAFCASS is dealing with already, and they have managed to very successfully cope with the demand. dawn bowden am: Because they were basically just saying that it's unpredictable at this stage, weren't they, so—? julie morgan am: Yes. dawn bowden am: Yes, because they were talking about the fact that no assessment had been made about the risk of malicious reporting. So, I think their biggest concern was more about the rise in looked-after children and the impact on that in terms of their workload, and it was just a question of whether this would potentially divert any resources, I guess. julie morgan am: I think, in terms of the malicious reporting, obviously that is something that happens a lot now and it is is likely that, perhaps—. I think they felt that, in existing cases, this might be another element that should be brought in, but they seemed, in my discussions, fairly confident. But, obviously, another area we are very concerned about is the rise in the number of looked-after children, and that's somewhere we want to try to do what we can to bring that down. Just before Suzy comes in with a supplementary—CAFCASS didn't come to the committee, they've submitted— julie morgan am: They sent a letter—that's right. suzy davies am: Just very quickly, because I don't want to spend a lot of time on this: isn't it going to be true that any increase in workload for social services or schools or whoever is going to depend on reporting rising? Where do you see the likely rise in reporting taking place? Will it be members of the public or is it going to be professionals who feel that this is something that they can't ignore from now on? julie morgan am: well, I think it would be mixed. I don't have any view or where it particularly would come from, because if there are any reports that go into agencies now about children being physically punished in any way—I think they investigate those already now. They would be made much more aware, we hope, by the legislation—so, that may happen. But I think, in schools, if there is physical punishment reported by a child, the schools would report it in any case. suzy davies am: I was just curious about where you thought the main source would be— julie morgan am: I can't really be definitive about that. sian gwenllian am: The Bill, in essence, is a simple one, of course, is it not? But what it does is  provide a useful discussion on what good parenting is and what discipline methods are the most effective—that is, discipline methods that parents can use rather than physical punishment. Do you think, therefore, that there's a need to invest much more in programmes to do with parenting and in support services for families in terms of parenting, and that as part of an early intervention strategy that's more co-ordinated and robust than what we have at present? julie morgan am: Well, we are developing the Bill as part of a much wider package of support for children and their parents, which, of course, is already in place. Give it time' campaign, which aims to help parents do the best job that they can by providing positive tips on parenting and information. And we're already preparing now to update that, because, of course, that only goes up to age 7 and deals with issues about how you cope with your kids if they're difficult at meal times and if they have tantrums. But, of course, this legislation will go up to 18 years old, and so the issues may be very different. And then, obviously, there's the universal services that give access to help and to promote positive parenting, delivered by local government, health, education, social services, social justice and the third sector. We will be encouraging all those agencies that provide that universal service to help support parents and to pass on this information. Then, there will be the more targeted supports, such as Flying Start and Families First, which offer help and advice. But what I've done is I've asked the officials to carry out a mapping exercise to see where the support is and where the gaps are or opportunities to do more, particularly around information and advice on positive alternatives to physical punishment, but also more widely. It's such a wide range that we need that mapping exercise and we need to see where we need to put in more support. sian gwenllian am: I'm pleased that you're going to conduct that exercise, because the evidence that we've received from a number of different directions is that there isn't enough investment in reality in the support services in the early years, and that there is a real need for the focus within Government go back to early intervention and to have a much more co-ordinated strategy. You've mentioned a number of agencies working on different elements, perhaps, but perhaps there's a need to bring them all together. Give it time' campaign, but I think it's an online campaign effectively, and Flying Start—yes, people who attend those courses find them useful, but, of course, it's not available across Wales and it's not available to every parent. There is a scheme that is available through schools in Gwynedd—perhaps you are aware of it—Incredible Years, with Professor Judy Hutchings, who has been working on this for a number of years now, very successfully, where schools, parents and the children work together on parenting methods that are positive. I wonder if it's time to think about expanding that as part of an early intervention strategy across Wales. Perhaps you can't give a specific answer today, but may I ask you to take a look at that? What concerns me is that the Bill is going through but there's not enough work relating to education and having people's support for different methods, more positive methods, in my opinion, of parenting. There's a real need to move and to invest in that area and perhaps move money towards that work. julie morgan am: Well, certainly, I think that is the purpose of the mapping exercise, to see what is successful, where things need to be expanded, and that's what we're going to consider. I think there are patches all over Wales of really good progress, but, certainly, I'm sure we need to give more support to parents in the early years, and I think they're only too glad to have it as well. Children are very receptive at that age and early intervention is the key to many of the issues that we have to deal with later on. We're going to return to some of the parenting issues later, but in the meantime we've got questions from Hefin David. hefin david am: Just to take it on the next step from what Siân Gwenllian was asking about—in schools, are teachers ready for this legislation? julie morgan am: On our implementation group, the education sector is represented. Obviously, corporal punishment was banned in schools a long time ago, and I think the education sector is very supportive of this move. But in terms of the awareness for teachers to be ready for it—obviously, the awareness campaign has got to be aimed at professionals in every field and certainly aimed at teachers. hefin david am: So, if I was a teacher in an individual school, what kind of preparation do you think I should expect? julie morgan am: You know this better than me, having been more in the education field than me, but I think teachers are updated on different parts of childcare legislation now, and have in-service training days and training courses. hefin david am: One of the things that the National Association of Head Teachers told us was that they wouldn't want the cost of that kind of training to come from core budgets. Would you agree with that? julie morgan am: Well, I would have thought this sort of measure would be incorporated into the training they were using already, actually. hefin david am: So, you think it should come from the core budget that they use for training? julie morgan am: I think it could be incorporated in what they're already doing. And do you think that would be a significant additional cost or do you think that that would be minimal? julie morgan am: I would have thought it would be minimal. They already have training courses about childcare issues, and this would be something that would be absorbed into that. Can you just be a bit clearer about how they are represented again? I'm not sure I caught that. julie morgan am: Do you want to, Karen, because you were at the group? karen cornish: Yes. So, education are represented on it through the Association of Directors of Education in Wales, and they have a representative on the strategic implementation group, and we are working with them to understand who else will be on the task and finish groups that we're setting up that the Minister's already talked about. I personally went and spoke to them earlier in the year when the Bill was being introduced, received their feedback and have said that I will go back and speak with them. The things that are being raised so far—would you say they're reflective of the concerns that the NAHT rose about, for example, funding of training? Are those kinds of issues raised? The practical implications of introducing this Bill—are they raised? If not, what other issues might be raised? karen cornish: So, I think that the main concerns that you've already heard as a committee are similar concerns to those that have been raised previously. So, there's not anything in addition to the things that we have discussed, either with the trade unions or through the implementation group, or during the consultation period. And, as the Minister said, for the majority of these sort of things, teachers, education and other workforces already have procedures in place, because this comes under a safeguarding issue at one level. The ask will be based around those safeguarding procedures and, therefore, education and other services update their processes and procedures on a regular basis as a matter of course when any issues like this are addressed. Minister, I don't know whether you wanted to say anything about the well-being and the— julie morgan am: Yes. One of the things that I think this committee has been involved in is we want to have a whole-school approach. We want mental health and well-being to be part of the way that the whole school operates, and the culture and how schools engage with pupils and parents. And we want to create that atmosphere where there's no wrong door, where children can bring up any of the concerns that they have with any member of the school staff that they trust. And so, I think the creation of that sort of atmosphere is very important in taking forward this issue. I think the Bill, though, introduces a very specific set of changes that— julie morgan am: It removes the defence; that's all the Bill does. hefin david am: But should a parent witness, now, smacking, then it will require a different kind of approach—sorry, if a teacher were to witness smacking, it would require a different kind of approach, perhaps, to existing approaches. There shouldn't, therefore, be any surprise amongst teachers in how to deal with these things when the Bill comes in. I suppose the question I'm asking is: can we be assured that nothing you've said today in this meeting, in this committee, should be a surprise to teachers and trade unions, because that would already have been communicated through the Bill implementation group? julie morgan am: Yes, well, Karen has already said about the meetings that she's had with the unions and they are present on the implementation group, but a lot of these things happen already. They already have to make decisions about physical punishment they may be told about by children, for example—probably more likely than actually witnessing anything. And they already have to make decisions on those sorts of issues, so I see this as being incorporated in with that. With regard to health and the communication of this to parents, we've heard about the Healthy Child Wales programme, and the fact that it has the opportunity to play a role in raising parents' awareness. Do you think that's the case? julie morgan am: I think the Healthy Child Wales programme and the role of the health visitor is absolutely crucial, because, obviously, the health visitor is there right at the beginning. It's a universal service, and so there will be great opportunity for them to promote positive parenting in a much stronger way than they're able to do at the moment, because the fact that you have this defence does mean that the professionals aren't able to make it as clear as they want to make it that positive parenting is the way that they'd like families to go. So, I think this will be a great advantage to health visitors, and, obviously, they support it strongly, because they're trying to encourage parents not to use physical punishment now, but with their hands slightly tied behind their back, because the defence does exist. hefin david am: That's great, that's a good thing, but the concern we've got is that half the parents across Wales are not accessing the Healthy Child Wales programme, and in my community, within the Aneurin Bevan health board area, 80 per cent of parents aren't accessing the Healthy Child Wales programme. So, are there concerns that, if you rely too much on that process for communication, then parents, particularly in the early years, will be left out? julie morgan am: We've got to rely on a range of ways of reaching parents, and I think that there are other times when there is a much higher ratio of children and families seen. But I think we've had that discussion with the mapping exercise that we've already mentioned, that we're going to identify where there are gaps or where we can do more, and that's where we will identify this. karen cornish: I think as well that that figure relates to one contact point across the whole of the Healthy Child Wales programme, not the Healthy Child Wales programme as a whole. That figure— lynne neagle am: The percentage relates to the contact at age three and a half, but that is exactly the kind of age when you'd expect more children to—. If they were going to be smacked, it would be at that sort of age, wouldn't it, really? So, that is a concern for the committee, really, in terms of coverage. Midwives, health visitors and others working with families would actually be giving those messages, core messages, about setting boundaries, managing behaviour, discipline, positive parenting, right from the very beginning. So, reliance on that single point of contact at that one age point is not necessarily the most appropriate, because I think there's a period from birth through to, actually, later as well, when those key health messages, those key messages around positive parenting, are and can be given. As the Minister said, we will be mapping a lot of this, but we can give you some more advice on that, if that would be helpful, about the types of messages that are given during that period of time. I've got some supplementaries on this, because I think the committee is concerned that at a key opportunity at age three and a half, a big chunk of families aren't having that contact that they should expect with their health visitor, really. It's also a time in their child's life when they're likely to be spending time not with their parents, in school or early years. And I just wanted a bit of clarification from you, Minister, on what you were saying to Hefin David about training here. I got the sense you thought this could just be slipped in as a paragraph in existing guidance, but I'm not clear about what happens to a teacher who is told by a child that they've been smacked, and they decide that they're not going to report that—will they get into trouble over that? If it's part of a bigger picture that a teacher should have picked up, that's different, but, if a child tells a teacher, 'Oh, Mammy smacked me because I did such and such', is that teacher going to get into trouble if they don't report that to the police? julie morgan am: If that happens now, the teacher is expected to report that now. sian gwenllian am: Yes, I'm just interested to hear a bit more about the mapping exercise that you've referred to, which I think is really important, but it is going to show up a lot of gaps geographically, but also in service provision for different groups of families. It's all very well doing a mapping exercise, but what is the purpose of that, and how are you going to ensure that those gaps don't exist in future? Maybe we could have a note about what the timetable is for this exercise, and more in-depth understanding perhaps about what your intentions are, and how you intend to take it forward once you've done the mapping exercise. We absolutely acknowledge that there is a lot more work to be done, and we know that we have to work hard at this to reach every family. Obviously, the information that we've had about the Healthy Child Wales, the health boards will be monitoring that information and will be—. I think they're going to establish a project board to consider the themes that are coming out from the Healthy Child Wales, and so that will be certainly addressed there. sian gwenllian am: And there will be investment needed, obviously, to fill in those gaps, which means a significant shift in the way Government now looks at its budget, and a shift towards that early prevention. julie morgan am: I think we all agree that early prevention is the key for happy, healthy children, and so we'll certainly consider everything that arises. You've said repeatedly that the intention of this Bill isn't to criminalise parents, and I believe that that's not your intention. So, what I'm interested in hearing about is how you—or the work that you've done to satisfy yourself that the huge majority of parents that are going to be caught up in the change of this Act won't result in parents getting anywhere near the CPS, for example. Obviously, there are going to be occasions where there are recidivists who keep smacking despite perhaps earlier warnings, or families get identified as doing something far more serious with their children than this, and I'm not talking about those—I'm talking about the people who are currently protected, if I can put it like that. I'm very interested in hearing what you've got to say about out-of-court disposals and pre being charged activity. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the assessment and work that you've done in that area. Well, there are a number of out-of-court disposals that the police can use, because the police want to respond in a positive and proportionate way. The use of out-of-court disposals is actually a non-devolved responsibility, but we'll be working— suzy davies am: That's what I wanted to ask you about. julie morgan am: Yes, they are non-devolved, but we will be working with the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the CPS, the police and the police and crime commissioners to consider suitable interventions. And one of the main areas of focus of the National Police Chiefs' Council's national strategy is to reduce the current six disposal options to just two. And that's going to be conditional caution and community resolution, and the four Welsh police forces are going to be moving towards this two-tier approach, which they believe will make for greater consistency. So, what we're doing is we are exploring, with the police liaison unit, how we can develop a suitable diversion scheme, with a focus on advice and support on positive alternatives to physical punishment, and how we can tie that into the wider activity. And, obviously, it all depends on the individual circumstances of the case, because the other thing we're going to look at is the individual. But it's possible then we could get a diversion scheme provided through a community resolution order; it could be potentially be given instead of a caution. suzy davies am: Thank you for confirming that, but even that is quite far down the process from the day that a smack is reported, and, as you know, particularly as soon as the police get involved, and even social services, if a record is made of even a complaint—even if that complaint goes no further, even if you don't get anywhere near an arrest, shall we say, that is logged in certain parts of the system and will need to be revealed in certain circumstances. I'm thinking of the enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check in particular, but there are other instances as well. Have you done any impact assessment on that, because that is a—we're talking about a situation where there's a massive impact, potentially, on an adult, when there have been no grounds at all to worry that a child's rights have been infringed, for example? It will happen in malicious reporting, but it could happen in reporting where an apparent battery has taken place, but it turns out to have been something completely different—you know, pushing a child's hand away, that sort of thing. The police are not going to want to take that any further at all, but it's on their records. How are you going to protect parents in those circumstances, within our legislative competence? julie morgan am: Well, the issue of non-conviction data obviously doesn't just apply to this Bill we're bringing in; it applies to everything. So, it's something that you can look at in a general sense—that the police can visit and there's no further action, but that could be for anything— suzy davies am: But this is very sensitive, this area. But, obviously, this does have an issue in terms of, particularly, the DBS checks and if you needed an enhanced certificate, if you wanted to be a teacher, a childcare worker, or those sorts of occupations. But, when disclosing information held locally, the police follow the quality assurance framework, and information must pass certain tests, which are related to considerations of relevance, substantiality and proportionality, and considerations of the safety aspects as well of disclosing information. And the police must record their thought process, their rationale, explaining how and why they reached all of their conclusions and their decisions. And this information is then assessed by the chief officer to determine whether it's reasonable to believe that it's relevant, and whether, in their opinion, it ought to be disclosed. So— suzy davies am: Is that in all jobs, though, because my understanding is that there are certain professions where that exemption doesn’t apply, and they’re likely to be the ones that are really relevant to the removal of the defence? So, I’m not talking about, I don't know, people who might work as volunteers; I’m literally talking about teachers and doctors, maybe dentists. julie morgan am: Well, we have done some work on this, haven’t we? Do you want to say about that, Karen? karen cornish: Yes. So, it does apply across all professions, and we have been in discussion with the DBS about when and how and why information would be released, and also how often. And our understanding at this moment in time is that this type of information is released only in a very, very small number of cases. I think we’re talking less than 1 per cent of cases— suzy davies am: One per cent of what figure though? karen cornish: —in the last year. suzy davies am: Okay, but it helps us to understand the general amount— karen cornish: So, it’s about two, three, four cases in a year where this type of information is disclosed. It’s information that, obviously, we have got, but I think it’s really important to understand that this is a really rigorous process that the police and the DBS have in place. They consider everything in the round before they would even consider actually releasing any information that's non-conviction information in relation to employment. Are you concerned that, in order to be on the safe side, if I can put it like that, there's an increased likelihood of disclosure—which actually might disappear over time, because there's an opportunity to exercise judgment more frequently and get the balance right? karen cornish: I think they do have to consider non-conviction information now and some of that non-conviction information may be in relation to physical punishment of a child. I think you've received evidence from the police saying that there are 18,000 or so incidents in one police force area alone, where information is potentially on their records, and yet we understand that a very, very small proportion of non-conviction information is released to an employer during a recruitment process. So, our expectation, based on that information, would be that it would remain at a very low level. And just to finish off on this one: we don't have legislative competence in this particular area, so we are relying on goodwill and the conversations that you have, which I'm sure are very productive. What will happen if we start getting instances where perhaps that judgment hasn't been exercised correctly? There's nothing, as a Government, you can do to challenge that particularly. julie morgan am: I can only emphasise the very close working relationships we've got and I think will continue to build as we introduce this legislation. Just before we move on, could I ask, then—? Maybe the committee would be grateful for a note providing an update on the latest work that the Government has done on out-of-court disposals, including estimated costs. We'd also appreciate a note on the Welsh Government's discussions with the DBS and the figures that Karen just referred to, if that's okay, please. hefin david am: When you first appeared before the committee at the beginning of Stage 1, I wasn't hugely reassured by the evidence you gave on the resource implications of the Bill. It seems to be relying, to a great extent, on the limited number of reporting of cases that's likely to happen, as we've seen in the evidence we've received. That's largely been recognised by the stakeholders who've given evidence, but isn't there still the potential for a degree of unknown costs to come into this, and what planning have you done for those unknown costs—those unforeseen costs—that might occur? julie morgan am: I feel that—. You're right that there always could be unknown costs, but we are doing our very best to prepare to cover all eventualities that we can anticipate. For example, I've committed to fund the high-intensity awareness-raising campaign, and committed to carry out a mapping exercise to establish whether there are any gaps in the parenting support. We know that evidence from other countries does show that, if we bring in this legislation and raise awareness, it does change people's attitudes, so there may, in the long term, be a saving if we do that. But we are committed to working with organisations to put in place arrangements so that we're able to collect the data so that we know what the impact is. But I just have to repeat that all our evidence, looking at other countries, is that there isn't a huge increase in the workload. I think you can make the argument for precedent elsewhere, but you can also say that every country has a different culture and approach to how it raises children, and therefore there'll be a number of differences as well. It talks about unknown costs in relation to social services as a result of a potential increasing referrals; family courts and CAFCASS Cymru as a result of a potential increase in allegations, which we talked about; the CPS and a higher volume of requests for charging advice from the police; and the review of training and guidance offered by organisations involved in the safeguarding of children. All those things we've talked around, but what would be reassuring for the committee is, perhaps, if you could give us a broad figure, which the Government would say, 'We'll need to set this number aside in order to be prepared for the implementation of this Bill.' Would you be willing to present that at some point during the passage of the Bill? julie morgan am: I think we have to rely on what the people who run those organisations are telling us. I think the other important thing to recognise is that this area of work is already dealt with by all these people. So, the CPS is already involved in changing its guidance all the time, so it's not going to be much of an impact for them to actually have to do that over this issue. Social services are already dealing with calls and referrals about the physical punishment of children already, including reasonable punishment. I accept that we're working in a situation where there's a general pressure on public services, but I think this area that we're legislating on here is part of what everybody's doing already. hefin david am: That's a perfectly reasonable answer, but then what about providing a ballpark figure for a kind unforeseen fund that you might set aside? julie morgan am: I don't think it's possible to do that. We've got to have baseline data to begin with, and that's what's so difficult to get, because we can't get that from other countries. Only New Zealand recorded any incidents before they actually brought in the legislation, and they did that for three months beforehand. That's why we've been looking at New Zealand a lot of the time, just to make predictions. One of these sub-groups is looking at data, so that sub-group should be very productive, I think. And the last question, with regard to resourcing, just to understand the process of how this ties into the wider budgeting—did you and your officials sit down with the Finance Minister and the First Minister's officials to discuss the costing of this? I imagine so. What was the nature of that kind of discussion? julie morgan am: Some of the costings are decided. For example, the advertising, the awareness-raising campaign—that's £2.2 million over six years. And who were the discussions with? karen cornish: There has been an in-the-round discussion before the Bill was introduced, at which the First Minister and the finance Minister and others were present. karen cornish: The consultation and then the Bill going forward has been discussed by Cabinet, and gone through Cabinet processes, as you would expect. hefin david am: So, are we able to say that the Government as a whole is satisfied that there isn't going to be a huge impact on resource as a result of the introduction of this Bill? karen cornish: I think what you can say is that the Government are satisfied that they are supportive of the Bill and have put the Bill forward. Are you satisfied that that amount of money—£2.5 million over five years [correction: £2.2 million over six years]—is going to be enough? From memory, with the organ donation Bill, the amount was something in the region of around £7 million that was set aside, I think. Or maybe I'm misremembering that, but— karen cornish: I think it was about £4 million— lynne neagle am: £4 million— karen cornish: Something like that. You've got to reach a lot of people, haven't you, with this, including some pretty hard-to-reach groups as well. Are you confident that amount of money is going to be enough? karen cornish: We are as confident as we can be at this moment in time. We are obviously going to be working with focus groups and others to look at what sorts of messaging there will need to be. But in terms of the initial stages of the awareness campaign, we are, as I say, as confident as we can be, based on what we know. hefin david am: I just wanted to ask a very specific question on human rights, because, you know, when it comes to appeals, there are a variety of articles under the European Convention on Human Rights that might be used with regard to a challenge to the law as enacted. For the purpose of the record, can you outline to us the assessment you've made in preparation for this Bill in relation to the balancing of relevant articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, including but not limited to article 8 on the respect for private life; article 9, freedom of conscience and religion; article 3, the right to protection from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment; and article 14, protection from discrimination? julie morgan am: Thank you very much. We have given a great deal of thought, as you can imagine, to the human rights considerations as set out in our impact assessments, and it's ultimately a question how we find a balance between the rights of children as well as parents, who both enjoy rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. So, article 3 is the prohibition of torture: 'No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.' In ensuring that children are protected from physical punishment in the same way as adults, the Bill is following that requirement of article 3, and the positive obligations on states to protect individuals from ill treatment or punishment that is contrary to article 3. And then, in terms of article 8, right to respect for private and family life, 'Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.' Some of those who are opposed to the prohibition of physical punishment have cited article 8, private and family life, and also cited article 9, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as potentially protecting the right for parents to decide how best to punish their children, including the use of physical punishment. But these rights are not absolute, and action can therefore be taken that interferes with them, provided the interference is justified. It's the Government's view that the Bill's provisions are necessary in order to protect the rights and freedom of children. The Bill's provisions are regarded as proportionate measures, and given the fundamental importance of protecting children from inhumane or degrading punishment or other ill treatment, we do consider that we have balanced the rights in a proportionate way. And then, article 10, freedom of expression, and article 14, prohibition of discrimination—these rights are not absolute and action can be taken, therefore, that interferes with them, providing the interference is justified. We don't think it's clear that article 10 and 14 rights are being interfered with, but even if they are, we consider we can justify the interference in order to protect the rights and freedoms of children. I think it's the equality impact assessment that sets out the positive and negative impacts of the proposal and the balancing of the rights enjoyed by both parents and children. So, last week, the Welsh Government published its baseline survey of public attitudes to physical punishment of children, and that showed us that 58 per cent of the public already thought the law did not allow parents to smack their children. You could think glass half full, which suggests that we don't have many people to try and convince of that. But on the flipside of that, would you suggest, perhaps, that that data shows there is a challenge faced by the Welsh Government to make sure the public understand the proposed legislation, given that more than half of the population, according to those statistics, have a complete misunderstanding of the current law? julie morgan am: Certainly, I think that finding is reflected in people I speak to who do think that the law does not allow parents to hit their children. , I'm personally very reassured that 58 per cent of the public think the law doesn't allow that to happen because I think, well, they're not hitting their children, so we're over 50 per cent of where we want to get. So, I think that is a good thing, but it does highlight the fact that the legislation, as it is, is confused. We need much greater clarity in the law for professionals who are working and trying to help parents, and for parents themselves. So, I think that this is a case for saying that it's very important that we carry out this legislation to make it all much clearer. vikki howells am: One of the most consistent messages that this committee has heard is that the proposed law won't work unless there's a significant campaign to raise awareness with members of the public. We know that Sweden went to considerable lengths to publicise the change in the law there, and I can remember attending a cross-party group, chaired by yourself, Deputy Minister, where we heard evidence from Ireland to the same effect, as well—the necessity of the public awareness campaign. You already said that a duty on the face of the Bill to raise awareness is not necessary, but then, in your answer to Suzy Davies, you said you would consider putting some things on the face of the Bill. So, can you explain to us your key arguments surrounding this issue? julie morgan am: I absolutely agree that it's essential that we do have a big awareness campaign, because all the research we've had shows, in fact, that if you don't have the awareness campaign, the legislation won't be as effective. I don't think it's absolutely necessary to have it on the face of the Bill, but as I said to Suzy, I'm prepared to consider anything the committee is bringing forward because I'm very keen for this Bill to progress through this process and to learn from it. And finally, New Zealand is an oft-cited example, mentioned in the explanatory memorandum as well. So, we know New Zealand prohibited physical punishment in 2007, but yet in a non-binding referendum two years later, 87.5 per cent of voters voted 'no' in response to the question, 'Should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offence in New Zealand?' On what basis, then, are you confident that this sort of polarisation won't happen in Wales, especially considering the current political climate there is out there? julie morgan am: Well, what we trying to do is we're trying to take this forward in as consensual a way as we possibly can. All those people who don't agree with us, who are a minority, it seems, we want to hear what they've got to say, taking very seriously all the points that are raised here by the committee. I haven't seen any sign of any polarisation in any way that I would be concerned about, because, certainly, the people who do oppose the Bill, I've met with them, I know they've given evidence to your committee and the views of parents have been taken into account. I hope that they then, if the Bill does become law, will then accept and respect the democratic process. janet finch-saunders am: I started at the very beginning, Deputy Minister, with the fact that there's an overwhelming majority of parents—those who are naturally charged with raising their children—against this Bill. We've gone out to survey on it and the overwhelming response from parents is that they do not support this Bill. julie morgan am: I think that our representative surveys that we've carried out do show considerable support for the Bill— janet finch-saunders am: But not from parents. And it's older people who are much less likely to support the legislation, and I think it's all linked to what many of us were used to, what happened in our childhoods, when it was accepted and it was part of the time that this was what you did. So, I think many older people, because they smacked their children or were smacked themselves, have felt a degree of resistance, perhaps, to the Bill. We want to respect children's rights and what happened in the past is in the past now, and we want to have a new era for respecting children's human rights and dignity. And I think I'll go back to what I said: I don't see that children's rights to dignity is going to happen if a big person is able to hit a small person. lynne neagle am: Just to clarify, Janet's referring to the committee's consultation and the percentage of responses that we've had. sian gwenllian am: Yes, we had a specific section, but because time is moving quite fast, perhaps you could give us a note in response. Some witnesses saw a risk that the Bill could have a disproportionate impact on specific groups—women, because they are the main carers, minority ethnic groups and very young children. So, if it would be possible for us to receive a note as to whether you agree that this will have a disproportionate impact upon them, and if so, what would be the mitigating measures you would take. But, specifically, we have heard from several witnesses and the equality impact assessment of the Bill does acknowledge that a low income is a risk factor in the use of physical punishment and that this could have a negative impact specifically on this group of parents. Now, we know that Flying Start is available to try to mitigate that to some degree, but of course not all low-income families live within a Flying Start area, so what mitigating work will you be undertaking in that regard? julie morgan am: Yes. We are running focus groups where we will be taking the different groups into account, and we will work with different groups, communities and organisations to make sure that they are aware of the change in the law, and we will—I know you want to move on—but we will write to you about anything more specific. lynne neagle am: Just finally from me, then, you referred to the mapping exercise, which is very welcomed by the committee. Should that mapping exercise identify gaps? Will the Welsh Government be making a commitment to provide funding to plug those gaps so that there is a universal offer of parenting support for families in Wales? julie morgan am: We will certainly consider it at that point. As usual, you will be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you very much to the three of you for your time this morning. julie morgan am: Thank you very much, and thank you for all the questions and the wide range that we covered. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services, providing additional information following the evidence session on 2 May for this Bill. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services in response to the committee's letter, which requested information on CAFCASS Cymru's response on specific points of interest in relation to the Bill. And paper to note 3 is a letter from the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services making the committee aware of research undertaken in relation to public attitudes to physical punishment. Can I ask if Members are happy to note those? suzy davies am: Can I just make one observation? I think it's on the first of the letters, which is the difficulty that there's been in trying to disaggregate the evidence of smacking as isolated incidents as compared to smacking as part of a bigger pattern of behaviour. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public from the remainder of the meeting

Julie Morgan, along with Karen Cornish, discussed the impact of the bill on various agencies such as social services, MASHs, and CAFCASS. They emphasized the importance of collaboration among agencies, but also acknowledged that not every area would receive assistance. Julie Morgan expressed gratitude towards social workers and mentioned that there had been a slight increase in referrals initially, but it was expected to decrease over time. She also mentioned the possibility of implementing a baseline to track future developments. Karen Cornish acknowledged that there may be potential barriers, but the Ministry of Justice had taken steps to address them, including recruiting more personnel. While there were challenges, they believed that the work could still be carried out effectively.

Question: What were the User Interface's proposals and suggestions regarding the buttons, shape, and layout when discussing the remote design? Article: industrial designer: Should I bring my pen too ? project manager: Yeah just yeah , no , industrial designer: Or project manager: that's for me , I just have to make some notes . marketing: Can you hear me ? Hello ? project manager: actually my laptop doesn't work , marketing: Test . So the thing we have to know is you already know what we're going to do , you also read what this the things or , not yet , user interface: Yes . So , yeah , it has to be original , trendy , user-friendly that's what we're going to design . We have to look what the needs are , the effects of the functional design , and and how the the the remote control works , so that's where we're going to look in the functional design , it's for the f next meeting . The the second thing is the conceptual design , that's what it that's the spe the specifications of the components and the properties and the specifications of the user interface . And we have to look what the market is doing for what kind of remote controls are in the market . And the third thing is the detailed design and that's exa yeah , you know what it is , it's exactly how it looks and whatever . Okay so no , this is a these are two smartboards , with the f s an introduction of that one . And you already saw you know all that that you here can put things in the the red project map . You have to draw a favourite animal on the whiteboard marketing: project manager: and and say why it's your favourite animal . So and you have this is just to try it out and we have to use a different pen colours and different thickness of the pen . So okay , so first have to show you , maybe you can come here to have a look how it works . project manager: I just h industrial designer: project manager: Something like this ? Oh no marketing: It look like a dinosaurs . project manager: Okay , so just for you guys just one of you can draw a painting if you want . Okay and then what's the colour ? How do I do project manager: It's in format . there has to be water , project manager: Just marketing: but project manager: No it has to be an animal , so if that's it's it should be a shna snake or something . marketing: Yeah yeah , but it's an animal it's an animal that lives in the water . marketing: Okay , who next ? project manager: do you have to write down why that doesn't matter , just it's to get used to the whiteboard , but it's okay . project manager: Maybe you should hold your pen a bit more to the back , so that no , to the yeah . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: marketing: A sheep ? project manager: we d only have twenty five minutes , so . project manager: Just hold it more more to the back then you don't have user interface: No project manager: okay . project manager: I thought these pens would be just you write it down and you download it to Word , you already did it or no ? No , not yet , okay . user interface: Yeah , that's right , project manager: But it's just user interface: it but you actually got to write on the paper . project manager: Yeah , I know , but I d I I thought it would be just in in in typed words in Word , marketing: Yeah yeah , it's a real pen . project manager: so that's not user interface: Yeah , but it's just a picture . user interface: You really marketing: Y you can you can't edit in the edit it in Word . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: I don't know , what time did we start this meeting , I'm not sure . marketing: project manager: Oh industrial designer: marketing: project manager: this is definitely the best one . project manager: Okay , so what we know is that we have to sell this remote control for about twenty five Euros . And we have to make a profit of fifty million Euros , so we have to use a big market in Europe . project manager: So can someone make a a calculation about how many we have to sell of these to make fifty million , I dunno . so we're gonna have a little discussion about what experience are with a remote control the and everything , so just have a look how it we think about remote controls . marketing: Yeah , my first question was does it have to be a a universal remote control ? project manager: Oh yeah , that's a good question . marketing: Because we sell it lonely from the t and not with the television , we sell it apart . project manager: I think it's I'm not I'm not sure , marketing: So I project manager: it's not I think industrial designer: Yeah , it probably would be universal . marketing: Because user interface: And only television ? Or more devices ? project manager: I don't think you can buy a a a universal remote control for twenty five Euros , so not sure , but industrial designer: maybe , I don't know . marketing: Yeah , I know you can buy a re a universal control for only twenty Euros project manager: Okay , so we we just say we just say that's universal remote control . industrial designer: And also for the V_C_R_ and D_V_D_ player project manager: Yeah , everything industrial designer: and project manager: just so a lot of buttons on the remote control . project manager: what what what's a remote control , it's just a black thing with some buttons on it , it's not nothing very special , but user interface: Well we can try to make it special . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: So do you have any ideas how it has to look for for usability or user user interface: Well marketing: Well I th I thought about making it the same style as the television , we don't have the same television all the time , so that's no matter . if we control the V_C_R_ and the D_V_D_ player player with it it has to be clear , because kids and elderly are gonna use it , so it's not only for the technical persons . I think it must be a very good control , so you can act use it from everywhere in your room , the the infrared thing must be from very good quality . user interface: It shouldn't be too big , marketing: I dunno user interface: but I don't think we can make it too small , 'cause it has to have a lot of functions , so . user interface: Maybe then you can make it s smaller and uniquer , marketing: Yes user interface: maybe more trendy . user interface: Fold open , project manager: Okay , user interface: where you can see more options . Maybe for the D_V_D_ pla player or something , industrial designer: Yeah marketing: Ah industrial designer: n marketing: that's that's project manager: if you just user interface: Yeah , something on top , just dren general things like volume and T_V_ channels and inside things you don't use that often . project manager: Why should you use a touchscreen on a remote control ? industrial designer: maybe be it's it's project manager: There are buttons on it . user interface: But that's industrial designer: like a a to have marketing: Yeah , but user interface: Yeah , I think it's much too expensive . project manager: marketing: And we have to care for the strength of the remote control , project manager: Yeah . marketing: because remote controls are most things in the house that falls down on the ground and it get often broken . marketing: Yeah and a lots lots of kids use it and touchscreen is not kids project manager: No . industrial designer: And how about the batteries ? marketing: industrial designer: should you put it in a recharger or a just project manager: Oh maybe that's a good idea , marketing: Ma maybe a home station . project manager: just to put it on your television and just s recharge , user interface: Yeah . user interface: Maybe that's a good idea , but yeah , we have to look at the price now I think . project manager: Yeah , how m how mu how how expensive is a normal recharger ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: Well how much is your standards mobile phone recharger ? project manager: I dunno . industrial designer: Yeah , if you buy it separately from your phone it's probably expensive , project manager: marketing: Ah yeah . marketing: user interface: Maybe have marketing: project manager: if you th look at the market , it's probably it's still the best way just to put batteries in it , because maybe it's too expensive . marketing: Yeah , but a home station is a really good idea , because lots of people are lose their remote control and don't know where it is , project manager: Yeah , that's right , yeah . marketing: Maybe it's Therefore it's a good idea , but maybe it's expensive . industrial designer: Yeah , but I have a mouse that's also user interface: Rechargeable . industrial designer: Yeah , and and you just have normal batteries that you can recharge and just put it in the station , user interface: Yeah . marketing: I I set something on paper already , size , looks , usable , the buttons on usable places , the the on off button must be on top , project manager: Yeah . marketing: you you have to project manager: Has it be has does it has to b have to be like a different form than a normal remote control marketing: Yeah , I don't I don't know I don't know project manager: or user interface: Well I think we have to look at that , marketing: if we user interface: 'cause well you can do the standard way , but then you won't marketing: You can make it very special , to create our own looks , project manager: Yeah marketing: but it's very hard to industrial designer: N if if we want to make it special , we probably have to do a lot of testing , if it really works . user interface: Well you can have the basic things on the same place , like on off button on top and the T_V_ channels one two three four as a block , and then the volume obviously on t on top , so you can see . user interface: But the rest is you don't use that often , so if you have a clear button with an good icon on it , it should be clear as well . user interface: So it doesn't matter what place it is on the remote control I think , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: And what we have to think about too is buttons that you use often are maybe like when you fold it open , when you have it closed , you can still do the th the functions . project manager: Yeah , just for the T_V_ and just the normal function , that's fine . marketing: on on top are the the basic options on top , industrial designer: But n user interface: Yeah , yeah . industrial designer: yeah , but i basically when I'm watching T_V_ I'm just using like five buttons or so , marketing: and if you fold it open project manager: But maybe it's user interface: Yeah . project manager: maybe it's very hard to to make it fold open and to l look like it's very what's it's called ? marketing: . If you if if you make to fold open it's or also an the strength is not s as good as a normal remote control . project manager: Maybe it's hard t user interface: project manager: No , that's right . marketing: for m for me the Marketing Expert , the user requirements specification , do I need to think as a user , a as a a a only the looks and the user interface: No , what you want to do with it . project manager: Yeah , I think this if you you have to n know if it's for s a T_V_ , a D_V_D_ player , all that things . user interface: Yeah , I also wrote down some stuff project manager: Yeah , user interface: that you want on a project manager: no maybe not not , that's not a f that's something for for for yeah . project manager: what's in the market , what's normal , what kind of buttons do you have . user interface: What do you want to do with your remote control , what do you need on your remote control . project manager: For the next time you have to put it exactly on the square , so your laptop <doc-sep>And the characteristics of this new remote control should be original and trendy and of course user user friendly . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Well , I think we should set the the points to to drive the project and user interface: . B did you send us an email about this ? project manager: not yet , user interface: industrial designer: project manager: but if you want user interface: Yeah , we we received an email about this d designs . project manager: Do you want do you want me to send you a mail ? industrial designer: user interface: Ah it's Okay . marketing: I think it's for your guys to how to design it all the aspects so you need that information . user interface: 'Kay , we can project manager: So there are so we have three user interface: So there are three kinds of designs , that's all . project manager: So , who will be the the responsible for the functional design ? Any any volunteer ? industrial designer: I think our responsibilities will be assigned when we in our mail we received from the account manager . user interface: Are you using the you are doing the in industrial designer: Yeah I I'm I'm Well , maybe we have okay so I industrial design . It was a little confusion about my project manager: user interface: Ah industrial designer: but it's alright . industrial designer: Well , I think we can have a little discussion about what has to be done project manager: industrial designer: and what are your ideas about the project manager: About the design or Maybe we'll discuss this later , no ? industrial designer: Well , w we want to have a new re remote control for for T_V_ distribution I guess . industrial designer: Yeah , I dunno I project manager: And of course it should not be very costly . industrial designer: Well I I think that Norman and I would think about the technical points and we should discuss it in the next meeting , or user interface: Need to collect information . , what is most important in a in a remote control ? What is the most important function aspect ? . project manager: You won't user interface: Or or you can say for example , I want to list all the programme tonight . Y you know , instead of remote control it's doing the some searching for you , so you don't have to look for the channel you want . project manager: I I think if we include a lot of technology on the remote control it will be very costly . user interface: No , because no , project manager: S user interface: it's not very a lot . industrial designer: I I think if you want t to choose from a list of programme or or something like that you you may have to to use w I dunno marketing: I'm a okay . marketing: the main function of remote control is to have something in the hand project manager: In the hand . marketing: If we are going to add a speech interface , I'm not sure with trendy slim size of the remote control it would be able to put a speech recog user interface: Yeah . marketing: if you want to put a speech recognition system f interface for that I think the T_V_ itself could have it . industrial designer: marketing: we have some or something , different technology but project manager: This is it's user interface: Yeah , yeah . But th the main idea I wanted to s I wanted to say is that there should be a function , instead of choosing the ch T_V_ channel , there's a option you can choose , either T_V_ channels or or pr or the or the contain or the contents of the programme . industrial designer: Yeah , yeah it's it's a good idea it's a good idea project manager: industrial designer: but I I think that technically it would be a little bit more tricky to to achieve this than just to user interface: No . They they are they are they are available in X_M_L_ format or whatever the format . user interface: And then there's there are only six buttons for six categories , or sev seven . So I just choose the category one and you reuse the same button , for example to to choose among the the sorted list the programme you want , so you don't have to choose among hundred channels , if you have hundred channels , you just have six buttons , seven buttons . industrial designer: Well I I I I think that j just by using navigation buttons and the user interface on the screen we are able to navigate through the Well channel programme or contents or in an easy way , so project manager: This is good idea . Yeah , so you don't have to display here , just display on the T_V_ screen , right ? industrial designer: Yeah in the dis display on the T_V_ screen user interface: Good idea . industrial designer: and just with the with your remote control would just navigate through the f user interface: I think I think that will be revol revolutionary . project manager: industrial designer: user interface: Because all the T_V_ the the remote control have all numbers , lots of buttons and then you dunno what to choose in the end . So I think for for the technical points we have to to to check how to gather the data from programme or contents and all this stuff user interface: Okay . project manager: So we have five minutes to user interface: Ah w w we have sometimes to use the white-board . project manager: Ah you can y you can you can use it if you so , can we industrial designer: user interface: Five minutes . marketing: And another interesting idea for this would be to have an light adaptation system depending upon the picture of user interface: Okay . marketing: So , if you're watching a movie and suddenly there is a dark some dark scene , the lights adapt themself . industrial designer: Oh right so user interface: Okay , do you want to have a conceptual remote control there , or you just want to put the function in ? project manager: Yeah . project manager: Be before before writing you can sit and that says what we what we said user interface: . So so the most functional des the most important function is to ch choo buttons to choose the content . The user can choose w which one they want , right ? industrial designer: Yeah , by content or by channel , user interface: By content or by channel . user interface: Okay , so technically how the problems that how to do it is to how to get the content . industrial designer: I think i it's not very difficult to to browse by channel but it's a little bit tricky to browse by contents so user interface: Okay . And industrial designer: I think that's the the things to do user interface: The main thing . user interface: So we are we'll discuss it we will get some information in the next meeting , so for now we get the funct this is the functional designer ? That's the first aspect . project manager: So maybe we'll meet in maybe five minutes ? And we'll discuss the other other aspects <doc-sep>Okay , so Right well from the last meeting I was trying to send you the minutes , but it didn't work out too well , so maybe in sort of quick summary of the last meeting , I can quickly give you what we what we had . user interface: project manager: right , so Wishing I hadn't closed the damn Right so we had the fact that we're gonna have the the logo the company logo in its colour scheme incorporated onto the the device the remote device . We had made our decisions about made our decisions about the device itself , that it was gonna be simple to make it enable us to complete the project in time . We're gonna have effectively two pages , a front page which had the features that the the customers most wanted , and then the the backup features on the second page so that it could meet the technical requirements . So basically what decisions have we made ? have there been any changes ? industrial designer: I think we all have a presentation again , project manager: Right . For the components design , next step is basically the the way the remote's gonna work is still the same idea as before . There's a kinetic option , which if any of you've seen those new watches which you kind of you power up by waving around , it just requires a small amount of movement which would mean the batteries wouldn't have to be replaced . For the buttons , we have an integrated push button , which is Oh just to say all all these are supplied by Real Reaction . So I guess for the ease of for quickness and ease we should take them from at least like one of these options . industrial designer: so for the buttons there's an integrated push button , which I guess is just the same as the standard ones . This says it's similar to the button on the mouse for a normal for like like modern computer . there's a scroll wheel which is you know the new mouse has just got like the centre section which you can scroll up and down , which may be for the volume . industrial designer: one issue for the buttons is , depending on which material we use , if we use rubber buttons then it requires a rubber case , so we have to take that into consideration . moving on to the printed s project manager: What would be the cost do do we know ? industrial designer: that's on the next project manager: industrial designer: I th I think the there wasn't too much difference in the cost , that that related to the actual buttons , but it does affect the printed circuit board . Basically for the circuit board which is the middle , it's just see it down there the chips like the like the workings of the actual of the remote . So if we've got the scroll wheel for one of the buttons , that would require a slightly more advanced circuit board than if we just had a standard push button . There's a small unit available through the company which obviously would be an extra cost , but it wouldn't affect the size of the remote too much . and I guess that would require a more advanced circuit board , so there is an extra price in that sense . going to my personal preferences , I thought possibly for power we could use kinetic which is the idea of the watches that you move you move the remote around to power it up . for the buttons , I thought we'd probably get away with just having the standard push buttons rather than the scroll wheel . So if we wanted the scroll wheel and wanted the voice recognition , then we'd have to get a a more costly circuit board . industrial designer: i it kind of depends if we're gonna have the speech recognition , we'd have to probably get an advanced one . industrial designer: but I don't know , so that is something I'll have to look into . project manager: So are we able to make that decision now in a sense that this is the point at which we're discussing that issue , industrial designer: Yeah yeah . project manager: so would it not be best to rather than one way is to do each of the presentations and then make decisions going back to the various presentations as they were . Maybe w user interface: Yeah , that's probably a better one , to discuss it straight away . project manager: 'Cause at that point then you've got the details up there , so if we wanted to know for instance that the scroll wheel required the regular and what required advance . Then if we were able to see that down then we could make the decision at that point in time industrial designer: . project manager: industrial designer: As I say it only specified that we need a more advanced circuit board for the scroll wheel , project manager: project manager: No the scroll wheel required the regular , so the industrial designer: Yeah if if you down . industrial designer: but the scroll wheel requires a mini m minimally a regular chip , project manager: industrial designer: which is in the higher price range . The display requires an advanced chip user interface: I think the scroll wheel project manager: the display requires an advanced chip which in turn is more expense . industrial designer: And note that the push button just requires a simple chip , so that would keep the price down . user interface: Yeah , and if we're going for sleek and sexy , I think a scroll wheel is maybe a bit kinda bulky ? marketing: user interface: I I've got pictures well I've seen pictures with it kind of sticking off the side of it , project manager: Right . So is marketing: So are we going for the w are we going for the simple one , are we ? user interface: Yeah , a simple pushbuttons . industrial designer: Did everyone get this on the speech recognition ? The it was basically what we said before , the idea that you record in a set message , and then it picks up that message and replies to you . Maybe we should go on what we're certain of rather than project manager: So if we go for the simple push button , so effectively we're going for the simple printed circuit board are we ? Or are we going for the regular ? industrial designer: if it's just the push button then it just needs the simple circuit board . But is there any other okay , that's true for the for for that element , but we have to take all el elements into consideration . And so if there is one element that requires the more expensive one , or say the regular one , or the more advanced , then that would have to be the same for all of them . But marketing: I suppose we need we need to find out what circuit board that requires , maybe before we m make a decision . user interface: But the way that I interpret that it doesn't seem to send out a signal to the telly , it just it's like a parrot just rep reply replying to your message . industrial designer: Okay , so we'd have a simple circuit board project manager: industrial designer: and that would be an extra that would be in addition to it . user interface: And I don't think you could really perform any of the remote functions with it . user interface: 'Cause the example that they've given there is good morning coffee machine , good morning Jo . project manager: user interface: But I think that's maybe as far as that one could go ? project manager: Okay . industrial designer: Yeah that makes sense , so we'd stick with the simple circuit board and then think of the speech recognition as an extra an extra possibility . user interface: And it says that project manager: You were you were wanting to go for the kinetic power supply . industrial designer: yeah I I thought so just for just for ease of not having to replace the batteries . project manager: And how does it get charged up ? industrial designer: It's I think it works on the basis they have some kind of ball bearings inside . It's it's some on watches which you you kind of you shake to power it up . industrial designer: So you'd you'd move the remote around a little bit and then that powers it up to use it . project manager: So the speech recognition was Are we going for speech recognition ? No ? 'Cause that required the advanced user interface: I think it would be helpful to find it , but I don't think it'd marketing: Just industrial designer: yeah I think did we decide it didn't affect the circuit board , it just affected user interface: Yeah , I think so . industrial designer: It was just project manager: I had speech recognition requires advanced req require industrial designer: Oh no th that's what that's what I thought , but maybe maybe it doesn't . marketing: 'Cause it's s it's separate isn't it , project manager: Speech recognition you reckon then is s simple . marketing: it's not part of the industrial designer: It's it's just an addition thing it's yeah . project manager: And so we would want it in as an extra because it doesn't appear to cost too much . industrial designer: 'Kay shall I pass on to you now ? user interface: I think project manager: In fact , it wouldn't really cost anymore , would it ? user interface: I'll just just check what it said . Actually I don't think it really says anything about the cost , but it says that it's already in the coffee machines , so like it's already kind of marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: I assume it would cost extra , but Maybe we maybe we'll find out how much that does cost and have to decide slightly later . From looking at the remotes that are out there at the minute , none of them are particularly sleek and sexy . I haven't actually got the examples of the scroll button there , but there's some curved cases that you can see , a range of sizes . Does that move it ? project manager: Sorry ? user interface: It just seems to be skipping on without us doing anything . some of the remotes that I looked at , one of the models da did actually have voice recognition where you could where it was connected to the remote control functions . And it was quite a swish model , where it can control four devices , T_V_ , cable , satellite , video , D_V_D_ , audio . So maybe it's better not to try and compete with that sort of thing and just to market it as a completely different like different viewpoint as a kind of finding your lost control industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . the scroll buttons , as you've already mentioned , there's examples of those , but they don't look as sleek as other models . And there's no real advantage and because it impacts on other on the materials and the price it's not great . There was children's remote , where they just had a very limited range of buttons and they were b bright and colourful and you you could program them so that they could only look at certain channels . user interface: but I don't know if that's really in our field ? industrial designer: I guess I guess we're going for the biggest market , maybe not , user interface: But that's something that's out there . industrial designer: but Was it was it specified that we went for the biggest ? project manager: Well we're to go for the international market rather than a local market but that that wouldn't necessarily preclude user interface: . So you have your basic model which you would sell at whatever , and then you could have additional features in you know like a You'd have model one , model two and model three , and therefore you can sub-divide your market up . project manager: industrial designer: So maybe the children's remote should be like a a next step , but maybe I dunno for ours , maybe we should project manager: Anyway you could add on for an extra package , but on this basic one I'm reckoning that we're going for the basic model to be discussed here and that you would have for future reference the possibility of adding in extra features at extra cost to take care of specialist market segments . project manager: Is that user interface: Right well that's something that we can be aware of . I think because there's already very good voice recognition technology out there , and because ours might not cover the same functions that the leading brands do , it might be a good idea to market it as a finder function . industrial designer: So you also said for going for the international market that some some maybe older people might not like the speech recognition . user interface: Yeah , 'cause I think you program this one yourself , like to say like whatever you want to your question . marketing: Yeah and ours is quite a cheap device , so I don't know how much we'll be able to put into it . And you were talking about scroll buttons ? user interface: yeah I think I think we've decided that it's gonna increase the cost project manager: Okay . project manager: Alright , so we're just gonna have the the rubber buttons , was that right ? industrial designer: Yes yes . user interface: and just to be aware that there are kind of specialist functions and specialist remotes but we probably don't want to focus on those like such as the children's remote . So it gave the example of say your volume buttons for up and down , they might both have a V_ on for volume , let's think how they did this . project manager: Good in in Flip it round in ninety degree a hundred and eighty degrees and have it up and down . So that would show that volume was going up , whereas the one underneath would see the volume going down . What did they say ? I think the thing was that if you decide to do this , to have triangular buttons , somebody might look at this one and say oh well this triangular button is pointing up , and that's the first thing that they see project manager: Right . user interface: Actually that can't be right , can it ? Oh well , no , they might see yeah , they might see this pointing down and think right that's gonna turn the volume down , project manager: user interface: whereas the actual button's pointing up , so the function is to turn the button up . user interface: So , be careful what you put on the buttons industrial designer: So maybe we could have like user interface: and be careful of the shape that you make them , industrial designer: Yeah . So maybe we could have volume written on the side and then up and down on the on the buttons themselves . project manager: And 'cause the idea was to have limited it was to have sizable amount of information on it . project manager: 'Cause it was sixteen buttons , wasn't it that were industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: so what was the decision on the design of the volume button ? industrial designer: Are we are we gonna go through the design of all the buttons at the moment , or are we gonna t marketing: I've I've got some things to say about possible design things from trend watching . Right , I've been looking at some trends in in sort of basically fashion on top of doing the research into the remote control market the the one that's the one I talked about last time , that we'd sort of asked people about remote controls and what what was good about them , what was bad , what they used . And we've also been looking at sort of fa sort of fashions and what people are wanting out of consumer goods at the moment . marketing: So user interface: marketing: So just to summarise the most important things which came out of the remote control market investigation . And then third and l less important than the other two , there should be an ease of use as well . And apparently , the fashion trends are that people want sort of clothes and shoes and things with a fruit and vegetables theme . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: but the feel of the material should be spongy , industrial designer: marketing: which is contrary to last year , apparently . project manager: user interface: marketing: So we need to emphasise the fancy design with on on our remote control above all else . And then also try and add in technological informat innovation which could be our sort of find the thing with a hand clap . And then we need to ma sort of make it easy to use that's as a third priority , so perhaps fewer fewer buttons and functions as we've as we've discussed . user interface: marketing: And then maybe find a way to incorporate these trends so that we sort of capture people's imaginations . So maybe we could make the buttons shaped like fruit and veg , or the the buttons could be spongy , somehow . And then sort of even wackier than that , we could maybe have a fruit or vegetable shaped remote , say in the shape of a banana or something like that . project manager: marketing: How how far we actually want to go along and sort of follow the trends , do we think the trends are particularly important for this type of gadget , or or you know , do they not matter that much ? user interface: I think if you start making the buttons fruit shaped , it might make it more complicated to use . project manager: Well you were just talking about you've got to be careful how you shape your buttons , 'cause you're can mis-direct people . And I would've thought the functionality 'cause the people get cheesed off by things by having to read instructions et cetera , so . user interface: Maybe just one button , say the standby button is quite kinda separate from all the other functions . user interface: And then that wouldn't get in the way of like kinda one to nine , industrial designer: user interface: and it wouldn't confuse the numbers . No th that that incorporates the trend whilst at the same time not confusing people , if you're looking for functionality . industrial designer: Well I dunno I I guess maybe fruit and vegetables may be popular at the moment , but as we know how fickle the fashion markets are , project manager: But what are they gonna be next Yeah . S project manager: But but th but okay but you you can incorporate the tr If y if you change all the buttons then you've got the problem that this year's fruit and veg , next year's I was gonna say animals or elephants or w whatever . Yeah , project manager: That means you're constantly changing your production schedule , marketing: I'm not project manager: and you've gotta make different moulds and everything else , marketing: Yeah . marketing: I'm not I'm not sure what what what the sort of timescale we're thinking of selling the product over is . industrial designer: it just seems realistic that the remote control market isn't the kind of thing which takes in those kinds of fashion trends . project manager: Well user interface: But I suppose as long as it's quite a subtle design , marketing: industrial designer: Maybe still with a rubber design we could project manager: Was that in the sort of fashion sense that this Or was the spongy feel was that sort of fashion ? It was , wasn't it ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: So the user interface: It seems like you're gonna have rubber cases , as well as buttons . user interface: And that you can make them curved or double-curved and that would be the kind of sleek and sexy look . industrial designer: Oh yeah yeah one of the things were if you had rubber buttons then you had to have a rubber case . industrial designer: oh no no no user interface: Oh right , that fits , doesn't it ? industrial designer: sorry it's if you use the rubber double curved case then you must use rubber buttons . user interface: And that would fit in with what we want , wouldn't it , for the spongy feel , to have everything rubber . The m the main problem is how f how frequently do the fashions change ? 'Cause in essence in the production you want things to stay you want to basically mint them out marketing: project manager: 'cause if you've got fashion changes and that you're incorporating , then it means that your stock is is last year's stock marketing: project manager: and therefore you're selling it or having to sell it at a discounted rate which you wouldn't want to do . Whereas if you kept the product the same but you could have a difference from year to year , it seems to me that you could incorporate a fashion statement if you like , rather than changing the whole kit and caboodle . project manager: You're just changing one aspect like like the standby button or something like that , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: and especially 'cause then you could make it something that industrial designer: I suppose we maybe are limited in the fact that we still have to put the logo on the actual marketing: project manager: Well you two are obviously gonna find that out fairly quickly when you move over to your kit modelling stage as to how much pl how much how much how pliable is Plasticine . user interface: industrial designer: Maybe we could think of the the cases like changing with the fashions project manager: industrial designer: like the Nokia phones where you could take the casing off the outside . industrial designer: Yeah the a the actual the sort of the look from the outside , so where the buttons would stay the same , and the general function of the remote would stay the same , marketing: user interface: Yeah and then you could have Oh but you still would have to have the logo on every new case , industrial designer: Yeah , that's true . project manager: Yeah you you could do a colour change , so therefore you would yeah yeah that's effectively what they did with the with the mobile phones , was to have some in blue , some in red , some in rather than all in black industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: or , you know , which four do you want , as long as it's black ? user interface: . user interface: But we are supposed to use the company colour scheme , aren't we ? project manager: Yes oh that's true user interface: We haven't really seen that yet industrial designer: Oh okay yes project manager: that might no marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: that is user interface: It might and we might be able to do both but it might clash with certain things . project manager: Well not necessarily , because you could have your company We're we're meant to be finishing up . a lot of computers for instance like like on the one you've got there , it actually has a sort of stick on badge marketing: project manager: so what you would al all you would really need , whether it , you know , whether the casing be w any colour , could be any colour , but that badge would then have to stick out on top of it so that in a sense , with a with a logo like that , because it's on a white background , the only colour that it might not stick out so well on would be a white casing . project manager: And in fact a lot of companies get somebody else to make them and literally just badge them themselves with their own badge over the top . project manager: And in fact the way they've got that there even if you had that on a white , which is the predominant colour of the the Windows badge , you'd still be able to see it clearly from you know a white casing product . industrial designer: And whether we'd have a big enough market to have this kind of like secondary market of selling the cases might be something to consider . project manager: user interface: Well if it's for young people , like the phone generation , that sort of thing'd probably go down well , marketing: user interface: and the market research has been on that side of things , hasn't it ? marketing: Yeah , it's people say that it's the look , they want the fancy looking thing but I'm Yeah . I think with the mobiles , it's the , you know it's a communication device , people see you with it all about and industrial designer: Yeah I suppose , user interface: industrial designer: where you you keep the remote hidden under the sofa most of the time . marketing: i if it project manager: It's in in the house , isn't it , I suppose . user interface: Okay , so if we just went for one colour of a rubber case marketing: I think project manager: So don't change case . user interface: Did we decide on the rubber case ? The spongy feel , or did we think that that might go as a trend ? marketing: Well , it was different last year . I don't know whether it's one of those things that like sort of having all fruit shaped keys , that that probably would go out of fashion very quickly , project manager: Yeah . marketing: whereas just the fact that it was a rubber case is probably less less of something that y you're gonna end up hating in a year , you know . If you're going for fashion trends like that they'll need t you'd have to have interchangeable cases industrial designer: So then th th that would project manager: so that you could industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: or 'cause otherwise someone's gonna have to buy a complete new remote rather than just a case . industrial designer: it seems to make sense that we we'd just maybe stick with the standard rubber case , marketing: . There's flat , marketing: user interface: there's single-curved and there's double-curved . industrial designer: Maybe curves give it like the slightly more aesthetic feel ? But the double curve wouldn't require us to perform miracles with the Plasticine . user interface: marketing: project manager: user interface: Well it says that marketing: When you say d when you say double-curved , what what exactly does that mean ? user interface: I'm not exactly sure . See how the one Oh I'm not plugged in , am I ? marketing: No you're not connected to me anymore . project manager: One one thing to cons user interface: Shall I just turn it round for time ? project manager: one thing to consider is that in some ways you want by having a fairly standard case it means they can all fit together on top of each other marketing: That should come up . project manager: therefore for storage purposes in shops and the like and it makes it easier that you can if you can store them up on top of each other . project manager: Whereas if you do fancy things with it , you then gotta put it in a ca a a packaging box that that does that . And the cost of packaging could be quite important vis-a-vis the total cost of the product . industrial designer: So shall we go through quickly and just work out what we've decide on , if we have to kind of project manager: So but marketing: Yeah . user interface: but you can see some of them have got kind of bulges , like the second one and the end one where there's a curve there . user interface: I'm not exactl I don't know if a double curve is maybe it comes up slightly , or ? marketing: That's what I was trying to work out . S so do you wanna go for curves , more curves ? marketing: Shall we industrial designer: project manager: We're meant to be f we're meant to be finishing this meeting in about a minute or so . user interface: Shall we go for single curve , just to compromise ? industrial designer: We'll go for single curve , yeah . industrial designer: So did we did we decide on the kinetic power supply ? The one you move around ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: and we don't really know much about the colour scheme or logo yet do we , industrial designer: Oh we ca user interface: but possibly a sticker . industrial designer: Yeah yeah , we'll still have the Are we gonna go for the simple circuit board just to keep the cost down ? I th I think we can by by not having anything too complicated . Yeah and and the voice recognition , we can use that can't we , just to find it . industrial designer: And see we could always decide against it if something comes up that's just something to that we seemed to leave out . user interface: Yeah that sounds like it wouldn't do too much harm in a couple of years . what sort of shape do we want ? project manager: So we've got spongy feel buttons as well , have we ? marketing: Don't know , maybe just project manager: As well as or w or was that marketing: Yeah . project manager: So it's rubber buttons , industrial designer: Yeah , it was just project manager: so it's not really spongy feel buttons , it's just rubber buttons . marketing: project manager: Okay so what what shape are we making the standby button ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: Shall we vote on it ? industrial designer: We will go for the a a a apples apples . user interface: Anyone got any suggestions ? marketing: Apple apple a a qu Quite a big one , as well . project manager: A red apple ? Is it ? user interface: Yeah 'cause we wanna incorporate a bit of colour if we can , once we find out industrial designer: Okay . And then we're gonna are you gonna work on keeping the button design quite simple ? Just like the Just working out what we're gonna do for the next time . project manager: Sorry what was that last thing again there ? user interface: just to keep the shape of the buttons simple . I thought you were going for a single curve and user interface: Ah just the shape of the buttons . industrial designer: And j yeah , just keeping the sort of the labelling them labelling of them fairly simple as well

The User Interface proposed a button layout consisting of six or seven buttons, each representing a different category, allowing users to navigate through hundreds of channels. However, to avoid confusion, it was suggested that only one button should have a fancy design, such as the stand-by button shaped like an apple, while the rest should remain in a normal shape. In order to make the remote control more unique and attractive, the User Interface drew a draft showing the placement of essential buttons together in one area, while others could be scattered throughout the remote, all with clear logos. The emphasis was on creating a user-friendly button layout, with less importance placed on the specific placement of the buttons.

Question: What was Alastair Birch's level of confidence in the clarity of teachers and others working in educational settings regarding the support for the implementation of this Bill? How did Alastair Birch address the concern about the potential risk of education settings playing a significant role in referring more parents to social services, leading to mistrust? Article: We've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies and Jack Sargeant and I'm very pleased to welcome Jayne Bryant back, who is substituting for Jack today. Item 2, then, this morning, is our sixth scrutiny session on the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. I'm very pleased to welcome our witnesses this morning: Sally Jenkins, who is chair of All Wales Heads of Children’s Services and is here representing the Association of Directors of Social Services; Alastair Birch, who is senior system leader for equalities and safeguarding at Pembrokeshire County Council, who is here representing the Association of Directors of Education Wales; and Councillor Huw David, who is the Welsh Local Government Association spokesperson for health and social care and leader of Bridgend County Borough Council. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so, if you're happy, we'll go straight into questions and I'll start just by asking about your general support for the Bill, which is outlined in the evidence. Can you just explain why you think the current law is ineffective or unclear? alastair birch: Bore da—bore da, bawb. The statement, really, from ADEW is that the rights of the child should be educated and achieved, really, under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The current legislation has been criticised, obviously, by the UN concerning the defence of reasonable punishment still being within our current legislation. So, we will always—ADEW will always—advocate that the rights of the child be upheld, so that is really the fundamental aspect in terms of the statement from ADEW, and the position of ADEW is that the rights of the child are fundamental in this process. I know that the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011 made sure that article 3 and article 4, article 12 and article 37 were a focus in terms of making sure that the best interests of the child were put first, that children expressing their views and opinions was a priority. And we know, for safeguarding purposes, that the express opinions of the child and the voice of the child are a fundamental aspect of any safe environment, whether it be a school or college. So, that is—the position is really following that legal position under the Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure. Nothing to add at this stage, no? sally jenkins: I'll just add, on behalf of ADSS and on behalf of children's services and social services more widely, for us, this is not a change in our position, this is not new; this is a position that we, on behalf of the leaders of social services across Wales, have taken over many years, going back 20, 25 years. I think what we would say is that we really welcome this Bill and we welcome the proposed change for the clarity it would bring—the clarity that it would bring for children, for parents and for professionals. I think what we would recognise is that this is a very little-used piece of legislation, so it's rare, it's not as if this is something that is going to cast great change across the scene for children and families in Wales, but what it will do is represent a change in the reality of how we care and nurture our children. I would echo absolutely what Alastair has said in terms of the rights of the child, but equally, in terms of all of our policies in Wales in terms of promoting well-being for children, this has to be key. So, for us, this is about a natural progression of change in how we care for our children in Wales. For children's services at the very sharp end of this world, for us, it brings a true clarity. This continues with an ambiguity in how we treat our children and how we care for our children, and the shift for us brings that very much needed clarity. The committee has already heard different views about whether there's clear evidence that physical punishment is harmful to children. What evidence does the work of social services provide about whether physical punishment is actually harmful? sally jenkins: Obviously, what you'll all be aware of is that, as part of the consultation for this Bill, the Public Policy Institute did a further piece of research to look at the impact of physical punishment on children. A number of things that we know—we know from across the world that the evidence is that introducing legislation or changing legislation in this way improves children's positions within their families. What we know is that children themselves, as Alastair has already referred to, really find physical punishment demeaning and harmful, and for children it is an emotionally damaging experience. Now, there may be disagreement about that, there will be different views on that, but that's the voice of the child in this debate. I think what we would also say is that, in the world that we work in, it's part of a continuum, and, whilst this is an element of how children are cared for, what we see is a continuum where an acceptance of how we treat children in a particular way perpetuates throughout our work. By changing this, it helps that shift to that absolute recognition that our children must be cared for in a way that is physically safe in all dimensions for them. We've had evidence from the equal protection network that the reasonable punishment defence undermines child protection and fails to protect children because it permits an arbitrary level of violence, which invades children's physical integrity, making it a potential pathway to more serious physical or sexual abuse, and you did refer to that just now. It is about how we see our smallest and most vulnerable people, and if it is acceptable it opens the door to those other, more extreme versions of violence, which then complicates the issue for us. This is about clarity, and, whilst there is an argument that this is a small episode for a child, it's not a small episode for a child, it is a major episode for a child, and I think absolutely, as you said, the potential for it then to lead on, and over gradation and time to increase the risk for children, is clearly there. The final question from me: your written evidence emphasises the need for greater clarity around the definition of what constitutes corporal punishment, but that contrasts with what we've been told by the children's commissioner and the equal protection network, who've emphasised the importance of simplicity in the Bill. How do you respond to that view, and is what you're calling for essential to be on the face of the Bill? sally jenkins: It's not essential for it to be on the face of the Bill. Absolutely agree in terms of simplicity—I think that is really important—and I've already mentioned clarity. We know that the legislation in different countries has done that, and there are ways that you can do it, but what we would welcome is an opportunity during the implementation phase for discussion. huw david: And, as a principle, obviously we would welcome full involvement, and we know there's the commitment from Welsh Government to full involvement in the implementation, because, as with every piece of legislation, implementation is the most important part, and we would want to ensure there is that commitment to a major awareness-raising campaign, and there is that from Welsh Government, because we need to take families, carers and parents with us on this. Also we need to ensure that there is that support available to parents and carers that do sometimes struggle with parenting, and that needs to be a universal offer across Wales. If we're to progress with this, that has to be an option that is offered to every parent in Wales. sally jenkins: Local authorities have already been very heavily involved in terms of looking at this Bill and exploring what the issues are and the discussions and looking at what the implications from a local authority perspective will be, as Huw describes, both in terms of the awareness raising, early support and intervention and prevention services for families against the backdrop of the current issues that we have in local government, but also awareness raising—because absolutely it is key that families come with us on this journey. [Laughter.] dawn bowden am: You've already said, obviously, that you're looking towards working with Welsh Government in terms of its implementation. What's been your role so far in terms of the implementation of the Bill—local authorities generally, now? Have you had a role? Has Welsh Government been involving you in discussions around the introduction of the Bill so far? huw david: Yes. So, obviously we were consulted—a key consultee—but also our officials have worked very closely with Welsh Government officials to make sure this is implemented successfully, if it is progressed. sally jenkins: Our involvement with this, from a social services perspective, goes back over two years, directly in working towards this point, never mind the history in terms of work towards this area. But, very directly in relation to this Bill, we were first involved at least two years ago, to recollect, and that was in a series of workshops with other agencies, for example Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service Cymru and the police, and looking in real depth at what the implications would be for us as agencies to look at what the likely trajectory would be in terms of our pathways for referral into our services and what that might mean for us. And then particularly, for example, with CAFCASS Cymru in relation to private law, what the fallout might be, and then what, if anything—and that's the discussion that we need to have—that could mean for children's services in particular, given the pressures that we're already under. So, we've been in constant, I suppose, involvement in terms of the Bill already, as part of the consultation, in terms of the focus groups and in terms of direct work with Welsh Government officials to take this forward. You touched there on the pressures that you're already under, which we fully appreciate, but you also mentioned in answers to Lynne Neagle earlier on that you welcomed the Bill in terms of its clarity. So, are you confident that the Bill can be implemented without any major impact on your capacity to deal with it? sally jenkins: We've done—. A number of local authorities—my own included, Newport City Council, has done some work to look at what the likely impact would be and then actually to look at what some of that costing would need to be. I think what we've done is we've looked internationally at what the impact has been elsewhere when similar legislation has been introduced to try and gauge, but that's difficult to do in terms of comparable nations and size and also different systems. And obviously our approach in terms of children and pedagogy is very different from some of the nations that have already done this. I wouldn't like to say one way or the other, because I think, in terms of that culture shift, it could be a double impact on us in terms of increased referrals because of increased awareness, but it could also be, I suppose, as Huw alludes to, that, if we're looking at ensuring greater awareness of preventative services and support services for parents, actually people coming to the fore and asking us for those services as well. So, at this stage, I think what we would want to say is that we continue to be fully involved in the implementation phase, to look at what the cost implications for that could be, and not just for the local authorities but also the police, CAFCASS Cymru, for third sector organisations involved in preventative services. I don't think any of that should undermine the position in terms of children and their rights within our society. So, a difficult answer, in the sense that— dawn bowden am: No, I understand. What you're saying is that this is a piece of legislation that, in your view, is a good piece of legislation. It's setting out to, hopefully, achieve what the purpose of it is and you will deliver what you need to. Can I ask you whether, then, you've also given thought to the impact on—we've talked about social services, but the impact on other services, like housing, education and so on? You're obviously coming at it from slightly different angles in other sections. alastair birch: We are part of the universal service for children, and we very much work in co-operation with the WLGA and our social care colleagues, and we've been part of that consultation. And, in terms of the Bill, there needs to be the clarity—ambiguity would be bad—in terms of making sure that safeguarding leads within all schools have the right training and support. So, really, that's the key element there, and then obviously the preventative services for the parents that schools can signpost, and sometimes possibly even host, in terms of being community schools. I have colleagues who have worked in that area for many years and see the benefits in how those positive parenting approaches make a difference to families. dawn bowden am: So, from your point of view, it's awareness raising, is it? alastair birch: It's awareness raising; it's making sure that professionals are fully briefed on necessary changes, that there's very little ambiguity, that we are aware that—. That'll still be part of the all-Wales child protection procedures. That won't change, and that duty is always going to be there for all our professionals. But that awareness raising and training will be the key, and then, obviously, working in co-operation with our colleagues. Have you been given an indication of how long you've got between Royal Assent and implementation, and whether you've thought through any of the key milestones that need to be implemented? sally jenkins: There's a group proposed that would be a strategic leadership group in the steering group that we're part of, which is now laying out what would happen after Royal Assent if that is given. My final question, Chair, is about some of the responses we've had to this committee that say that the state should not get involved in family life—I'm sure you've heard those views—unless it's in the most serious circumstances. To what extent do you think that this Bill undermines the existing local authority responsibilities, or don't you? huw david: The state's paramount role is to protect children from harm. And there is obviously a view—it's a view that is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—that physical punishment, physical harm to a child is harm to a child, and we should be preventing that and act to prevent that. That would be the position of the Welsh Local Government Association, and we also respect the mandate that Members of the National Assembly for Wales have too. And we believe that children can be raised by parents without recourse to physical punishment, effectively, and we'd support parents in that. We do not believe that in the 50 nations across the world where such legislation exists that the state is interfering in family life unnecessarily. We believe this action reflects a cultural change, a sea change that's taken place in Wales over the last 30 to 40 years, where the vast majority of parents now say that they do not use it themselves, they do not support it, and we believe this is actually a reflection of what has happened in Welsh society. We support Assembly Members in the view that the natural progression of that is that children's rights are protected across Wales. dawn bowden am: So, I've got largely positive feedback from you in terms of the Bill and its intentions, and so on. Do you foresee any unintended consequences for this Bill? huw david: If we implement it carefully, if we implement it with the right resources, then I hope not. But as with every piece of legislation, it is about the implementation, it is about the cultural change as well, and that's why I cannot overstress the importance of making sure that resources are made available, because our social services departments—children's social services in particular—are overstretched. They are at breaking point—make no bones about it—and they are dealing with children who are facing serious harm and neglect. We are having record numbers of contacts from police, from teachers, from doctors and, of course, from children themselves who are experiencing that harm and neglect. Equally, though, we don't want to lose sight of those families and children that are experiencing significant problems, but who we want to support through our early intervention and prevention programmes, and that is why it is important that there is investment in those programmes, so that children do not end up in that terrible position where we have to, for their safety, take them from their birth families to protect them. And the reality is, in Wales, that we are doing that to more children than we've done for a long time, and the numbers are growing across Wales. And that is only because of the most appalling neglect and abuse, because there is no way that any judge would permit us to act to make a child safe if it was not for that fact, and the facts are there. So, I don't want that focus to be lost, but, of course, we welcome and understand the need to progress this piece of legislation. dawn bowden am: That rise that you talk about here, is that due to more interventions, greater awareness, more incidents? I'm trying to link this to the Bill in terms of whether the Bill is actually going to give you more work to do in those areas. sally jenkins: On the reasons for the rise in the numbers of looked-after children in Wales, which are higher than those in England, and also the numbers of contacts that we have across the local authorities, the work of the care crisis review, which was completed last year; the work of Isabelle Trowler, who's the chief social worker in England; countless research and reports that have taken place in the last 18 months; and currently the public law working group, under the auspices of the president of the family court, would all indicate that it's multifactorial. So, what you have is a range of reasons that have led to the increasing numbers of children becoming looked after across England and Wales. There have been headlines that have said, 'Is it increased austerity?' That is clearly a part of this. Is it in Wales an increased awareness of adverse childhood experiences and the emphasis of the impact on children of, for example, domestic abuse? Is it because of our understanding of what happens to children in those households? All of that research would say it's all of those things. And then, when you also add in changes in our practice with our colleagues in the judiciary, changes in our police service, but also changes in our preventative services, you've got that whole range of elements. And there is going on across the local authorities and Welsh Government a huge amount of work to try to address and understand that, and then to ameliorate that. Children who need to be in care for safety need to be in care, but what we have to do is get to a point where fewer children come into care and we're able to protect them, firstly, and secondly where those children who are in care are cared for in a way that delivers the best possible outcomes for them. I think, in terms of this Bill and unintended consequences, I agree absolutely with everything that Huw has said. It takes away even that point of discussion that this could possibly be okay, and I think that's important to hang on to. alastair birch: One unintended consequences is that I think that there will be an increased focus on the UNCRC. And, in terms of children having a discussion around this point, children need to be part of that discussion. It's changed completely in the last 10 years, and it is one of the key things in terms of us driving improvements. dawn bowden am: Would that be something that you would be looking to do in schools? alastair birch: Anything that improves the voice of the child in any educational context is good and it's very powerful for the children. And it improves their educational experiences, encouraging the opportunities for them to discuss the issues, the adverse childhood experiences that they encounter, which are significant, and it's our educational professionals that are facing this day-in, day-out. They've become a very highly trained workforce, they're ACE aware, they're trauma aware, and anything that focuses, even increases, their professionalism and understanding around a particular point, and also—. So it's a positive unintended consequence, shall we say, that it could reinvigorate some of the voice of the child discussion within various contexts. lynne neagle am: We've got some specific questions now on implementation for social services, from Janet Finch-Saunders. If this Bill becomes law, would you encourage members of the public to contact social services departments if they do see a child being smacked? sally jenkins: We already encourage members of the public to contact social services or the police, depending on the circumstances. Interestingly, I'm picking— janet finch-saunders am: What, if a child is being smacked now? sally jenkins: Yes. But if you were walking out, and you saw something happening to a child, in the same way as if you saw something to an adult. sally jenkins: So, I think that the challenge is about—we've all probably, sadly, witnessed incidents in the doctor's reception, or in a supermarket, and we've failed to do something about it. And I think we then walk away and feel pretty guilty about that, realistically, when you see something happening to a child in a particular circumstance. A campaign opposing this Bill, Be Reasonable Wales, have said that 'If the law is changed, the consequences for parents will be considerable.' It also says, 'Anyone accused or convicted of assaulting a child—under the new definition—' so, I suppose you could argue, a minor tap— 'will be subject to long-term social services involvement in their family and social stigma.' To what extent is this accurate, and, also, will thresholds for social services intervention change if the Bill is enacted? sally jenkins: There are a number of parts to that. Firstly, in terms of long-term social services intervention in a family's life, I think, for people to be fully aware of the very few numbers of families where we have long-term intervention currently, even where there is what would be perceived as very significant abuse. What we do is we go in for short periods in families' lives, to support them to work with their strengths, to work with them and their family members. So, in terms of long-term intervention, what we want is for families to find their own solutions. We want families to be able to work with each other, and together, and local community support, and preventative services, to be able to address issues. In terms of thresholds for children's services, we would not be anticipating a huge number of referrals to us. Because we also know that this is actually quite a rare occurrence currently; this is not a defence that's being used with great frequency, this is not something that is happening. And if we look at the data, we know that the incidents of children, and the number of parents who now recognise this as an acceptable form of punishment, has steadily declined over the last 15 to 20 years. janet finch-saunders am: So, on that one then, is there a need for legislation that will—obviously there'll be resources for the Welsh Government and there'll be resources out of hours and things like that—is there a need for legislation if, as you say, natural behaviour and the culture is changing? Let's be honest, as you've rightly pointed out, in social services—I know in my own authority—in your own authority, you're saying that even now you're working with the police, on systematic failings within the system. Firstly, we want legislation that reflects our society—we don't want the two to be out of kilter. It shouldn't be that we've got these rather confusing elements running in parallel, and that continues to perpetuate a lack of clarity and the ambiguity that we currently see. I think the other element is that, again, this is about potentially an accelerating of that awareness and that culture in our society, about how we care for our children. We've got there naturally; we've got there by the change that's happened in Wales over the last 15 to 20 years. What this does is to continue with that change and continue with that awareness and understanding of how we positively, from a strength-based approach, should care for our children, bearing in mind what's required of us in terms of the UNCRC. Are there any comments from anyone else? huw david: Simply to say that I think that, in terms of that clarity for the very vulnerable children out there who are currently being assaulted—seriously assaulted and abused by their parents, which goes on on a daily basis—that is already covered by existing legislation. But at the moment, they don't know, because they could be being told—and they probably are being told—by their parents that's it's okay, that they can smack their child and that that's acceptable. And if you asked most parents, and in fact lots of professionals, they would not be able to tell you, and probably most of you wouldn't be able to tell me exactly where is the threshold— janet finch-saunders am: Yes, where's that line. That vulnerable child, at home, being abused by their parents, does not know where that line is. And they should know where that line is because then they can pick up the phone to Childline or they can talk to a professional and ask them where that line is. I do recognise, though, that what we don't want to do—and the last thing any of us want to do—is criminalise parents who are bringing up their children. That is why we're saying there needs to be an emphasis on the support programmes that are available to parents. And to be clear, there is no way that we want long-term involvement in any child's life, but particularly not in the lives of children who have been smacked by their parents. That is not going to be the result of this legislation, trust me, because we don't want to be involved in—we haven't got the resources to be involved in children's lives. The social worker or the police officer—if they become involved, then there would be a proportionate response to that, and there'll also be a test about whether or not that is progressed. So, if there is an allegation—if this legislation is passed—then that will be looked into and a consideration will be made about whether any action will be taken, and as with any allegation of the law being broken, there would be a proportionate response, as there is now. Can you outline the practical ways in which social services' interaction with parents will change as a result of this proposed law and do you envisage that all referrals to the police will be automatically referred to social services for an assessment? Who's going to make those decisions? sally jenkins: That will be part of the implementation phase about that decision making. Interestingly, the number of referrals that we currently get from the police that we take absolutely no action on is extraordinary. It will be happening now; sitting in the civic centre in Newport City Council will be a whole host of social workers taking in the public protection notifications from overnight. janet finch-saunders am: So, if there's an increase as a result of greater awareness— sally jenkins: What happens is there is a paper assessment of them. There's a look at what's happened, who's involved, what the police have reported, and there's work being done with the police to improve that. Because one of the things that we want to get to is actually where we're not using huge amounts of time to look at that, but what comes to us is what we act on. So, there is work going on with a number of police authorities to look at how you improve that process. But I suppose, to pick up, each incident will be looked at, each one will be assessed in a way that is proportionate, as Huw says, to look at what's happened and then investigated. lynne neagle am: Sally, can you give us a couple of examples of what kind of things might have come in that you would then take no action on? sally jenkins: We get countless referrals, for example, where there's been a domestic abuse incident overnight where a child wasn't present in the property and we then haven't taken action. It’ll be where the level of harm that’s perceived to happen to that child is below the threshold for intervention from children's services. janet finch-saunders am: I’m pretty cynical about assessment, because, you know, I have people come in who are benefit claimants where, when they’ve been assessed, the whole process has been very flawed and I’ve had to fight and fight and fight on their behalf. So— sally jenkins: Assessment processes within social— janet finch-saunders am: But if you're struggling now with those assessments— sally jenkins: Assessment processes within social services are as laid out in the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014. So, we have within what we carry out, I suppose, that kind of initial look, that look at the information, what else do we know about that family— janet finch-saunders am: And are they qualified people that are doing this? sally jenkins: Yes, absolutely. huw david: And, in fact, in lots of places in Wales now, it’s a multi-agency assessment. janet finch-saunders am: So, what proportion currently would you not be taking any action on, if a report came in of some domestic abuse where a child had perhaps been smacked? sally jenkins: If something came in to us where a child had been smacked and there was something clearly there, we would look at it. lynne neagle am: Can you ask a final question? And I'm going to have to appeal for brief answers, because we've got a lot of ground to cover. huw david: Just very quickly, there may be no action from social services, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t offer support. So, the expectation is that support is offered in those circumstances from family support services, for example— sally jenkins: Or prevention. So, we would not say, if we were aware, for example, that there was domestic abuse at a home, ‘There’s no role for children’s social services’, because there may be an assessment that that child may not be at immediate risk of harm, but we would obviously recognise that there are causes for concern there and we would offer that support. And that’s a process that happens in every social services department in the UK, and it’s happened for a very long time, and, in fact, it’s reflective of the legislation that you have laid down as Assembly Members. lynne neagle am: And are those services there, Huw? Because I’m very acutely aware of the pressure on local government. Are the services there? Is there sufficient resource in things like Families First? Because what I’m hearing on the ground is that eligibility is changing for even those preventative services. huw david: There’s not enough of those services, and, obviously—you may have heard me saying this before—I think we need to invest more in those services, and I hope you invest more in the services, because, obviously, prevention is better than cure. And those pressures that Sally talked about earlier are pressures that are not going away; they’re only increasing by the day, actually, and I would want us to be able to offer those services now. Because that example of a child that perhaps is in a home where there is domestic abuse—we’ll probably have another referral off them in a couple of months’ time, and that could escalate. And what I’d rather do is provide support to that family and try and stop that family breaking down so that, in six months, we're not going back and saying that we've got to take this child into care because the domestic abuse has worsened and that child is at risk. sally jenkins: I appreciate that time is of the essence, but, just really quickly in relation to that, it’s not just social services. So, for example, there are developments like Encompass, which is a piece of work that is being rolled out across Gwent and across other areas, which is where the police automatically notify the school overnight of an incident, not expecting the school to do anything per se, but to be aware, to be able to offer care for that child. alastair birch: Can I add to that? Operation Encompass I know in Gwent has been operational, and we started it in Pembrokeshire 18 months ago. We as a local authority—and it’ll be education that will contact the school around the domestic incident happening, and the school as part of that protocol will provide a level of universal service support for that child when they come in, before 9 o’clock, so that professionals are aware of the needs of the welfare of that child at that point. So, you know, schools play a key role in the universal service of this and we work very closely with our social care colleagues on that. janet finch-saunders am: The Bill's explanatory memorandum refers to an estimate of 274 offences annually where lawful chastisement was used as a defence or considered. It says there is also potential to create extra demand on out-of-hours social services teams due to the time that the offences were reported, and in order to support safeguarding measures. Have you assessed how this Bill will impact on emergency and out-of-hours local authority services? sally jenkins: We have considered that, and again I think that's something that we would very much want to look at as part of implementation. We have out-of-hours provision, we have emergency duty teams already across Wales that operate 24/7. janet finch-saunders am: Are they overstretched at the moment? sally jenkins: I think in the same way as all of social services is. But are they working in a way that protects children day in, day out, and vulnerable adults? Yes, they are, and they will continue to do so. Alastair, you've already mentioned about awareness raising and training, which will be key with educational professionals. How confident are you that teachers and others working in those educational settings will be clear about how to support the implementation of this Bill, if enacted? alastair birch: Training requirements for all professionals in education settings are clear. In that level of general safeguarding awareness and training, the infinite emphasis is on the duty to report. It says in 'Keeping learners safe', which is the bible in terms of education professionals, that there's a responsibility on the professional to make that referral and for that universal service. So, the more specialist safeguarding leads within the schools, who have become highly skilled professionals in terms of understanding what might be significant harm—because that's what we're talking about—they understand the legalities when a referral needs to be made. There's always the collation of safeguarding information, where there might be just general concerns about neglect and other areas, which combined would create a picture that there might be significant neglect or significant harm to the child, and then that referral would be made to the child care assessment team or the police. So, that awareness—it needs to be clear for educational professionals that that duty to report is always there. If they believe that that significant harm has happened then that report then goes to the child care assessment team. But in terms of education, it'll be that awareness, making sure that there's clarity. If there's anything that professionals need to be trained additionally on, it'll need to go into 'Keeping learners safe', which at the moment is being rewritten. But as long as there's clarity, and once that implementation phase and the discussion has happened, as long as it's clear for professionals that the duty is always there and they feel a significant harm, then that report will always be there and will always need to be made. It's making sure—and I'll echo what my colleague said, Huw—that the services are key for families. On a daily basis, professionals are working on that trust with parents, because they are the ones that can engage with those families. The family support officers that are working on the ground with highly complex families, with multiple leads and supporting the children—they are fundamental, and investment in that level of support would also help our colleagues as well. That is already happening in schools and is effective, and is shown to be effective, and has an evidence base—we'd always support that that would continue to be invested in. And you were saying about how important trust is as well, but do you think that there's a risk that those in education settings will have a key role in referring more parents to social services, which some have said could cause potential harm to relationships and cause mistrust? alastair birch: I don't think it's a matter of mistrust—it's a matter of, you know, if a professional believes, based on the evidence that they have, because they're working with that child every day, that there is significant harm to that child, they are under a duty to report that to social care. So, part of the work is with families, and most of the referrals we make are with parental consent. That consent is a key element of this, and conversation with our social care colleagues is usually, 'You need to speak to the parents again and have a conversation with them.' Some of the NFAs—the ones that don't get referred at threshold—it will come back to school for, possibly, some support from the family or a team around the family or some other aspect. The trust in the professionals—it's actually more important that we are seen to be upholding our duties under the all-Wales safeguarding procedures. We're going to move on now to some questions about the importance of awareness raising from Siân Gwenllian. In looking at your written evidence, you say that we must make it very clear to parents, guardians and the public that this legislation is not trying to criminalise parents, and that is clearly very important for you. How do you think we should do that and who should be doing that work? sally jenkins: I think that's really broad. Obviously, colleagues in education, colleagues in social care, colleagues in preventative services, but also Welsh Government and the National Assembly, in terms of those drivers in relation to that awareness raising are really, really key. If you look at some of the other campaigns that have been run, notably in relation to violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, and echoing some of those building campaigns that have been done to raise awareness—I think those would be really good models to begin to consider in terms of how this is taken forward with awareness. We also know that there are a number of routes that we can go through in terms of raising awareness. We have existing preventative services, we have all our universal services, we have the regional safeguarding boards and the national safeguarding boards. In terms of not wishing to criminalise, I think if we look at the numbers, they are very, very small. And I think one of the things we need to hold on to in this is a sense of proportion about what is or isn't likely to happen once or if this Bill ever gets to the point of Royal Assent—they are small numbers who currently use this defence. It is about that wider issue of awareness raising, and using all of those avenues will help us to do that in the broadest sense. sian gwenllian am: Do you, therefore, believe that this needs to be on the face of the Bill? That is, you don't say this in your evidence. Scotland is going to be making it a duty for Scottish Ministers to raise awareness of the impact of the Bill. Wouldn't it make it clearer for you if it was a clear duty on the face of the Bill, for example as it was with the Human Transplantation (Wales) Act 2013? There was a duty in that Act for Ministers to promote transplantation. Surely, that awareness raising aspect would be clearer for everyone if it was on the face of the Bill. Do you have an opinion on that? huw david: Well, Welsh Government have given that commitment, and I know the Welsh Government honour every commitment that they make—[Laughter.] sian gwenllian am: That's why I'm asking. huw david: I don't know whether that is necessary—I'm not a legislator. I think that there's obviously an inherent interest in Welsh Government raising awareness, because we have to raise awareness effectively for this to be successful, otherwise we will have parents who feel that they're being criminalised, and that's the last thing we want. I think it's worthy of consideration, but, as I say, I'm not a legislator or a lawyer, so I don't know what implications that will have long term. But to be fair to Welsh Government, I think that commitment is one that I'm sure will be honoured, because Welsh Government will want to make a success of this Bill if it does receive Royal Assent. But is it clear who would pay for all of that? huw david: I've suddenly changed my mind—[Laughter.] I think it should be a duty on Welsh Government Ministers—absolutely. And that's the WLGA position; I don't need to ask the other 21 leaders on that either. [Laughter.] sian gwenllian am: Wouldn't it make it clearer if there was a clear duty on the face of the Bill that awareness raising had to happen? It would be clearer, then, for local authorities and people in the front-line services what needs to happen. We're moving on now, then, to the contentious issue of resources and we've got some questions from Hefin. hefin david am: Sally Jenkins, you said that the purpose of the Bill is to bring clarity and to remove what is a little-used defence. Isn't this an expensive way of doing that? sally jenkins: I don't think so, no. hefin david am: But introducing this legislation diverts finances from other areas of children's services—or doesn't? sally jenkins: Well, I would say, no, I don't think it will divert resources from children's services. Firstly, going back to the comment made, I think, proportionally, this is a very small number of cases. It's a very small number of existing cases that go through in terms of prosecution, or consideration for prosecution. We know that it's likely, from some of the work that we've already done, that it's not opening floodgates for a sudden sea of referrals to children's services—that's not the way this is going to be, because the numbers are not out there because of the changes that have already happened in Welsh family life and Welsh society. So, I think as part of the implementation phase, we need to have a really clear understanding of the trajectory of those costs and what's likely to happen over the first six months, 12 months in terms of people's awareness and understanding and what is referred and how that's worked. But in terms of a huge number, no, I don't anticipate it being that. hefin david am: But the costs wouldn't just be directed to the number of referrals and the number of cases raised, it's the cost around that, with training of staff, awareness—all those extra additional costs that always come with legislation. And I agree with that—that there clearly are—but if you think, many of those things will be aligned with work we are already doing, but it brings a clarity to that work. So, our teachers, our social workers, our health workers, our police officers already get substantial training around child protection, around safeguarding, around adverse childhood experiences and around a trauma-informed approach to children. But rather than having a part of that training, which has to deal with this as an aspect—that is no longer there; it is a clear message for all professions. hefin david am: I fully appreciate that, and in the briefing note you've given us, you've outlined the pressures on social services. So, do you think this is another way of getting money into social services? sally jenkins: If this was a way of getting money into—. I think this is a clear commitment to the rights of children in Wales; this is not about levering additional resources into children's services. And, do you think those costs are quantifiable? sally jenkins: I think we are currently looking at work and are doing work across my own local authority and across two others to look at breaking down those costs, not just for local authority, but also for health, for police and for Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service Cymru. I think there was a bit about local authorities that Siân— lynne neagle am: Okay. The explanatory memorandum that accompanies the Bill talks about the unknown costs for different agencies. You mentioned there that you're doing work around trying to identify some of those costs, but wouldn't it be useful if the explanatory memorandum did explain more about any unknown or unidentified costs, partly in order to calm some of those fears around that? Giving a title 'unidentified costs'—is that good enough? sally jenkins: I think, clearly, that is a challenge, and that is work that we are participating in and are committed to completing with Welsh Government, to look at what those costs are. huw david: I think this is where it would be helpful in the committee's deliberations and where our concern would be, because the reality is we're not going to know what the costs are until it's actually implemented, because we haven't implemented this before. And, therefore, I think there needs to be a commitment that, whatever the costs are, those costs are met because it is legislation that is being led by the National Assembly for Wales. And whilst we don't see it as levering in additional resources, we don't think it should be at the expense of current service provision to vulnerable families in Wales, and therefore it's important that it is properly and fully resourced. sian gwenllian am: What I would argue on that is that you have to try and forecast. You say it's difficult to forecast how much this is going to cost, but we have to try and forecast that, and part of the argument for trying to have projections is to show that, perhaps, it's not going to cost that much, and that would add to the argument that, 'Okay, this is going to be fine to do and it's not going to put too much pressure on us'. Or we need to know that this is going to cost a lot to do it effectively, and therefore you have to make your argument, then, 'Well, we can't afford that, the money has to come from somewhere else.' We have to get the costs, surely. huw david: Yes, and we will work very closely with Welsh Government to try and establish those costs as quickly as possible. So, for example, a campaign, an awareness-raising campaign, the marketing, if you like, but some of the other costs will be more difficult to establish in terms of the resource implications for front-line workers. I expressed a view that we need to see some additional investment in some of those programmes that are not targeted directly at families that would be impacted by this but support all families across Wales that have different needs, and some of that provision is universal. So, there's no limit to that, but I suspect Welsh Government will take a very different view to that. But I don't put an upper limit on that, because I don't think there's an authority in Wales, and I don't think there's a charity, a police service or a health board in Wales that doesn't think that we need to do more of that and could offer more of that if the resources were available. We've come to the end of our time, so can I thank you all for attending and for answering all of our questions? It's been a really useful and informative discussion. As usual, you'll be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again, all of you, for coming. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Minister for Housing and Local Government—additional information for our inquiry into school funding. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Health and Social Services on in-patient child and adolescent mental health services provision, and I would like to briefly return to that when we go into private. Item 4, then: can I propose a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.

The training requirements for professionals in education settings were clearly outlined, with a focus on the importance of keeping learners safe. It was emphasized that educational professionals needed to be aware of their duty to report any significant harm that occurred, which would then be forwarded to the childcare assessment team. Schools played a crucial role in supporting families, as they had established relationships with them. Alastair Birch, however, did not view this as a matter of mistrust. He stated that working with families involved obtaining parental consent, which was a key element. While some cases did not meet the referral threshold, support would still be provided by the school.

Question: Summarize the opinions of Industrial Design and Marketing teams on individual task assignment. 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Yeah I see a long neck user interface: Yeah , that's a project manager: but marketing: It's more like a dinosaur . user interface: industrial designer: Is this part of our a acquai or introduction to each other ? project manager: Yeah sorry , introduction and get acquainted marketing: project manager: and industrial designer: Alright . user interface: project manager: Yeah it's a bit slow , marketing: It's not that fast . user interface: 'Cause it's so project manager: You were slow too user interface: 'cause it's green . marketing: So some other line width industrial designer: Do you have a turtle pet ? project manager: user interface: marketing: No . marketing: Yeah ? project manager: Yeah not exactly legs but More like fins marketing: industrial designer: Stumpy stuff . user interface: marketing: or project manager: There's a a gum , marketing: Yeah ? Alright . industrial designer: And why did you choose this animal ? marketing: So project manager: He said it was slow . marketing: A cat who had an accident or project manager: Why a cat ? industrial designer: yeah I dunno . Yeah I'm not so good at drawing with this kind of project manager: The pen , industrial designer: st Oh shit . It's my favourite pet animal , 'cause they're cute , they're independent and cuddly , I dunno . industrial designer: Or do I need to use more colours and project manager: I think it's okay . Okay industrial designer: So we have to s project manager: now it's time for some discussion . project manager: did any of you already do some work on this part or industrial designer: Well I started making an overview for myself , what I had to do , 'cause we have three design steps and in every step I have a s specific task to perform or whatever . industrial designer: So I had to , I dunno , make an overview for myself about what I have to do , project manager: industrial designer: and kind of let it work in to get ideas about well how I have to fill it . And do you have any ideas about the product so far ? industrial designer: Well I started I started with the first phase , I think was the functional . industrial designer: And let's see I had to focus on the working design , which you said . industrial designer: and we ye use button presses to activate or deactivate certain functions on the T_V_ . Yeah I kept it global 'cause that it activates or deactivates specific functions , user interface: Okay , yeah . project manager: and what did the Marketing Expert do ? marketing: well from a marketing perspective , well the function des design phase consists out of the user requirements . marketing: what needs and desires are to be fulfilled ? So there are a few means to reach that by by doing research to see what existing products are there out in the market . marketing: especially what are their shortcomings ? Are there any new functions which can be added to our product ? project manager: For example for well what kind of applications do current remote controls support , and what are f featur features of current and future televisions ? project manager: Yep . What w what would they like to see on a new remote control ? especially for future users , project manager: Okay . marketing: I'm thinking of early adopters , because they they use new technology first , project manager: marketing: and they play with a lot of tools and stuff so maybe they have some good ideas to to add . project manager: but have you any idea so far as what the user requirements are ? marketing: No n not specifically . user interface: I got some requirements marketing: and project manager: Yeah ? user interface: it has it has to be user-friendly . user interface: really easy to use buttons , not not very small buttons , but not the the also the big big buttons , but just normal buttons . project manager: what do you mean by that ? user interface: the distance from your television to your remote control has to be , yeah yeah , quite a big distance . project manager: user interface: Are you going to put the the notes on the project manager: Yeah , in the project folder . industrial designer: Well no I'm just a bit wondering what we're gonna do the next session ? user interface: Yeah . Because then we have a user interface: After that we are going to the conceptual project manager: Yeah . project manager: Y you do some individual work , marketing: We're just working the three phases . And then I have to prepare I have to defend our design , user interface: project manager: so make it good . marketing: Better make it industrial designer: I am gonna work on the conceptual design already 'cause yeah it's fairly important to know what kind of components we want to put in . industrial designer: Do we , is it gonna be a multimedia control centre ? Do we want to be able to use the video recorder with it ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: I would first m industrial designer: So if I don't know what components to put in , it's kind of hard . marketing: Yeah project manager: You can always add a few marketing: well like l li like some like some some remotes who are out there , which I know , there's one button which is very easy to switch between devices . marketing: So you can switch to your video project manager: marketing: and then the same buttons control your video . marketing: And another function I'll think of switch to your media centre , because that's getting very popular . industrial designer: Yeah so marketing: And then use your Windows media centre under your T_V_ with the same remote control . industrial designer: Yeah I I know what you mean , but you'll ne need several other buttons for a video player . industrial designer: And and for a t teletext you need additional buttons as well , marketing: No . project manager: We could just start with the assumption that's only for T_V_ and video

The Industrial Designer began by outlining the three phases of the project, with the current phase focusing on the basic functions of the remote control. This included incorporating batteries for power and using buttons to activate or deactivate specific functions on the TV. The Project Manager also suggested using infrared light to communicate signals to the TV or stereo, which the Industrial Designer agreed with. From a marketing perspective, the current phase involved gathering user requirements and feedback through internet research. The Marketing team aimed to identify the shortcomings of existing remote controls and optimize their design based on the research results. Additionally, they mentioned the potential inspiration from early adopters of remote controls.

Question: Summarize the discussions in the meeting regarding innovation schools, progress in numeracy skills, school reopening date, current education situation, assurance of higher and further education, and the GBA+ analysis. Article: Item 2, then, this morning is an evidence session to scrutinise the Welsh Government's progress in developing the new curriculum for Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education; Steve Davies, director of the education directorate; and Claire Bennett, who is deputy director for curriculum and assessment. Thank you all for attending this morning, and thank you for the paper that you provided in advance to the committee. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so if it's okay, we'll go straight into questions. If I can just start by asking you what the main messages are that you've received during the feedback period on the draft curriculum. If I may, I think it's important to understand what the level of that feedback has been. So, there was a concerted effort and a plan drawn up to try and ensure that there was as much engagement, knowledge and opportunity as possible. So, working through the regional consortia, approximately 120 separate events were organised, and we believe that in the region of 6,000 headteachers, teachers, governors and teaching assistants have actually had an opportunity to participate in those events. We also held a number of focus group sessions specifically for young people themselves, so that they could give us their feedback. We'll all be familiar, won't we, with the narrative of, 'Oh, we're sending people out into the world of business without the skills that we as an employer are looking for'. So we thought it was really important to engage business so that they can have their say and their input into the process. And obviously we work very hard on making it as easy as possible via new technology for people to have their say. So, Members, I'm sure, will have been aware of the specific pages on Hwb that outlined the draft curriculum, and we had 275,000 unique visits to the Hwb curriculum pages. It's really interesting to see the breakdown of the areas of learning and experience—which particular AoLEs were the most popular and were being looked at the most—with our creative and performing arts and the creativity and the expressive arts being the most popular. So that's really interesting that people really wanted to engage in the content of that particular AoLE. What, then, have people said to us? Well, I'm really pleased that there has been broad support for the curriculum changes that we are proposing. There's real support for the need for change, because that's the first question, actually; why are we doing this, and why do we need to change? So, support for the need for change, and lots of support for the principle of a purpose-led curriculum. Strong support for greater autonomy and agency for the profession—so, the ability of the profession to take a framework and then truly let them adapt it to meet the needs of the children that they are working with in their communities. In terms of some of the things that people are asking us to look again at, some of that is around some of the language used. Can we clarify, can we simplify in some areas, are there things that are repeated in a variety of AoLEs? Can we use that as an overarching, rather than repeating ourselves? Can we simplify it and clarify some of the language? Also, in some areas—. It's interesting; in some areas people want it simplified and cut down, but in other areas, people say, 'Well actually, in this bit of it, we need a bit more detail, and a bit more depth and clarity'. That process has already started, but considering that this is a massive change, I have been hugely encouraged, actually, by the high levels of engagement and support for the broad principles of what we're doing. Are you able to give the committee any early indication of what level of change you anticipate making to the guidance? kirsty williams am: I think what's really important and what has been the strength of the process to date is that we are not doing this to our profession, we are doing it with our profession. So, in the spirit of co-construction, the reflection on the feedback will continue to be primarily led by the existing infrastructure that we already had that got us to this stage at present. So, Members will be aware that we've slightly changed the model. Pioneers were asked if they wanted to continue in that process and to put themselves forward, and we've narrowed that down now to a smaller group of innovative schools. But above and beyond the innovative schools, we looked at individuals who have specific expertise in subject areas, and they're the first part of that process. So, they met last week to begin looking at the feedback, and we'll continue to use the processes that we have to reflect and refine. Opportunities to do things better, explain things better, simplify where possible, where we've been told that that needs to happen, provide greater depth where we've been told that needs to happen—absolutely. We're definitely very alive and very willing to engage in those, but in terms of the overall concept, then no, no significant changes. And what are the steps now before the final curriculum is published in January 2020? kirsty williams am: Okay. We call them—it's not a very nice name—quality improvement practitioners, the QI practitioners. In October, there will be a number of workshops lasting three days at a time where those practitioners will continue that process of feedback with our curriculum and assessment group and all those people involved. By November, we would expect the QI groups to have completed their work and would want them to be in a position to hand over the refinements to an editorial process, and that has to be done in both languages. I think it's really important that we don't do it in English and then we simply translate it into Welsh. It also, then, hands over to the publication team to do all the work on the publication, our website team will then be working on it, and then we would expect final publication in January—am I right, Claire? claire bennett: Yes. sian gwenllian am: You've touched on the point that there's going to be some sort of change, and you've mentioned in your paper to us that further specific aspects of the framework of the curriculum are going to be included in the primary legislation. kirsty williams am: The original proposal that we began working on was, in the legislation, to provide for the four purposes—so, the four purposes would be set out in the legislation—as well as putting in law the areas of learning and experience that you'll all be familiar with. Then, below that, we were going to legislate for a number of the cross-curricular aspects—so, the literacy, the numeracy and the digital competency—as well as some elements where we had already said that we were going to make that statutory, so, for instance, above and beyond what Graham Donaldson would have put in his original reports. I've already made an announcement that I was going to put RSE on the face of the Bill. So, the two main new areas that we are now working on to include within the Bill are to ensure that there is breadth within the curriculum for everybody—. Rather than simply, in law, leaving it at the AoLE level, we'll be bringing it down again to the 'what matters' statements within that, again, providing greater certainty and greater clarity about our expectations at a national level. We'll also be looking to include in the legislation provision for a statutory framework setting out our approach to progression in each of the AoLE areas. So, there has been in the Chamber—I can see Suzy is writing this down—Suzy has asked me questions about, 'How do you create a national expectation around progression?' We've reflected on that and our conversations with other people outside during this process, so we would look to have a statutory framework where our expectations of progression at a national level would be laid out. One of the consistent worries that some people have had, whilst being very supportive of the overall aims, is how do you get that balance between individual autonomy in the school, but also ensure that there is some national expectation and that the variation on these important things is not so great as to cause concern. I set up a process—this was an open process, and we were open to listening to people. So, I think those will be the two main areas where we hadn't originally thought that we would legislate for, but that we will now legislate for. I haven't got the 'what matters' statements in front of me— kirsty williams am: Well, if you remember, we have the four purposes, and then we have the areas of learning and experience, and then, below the areas of learning and experience are the broad concepts that we would expect to be delivered in each of those areas of learning and experience. Some of the feedback that we've had is that— sian gwenllian am: So, will you be adding to those? kirsty williams am: Adding is not necessarily—no, not adding. But, for instance, the children have given us some interesting feedback about what they feel really matters in those areas of learning and experience. So, they'll be refined, but not added to, and then we will legislate for them, and that hadn't been the original intention. Will they include mental health and well-being? kirsty williams am: Well, the area of learning and experience for well-being is already there, and underneath that area of learning title, there are the broad concepts of what matters, what we believe matters, in that area of learning, and it is that that we will now actually put into the legislation. Sorry, I'm not helping, because I haven't got them with me either to read them out. lynne neagle am: They are in the annex to the paper, Siân, and, obviously, mental health is in there. So, just to clarify, then, that would mean that every school would have to teach mental health by law. kirsty williams am: Yes, because the 'what matters' states very clearly the broad concepts in health and well-being. It refers to both physical and mental health, and we intend to legislate to ensure that the 'what matters' statements are a set given in the system. kirsty williams am: Claire, am I explaining it okay? claire bennett: Yes, the 'what matters' are the articulation of the big ideas. So, the idea is to make sure that those are consistent, and then that still leaves huge flexibility underneath as to how to approach those, which particular topics to select in how to actually teach them. But the concept that you might not do one 'what matters'—it was never what was intended. They won't be literally in the Bill, because, obviously, you might want to change the emphasis, so that'll be provided for in subordinate legislation, but the provision will be there, and they will have the status of something that's not optional, basically, for a school. sian gwenllian am: Therefore, it's not going to be on the face of the Bill—the mental health aspect, for example. You're saying that it's subordinate, but then you're saying— kirsty williams am: So, on the face of the Bill, we will make provision to say that the 'what matters' statements have to be delivered. So the actual wording of the 'what matters' statements will be in secondary legislation; the need to deliver and the requirement, the legal requirement to deliver the 'what matters' statement, will be on the face of the Bill. If I think, if we had sat here 20 years ago, we probably, in a 'what matters' statement on health and well-being, wouldn't have referred to mental health, 20 years ago, because our understanding as a society, our willingness as a society to engage in that—. So, if we had drawn up a 'what matters' statement even a decade ago, I suspect we wouldn't have talked about mental health. So, the concept of having to deliver the 'what matters' statement will be in the primary legislation; the actual wording, because otherwise if you wanted to change it you'd have to go through the entire process—. The actual need and the compulsion, the expectation that you have to do that, will be on the face of the Bill. The point you've made is one that Government has made with other legislation prior to this, but can I just ask you to consider the worthiness, if you like, or the good purpose of actually putting the wording of the 'what matters' statements, the first round of those, in the primary legislation on the basis that they can be amended through affirmative procedure secondary legislation when they need changing in due course? The reason I ask this is just to explain to the population of Wales that there is certainty at the first step, bearing in mind that it will change over the years—I completely accept that. But when you're amending primary legislation, you don't have to go through the whole process again—you can do it via secondary legislation provided the correct powers are put in the primary legislation to do that. kirsty williams am: Yes, as I said, I think we've demonstrated that we're listening to people, that there has been concern expressed about certainty and having a national approach on some of these issues, and we have taken steps to address that and we'll continue to reflect, but, crucially, we'll continue to reflect with our partners who are co-constructing this with us. And I think the important thing to remember is that it's not Ministers or civil servants that are necessarily drawing up these 'what matters' statements, it is practitioners themselves, guided by experts in the field that are not teachers, that have come up with these things. Obviously, the Bill will presumably come to this committee— kirsty williams am: We're assuming so. sian gwenllian am: Moving on, therefore, to the religious education and relationships and sexuality education, I understand that you've had numerous responses to the White Paper surrounding this particular area. What are the main points that were raised with you and how do you intend to respond to what's been said? kirsty williams am: Well, these two areas certainly have ensured that lots of people have responded. It's interesting that people are far more interested in what we may or may not do about these two subjects than maths, English, Welsh, science, but there we go; I guess it's the nature of the areas that we're talking about. With regard to religious education, we had a significant number of people that have expressed concerns about our approaches towards RE that were set out in the White Paper. There were very mixed views on the inclusion of a range of faiths and world religions included in that area of learning. Many people said that there needed to be a much clearer and stronger—and in some cases exclusive—focus on Christianity, as opposed to including other world religions and, indeed, non-religious views. There were people who thought that RE shouldn't be compulsory at all and therefore our proposals to ensure that RE was compulsory, people objected to that, on the other—. Of those respondents that agreed that RE should be a compulsory part of the curriculum, or were neutral—didn't express an opinion either way, but were neutral on the question—the issues that they were bringing forward were: a need for learners, as they saw it, to be prepared to be part of a diverse and multicultural society. So, they wanted RE to be much more broad-based and encompassing of world views and world religions. They felt that that was an important part of preparing a young person to live in a world that is, as you say, diverse with people of different views living in it. There is certainly a need to modernise RE; some people perceived the current curriculum as a bit old-fashioned. And also there was much feedback on making sure that the profession was ready to deliver a renewed, modernised RE curriculum. So, those are the issues around religious education— sian gwenllian am: Can I just—? Before you go on to the next section—is there evidence that this was a co-ordinated lobby to present a particular view and what is your response going to be to this? Obviously, there are always going to be lobbies presenting particular viewpoints. Our role, as politicians, is to lead, obviously, isn't it? kirsty williams am: Yes. Claire, would you say that it was a co-ordinated response? claire bennett: It wasn't a campaign in the sense of it being completely consistent, but, certainly, I think people with a particular interest in this issues felt galvanised to respond to the White Paper on this issue—on this one and on relationships and sex education. And your response? kirsty williams am: And my response: well, clearly, Siân, I need to consider those responses, and both for RE and RSE, I shall be making a statement in the near future of our intentions on how to respond to these issues. With regard to RSE, the key messages, again, are focused on whether children should be taught RSE at all and that this should not be in the curriculum and it shouldn't be a compulsory part of the curriculum—that this was not an area where the school system and the education system should be involved, and that it should be alone the preserve of parents to teach children about issues around relationships and sexuality education. There were some issues raised about potential challenges with staff in talking about issues that they perhaps personally did not agree with with regard to this curriculum. With regard to guaranteed access to a full curriculum, there were strong views that, again, it should be parents, and parents alone, that made decisions about whether their children should have access to the entirety of the curriculum rather than schools or the state setting those rules. I think if we are to achieve the four purposes, and that's how we have always got to think about it, and if we agree that those are the kind of people and individuals we want leaving our compulsory education system—how do we achieve those purposes? How are they healthy, confident individuals? How are we to prepare our children to be ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world? So, we will reflect on what has come back to us, but I do believe that these are important aspects of the curriculum, if we are to achieve the four purposes. You've also mentioned that there will be a final draft of the curriculum at the start of next year. What is the timetable for the Bill itself and for seeking Royal Assent for that? kirsty williams am: Okay, so, as I said earlier, the expectation is that we will publish a final version of the curriculum in January 2020, so schools will then have the opportunity to be really engaging in it. I have to say, I'm in schools most weeks, and many, many, many schools are already taking the opportunity, even on the draft, to begin to think about planning and, indeed, changing what they're doing in schools. I'm overwhelmed, actually, by the enthusiasm of the sector to embrace what is a massive change for them. sian gwenllian am: —actually implemented in September— kirsty williams am: In 2022. kirsty williams am: And I think what's really important is that we get the actual curriculum out in January itself, because that's the bit that schools are really concerned about, and then we will have the process here to underpin it. We've got some questions now on potential unintended consequences, and other matters relating to that, from Hefin David. hefin david am: Can I ask what value you place on the work done by the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods and the presentation so far and the paper to be presented by Dr Nigel Newton? kirsty williams am: I always—and Welsh Government are big supporters of WISERD and the work that they do, and, in fact, we need more research into Welsh education, not less. I think what's really important in perhaps this piece of work is to say that I hope that, in the time where I've had an influence to influence over Welsh education, either as a backbencher or now as a Minister, equality and principles of equity have always driven what I've tried to achieve. And I would never undertake a policy reform that I thought would lead to less equity in the Welsh education system. Closing the attainment gap is a core element of the national mission for education in Wales and we would not proceed with anything that we thought could lead to an exacerbation of an achievement gap. And how do you respond, then—? , it's a balanced paper, it looks at pros and cons and there's a mixed picture from it. How do you respond to the specific statement that Dr Nigel Newton said that the curriculum could exacerbate segregation within schools between different groups of pupils? kirsty williams am: Well, I think what the paper acknowledges is that there is no evidence that that will happen. These are 'coulds' and 'maybes' and things that we need, as a Government, to take into consideration as we plan this journey. There can't be any empirical research done at the moment because the curriculum isn't being delivered, but I understand, and we need listen to—. If there are concerns out there in the field that these are unintended consequences that we may fall into—that is the value of that piece of research that helps inform us. I have to say, though, the curriculum in itself is neither going to necessarily on its own hugely enhance equity nor detract from equity, in the sense that the curriculum is what's taught in our schools. There is an opportunity, I believe, that empowering teachers to be able to be more flexible in what they teach their children actually gives us an opportunity to deliver lessons that could be much more engaging and much more relevant to some of our schoolchildren than what they have at the moment. What will make the curriculum a success for all of our children, and I believe will have a bigger impact on children who are in danger of being left behind, are the four enabling purposes of the curriculum. So, the curriculum on its own can play a part, but it will only be as good as the four enabling elements that surround it. And that is strong leadership of our schools that ensures that there is no segregation, that has high expectation of all of our children, and delivers a curriculum within that setting that meets the needs of the children there. In the end, no education system, whatever its curriculum, can exceed the quality of the people who stand in front of our children day in, day out. So, the curriculum can be the most exciting, wonderful—and I think it is exciting and I think it's wonderful—it can be the most exciting, wonderful thing in the world, but if teachers can't teach it effectively, if their pedagogy is not excellent, then the content itself—it won't work. So, how do you assess how children are doing in your new curriculum? How do you understand how that pupil, who has, you know—who could be vulnerable for a whole host of reasons, usually reasons outside of the school—? That pupil is vulnerable. How can you assess how that pupil is and move their learning along in an appropriate fashion? And then, finally, the well-being of the child. But what we know is that we cannot expect children to learn unless we address issues around their well-being. There's been lots and lots of research done, not in a Welsh context but in other systems, where children are kept behind for a year. So, good achievement leads to good well-being, but good well-being also leads to good achievement, and you can't separate the two. It is the four enabling objectives that sit around it, and we have to be cognisant of the WISERD's research, of course we do, to ensure that, as we're doing our professional learning, as we're planning well-being for our children, as we think about assessment methods and how we develop a culture of strong leaders in our schools—and we have some, we have many, but we need to do more to support them—it is that that will make the biggest difference, not just the content of the curriculum on its own. Although I do believe the flexibility that we're allowing people will, I think, lead to a curriculum and more meaningful lessons for some children in schools who are in danger of disengaging because they don't understand why they're being asked to learn what they're learning, they don't see the relevance of what they're learning to what they may want to do or how their lives are, or they don't see themselves reflected. So, for some of our communities, they don't see themselves reflected in the curriculum that we're teaching at the moment. And, again, international research would suggest that, if you want a child to thrive, they have to see themselves and their community reflected in what they're learning in schools. hefin david am: What the WISERD research suggests is that the senior management teams—the management teams—would certainly buy into what you've just said, but the classroom teachers would be a little bit more sceptical. kirsty williams am: As I said, classroom teachers are absolutely crucial to this, which is why, first of all, we've taken the difficult step to delay the implementation of the curriculum to give us the time that we need to make sure that it's not just school leaders but it is individual classroom practitioners who have the skills that they need to make the most of the opportunity that the curriculum allows them. hefin david am: So, if we look at some of the statements that were in the presentation by WISERD at the seminar two comments jump out: 'We'll end up'—this is from classroom teachers— 'We'll end up with a different accountability framework to the aims and objectives of the new curriculum.' and 'there will be no consistency'. And consistency is the one I'd particularly like to focus on: 'there will be no consistency across all schools in how the new curriculum is delivered which could affect outcomes'. kirsty williams am: Well, first of all, we've just talked, haven't we, about trying to ensure that there is greater consistency and that's why we're changing our approach to the legislation around the Bill. So, in terms of progression steps, there will be a statutory framework to ensure that progression is the same wherever you are in Wales. So, as I said, we're using this report, we're using this feedback, to inform decisions going forward. hefin david am: Yes: 'different accountability framework to the aims and objectives of the new curriculum.' kirsty williams am: Okay. So, as always, in education, teachers—understandably, because this is the regime that they have been a part of—immediately don't think about their pedagogy, they think about, 'How are judgments going to be made upon me as an individual?' And what we're trying to do is ensure that we are developing another accountability regime that is indeed in line with the purposes of the curriculum and doesn't work against the purposes of the curriculum. They spend a lot of time thinking about accountability and how they're going to be held accountable for their practice, but, again, what we want to do is provide reassurance that we are devising an accountability regime for our system that is in line with the purposes of the curriculum and puts us in line with the mainstream thought and reform process across the world of progressive education systems. hefin david am: It was the segregation bit I was particularly interested in and the response with regard to disadvantaged pupils and pupils of lower attainment. I do not believe that any changes—and I would not pursue any changes that—would lead to a segregation. And with regard to the connection between Welsh Government and local government and the concerns that the Welsh Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Education Wales raised, what progress has been made on bridging the gap between—? Whether it's a perception gap or a practice gap, what progress has been made on that? kirsty williams am: Well, I think the last time we had this conversation in the committee I said that I think the comments that the WLGA and ADEW had made were reflective of an old piece of work and were not current and up to date, and I think progress had been made in that time, and I'm pleased to report the significant progress that's been made— hefin david am: Bridges have been built. But we've got renewed, energetic engagement from the WLGA and ADEW in all the arrangements that we have for the development of the curriculum and my understanding is that they have said publicly and in writing that they're very supportive of what's going on. hefin david am: I'm sure they're watching and nodding vigorously now on Senedd.tv. kirsty williams am: And I will be with them tomorrow night and Friday morning and I'm sure if they've got any other views they'll let me know. hefin david am: And the final question: there is a process, a model for this, which is Scotland. What kind of lessons are being learned from the introduction of their curriculum? kirsty williams am: Okay. So, I think the first thing to realise is that our curriculum is not a copycat of the Scottish curriculum, but it is always useful to reflect on how other systems have undertaken curriculum reform in their nation and to learn from any issues that have arisen. So, I think it's fair to say—and I spent time with some delegates from Scotland just this weekend at the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory conference that Wales hosted this year. Unfortunately, Minister Swinney was not able to attend at the very last minute because of Brexit preparedness work that he was involved in, but certainly their teaching union and their equivalent of the EWC in Scotland joined us as well as representatives from the Scottish Government, although not John himself, and they were very frank about some of the challenges that they had faced in introducing their curriculum. Professional learning, ensuring that the profession was properly prepared for the changes, I think they would agree that that wasn't necessarily—. Well, they've got local authorities and regions, but whether they were truly engaged in what they were doing. Although our curriculum isn't a copycat, as I said, we have been able to learn from, and we've had people who have been deeply involved in the Scottish experience as part of some of our curriculum and assessment groups and some of the advice that we've had in terms of developing coherence. steve davies: As I said, they're very forthright in sharing their learning and I think one of the critical elements was the extent to which assessment was considered at the outset alongside the curriculum content. So, that was critical, but we've embraced experts who were involved in that process who were part of our curriculum assessment group. So, they feed in throughout—not 'don't do this because Scotland has done it', but they feed some of that learning into the system. As the Minister said, we had seven other countries from across the world giving us feedback and input over four days as to where we can continue to look at what we're doing but also checks and balances against some of their experiences with this area of reform. kirsty williams am: The particular focus of this year's conference was on the issue of assessment and we were joined by colleagues from Scotland, from Ireland, from Iceland, from Finland, from Saskatchewan, from Nova Scotia and from Uruguay. hefin david am: When did that take place? kirsty williams am: Where? hefin david am: When. You've got a whole section on assessment, I don't know— suzy davies am: This isn't about assessment. suzy davies am: So, on the basis that this is not about assessment, you mentioned that one of the lessons learned from Scotland is that they said they spent too much time on curriculum content rather than assessment. Can you tell me a little bit about what you've learned about how they quality control the content, even though the content, of course, will be completely different in Wales? kirsty williams am: Yes, the content would be completely different. When I said they spent too much time, I said that the focus had been in their work about just talking about content and, actually, the assessment arrangements were bolted on at the end of the process. So, the curriculum was all designed and developed, it was sent out to schools, and then the question was raised: 'Oh, actually, what assessment methods—? How are going to assess how children are getting on?' But, Steve, you would have more details of their exact experience of quality control of the content— suzy davies am: Of the content, because every school is going to be very different at this. steve davies: In terms of developing the guidance and the curriculum going out in January is concerned, I think—again, I don't want to be overly critical, but one of the findings was that they encouraged schools to go forth and multiply in terms of the materials and ideas and concepts that were coming through. What we learnt was to actually—the pioneer movement was to get a smaller group to develop those materials and look to engage through cluster groups. So, we had pioneers who worked with clusters to test the development of that concept before we were looking for schools to go away and develop a larger amount of content. So, in terms of the staging and measuring of bringing together the curriculum and the associated guidance, I think the time we've taken to actually get there and the strategy of using pioneer schools, external experts, back to pioneer schools, back to regions, or engaging regions in that, has been more measured and planned against a planned timescale, where everyone from the outset—with the exception of the extension of the one year—was clear on when we were going to be producing materials that would allow the profession to then take it and use it. Claire, do you want to add to that, or—? claire bennett: I think, as we move forward, that kind of cluster approach remains really important. So, it's, as schools then think about, 'What am I going to do in my school?', that they're doing that in clusters together. When colleagues from the regional consortia were sharing their thinking with the curriculum assessment group last week, they were talking about the very specific and differentiated, I suppose, professional learning support that they would be offering to schools that have already done quite a lot of thinking and are quite far down this journey and then the kind of different sorts of approaches they would offer schools that are just starting out. Their emphasis was very much on this peer-to-peer sharing and support, so people aren't just going off in isolation. So, there'll continue to be a focus for each area of learning and experience, bringing together the professional learning and the ongoing curriculum development, bringing together practitioners and experts and colleagues across the middle tier to give a bit of strategic direction and to be able to identify if there are areas where more support is needed. So, I think that a huge amount of thinking, particularly in the regions, has gone on into the practical support that can be given to schools, not just in engaging with the curriculum now, but then how they take it and think about then developing it in their schools. You don't start in 2022—people are already doing it and there's a lot of thought going into how to support continued sharing through the next two years. kirsty williams am: And I think that's another difference, you see—that strong middle tier and the role that the middle tier is playing in Wales, which was absent in Scotland. So, this ability to work in networks to provide support to a network of schools, that wasn't available in the Scottish system and I think that makes—I think that helps us in the way that they just simply didn't have a structure that allowed them to do that. It's not a criticism of them; it's just that we have got a structure that we can utilise to do that support so that schools are not completely left on their own and they can be working with other schools, with their regional consortia, going forward. suzy davies am: Can I just have a quick—? lynne neagle am: Very quickly, because I want to move on to implementation. Was one of the things that Scotland did—I don't want to use the word 'assess'—to monitor the pupil response to the curriculum as one of the means of deciding whether curricula in particular schools were working well enough? kirsty williams am: I don't know if they—. I don't know if they did, but one of the interesting things that we were reflecting on over the weekend is that, certainly some of the Canadian systems, in particular, which we were interested in, used pupil surveys as part of their accountability regime—so, actually taking the time to ask students how they felt, not just about the content of the new curriculum, but actually how they felt their school was doing. And so we're interested in looking, as I said, at some of the practices that other countries use to include pupil voice to find out what's happening. They found that particular useful and successful, and we're keen to see if we could do something similar. You touched on this briefly in response to some questions from Hefin David earlier on, but I'm just interested to know how the money that you announced for supporting teachers for the preparation of the implementation, how that's actually been used. What specifically have teachers been doing to prepare for its implementation? I know you've set aside about £24 million over two years. kirsty williams am: You're right, first of all, it's not an insignificant amount; it's the largest investment in professional learning since the history of devolution. So, you're right that it is not insignificant, and it was a hard-won resource, I can tell you, from my colleagues. Because, as I said earlier, the curriculum itself can be amazing, but if our teachers and our professionals are not equipped to deliver it, then all this change will be for nothing. That money is being made available to each and every school and has empowered headteachers to really think, 'What are the professional needs of my school and the practitioners in my school?' Because, as we've just heard from Claire, there are some schools that have been part of the pioneer process from the very beginning and therefore are further along that development chain. There are other schools that maybe are only beginning now, now that it's published, to be really engaging with the curriculum. kirsty williams am: There is a national element to it, but we've given the money to individual schools and individual headteachers because I have no way of knowing how each individual practitioner is ready or how much additional support they're going to need. But we have worked with the National Academy for Educational Leadership to put together a programme for headteachers, and that's national. The regional consortia are working together to provide consistency for classroom teachers and teaching assistants, and then the next stage of that development is for subject specifics. Claire referred to the AoLE networks, and there's an opportunity then for people to engage in that. So, this September is the start of our new ITE courses, taught for the first time, and that's great. So, we're looking at developing potentially a stronger set of support, again on a national basis, for those who are newly qualified, beginning their teaching career, because I don't think we've done that on a consistently good level across the country. We're also working with the regions to revisit and improve their coaching and mentoring schemes that they have across the system. We're also involved in—and I'm sure the committee has heard about it, so forgive me if I'm going over old ground—schools as learning organisations and the OECD work to support schools to develop that culture as a learning organisation. We know from very successful education systems in other parts of the world there is a strong, strong culture of self-evaluation as a first step in their school improvement system, and we've not been very good at that in Wales, we've not been strong at that, that's not the culture that we have had. We've kind of depended on a culture where a school does its thing and then somebody comes along and tells you whether you're good or bad, rather than the school really thinking itself deeply about, 'What are we doing well and what do we need to improve on?' So, the schools as learning organisations are an important part, again, so that money is being used for schools participating in that programme with support from the OECD. And the money that you announced for this  professional development preparation, if you like, was for two years. So, there's going to clearly be an ongoing programme of preparation development and personal development, as well as anything else. But is there likely to be any more money allocated specifically beyond the two years that you've already allocated or is that going to be a question and negotiation with your colleagues? Or do you see what you've put in as being, 'This is what we need to develop or to prepare for the implementation. The rest would be what would be normal professional development beyond that'? kirsty williams am: The money that was agreed was for a two-year period and, clearly, I continue to have conversations with the Minister for Finance and the First Minister around future allocations for professional learning, and I'm sure this committee and, indeed, members of this committee could help me in that task. Can you tell us a bit about the innovation schools—the 16 innovation schools—and how you've made your decisions about who they might be, across which sectors, in primary, secondary and so on? So, basically, how they were selected and what you're expecting of them. So, all of our schools that had previously been pioneers were invited to apply to morph into the next phase, which is innovation schools, and they were asked to apply and there was a discussion held both internally within Welsh Government and with the consortia about which schools were best placed to be able to do that role and to continue to work with us, going forward. I think one of the lessons learned, and this was said in the committee, was that there was an upside to having pioneer schools, but there was a downside to having pioneer schools, and I think, at this stage of the game, we need to move away from that model and to really get the message to everybody that they all had to be pioneers now—everybody had to be a pioneer—because this is coming down the track and we don't want anybody just sitting there waiting until September 2022 and saying, 'Oh, gosh. So, the move away is partly to engender within the sector the fact that we've all got to engage in this now. The innovation schools have led to a very specific piece of work as we do the final refinement, and their main role is working with us on these final refinements to the content but also to the assessment issues and accountability issues. It was important that we engaged with the regions to get their view, and we've had evaluation being carried out— claire bennett: Yes. So, during the first term of work, we asked them to really look at the curriculum as a whole—so, take the whole curriculum guidance and then think, 'How would I apply that in the school?, Does it make sense?, Can we work with it?, What are the issues?, What are the questions that arise for us for assessment?', and each of the schools produced a report setting out their reflections on, 'If I were putting this into practice—'. So, it's slightly different to the feedback we've had from other people, which has been more, 'Maybe you should emphasise this or change that wording' and kind of quite practical, and really about how you would realise this curriculum in a school. That's been drawn together into an overall report, drawing out the themes, by Wavehill, who are a kind of research company. Having 16 headteachers in a room talking about how they see this curriculum and the way in which they would practically engage with it has been invaluable, in just making us think, even with all the practitioners that have been involved, 'How do we make this work for schools?', given that we've got schools and headteachers really engaging in the detail of how they would use it practically. So, it's been invaluable, and they're continuing on that work now this term to keep making sure that what we're doing is something that schools can actually realise practically. kirsty williams am: If you think of the pioneer model, pioneers were looking at specific aspects of the curriculum. So, you might have been a pioneer school because you had particular strengths in health and well-being, or you might have been a pioneer schools because you were particularly looking at professional learning needs to support the curriculum. This is about, at this stage, where we have a high degree of certainty about what it's going to look like, 'Actually, how do I as a school practically implement this in the round?', and the schools were chosen because of their ability to do that. But also we did need a mix of sector—secondary, primary—but also linguistically, to just try to make sure that this works in all the different types of schools we've got. So, just trying the practical implementation now, now that we know exactly—not exactly— but we have a good idea what it's actually going to look like, so, 'How am I going to go about doing this?' lynne neagle am: Okay. If I could ask as well, maybe you could provide the committee with a list of the new innovation schools. sian gwenllian am: Are you confident that every school across Wales is participating in this process of change now, because the danger is, in getting these pioneer schools—? I understand that they are discussing in clusters, and so on, but can you put your hand on your heart and say that every school is participating in this project now? steve davies: I can't tell you that, absolutely, 100 per cent are definitely, totally, absolutely equally involved. The structure we've got in place across the regions is working with schools on their readiness to actually—not readiness to engage—start to deliver as we move through to the future. And we don't have a roll-call against all schools, but we require them, or request of them that they keep us informed of the networks. Every school is part of a network that links to it, and they gauge (1) the level of activity in it, (2) the outcomes of that work, because each of the networks, each of the clusters, produces work that the region brings together. What I would say, and it touches on the point you raised earlier and in relation to Scotland, I think if we had 22 units of local authorities trying to do this, it would be incredibly complex and very difficult to deliver. dawn bowden am: I just wanted to clarify, because in your paper you talk about giving £30,000 to each, or to the innovation schools. Was that £30,000 each, or £30,000 for the project? kirsty williams am: Each school that participates in the innovation schools programme gets £30,000. My final question in this section is just about how we are going to deal with the issue of teachers who are not trained in Wales. So, teachers trained in England apply for jobs in Wales, but they obviously haven't been trained in the new curriculum. Well, you're right—we will continue to have a system where teachers trained in Wales will teach in England and teachers trained in England or who have worked in England will come across the border, as well as teachers from other parts of the world coming to teach in our schools. Indeed, when I'm feeling at my most confident and bullish about these issues, I think Wales will be a really attractive place to be a teacher because of the autonomy that we will be giving to our professionals, as well as an exciting new curriculum. So, I think, actually, potentially, we will have people coming across the border to teach here because it'll be a great place to be a professional. So, our programmes of study are already different and that does not preclude anybody from coming across to teach in our system from a different system. Clearly, there may be pedagogical concepts in the new curriculum that perhaps somebody who had trained in a different system would not be completely au fait with, but that is the ongoing role of professional learning within our school system, because we've just talked about the two years' worth of money; in an ideal world, if I was able to make long-term plans, I think there will be an ongoing, and there should always be an ongoing, provision for professional learning in our classrooms. And this shouldn't just be about just getting people ready for the curriculum and then taking away professional learning budgets. One of the ways in which I think we can attract teachers to Wales is to send a very clear message— and actually attract people into the profession and keep them in the profession, wherever they train—that you will have a career in teaching where you will be continually supported in your practice via professional learning. dawn bowden am: So, you'll still be recruiting on the basis of skills and adaptability and so on. We've got a lot of issues to cover, so I'm going to appeal for concise questions, concise answers. What was the feedback like with regard to the draft assessment proposals? lynne neagle am: Excellent, concise question. We received what I would describe as positive feedback regarding the emphasis placed on ongoing assessment that is there to support children's learning and progression. Key messages were perhaps to find a better way of expressing the purposes of assessment—we refer to a formative and summative assessment—and just being a bit clearer about what that actually means and being clear about definitions around it. suzy davies am: Obviously, we're all aware now of the distinction between assessment of pupils for their own progression and the evaluation of how a school does at certain points in its life cycle as well. Presumably, the way you're looking at this is to keep these items completely separate, and that evaluation and assessment proposals will be—. They're out in a separate document; their results are going to be coming forward in a separate document—is that right? There's a thick black line between these two concepts. I think some of the trouble that we've got ourselves in previously is because there has not been a clear distinction between assessment and accountability, and, when you start using assessment for accountability purposes, that's when, potentially, that assessment process gets corrupted and you have gaming. suzy davies am: Can I ask, with the assessments, though, which is about pupil progression, will those results be published internally? Will parents get to see those? kirsty williams am: Oh, yes. The primary purpose for assessment is for that professional to be able to know how to move that child's educational journey on, and you would absolutely expect professionals to have those conversations with parents, whether they're using formative methods of assessment or summative methods of assessment. So, absolutely, you would expect teachers to be sharing information around assessment methods, whichever type they use, with parents, to describe and to inform parents about what happens next for their child. Is it realistic, then, to expect parents, families, communities, not to think about that information when they're drawing conclusions about the school, notwithstanding that formal evaluation of those schools is going to be done completely separately? kirsty williams am: Well, of course, parents will always be interested in how the overall institution is doing. But the conversations I have with parents, and I certainly feel this myself as a parent—I'm interested in how my child is doing, how my child is getting on in school, what are the issues that that child has, and, more importantly, what is the school going to do about it? So, if my child is struggling for whatever reason, what is the school going to do about that to help that child? If my child happens to be exceptionally able and talented, how are you as a school going to make the most of my child's talents and move them on to fulfil their potential? So, undoubtedly, I can't control assumptions that parents will make, but it is absolutely clear in this system, and my intention is, that teachers should share assessment methods and outcomes with parents to have that conversation about what happens next. But I am absolutely clear that we do have to make this distinction between assessment for learning and an accountability in the system, otherwise we drive—inadvertently; people don't set out to do it, but we drive a set of behaviours that has negative unintended outcomes. So, how—? Can you just briefly give us an indication of how you think the accountability, on both sides of that thick black line—the methodology—is likely to change with this? You mentioned that there's going to be an independent review of performance measurements coming shortly; we know that some of the existing ones have been ditched in fairly recent legislation. Without pre-empting the findings of such a review, have you got your top three likely expected changes? kirsty williams am: To accountability? suzy davies am: Yes. Well, we're moving to a system of schools as learning organisations, and a greater emphasis on self-evaluation, with external verification of that by Estyn, our inspectors. suzy davies am: And that will be reflected in the school categorisation system as well—will those indicators change, do you think? kirsty williams am: Well, categorisation—again, the purpose for categorisation is not to make a judgment on a school in the sense of a league table; it's a triage process, categorisation. kirsty williams am: Well, this is the issue, isn't it? This is the problem of designing a system where there are perfectly good reasons to introduce the system—and in this case it's a triage system to identify levels of support for a school. And categorisation was never intended to be a way of expressing a league table of school performances; it's there to identify levels of support that a school can expect from its regional consortia. Now, we have, we have—we will continue to keep categorisation, but, since coming into office, we have tried to adapt categorisation simply away from pure data to a more formative assessment process, and categorisation will continue to evolve. And the first level of accountability in that system has to be the professionalism of an individual member of staff—the moral purpose that I bring to my classroom today to do right by the children that are in front of me. That's the first part of our accountability regime—the moral purpose our professionals bring to their work. Well, just finally on that, there may be an argument, then, for scrapping categorisation, putting something else in place. But I suppose the core question is: how are the general public going to understand all those things that you've just mentioned about the teachers being able to teach, the leaders being able to lead, and how well a school is performing against KPIs on those measures? kirsty williams am: Well, because we will still—. kirsty williams am: Yes, that's the ultimate, isn't it? So, the ultimate is—. The ultimate system that we're going to get to and the ultimate arbiter and the part of the system that provides public assurance and public confidence ultimately ends in Estyn. Because I get the point of the end point being Estyn, and that's where the public assurance will be seen, but what about the public assurance at those early steps of the teaching standards and the leadership standards? Where will we see those demonstrated? kirsty williams am: Well, you would expect to see those demonstrated in the self-evaluation that a school will provide of itself, and then Estyn— suzy davies am: All right, so schools will be publishing self-evaluations annually, or something like that? kirsty williams am: Yes, schools— steve davies: The outcome of the self-evaluation is a school development plan. steve davies: We expect a series of priorities for a school to set itself as a result of prioritisation. What we're looking at, in terms of what's brought to that, is not a narrow set of measures—just two measures, or one measure in a secondary school. The measures will still consider reflection on progress of children, but it'll also have reviews of mental health, well-being, how it approaches that and things that it wanted to do. The school is evaluating—the outcome of that will be a development plan, annually published on the website. kirsty williams am: And the schools' ability—whether they do that well or whether they don't do it well—will be judged by Estyn. lynne neagle am: Okay, as my colleague Chair Dai Lloyd would say, 'Now we're into the needing serious agility territory'. Firstly from me: Qualifications Wales have told us that the curriculum must define qualifications rather than the other way around. What implications does that have for the amount of time that is needed to develop qualifications that are properly aligned with the new curriculum? kirsty williams am: Well, I'd absolutely agree with Qualifications Wales. The qualifications have to arise out of the curriculum, and the qualifications should not be dictating the curriculum. Qualifications Wales, which I met with yesterday, I think—yes, yesterday; it seems a long time ago—will begin their national conversation about reform of qualifications as a result of curriculum reform in November. How is awareness and understanding of human rights, including children’s rights, being embedded in the new curriculum? kirsty williams am: Children's rights, human rights—they've been key considerations throughout the design, and this is currently set out in overarching guidance and we continue to work with the children's commissioner's office to map the rights of the child across each area of learning and experience. And I'm delighted that the children's commissioner took the time to write to me during the feedback phase to say that they were very pleased that their initial assessment demonstrates that what we're proposing is a big step forward. And how do you respond to the concerns expressed in the children's commissioner’s quarterly report of July 2019 that consultation materials for young people were not released until mid June, allowing just over a month for young people to engage? And they said it was disappointing that a plan was not in place at the start of the consultation period. kirsty williams am: Well, we undertook a specific programme of engagement with children and young people, as I said at the beginning. We had over 20 events where focus groups of young children were involved and we had a number of children who took the opportunity to feed back via different mechanisms. The output of that engagement and feedback has been drawn together into a report exploring learners' views about schools and learning. It's a powerful contribution and I think will actually effect change, especially in how the 'what matters' statements are worded. sian gwenllian am: Turning to the Welsh dimension in the new curriculum, the Learned Society of Wales has said that there needs to be a directory of resources to implement that Welsh dimension. Do you agree with that and will you be publishing such a resource? kirsty williams am: We have a separate programme of work that is looking at resources that are needed to support the curriculum. It's one of the conversations I had with Qualifications Wales yesterday to try to avoid the debacle that we've had previously, where we have new qualifications and the resources to support those qualifications aren't available. So, we're already having those conversations with Qualifications Wales and there is a piece of work that is ongoing to look at what are the resources that are necessary to support the curriculum. And, in terms of the single continuum of learning with regard to the Welsh language, how are progression steps and achievement outcomes in Welsh-medium schools going to work and how are they going to work in English-medium schools? kirsty williams am: Okay. Just on the Welsh dimension, I think it's really important that whatever resources we have to support the Welsh dimension are really, really, really broad and not confined to specific areas. I was in Swansea University just this week, looking at some of their Technocamp work that they're doing to help us with coding, and we had an amazing conversation about the Welsh contribution to the computing industry. And so my expectation is that that isn't taught in a history lesson—that, actually, when children are learning about coding, they get to hear that Welsh people have been at the forefront of developing this technology. When I talk about a Welsh dimension, right the way across the curriculum, and I think that's important. The continuum for language will have to be contextualised depending on the setting where a child is being taught. We have to recognise that, and there will be progression points on that continuum that will be there to show progression both in Welsh language and in the English language, and they have to be contextualised. We recognise that children learning Welsh in a Welsh-medium school, their progressional on that point would be more speedy and quicker, and by the end of primary school they would be in a very different position than a child that was learning Welsh in an English-medium school. Vice versa—we've had this discussion before—if a child is going into Welsh medium, their progression in English perhaps from age three to seven would be very different from a child that was in an English-medium school, although the expectation would be that by 11 they would be in the same position. So, we have to contextualise that learning continuum depending on the medium of tuition with the school, but recognising that it is a progression. sian gwenllian am: With regard to the creative thinking element of PISA, I take it that you are adhering to the fact that the Welsh Government is opting out of the creative thinking tests with regard to PISA 2020. I don't entirely understand that because the new curriculum does place great emphasis on creative thinking and independent thinking. So, why not participate in these tests? kirsty williams am: Because, for me, the key factor for making that decision, and I intend to stick to it, is in 2021 we will be expecting schools to be right in the middle of their preparation for the introduction of the new curriculum— sian gwenllian am: Okay, so it's the timing. sian gwenllian am: So, later on, maybe when this is embedded— kirsty williams am: I think there could well be a different decision at a later date, but at 2021 this is not the right time to do it. Can I just say? In terms of creativity, Wales is seen as an exemplar by the OECD, especially our partnership with the Arts Council of Wales and creative learning through the arts. That's why I don't understand why we're not actually going for it and showing how good we are through the PISA. kirsty williams am: There could well be a different decision, but for 2021 we're asking enough of people at the moment and this would be an unnecessary addition to cope with. I just don't think that that should be seen as us running away from it because we're worried about a lack of creativity in our education system. We are seen as exemplars by the OECD and some of the work that's been going on with creative learning through the schools is now being shared internationally. sian gwenllian am: So, you'll think about it for the next round of PISA. kirsty williams am: Oh gosh, that shows that Siân thinks that I'll be here to make that decision. Countries were offered if they wished to take the invite to come into it, and a number of countries across the world are yet to make their decision on this. janet finch-saunders am: Can you give a guarantee that all children and young people, where appropriate, will take part in physical activity under the new curriculum for Wales? Also, how much time per week will the Government expect children and young people to spend undertaking physical activity? kirsty williams am: Yes, all children will be given that opportunity, because if they are not then that school would be in breach of the expectations that will be set out in statute. janet finch-saunders am: How will you monitor it? kirsty williams am: Again, Janet, I don't go around monitoring schools now. As we've just said— janet finch-saunders am: How will you ensure that every child has that opportunity? kirsty williams am: Well, as we've just said, ultimately, we are not getting rid of our school improvement services and regional consortia, nor are we getting rid of Estyn. So, one would expect the quality of the curriculum to be a key consideration of any visit that Estyn would make to a school. To what extent will the new curriculum allow for the continuity of the way that the foundation phase is taught? Will there be any significant differences and have the early years professionals been involved in the development of the curriculum to date? kirsty williams am: Yes, early years professionals have been involved in the curriculum to date. One of the advantages, I think, of the new curriculum is to take the pedagogical principles that underpin our approach to early years education actually further into children's educational journey. We have a certain pedagogical approach until the age of seven, and then all of a sudden, at seven, it's like, 'Forget all of that now. Sit down, pick up your pen and do this.' That's been really uncomfortable for many practitioners in our primary sector. So, actually, yes, statutory and non-statutory provision have been involved in the development of the curriculum because, of course, some of this is going to be delivered in the non-statutory sector. I'm very welcoming and supportive of that, but those pedagogical principles will now be available throughout that child's educational journey, rather than the false divide we've got at the moment. suzy davies am: So, aside from the purposes and the AoLEs, the type of teaching is unlikely to change in the foundation phase settings. The other end of the scale now: you report that one of the themes of the feedback from further education has been the need to ensure that the transition to post-16 education is supported so that the systems don't just clash against each other. How are you working on the sector at the moment to make sure that there's a decent dovetail? kirsty williams am: Okay. We don't want to do anything in pre-16 that stops people going on to be successful in post-16, whichever route the child or young person decides to take. FE have been involved in every single AoLE and they're a part of the curriculum and assessment group. And then in the conversations we had yesterday with Qualifications Wales around what qualifications will look like, I was very keen to take the opportunity to emphasise that any changes to qualifications should be a gateway to further study in FE, whichever type of route the child took. suzy davies am: And you're confident they're geared up to accepting young people who have been educated in this way. sian gwenllian am: I think you actually answered this at the beginning, but just to confirm that you're carrying on with the same governance set-up, the different groups that you've got, and there's nothing being added there or taken away. And just finally from me, then, on pupil referral units: what arrangements will be in place to ensure that they can benefit from the new curriculum and how is that going to be reflected in the legislation? kirsty williams am: Okay. So, we've been taking advice from Brett Pugh, who chairs the education otherwise than at school improvement group, and this has been an area where we've had to think really, really, really, really, really hard. So, what we intend to do for EOTAS and PRU is to set a minimum of what we would expect a child to receive. So, that would be around the four purposes; that would be around the cross-cutting themes of literacy, numeracy and digital competency and health and well-being. After that, then there needs to be a discussion and a focus on what is in the best interests of that particular pupil. One of the things we know about sometimes in EOTAS is we have very able and talented students who don't get access to the range of qualifications and courses that they have the capability and the aptitude to do. We also have to consider, though, that for some children they may be out of school for reasons, and telling them that they've got to do a full curriculum may be hugely detrimental to their mental health and well-being. So, for instance, to give an example, you could have a child who's very ill, and saying to them, 'You have to carry the full load of a curriculum' could be inappropriate. So, we'll be setting a minimum standard, as I said, around the purposes, around the cross-cutting themes and health and well-being, and then there will be an expectation that in conjunction with the child and the family an appropriate addition would be put in place to meet the needs of that child, recognising that they could have very different needs. Is that clear? lynne neagle am: Well, yes, and it's something that we'll probably look to build on when we look at our inquiry on EOTAS, which is coming up. So, can I thank you for attending and thank your officials for coming today? As usual, we will send you a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again, all of you, for your attendance this morning. As Members will see, there are a substantial number of papers to note—23 in total, which are in a supplementary pack. As there are so many, can I suggest that we note them all together and then we've got an opportunity to return to some of them in the private session afterwards? Is that okay with everybody? Okay. Can I propose in accordance with Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content?<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to the 20thmeeting of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. As a reminder to all members, in order to avoid issues with sound, members participating in person should not be connected to the video conference. I want to remind those who are participating by video conference that, when they talk, they must use the channel that corresponds to the language they are speaking in. Chair, today I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the 2019 annual report on the RCMPs use of the law enforcement justification provisions. This report addresses the RCMP's use of specified provisions within the law enforcement justification regime, which is set out in subsections 25 to 25 of the Criminal Code. Chair, pursuant to Standing Order 32, I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the 2018-19 progress report on Canada's national action plan for the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during the meeting of a special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. Members who are participating in the meeting in person are kindly asked to bring the signed certificate to the office once the petition has been presented. The petitioners note that research from around the world points to a threat to pollinators, particularly from a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. The petitioners call on the Government of Canada to practise a precautionary principle and remove from use neonicotinoids in Canada to protect our pollinators. These iconic whales are much beloved in SaanichGulf Islands, throughout coastal British Columbia and indeed across Canada. The petitioners are calling for more action to be taken as the population of southern resident killer whales continues to decline, more action for boat-free safety zones, more prohibitions around whale tourism to make sure that the whales are safe from those who are keen to watch them from too close a distance, and more of a credible enforcement regime to support these measures to keep the southern resident killer whale population in our waters and not on the list of species that have become extinct. Chair, for over 10 years, members of Parliament from various parties have been trying to pass legislation to deal with the horrific practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking. Irwin Cotler, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Senator Salma Ataullahjan and I have all proposed bills on this. This is another bill that would make it a criminal offence for someone to go abroad and receive an organ for which there has not been consent. I'm sure petitioners would want me to add that, given the urgency of this issue, perhaps the government could consider bringing forward a government bill on this issue, which would allow the process to move much faster. Chair, I rise here today to present a petition from Canadian citizens in support of motion M-1, which was placed in this House by my colleague the member for New WestminsterBurnaby on the green new deal. These citizens point out that climate change has escalated into a global climate emergency and that Canada must act with ambition and urgency. They call on the government to support M-1, a made in Canada green new deal, to take bold and rapid action to adopt socially equitable climate action to tackle the climate emergency and address worsening socio-economic and racial inequalities at the same time while ending fossil fuel subsidies, closing offshore tax havens, and supporting workers impacted by the transition by creating well-paying, unionized jobs in the shift to a clean and renewable energy economy. Chair, it's an honour and privilege to table e-petition 2577, which was sponsored by Chris Alemany from Port Alberni and is supported by 5,183 petitioners. They're calling on the Government of Canada to work urgently across party lines and in partnership with provincial and territorial governments to implement a guaranteed, consistent, national and livable universal basic income system for all Canadians. The petition is very timely, coming almost one year to the day since the completion of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which also called on the government to establish a guaranteed annual livable income for all Canadians. Whether it's about providing a safety net to get through a global pandemic, the means to keep your children out of poverty at any time, or simply being able to afford safe housing or transportation, it's time for Canada to have this conversation. Chair, it's an honour and a privilege to present a petition on behalf of the constituents of NanaimoLadysmith. People are concerned about gas fracking and the use of methane and the destruction that methane causes to our atmosphere and with climate change. They're calling on the government to commit to upholding the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action by immediately halting all existing and planned construction of the Coastal GasLink project on the Wet'suwet'en territory, and by ordering the RCMP to dismantle their exclusion zone and to stand down. They also call on the government to schedule nation-to-nation talks between the Wet'suwet'en nation and the federal and provincial governmentswhich is something that we're happy to see has been happening and I commend the government for that effortand to prioritize the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Chair, like Canada, Guyana is part of the Commonwealth, and many constituents of Winnipeg North have raised the issue with regard to the presidential election back in March, when it was being called into question. There have been some very positive indications in recent days, but the petitioners are asking the Government of Canada, and in fact all members of Parliament, to be aware of what's taking place in Guyana, and as much as possible, to be advocates for democracy and make sure that we're being diligent in supporting what the people of Guyana want to see. the chair: I just want to remind the honourable members, when presenting petitions, to be as concise as possible. I notice they're starting to stretch a bit and it's something we all tend to do. Chair, I just want to say thank you to the industrious people of Sudbury who have risen to the challenge and joined forces in the face of COVID-19. I am proud of all my constituents, and all Canadians, including first responders, volunteers, health care and essential workers, local miners, the farmers and produce growers who are feeding our families, and local businesses who are staying connected with their staff. I also salute all our homegrown innovations such as ProStitch and King Sportswear face masks; Crosscut Distillery hand sanitizer; Nobel Prize winner SNOLAB's work on ventilators, which earned a federal contract; Vale Canada's $1 million in seed capital to small firms developing COVID-19 health solutions; and many more. It's tucked in between the Fraser and Pitt rivers and is in the shadow of Golden Ears mountain. In the 1900s Dutch immigrants drained and diked the marshes allowing for today's bumper crops of cranberries and blueberries. It's hard to believe that this community is only a short commute to Vancouver and has one of the nation's busiest general aviation airports. In a great show of community spirit, from their front yards and balconies, thousands of residents came out to cheer for first responders and essential workers as we paraded throughout the city. I am thankful to have raised my family here, taught in the schools and to now be the member of Parliament representing this wonderful community. Chair, over the last few months I have watched constituents in my riding come together to look out for one another during these challenging times. Regardless of how deep and painful this pandemic has been, it continues to amaze me just how brightly the collective character of Cape BretonCanso shines through. Whether it is someone like Glen Muise, who delivers iPads to seniors' homes so they can connect with loved ones, teachers who deliver meals to students in need, Liam and Lucus Sakalauskas, two young boys who keep youth informed across the east coast, or Rose Fitzgerald, who delivered bouquets made from the remaining flowers from her shop to essential workers across her county, constituents in Cape BretonCanso have stepped up to support their community and to support those in need. Chair, as you know it is with great pride that I represent my constituents in Cape BretonCanso. They know that as a community, we're only as strong as our most vulnerable people, and I cannot help but be filled with joy when I see these gestures happening across my riding. sylvie brub (abitibibaie-jamesnunavikeeyou, bq): Mr.Chair, unacceptable incidents of police brutality against aboriginals have prompted former member Romeo Saganash, whose commitment I commend, to call for a commission of inquiry similar to the Viens commission in Quebec. The Bloc is open to the idea, but we shouldn't wait for such an inquiry to be recommended to take action. Last year alone, the Viens report and the report stemming from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls contained dozens of recommendations. The federal government must work with indigenous peoples, Quebec and the provinces to establish adequate funding for indigenous police forces. Hundreds of pages must be written and actions taken to restore confidence in law enforcement so as to achieve the long-overdue reconciliation. steven mackinnon (gatineau, lib.): Mr.Chair, on behalf of myself and my parliamentary colleagues, I want to congratulate students from our high school class of 2020. We know that, owing to the pandemic, graduation celebrations will be different this year, as students will be deprived of their prom, their graduation ceremony and, in some cases, their goodbyes to friends and teachers. I know how disappointed students from the high schools of duVersant, LeCarrefour, Nicolas-Gatineau, de l'rablire, Collge Saint-Alexandre, Collge Nouvelles Frontires, Collge Saint-Joseph, Philemon-Wright and other regional schools, are not to be able to celebrate their five years of incredible efforts surrounded by their families and friends who were by their side on a daily basis. So when they receive their diploma, here is what I will say to them: Surge ahead! The future belongs to you. Be ambitious, follow your dreams and, most importantly, continue to change the Outaouais and the world! The class of 2020 will be remembered for a long time. Chair, I am delighted to rise to talk about the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre, which is now under construction in my riding in Winnipeg. This state-of-the-art addictions recovery facility was made into a reality by Scott, Anne and Darcy Oake in memory of their son and brother Bruce, who passed away tragically from an accidental overdose in 2011. The Bruce Oake Recovery Centre will provide help to thousands of Manitobans to manage their addiction and reintegrate into the community. With approximately eight million Canadians suffering from addictions, we need centres like these to help them recover so that no other family will face a heartbreaking loss due to addiction. Week after week residents and organizations have come together to support our most vulnerable during a time of great difficulty. I want to thank the champions of the community who were generous enough to donate masks and other supplies as well as services. I would also like to recognize the charities and care centres which, upon receiving these donations, redoubled their efforts to serve their communities. Special thanks go to the Mon Sheong Foundation Long-Term Care Centre, Divine Favour Senior Homecare, the Community & Home Assistance to Seniors, the True Compassion Home Health centre, Blue Door, the Mosaic Interfaith Out of the Cold program, Yellow Brick House, Hill House Hospice, Community Living York South, and Parya Trillium Foundation for continuing to support the residents in my riding of Richmond Hill. marie-france lalonde (orlans, lib.): Thank you, Mr.Chair. Usually, at this time of the year, I have the pleasure of being invited to the graduation ceremony of the grade12 students in Orlans. I cannot express enough how, in these exceptional times, I have witnessed the strength, resilience and community spirit of our graduates. I also know that a number of high schools have made significant efforts to celebrate the success of their graduating class. Young graduate Maryanne Collard was amazed to see that people from her school, the cole secondaire catholique Batrice-Desloges, had installed a sign in her garden to congratulate her on her academic success. The sad reality is that even before the crisis hit, most rural Canadians simply did not have access to a strong and stable Internet connection, even though Internet is an essential service. Those in underserved areas, including many parts of MissionMatsquiFraser Canyon, cannot work from home and their children cannot keep up with their classmates. For many of my indigenous constituents, Internet services are stuck in the 1990s because telecom companies don't want to serve them. We call on the government to outline and implement a concrete action plan to address Internet connectivity deficits between rural and urban Canada. Congratulations go to Lutsl K' Dene First Nation and the Northwest Territory Mtis Nation, with support from Deninu K'ue First Nation and the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, for the establishment of the Thaidene Nn territorial protected area. It's 14,000 square kilometres of the most beautiful land and waters you'll find anywhere on earth. I would also like to thank the previous minister of the environment for securing Canada's $7.9-million commitment, along with our visit to celebrate the new park last year. The award is given to groups that have exemplified actions to protect critical ecosystems and biodiversity for generations to come and to show how indigenous peoples and local communities have confronted legacies of disadvantage and discrimination in support of their communities and the world at large. Chair, the Liberal government has tabled $87 billion in spending and allocated just four hours for Parliament to study, debate and pass it. They deserve to know that this government spending was scrutinized and passed through the rigours of Parliament. It is Canadian taxpayers of today and tomorrow who will have the responsibility to pay for this government's spending. It is real Canadians who fall through the cracks when this Liberal government's programs fail to meet their intended goals. Just as we gather four days a week for a hybrid committee meeting, parliamentarians can gather to do the full scope of the work that Canadians elected us to do. jol godin (portneufjacques-cartier, cpc): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I want to say to all the essential staff and the many support organizations that they are really changing things. Chair, today I rise to honour Justice 4 Black Lives Winnipeg, led by women and non-binary individuals, who stood together and mobilized our city to state clearly that we will not stand by and stay silent in the face of police brutality. We will not stand by while we witness our bodies being abused by centuries of racism supported through legislation that has left us vulnerable at the hands of those who abuse their power. We will join together to ensure that laws are instituted that are designed to protect us, not abuse us. To all the women and non-binary folks who are standing, I say, let's continue to sound our voices in solidarity and support of one another until indigenous and black lives are honoured and respected. claude debellefeuille (salaberrysurot, bq): Mr.Chair, this is not the time for governments to get complacent about COVID-19. First, he locked down Parliament to avoid being accountable to the opposition, while the economic recovery must be prepared. We need to know how much flexibility we have in case of a second wave of the pandemic. Chair, I rise to give thanks and recognition to the contributions of many businesses and organizations across my riding of Edmonton Mill Woods that have stepped up in a major way during this pandemic. I joined my friends in the Filipino community who partnered with Mill Woods' Calvary Community Church to deliver care packages to seniors. Varinder Bhullar and his Green Scholars of Alberta team and Dil-E-Punjab restaurant provided thousands of free meals. Edmonton Towing and its full team with Dukh Nivaran Gudwara prepared food packages for any truckers who were coming through Edmonton. The staff, nurses and doctors of Grey Nuns Community Hospital in the heart of Mill Woods have been keeping people safe and healthy. I want to thank our Mill Woods community as a whole for its continued strength, resilience and compassion as we move forward together. This year is a difficult one, though, for all of us, including our Portuguese diaspora community across the globe that is deeply affected by the COVID situation. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our luso community of over half a million members in Canada from coast to coast for staying strong during these difficult times. Your warmth, hard work and team spirit resonate well across my riding of Mississauga EastCooksville and globally. As a Portuguese immigrant who came to Canada at the age of two with my family, I know this year will be a lot different from previous years. I encourage all of you to stay safe and enjoy a Portuguese meal, and please continue to support our local businesses. Please note that we will suspend the proceedings twice in order to allow employees who provide support for sitting to substitute each other very safely. He is refusing to table a budget, refusing to provide an economic update and refusing to let the House of Commons do its work. Will he at least provide the Auditor General with the additional funding she needs to look into government expenditures? right hon. justin trudeau (prime minister): Mr.Chair, not only are we introducing a bill this afternoon to help Canadians with the Canada emergency response benefit and those living with disabilities, but we are also proposing to the opposition parties that we hold a debate and a vote on that. Under the government, the Auditor General has had to do more with less, and her ability to conduct audits is being affected. The Auditor General has indicated that she will be able to do half as many audits, despite an almost doubling in the size of government spending. Will the Prime Minister give the Auditor General the money she needs to do her job, yes or no? right hon. Chair, we worked with the Auditor General to increase the funding of the Auditor General's office in 2018-19, and the equivalent of 38 full-time staff were added. We support the Auditor General, unlike the Conservative government, which fired 60 people from the Auditor General's office. We are now proposing that we sit down to debate legislation this afternoon, and I certainly hope that members opposite will vote for debate. He well knows that it was the Auditor General's office that volunteered to make administrative efficiencies, which did not affect its ability to do the job. In fact, as the interim auditor general, John Wiersema, said, We would not have proposed if we didnt think it was the right thing to do and that wed be able to carry out our role for Parliament. Only the government's refusal to grant that extra funding is hampering the Auditor General's ability to give Canadians the answers they deserve, and we wonder why. This is the government that cannot explain where 20,000 infrastructure projects went and where five billion dollars' worth of supposed infrastructure investments have gone. Then there is, of course, the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank, which has completed precisely zero projects. Are these the reasons the Prime Minister is so intent on withholding funds from the Auditor General? right hon. Chair, talking of revisionist history, Stephen Harper's Conservatives cut $6.5 million from the Auditor General's budget and fired 60 staff. On the contrary, we worked with the Auditor General's office and increased its funding and added the equivalent of 38 new full-time staff. We will continue to respect the officers of Parliament, whom the Conservatives, in their time in office, showed no respect for. We will continue to move forward in a way that has led, for example, to proposing debate and voting on important legislation this afternoon to help Canadians. Chair, it's no surprise that the Prime Minister likes to reach back into history from before the 2015 election to justify his position. The 2015 election was the only time he got more votes than the Conservative Party did, so I understand why he likes to live in the past. In May, the interim auditor general said, Ten years ago, we were completing about 27 performance audits every year. The Auditor General's office has requested more funds to be able to do the job that Canadians expect to be done. Will the Prime Minister give those additional funds to the Auditor General's office, yes or no? right hon. Chair, we very much look forward to working with the new Auditor General to ensure that her office has the ability to continue the important audits and transparency measures that are foundational to our institutions. Speaking of what is foundational to our institutions, this afternoon we're putting forward a bill that would help Canadians across the country, and we've proposed to debate and vote on that bill. They have been complaining about not having debates and votes in Parliament, and now they're proposing not to have them. yves-franois blanchet (beloeilchambly, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. This morning, we heard many groups and organizations that represent people with a disability express their concerns over the bill introduced by the government, which I feel is chocolate pudding containing cod liver oil. I am saying to the Prime Minister that, if he presents the part on disabled individuals, it will be passed at the speed of light. Is he prepared to divide the bill, so that we can work together to help people with a disability? right hon. We will also increase the flexibility of the Canada emergency response benefit from four-week intervals to two weeks. I am always willing to work with members of the opposition to ensure that we adopt these measures, all or some of the measures. That means that we are not adopting them all at the same time and that the bill is being split. Can the Prime Minister confirm that he is in fact going to split his bill so that we can address the various components separately, since they have nothing to do with each other, and improve them, in keeping with our mandate as elected officials? right hon. justin trudeau: Our goal on this side of the House, and it is shared by all members of the House, is to help Canadians during the pandemic. Yes, that includes Canadians living with disabilities, but it also includes businesses that cannot, but should be able to, access the wage subsidy. yves-franois blanchet: We almost had some clarity, but one swallow does not make a summer. The government says that it wants to transform the program into something very coercive, without admitting that the lack of an employment incentive has essentially sabotaged another program, the wage subsidy. When the government says that we are going to have to vote on this, it means rubber stamping its bill. justin trudeau: We are not proposing only to vote on this bill this afternoon, we are proposing to debate it. It is the role and responsibility of all of us in the House to exchange ideas and to work together to help Canadians. It is about helping people with disabilities, increasing the flexibility of the CERB, and expanding the scope of the wage subsidy so that more businesses have access to it. I would be remiss if I allowed the Prime Minister to mislead people quite unintentionallyI say this in accordance with the Standing Orders. When we introduce a bill, we discuss it at second reading, we vote, we continue to discuss it and we send it to committee. Can we follow the real procedures of Parliament, do a proper job, and then have a vote that is likely to suit the majority of members, not just the Prime Minister? right hon. We have been working with them for hours over the past three or four days to amend the bill, if they had amendments to propose. That is how we are taking action to help Canadians quickly during this crisis, and that is what we will continue to do. jagmeet singh (burnaby south, ndp): Mr.Chair, will the Prime Minister make a clear and direct commitment today to extend the CERB for families who need it? right hon. justin trudeau: Mr.Chair, we are introducing legislation this afternoon that will directly help Canadians living with disabilities, will expand the scope of the wage subsidy and will increase the flexibility of the Canada emergency response benefit. jagmeet singh: Will the Prime Minister extend the CERB for families in need, yes or no? right hon. Chair, discussions are ongoing on that, but I can assure Canadians we will continue to be there for them and support them, as we have been. Chair, a family that needs to buy groceries can't take those pretty words and buy groceries with them. We are engaged with stakeholders, with opposition parties and with Canadians to ensure that we continue to support them the way they need to be supported. Don from Burnaby sent me a note saying he's an arts worker and there is no forecast for his job to be reopened. He sent an email saying he's faced with a grim realityhis wordsand he's frightened that if the CERB runs out, and it is planned to run out at the end of this month, then he will have no way to afford to make ends meet. Will the Prime Minister extend the CERB so Don does not have to live in fear? right hon. Chair, as I said, and as we have been saying from the beginning, we will continue to be there to support Canadians who need it. The member opposite is not actually looking at the fact that we are proposing three significant helps for Canadians this afternoon. We are proposing to help Canadians with disabilities, to expand the wage subsidy for more businesses and to create flexibility for the CERB. One of the things we asked the government to do five weeks ago was to bring in help for Canadians living with disabilities. Will the government commit to helping all Canadians living with disabilities and propose a plan that will do so? right hon. Chair, the NDP leader seems to have decided that rather than help 40%, or a significant portion, of people with disabilities, he wants to help none of them, because he's not going to allow the debate to move forward on this bill. Chair, I appreciate that the Prime Minister accepts that his plan only helps 40% of Canadians living with disabilities. Often it's the poorest of Canadians living with disabilities who won't be helped with the plan the government is proposing. Chair, our proposal will help 100% of Canadians who receive the disability tax credit, including many veterans. Why is the NDP not allowing us to move forward on debating and voting on this important legislation? the chair: Mr. We made it very clear that if the government extends the CERB, if it ensures there are no penalties on those who are desperately in need of help and if it helps all Canadians living with disabilities, we will move forward. Chair, as I have said from the beginning, we look forward to continuing to work with the members opposite to keep moving forward to help Canadians. I hope we're going to be able to actually have a debate and a vote on this important legislation this afternoon. the chair: We're now going to take a short pause to allow staff to change up in a safe way respecting COVID-19 procedure. alain rayes (richmondarthabaska, cpc): Mr.Chair, can the Prime Minister tell us whether we will have an economic update by the end of June? hon. bill morneau (minister of finance): Mr.Chair, I would like to thank the hon. When the situation is stable, we will have the chair: Once again, the floor goes to Mr.Rayes. alain rayes: Mr.Chair, most of the provinces in Canada are working on tabling economic updates by the end of June. bill morneau: I understand the importance of transparency and that is why we are trying every day to explain our investments to Canadians and to continue to be transparent with them. alain rayes: The Liberal government announced hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending during the pandemic, but it still refuses to provide an economic update in order to be transparent with Canadians. I repeat my question: why does this government not want to table an economic update by the end of June, when the provinces are doing so? hon. bill morneau: Every day, we explain the economic situation, our investments, the changes we are making, and our programs to improve the situation of Canadians during the pandemic. alain rayes: The Parliamentary Budget Officer himself does not understand why the federal government cannot deliver an economic update when the provinces can. Why are the government and the minister defying the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is an independent officer and is requesting an economic update? hon. We think our approach of providing information daily is appropriate and we will continue to be transparent about our investments. When we listen to the minister and the Prime Minister talk, you would think we were in the pesky terrible twos phase that children go through, when they keep saying no, no, no. The provinces are doing it, the opposition parties are calling for it and the Parliamentary Budget Officer is calling for it. Why will the Minister of Finance not table an economic update so that all members of Parliament can do their verification work? hon. In the meantime, we will be adapting to the situation on a daily basis and making sure that we have the information we need to make our decisions and to make sure that Canadians understand our situation. alain rayes: Mr.Chair, one month ago, the Prime Minister announced with great fanfare that the eligibility criteria for the $40,000emergency loans for businesses would be more flexible to help self-employed entrepreneurs and businesses that pay themselves dividends to have access to them. However, as of todayit has been four weeks since that announcementbusinesses are still banging their heads on the doors of their financial institutions. In addition, even senior officials confirmed to me during a technical call on June2, last Tuesday, that this information would not be available for several weeks. Can the Minister of Finance, who says he wants to act quickly to help our businesses, explain why, after four weeks, it is still not possible to get the information the Prime Minister promised us from his doorstep? hon. mona fortier (minister of middle class prosperity and associate minister of finance): Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been listening and responding to small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country. In fact, we have even announced the expansion of the program's eligibility criteria to include many owner-managed small businesses with payrolls of less than$20,000. We are working around the clock to ensure that we are able to promptly provide small businesses across the country with the assistance they need. Can the government tell us what their plans are to help the travel, hospitality and tourism industry that so many of my constituents depend on? hon. I had a good conversation with the mayor of Niagara Falls recently, and we believe in the importance of the tourism sector. If he has clear, specific projects in the tourism sector that he needs help with, I would ask that he please come and see me and have a conversation. Chair, the message from the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Perrin Beatty, and also other industries, is that we need a clear and coherent plan from this government because there's a whole hodgepodge of regulations and confusion about what's going to happen through the strategy. What I've told the government is that we need a strategy to reflect local conditions that is consistent and has a clear timeline so that businesses can begin to open safely and with confidence. We have been consulting with businesses on the appropriate way to extend the wage subsidy so that we can continue to support businesses as they turn towards a safe restart. We've also looked very carefully at how we can ensure that the programs that we've put forward the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Because of the shortage, in my riding of Niagara West, dentists have to pay up to 10 times the amount for an N95 mask. Compared to early March, when will the government finally begin to produce enough PPE in Canada to meet Canadian demand? hon. We have mobilized over 700 Canadian companies to help them retool and rescale their efforts to make more personal protective equipment in Canada as part of a made-in-Canada initiative. What's the evidence of this? We know that the government procured 10 million substandard N95 masks that couldn't be used. Planes are arriving empty that should have been filled with PPE, and we received less than 5% of our total order of gloves. When will this government finally begin to take PPE equipment issues seriously and make enough in Canada to meet demands by Canadians? hon. Regarding the flights that returned from China without federal cargo, Air Canada did reimburse the federal government for that amount. In addition, with regard to the N95 masks that were referenced, the Government of Canada will not pay for masks that it does not use. Furthermore, as my colleague Minister Bains just stated, we are mobilizing and retooling the domestic industry. dean allison: At a time when the Prime Minister has ordered Canadians to stay home and businesses to remain closed, at a time when Canadians have had to say goodbye to their relatives over Skype, at a time when Canadians are not allowed to get married, at a time when Canadians are being fined for taking their kids to the park, at a time when restaurants are being fined $800 for allowing customers to eat outside and not being socially distanced, in these times, the Prime Minister's son attended a mass gathering with thousands of people while not socially distancing. Chair, why is it that there seems to be one set of rules in this country for some people but a different set for the Prime Minister? Why the double standard? hon. Chair, as the member knows, this country has been gripped with the need to stand up with one another to fight the experience of racism that so many Canadians live with and that so many of our American cousins live with. As the member knows, local public health sets advice for regions that he specified, and I would encourage all Canadians to check with local public health advice before they resume activities. It can take upwards of a year for Veterans Affairs to adjust their rate scale to compensate, and they do not allow for retroactive reimbursement. What are the government's actions to alleviate this hardship for our men and women who stood guard for this country, our veterans? hon. Chair, the fact is that when we inherited the government, Veterans Affairs needed a lot of support from government. In fact, at that time, we invested $10 billion to make sure that Veterans Affairs was put in place and that we could provide the appropriate supports for veterans, like the pension for life, the centre of excellence on PTSD and the chronic pain centre of excellence. Thank you, Minister, for answeringor respondingto my question, although that really did not provide an answer, in my humble opinion. The opposition has put forward clear proposals, such as a one-time tax-free withdrawal being allowed for an RRSP or a RRIF. To help preserve their registered retirement income fund assets, we are reducing minimum withdrawals by 25% for 2020. As the market is volatile during this time, we continue to look at all ways that we can best help seniors during this difficult time. It is anticipated that more unjust incarcerations will occur as Beijing imposes the national security law in Hong Kong. Has our government started preparing a list of names for Magnitsky-style sanctions, yes or no? hon. Chair, as we have said, we and our allies are deeply concerned with Beijing's decision to impose a national security law on Hong Kong. With hundreds of thousands of Canadians living in Hong Kong, we have a vested interest in its stability and prosperity, the foundations of which are Hong Kong's relative autonomy and basic freedoms. It's time for action, because the Chinese embassy has said, in response to Canada's expressed concern, that they deplore, reject and condemn our response and our concerns thus far. What are the conditions for this government using Magnitsky sanctions should China continue to incarcerate Canadians and jeopardize the human rights of its citizens? hon. We will continue to encourage all parties to engage in peaceful and meaningful dialogue to address the legitimate concerns expressed by the Hong Kong population. Canada will always support and promote freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press around the world. Chiu, we have about 22 seconds, so you have time for a very quick question and hopefully a very quick answer. When will this government listen to Canadians and call for a stronger, more effective and truly independent international investigation into COVID-19's origin? the chair: The honourable minister has 22 seconds or less, please. It is critically important that all countries in the world work together in a transparent, open and respectful manner so that we understand what is going on and how we can bring it to an end as quickly as possible. Chair, if the government orders someone who has been exposed to a confirmed COVID case into a 14-day quarantine, why won't the government allow them to take an antibody test to lift the quarantine so they can go back to work? hon. patty hajdu: As the member opposite may or may not know, testing strategies are determined by provinces and territories. Furthermore, the testing of a particular person has to be done at the right point in time the chair: We go back to Ms. My friend and colleague here, Colin Carrie, from the constituency of Oshawa, has a constituent who has a test. Why won't they provide a DIN number to it so that Canadians have access to it as well, regardless of which province or territory they live in? hon. Any test kit that would be approved by Health Canada would be accessible to wherever that company chose to market that test kit. Furthermore, it's really important that test kits that are approved by Health Canada be accurate and have been tested with rigour with regard to their ability to provide credible and accurate information to the people who are using that test. Chair, the test has proven to have an accuracy rate of 90% in identifying whether or not an individual has antibodies. Chair, I am happy to follow up with the member opposite's office when she is able to provide me with the name of the company. cheryl gallant: How long will it take for an antibody test to be approved by this government once you have the name of the company and the test and the evidence in front of you? the chair: Before we go to the honourable minister, I just want to remind the honourable members to place their questions through the chair and not directly. patty hajdu: We have an expedited process that could be completed in as little as five to seven days, depending on the accuracy of the test and the information supplied by the vendor. Chair, will Health Canada use reputable data from other countries to speed their determinations about antibody effectiveness, or just continue to withhold access? hon. patty hajdu: Canadians expect us, at Health Canada, to ensure the accuracy and the safety of all equipment approved for use in Canada. Chairman, if the minister can approve tests and studies within five days, why is it taking over 30, over 60, or over 90 days to approve an antibody test that exists? hon. patty hajdu: I appreciate the member opposite's interest in urgent and quick approvals; however, sometimes, depending on the company, there may be further questions and further tests that need to be run to ensure the accuracy or safety of that equipment. Should she wish me to check into the process for a particular the chair: We will go back to Ms. cheryl gallant: Have officials provided the government with a target for a daily antibody test to complete an initial survey or the initial phase of a study? hon. Chair, I assume the member opposite is talking about the work of the immunity task force, which is, as you know, a group of scientists who have been funded by the Government of Canada the chair: We'll go back to Ms. Chair, would the minister please provide the names of the people on the task force to which she just referred? hon. cheryl gallant: I hope that will be within the next two days or so, and not wait until after the crisis has passed, Mr. Why isn't the Prime Minister showing as much fervour for antibody testing as he is for getting a vaccine on the market? hon. In fact, the Prime Minister has shown fervour for all aspects of dealing with the coronavirus from the very inception of the virus on the world stage. pat kelly (calgary rocky ridge, cpc): When will the government give the Auditor General the funds she needs to do her job? hon. On behalf of the government, I would also like to offer her our full support and collaboration the chair: We'll go to Mr. pat kelly: I share the minister's wish to congratulate the new Auditor General on her position. Chair, our government has added 38 permanent staff positions to her office, while the Conservative government, under their leadership, cut the funding for more than 60 the chair: We'll move on to Mr. If he will look at the committee transcripts of the time, he will know that it was the Auditor General's decision to reduce their own budget. The finance committee yesterday, with the support of Liberal backbench MPs who are on that committee, unanimously passed a motion to fund the Auditor General in full so that her office can do her job. If this minister will not listen to me, will he at least listen to his own backbenchers? hon. Chair, our government is fully committed to supporting the important and ongoing work of the Auditor General, an independent officer of Parliament. If the Auditor General identifies the need for additional resources, we will work with the Office of the Auditor General to ensure that they have all the resources they need to continue fulfilling their mandate efficiently and effectively. Chair, the Auditor General has consistently, since 2018, told this government that the office doesn't have enough funds. It's the first time in history that the Auditor General has had to tell public accounts that they don't have the resources to do their job. When will this government actually do the right thing and fully fund the Office of the Auditor General? hon. If the Auditor General identifies a need for additional resources, we will work with her to ensure that her office can continue to deliver its mandate efficiently and effectively. With this increase, the office was able to add the equivalent of 38new full-time staff to its team. I would ask the minister to please stop with the platitudes and actually just say yes or no. Chair, we have already increased the budget of the Office of the Auditor General in the 2018-19 period. the chair: Before we continue, we're going to suspend for a second to bring in the next chair. alexandra mends (brossardsaint-lambert, lib.)): There's a point of order. It's always customary to give members a chance to correct the record, so I call upon the minister to do so now, and perhaps even the Prime Minister. I have here the transcripts of the public accounts committee, and they will confirm that the the acting chair (mrs. I would also like to inform you that I will be sharing my time with my colleague and friend, the member for Lac-Saint-Jean. While Quebec estimates its additional health care costs related to COVID-19 at $3billion, Ottawa is transferring around $115million, which is not even4%. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, as the member opposite knows, we invested an initial $500 million in transfers to the provinces and territories to manage the extreme pressure put on health care systems as a result of their supporting people living with COVID and in preventing COVID. We want to thank the provinces and territories for their work, and as the member opposite knows, we will continue to be there for the provinces and territories. The government is giving about $115million to Quebec, but that is not even 4%of what is being requested. patty hajdu: We have been working with the provinces and territories from the beginning to respond to the crisis. We have been able to make so much progress in the fight against COVID-19 precisely because of this co-operation. gabriel ste-marie: MadamChair, it isn't about squabbling, it's about needs. What we're seeing today are the results of massive disinvestment by the federal government in health care. Can the government commit to better funding to the health care sector and to organizing a meeting with Quebec and the provinces on this exact topic, in September at the latest? We can't afford to wait. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, with respect to the transfers to provinces and territories, the member opposite knows that our government, in our last mandate, significantly increased transfers to the provinces and territories for health services, including mental health and home care services. In fact, the funding we're providing is in addition to the $40 billion that was transferred the acting chair (mrs. alexis brunelle-duceppe (lac-saint-jean, bq): Thank you, MadamChair. Tudo bem? Tudo bom? Today in La Presse, we learned that the government has extended its military presence in long-term care homes. Can the minister confirm this information, and can he also confirm that the presence of these 500soldiers is indeed in response to a request from the Government of Quebec? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, let me assure the member that when Quebec made a request for assistance at the beginning of April, we answered the call. I had a conversation today with Minister Guilbault, my counterpart in Quebec, and we have renewed our commitment to continuing to provide assistance. That assistance can take additional forms and can include involving the Canadian Red Cross, but we remain committed to providing the assistance that Quebec needs. alexis brunelle-duceppe: If I understand correctly, negotiations are still under way with the Government of Quebec, even though it needs these soldiers. We have to make sure that the military will stay in our long-term care homes as long as we need their services in Quebec, and until new attendants have been trained. bill blair: I'd like to assure this House that we have assured Quebec that the Canadian Armed Forces will continue to provide support until such time as other trained professional people are able to do that job. We will be there for Quebeckers because they need our help, and as long as they need our help, we'll be there to support them. alexis brunelle-duceppe: This isn't the time to play cat-and-mouse. The only thing we have to do is to give the Government of Quebec what it's asking for. Quebec has more than 5,000deaths from COVID-19, 90%of which have been in seniors' residences or long-term care homes. Will the minister commit to extending the mission now and putting an end to this uncertainty? It's certainly bad for both the military and the health care workers, who rely on this support. We have made a commitment to the Province of Quebec that we will continue to provide that support until the middle of September, exactly as they have requested, but we are also working to ensure that we have an sustainable, effective solution to the request that Quebec has made, so we're working with the Province of Quebec, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Red Cross to ensure the help that is needed is there. Madam Chair, COVID-19 continues to create challenges for all Canadians, including those with disabilities, and exacerbates those experienced by Canadians with disabilities. As we mark the end of National AccessAbility Week, I would like to remind our colleagues that our commitment to making Canada more inclusive and equitable is ongoing, including our passing of the Accessible Canada Act. Would the minister inform the House about the government's plans to support Canadians with disabilities who are experiencing increased costs due to COVID-19? hon. carla qualtrough (minister of employment, workforce development and disability inclusion): Madam Chair, last week was the first National AccessAbility Week that was legislated under the historic Accessible Canada Act, and I thank every party in this House for the consent they gave to that legislation. I'm hoping we have the same spirit of camaraderie for people with disabilities this afternoon. Since the beginning, Madam Chair, we have taken a disability inclusion approach on how we support people with disabilities in this time of pandemic, including the establishment of our COVID-19 disability advisory group, which has given us invaluable advice. Last week we announced a suite of measures to support people with disabilities that complement existing measures that are in place. This includes a one-time payment of $600 to 1.25 million citizens with disabilities, which again is the subject matter of the legislation this afternoon, as well as a $15-million investment in an accessible workplace initiative that will ensure, moving forward.... Finally, there are five really exciting accessible technology initiatives, including working on point-of-sale terminals for Canadians who are blind or visually impaired. bryan may: I want to take this opportunity to thank the minister and her department for all the work they are doing to ensure that accessibility is at the forefront of everybody's mind through this crisis. shaun chen (scarborough north, lib.): Madam Chair, as humanity battles COVID-19, we are confronted by the stark realities of another disease. On May 25, George Floyd fell unconscious and died as a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. This all happened after the 46-year-old black man was handcuffed and put in a position where he could do no harm. In Canada, we have come a long way since Viola Desmond, yet there is much more to do. Hatred has no boundaries, whether it is against black communities or is anti-Asian sentiment fuelled by COVID-19. The question always is this: Who is next? We must all stand up together against hatred and for justice and reconciliation, to dismantle systems of oppression that long remained unquestioned. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that Canada is failing black youth, creating the conditions that push them into the justice system. To the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth, my question is this: What is the government doing to address the unique challenges faced by black youth? hon. bardish chagger (minister of diversity and inclusion and youth): Madam Chair, the member for Scarborough North is absolutely correct. We often say that today's youth are not only the leaders of tomorrow but the leaders of today, so we need to equip them for success by investing in youth. According to the 2016 census, black Canadians accounted for 1.2 million people, and more than a quarter of that population is under the age of 15. Socio-economic gaps, such as in employment and education, exist between black and non-black youth. We have Canada's first youth policy, and it was created by youth for youth to ensure that all young people are equipped to live healthy and fulfilling lives, and are empowered to create positive change for themselves and their communities. Our government launched the community support for black Canadian youth program, which supported 56 projects geared to address the unique challenges faced by black Canadian youth through the development of leadership skills and civic engagement, while empowering them through the promotion of black history, culture and identity. To address the challenges of the pandemic, our government has implemented a suite of measures designed to help youth and students, including with employment and service opportunities. My office is working with community organizations who serve black youth to make sure they too are both aware of and benefiting from these measures. Will the government bring in legislation that would enshrine into law access to, and federal funding for, quality affordable child care? hon. ahmed hussen (minister of families, children and social development): Madam Chair, we are, of course, committed to investments in child care. We have constantly worked with provinces and territories to ensure that we provide the supports they need to provide quality, affordable and accessible child care. We are committed to creating an additional 250,000 before-school and after-school child care spaces. lindsay mathyssen: The government doesn't seem to understand that this is not universal child care. During COVID-19, women have lost the majority of jobs, and they have taken on the majority of additional child care responsibilities. Canadian women want and need to return to work, but this government doesn't understand that without affordable child care, they simply cannot re-enter the workforce. For 26 years, Liberal governments have been promising, but failing to deliver, a universal child care program. Since 2015, we have created 40,000 affordable, accessible, quality child care spaces across the country. We are on track to continue to invest $7.5 billion over 11 years to create additional child care spaces and support provinces and territories. We will be there for parents as they get back to work, and we will continue to reinforce the early learning and child care sector. Instead of helping parents return to work, the government is now bringing forward legislation that's penalizing them. Why is the government looking to sentence mothers and fathers to jail time and large fines when they cannot find the child care that the acting chair (mrs. It's an honour to be here, and I'm hoping that you and your family stay safe at this time. COVID has shaken up Canada's middle class, so my question is for the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity. She runs her own business, a travel agency, but because of COVID she has been wiped out. Will the minister fight for an extension of CERB so this woman can stay in the middle class? hon. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, we know how worried Canadians are as they see their final four-week period of the CERB approaching, and we're working very hard to ensure that the CERB continues to serve an important purpose as we move into economic recovery. Now we're asking people to go back to work if it's safe for them to do so. In fact, the measures in today's legislation will help us to get the flexibility to be able to do just that. We need a Minister of Middle Class Prosperity in a time of middle-class disparity, and she has talked about middle-class criminality. Will the minister assure us that this man will be able to stay in the middle class because the CERB will still be there in July, yes or no? hon. mona fortier: MadamChair, since the beginning of the crisis, we've been helping Canadians by putting programs in place. charlie angus: The issue here is that when COVID hit, millions of Canadians were living in such precarious working conditions that they didn't even have enough money to pay their rent. What I need to know from the minister, and what Canadians need to know, is whether she will commit, yes or no, that the CERB will be there for those who have no work to go back to. mona fortier: MadamChair, since the beginning of the crisis, we have been helping families with a supplement to the Canada child benefit. It was all the way back on March 25 that the Minister of Finance stated that help for the energy sector was coming within hours, possibly days. Seventy-seven days after the minister made that statement, not a single energy company has received financing under EDC, the BDC, or the LEEFF program. As the energy sector faces an unprecedented liquidity crisis, how can this government possibly justify such a delay? hon. seamus o'regan (minister of natural resources): Madam Chair, weeks ago we opened applications through the business credit availability program to support the small and medium-sized players that make up 85% of the jobs in our sector. We've also opened applications for measures that will be available to our larger players through our LEEFF program. We will continue to support workers, and we will continue to do so to get through this unprecedented challenge. michael cooper: Madam Chair, on June 2, the vice-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said, The entire industry is frustrated with the delay that we are facing. The Saskatchewan Minister of Energy and Resources has spoken about a gaping hole that exists in terms of support for the energy sector. The gaping hole that I'm speaking of is the EDC and BDC programs that this government has failed to deliver upon. Indeed, it was on April 17 that those programs were announced, and 54 days later, not only has not a single energy company received financing, but guess what? They can't even apply, and the eligibility criteria have yet to be finalized after 54 days. seamus o'regan: Madam Chair, the Business Council of Alberta has said that the LEEFF program is a positive development showing that the federal government recognizes the needs and value of Canada's large corporations. It is essential that we support our oil and gas sector as it suffers through two crises: the impacts of COVID and the effects of a global price war initiated by Russia and Saudi Arabia. That's why, weeks ago, we opened applications for liquidity measures to support the small and medium-sized players that make up 85% of the jobs in our sector. michael cooper: Madam Chair, contrary to the representations of the minister, neither the EDC program nor BDC programs are accepting applications. Just yesterday officials from both BDC and EDC were before the finance committee, where I posed precisely those questions to them. We know, Madam Chair, that the application process isn't up and running and that eligibility criteria remain to be determined, but I guess this government has some good news for the energy sector after 77 days. Is that the kind of help the Minister of Finance had in mind after 77 days: email updates instead of real relief for the energy sector? hon. seamus o'regan: Madam Chair, the Alberta finance minister, Travis Toews, said in a LEEFF announcement that in combination with earlier measures for small and medium-sized companies, it represented an expression of confidence in our industries. It is essential that we support our oil and gas sector as it suffers through these two crisesas I said, the impact of COVID, and then on top of that, the effect of a global price war. We supported small and medium-sized players essential to the supply chain, who make up 85% of the jobs in that sector, and then we announced liquidity made available to our larger players through the LEEFF program. alexandra mends): I now have to interrupt for a few moments to allow our technicians to change places. richard martel (chicoutimile fjord, cpc): MadamChair, there has recently been positive progress in AndrGauthier's case, and I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Deputy Prime Minister for their co-operation in this matter. However, Mr.Gauthier is currently on his own in the United Arab Emirates, without a passport, waiting to settle civil lawsuits. What services does the minister intend to provide to help him, and when does he plan to repatriate AndrGauthier to Canada? hon. marc garneau: MadamChair, in all cases similar to Mr.Gauthier's, the Government of Canada, through its consular services, tries to do the best it can under the circumstances. richard martel: The House recognized on February18, 2020, that the 15weeks of sickness benefits provided by employment insurance were insufficient. They are being denied the CERB because they didn't lose their jobs because of COVID-19. In addition, some citizens are waiting for surgery, which is being delayed because of COVID-19. Of course, we understand that people who are no longer receiving EI benefits should have access to the CERB. richard martel: I've called on the Minister of Economic Development several times to be more flexible in establishing these programs, so that they are better adapted to the realities of the regions. Recently, it was the SMEs in Montreal that were monopolizing the funds earmarked for the regions. When will the Liberal government listen to the needs of regions like SaguenayLac-Saint-Jean? hon. mlanie joly: I thank my colleague for the opportunity to announce the good news that was mentioned on Radio-Canada this morning, namely, $71million more for the regions of Quebec. I will be happy to work with my colleague to ensure that the CFDC in his region can support businesses. According to a survey conducted by the Universit de Trois-Rivires in Quebec, the SaguenayLac-Saint-Jean region is apparently the most economically affected by COVID-19. Our region has forestry, the aluminum sector, GNL Qubec, tourism, the Port of Saguenay, Davie Canada, a military base and a tax centre. I'd like to tell my colleague that there will be other announcements to support the economic development of the beautiful region of SaguenayLac-Saint-Jean. richard martel: Sustainable forestry development is at the heart of the economic development of Canada and for SaguenayLac-Saint-Jean. Canadians have reason to be proud of the use of the boreal forest in the fight against climate change. Currently, our innovative forest industry is experiencing many problems, and on top of that, there is the COVID-19 crisis. I will also be pleased to work with my colleague, the Minister of Natural Resources, who is very familiar with the matter and who knows the challenges faced by the various businesses in the forestry sector, as well as the employees. We are hearing from women who are pregnant or who have just given birth and are being left out or told to go back to work. carla qualtrough: We know that there are many situations of Canadians who are about to or are just going on maternity or parental benefits who might not have access to their EI benefits due to not having accumulated enough time for COVID reasons. We're working very hard to make sure, as we did for fish harvesters, that we support all Canadians in these situations. This is something that has been brought to the government's attention for months now, and still nothing has been done. Had the government conducted a GBA+ analysis, they would have discovered this prior to rolling out inadequate programs for women. carla qualtrough: I can assure everyone in this House that we are very aware and deeply concerned about the disproportionate impact of this pandemic on women and girls. As we move forward, we are, as I said earlier, taking into consideration improvements to the EI system, the wage subsidy and the future of CERB. jag sahota: Madam Chair, might I remind my honourable colleague that this Prime Minister said that every piece of legislation would go through a rigorous GBA+? Why was it not done? hon. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, I can assure the member that we absolutely took into account the needs of women as we developed the CERB. jag sahota: Madam Chair, it is a simple question, and I will ask again. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, as I said, the needs of women and girls were taken into consideration every step of the way, from the beginning, as we worked to provide a comprehensive suite of support for Canadians across the country. jag sahota: Madam Chair, if that's the case, then how did you miss these gaps? hon. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, I can assure the member that we didn't miss gaps. As we moved from supporting workers to supporting students to supporting seniors, and today to supporting people with disabilities, we are ensuring that everyone is covered by our measures. As this pandemic evolves and as we move into economic recovery, of course we're going to make sure that women in particular are supported in our measures. I'm very proud of how many senior women we have supported with our measures, how many women received the GST credit, how many women who lead families received the CCB one-time payment and how many women with disabilities will receive the disability support if we have all-party consent today. jag sahota: Madam Chair, I will ask again, hoping for a straightforward answer from this minister. I'll say again how important it was from the very beginning that we took into account the needs of women and girls, and as we move forward into the economic recovery phase, how completely we make women at the core of every decision. Why was a GBA+ analysis not conducted on the COVID-19 relief programs? the acting chair (mrs. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, we've taken into account the needs of women and girls from the beginning, and we'll continue to do so. colin carrie (oshawa, cpc): Madame Chair, on April 29 I asked Minister Blair why Lisa Freeman, a constituent of mine, wasn't able to participate in the Parole Board hearing of her father's murderer. The minister acknowledged that this had been a mistake and that victims would now be able to attend by telephone and video conference. Can the minister tell this House how many parole hearings have been conducted under this digital format with victims since April 29? hon. I'm glad to hear that Minister Blair was able to provide information on the specific case he raises. colin carrie: Madame Chair, on April 29 the minister said, and I quote, Steps have been taken to make it possible for victims to participate in those parole hearings virtually by phone or video conference. If the change has been made, can the minister please tell us how many hearings victims have been able to participate in by video conference? hon. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, as I said, certainly we will confirm the number of hearings that may have occurred. With regard to the hearings under the Parole Board of Canada, we want to ensure that victims and others are able to participate in a fair and transparent manner. colin carrie: Madame Chair, the website says, To protect the health and safety of the public, offenders, Parole Board...members and staff in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the PBC is currently conducting its hearings remotely via video conference or teleconference. However, when referring to victim participation, the PBC says it has Implemented technological and procedural enhancements in order to provide victims...the ability to participate...via telephone. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, as I said, it is very important that all parties be able to participate before the Parole Board. The Parole Board has introduced technologies to allow victims to participate in a manner that is fair and that accords them the opportunity to express themselves. For victims, besides the criminal trial, the Parole Board hearings are the only chance to participate in the judicial process. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, as I've said now on a number of occasions, victims are able to participate in the hearings before the Parole Board. colin carrie: Then, Madam Chair, why did the minister and this government tell Canadians and the House that victims of crime have the opportunity to participate in parole hearings by video conference, when in fact they do not? hon. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, as I've said, of course we are going to confirm the status of that particular request. In the meantime, as I've said on a number of occasions, victims are able to participate in these hearings. When will the minister finally give victims of crime the same right to parole hearings by video conference as he gives convicted inmates? hon. The Parole Board is a well-established tribunal that does allow for all parties, including victims, to participate in a manner that is fair, and that allows them to express themselves so those representations can be taken into account in the decisions of the Parole Board of Canada. colin carrie: He can reject it as much as he wants, Madam Chair, but it seems he thinks it's fair that inmates have that right, but victims don't. On May 19, the Prime Minister announced the government would allow sole proprietors and gig contractors to qualify for the Canada emergency business account; however, Brandon has still not been able to take advantage of this benefit. When can small business owners like Brandon expect this change to finally be made? It's been over three weeks, and the clock is ticking. mary ng (minister of small business, export promotion and international trade): Madam Chair, from the very beginning, we have been working hard to support our small businesses. Shawn and Denise operate a gymnastics facility in Whitby and have been forced to close throughout COVID-19. As the economy begins to open, they are concerned about not having the money to pay their employees in the short term, especially at a reduced client capacity. Is the government extending the wage subsidy to small businesses that have been closed and are just beginning to open now? hon. We hope businesses like that one will be able to take advantage of the wage subsidy to keep their employees on staff. Just to put it on the record, because we may or may not be debating it, the draft embargoed bill that we've seen is unacceptable to members of the Green Party caucus. I certainly appreciate her work and I know her intentions are the best, but part 3 of this bill allows for the information to be shared so people can get a one-time payment of $600, which is not enough to really deal with the COVID crisis for people with disabilities. It's clearand I thank the honourable leader of the New Democratic Party for making this point clearly in question periodit will reach approximately 40% of people with disabilities because of the structure of going through the disability tax credit. To the honourable minister, are other measures under consideration to reach the rest of the people in Canada with disabilities who need help? hon. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, the disability support payment we are proposing and that we hope to get through the House today complements a whole suite of measures our government has put in place that people with disabilities have access to. We know that people with disabilities who were precariously employed are now taking advantage of the CERB. Students with disabilities get the student benefit, including a $750-per-month top-up for four months. All around, Madam Chair, we're trying to get to every citizen with a disability, and this measure fills an important gap. elizabeth may: Much worse than part 3, from our point of view, is the treatment of people who are at this point potentially to be jailed for refusing to return to work when it's considered reasonable and they are recipients of CERB. To the minister, what's reasonable, and in whose eyes is it reasonable? In today's news, Hamilton's chief medical officer says there is a spike in cases among young people, who likely were exposed while taking public transit to get to work. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, as with the current CERB, moving forward it tries to encompass the situations of people who are unemployed, people who can't work because of child care responsibilities, people who are ill or sick. We're trying to look at the person and their particular circumstances as we work to ensure that if someone is immunocompromised and can't take transit to their job, then it's reasonable for them not to take that job. elizabeth may: The approach is so very flawed, Madam Chair, in that it attempts to punish people as opposed to encouraging them. I think the Liberals have been overly influenced by the Conservative Party's cries that there's vast fraud, that Canadians are cheating. The reality is that if you want to create an incentive to go back to work, you don't threaten people. You let people continue to receive CERB, but maybe less as they begin to earn more, so that you have a transition on a sliding scale to go into the wage subsidy or into CERB. I ask the honourable minister this: How can it be considered fair to say that someone isn't eligible, even though they believed they were? The language in this bill, particularly at proposed paragraph 12.1 in the penalties section, is an unreasonable determination that someone has violated the act and is subject to jail time and heavy fines. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, because of parliamentary privilege, I can't and won't speak to specific acts of a piece of law that hasn't actually been introduced in the House, but I'll tell you that what we're trying to do is enhance our integrity measures. We're working with those people who made an honest mistake, those who took advantage of returning to work when they were still receiving the CERB. I'm going to be sharing my time with the member from EsquimaltSaanichSooke. Tourism is a critical part of the economy throughout my riding, and after struggling with years of forest fires and floods, tourism was set to have a record-breaking year in 2020, but the COVID epidemic has burned tourism to the ground, in the words of a local leader. Many of them are small seasonal operations that don't qualify for any of the government's COVID support programs. While funding for ad campaigns is appreciated, these businesses need direct support and they need certainty about that support. Can the finance minister pledge now to provide direct and timely support to tourism businesses in my riding? hon. Yes, we were looking forward to another record-breaking year in 2020, but unfortunately the pandemic happened, and therefore many businesses were impacted. That's why, as a government, we're there to help with the wage subsidy, which has been extended until the end of August, as the tourism sector has been asking us to do; with the CEBA loans, the $40,000 loans, which also include a subsidy; and with the commercial rent relief. One thing that has allowed the wine industry to grow so dramatically in the past few decades is the excise tax exemption. That exemption could likely end very soon if it is found to be non-compliant with our trade agreements. Can he assure this House and the industry that the government will act immediately to implement this program? the acting chair (mrs. We recognize how important the wine industry is in B.C., and I assure the honourable member that I will come back to him and give him an update. randall garrison (esquimaltsaanichsooke, ndp): Madam Chair, this is National Blood Donor Week in Canada. More than 17 other countries have no deferral because they know that behaviour-based screening provides better security for the blood supply than identity-based exclusions. Will the Minister of Health do more than repeat those same promises today and instead take action to get this unscientific and discriminatory gay blood ban lifted? hon. jean-yves duclos (president of the treasury board): Madam Chair, I'm glad to be able to answer this very important question. randall garrison: The government knows I've been calling on friends, family and allies of the gay community to donate blood this week in the place of those of us who cannot. Not only do we need routine blood donations, but to do the research we need on possible prevention and treatment of COVID-19, we urgently need plasma donations from those who have recovered. jean-yves duclos: Madam Chair, I think the member used the right key words in referring to science and more prevention work to make sure that everyone lives in dignity and safety. Although there has been progress in the last few months and years on this important issue, there is more work to be done. randall garrison: Six years ago this week, I tabled a motion in the House that called for an end to this homophobic and transphobic ban on blood donations from gay men, men who have sex with men and trans women. Since we appear to have cross-party support for my new motion, M-41, that I put on the notice paper this week, would the minister and the government agree to support a unanimous consent motion to proceed with M-41 immediately? the acting chair (mrs. Homophobia and transphobia are examples of discrimination and absolutely important things not only to recognize but to fight against. That's why we are pleased to have voices such as the member of Parliament's voice to make sure that we make progress in making sure that everyone in Canada lives in safety and in dignity. maxime blanchette-joncas (rimouski-neigettetmiscouatales basques, bq): MadamChair, I will share my time with the honourable member for LongueuilSaint-Hubert. As Quebec starts to gradually emerge from the general lockdown, the outlook for the recovery of the tourism industry remains bleak. The economy of several regions of Quebec depends on tourism to ensure stability and balance, which will be beneficial in the coming months. Is the Minister of Finance prepared to extend the Canada emergency response benefit beyond 16weeks to ensure a living wage for tourism workers? hon. carla qualtrough: MadamChair, as I said in English, we're working very hard to continue to be there for all Canadians, whether it's through the CERB or the Canada emergency wage subsidy. We're going to have news on this very soon, Madam Chair, but the point is that we want to make sure that all of these programs work well together, whether it's the wage subsidy or the CERB. We want to make sure that we incentivize work, but we still continue to be there for Canadians. maxime blanchette-joncas: We read that the government wants to gradually replace the Canada emergency response benefit by using the Canada emergency wage subsidy. That's all well and good, but seasonal industries aren't entitled to it under the current criteria. If the minister is aware of the importance of the tourism industry in the economic cycle of our regions, he must commit to helping workers. We simply need to make it an employment incentive so as not to hurt people who are lucky enough to be able to go back to work. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, we are working hard to make sure we continue to support Canadians as we transition through economic recovery. We want to make sure that we support Canadians, but of course we don't want to disincentivize work. We want to make sure that as we ask people to go back to work, we don't disincentivize work, but the reality is that there won't be jobs there for everyone, and we need to continue to support everyone. denis trudel (longueuilsaint-hubert, bq): MadamChair, I join my colleague in extending my good wishes to you on Portugal's national day. Apart from the fact that it is probably the most beautiful riding in Quebec, the riding of LongueuilSaint-Hubert has surely been one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, both in terms of health and the economy. But we aren't close to being able to go back and see a show by WajdiMouawad or FredPellerin, and that's a shame. steven guilbeault: MadamChair, I thank my colleague for his question and all the work he's doing in arts and culture. We introduced the Canada emergency response benefit, for example, but also the emergency wage subsidy, which we made available to non-governmental organizations. To ensure that people who receive royalties aren't penalized under the Canada emergency response benefit, we have adapted it. Instead of giving a long preamble, I'll ask a very simple question: will the CERB be extended on July5? the acting chair (mrs. carla qualtrough: Madam Chair, I can assure the member opposite that in July we will be there for Canadian workers. denis trudel: In my riding, a nice little restaurant called Crpe Caf on St-Charles Street in Longueuil has just closed its doors. Another restaurant owner told me that he was going to reopen his restaurant, but he didn't know at what capacity. How many hours a week will it be able to offer its employees? Will it be 12hours, 15hours, 22hours? Will employees even want to return to work to put in 12hours a week? If the CERB isn't adjusted, nothing will happen. Will the government commit to extending the CERB and providing an employment incentive to get the economy moving again at full speed? hon. mlanie joly: MadamChair, I know, of course, that the restaurant sector has been much affected. If my colleague wants to work with me to provide support to restaurant owners and other restaurants in Longueuil, I'd be very happy to do so. richard bragdon (tobiquemactaquac, cpc): Madam Chair, last month, on May 5, I asked the government how it plans to support the agriculture sector. Now, one month later, our farmers, who provide the food we need, are still waiting on funds to be delivered. The New Brunswick potato industry is sitting on a massive amount of last year's crop that, because of the pandemic, has no buyers. When will the Prime Minister and the government step up and deliver the support our farmers so desperately need? hon. In addition to that, we have provided relief and support for migrant workers, who are ensuring that Canadians have access to safe and affordable food. richard bragdon: Madam Chair, when support for the agriculture sector was announced on May 4, our agriculture sector had been sounding the alarm for weeks that they needed help to continue to meet Canadians' food needs. It is worth noting, Madam Chair, that vegetables like the potatoes in New Brunswick that I previously mentioned are perishable products. Again, will the Prime Minister and this government make agriculture a priority and provide them with the support they desperately need right now? hon. mlanie joly: Madam Chair, obviously we believe in the importance of our regions and our rural communities, and that's why we've always made sure that agriculture was at the core of many of the decisions throughout this pandemic. That's why our colleague Minister Bibeau, who is the Minister of Agriculture, has been there providing the right liquidity and the right support through this pandemic. Of course we want to make sure that we continue to partner with provinces and territories, because we need their help in this context to make sure that all together we show strong economic support for our farmers, who are going through tough times. richard bragdon: On May 1 the Liberals introduced a sweeping firearms ban through an order in council that outlawed 1,500 firearms. Recent reports show that since then, more and more firearms are quietly being added to the list of banned firearms, including many common hunting rifles and shotguns. Madam Chair, our hunters, outfitters, dealers and sport shooters are some of the most vetted members of our society. Why does the Prime Minister insist on making criminals out of law-abiding firearms owners instead of dealing with the criminals we already have? hon. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, I am very proud of this government's record when it comes to ensuring that we take out of our communities those guns that have one objective only, and that is to kill other people. We will always stand by that record, and we will continue to take the necessary steps to keep our communities safe. richard bragdon: Madam Chair, the Liberals have said that to compensate firearms owners, they will implement a national buyback program. Instead of targeting law-abiding firearms owners and their legally purchased private property, wouldn't the estimated quarter of a billion dollars needed to buy back these firearms be better utilized right now in supporting our agricultural sector, the very people who grow our food and literally keep our land? hon. marco mendicino: Madam Chair, of course we look forward to saying more about that, but of course we remain committed to taking those guns that have only one objective, and that is to kill people. The legislation we have introduced and the measures we have taken are designed to keep our communities safe, and of course we will do that. We will also continue to support farmers, introducing hundreds of millions of dollars in support because we know they are providing Canadians with affordable food. richard bragdon: Madam Chair, many sole proprietors have been hit extremely hard by this pandemic. My office has heard from many who have been in business for nearly 30 years and have submitted hundreds of HST returns, yet still cannot access the CEBA funding because they do not have a business chequing account, as a lot of small business owners use their personal chequing accounts to do their business. The Liberals offered aid to sole proprietors but attached unnecessary hurdles that prevent many of them from accessing the funds they desperately need to keep their businesses afloat. When will these unnecessary hurdles be removed so businesses can start to receive the relief they so desperately need? the acting chair (mrs. mlanie joly: We believe in the importance of making sure we're supporting our businesses, including sole proprietors. That is why our colleague, Minister Ng, the minister for small business, has been working on this and will continue to make sure we take the appropriate steps to recognize that. Meanwhile, people can definitely come to the regional development agencies if they don't have access to funding through banks, and that's a good way to make sure there is a backstop. alexandra mends): Please note that, pursuant to the Standing Order made on April20 and May26, the House has been recalled. Therefore, the committee will adjourn, and the House will begin sitting at 2:30p.m<doc-sep>In accordance with Standing Order 34.19, I determine that the public are excluded from the committee's meeting, in order to protect public health. In accordance with Standing Order 34.21, notice of this decision was included in the agenda for this meeting, which was published last Friday. This meeting is, however, being broadcast live on Senedd.tv, with all participants joining via video conference. Aside from the procedural adaptation relating to conducting proceedings remotely, all other Standing Order requirements for committees remain in place. Can I remind all participants that the microphones will be controlled centrally, so there's no need to turn them on and off individually? Can I ask whether there are any declarations of interest, please? No. Can I just then, again, note for the record that, if, for any reason, I drop out of the meeting, the committee has agreed that Dawn Bowden AM will temporarily chair while I try to rejoin? Item 2, then, this afternoon is an evidence session with the Welsh Government on the impact of the coronavirus epidemic on education in Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, Steve Davies, director of the education directorate, and Huw Morris, who is group director, skills, higher education and lifelong learning. Can I welcome you all and thank you for attending? Minister, I understand you'd like to make a short opening statement. And indeed, if I could just begin by, once again, putting on the record my gratitude to everyone who is helping us get through this pandemic. There are a vast number of people who are keeping our school hubs open, looking after vulnerable children, and the children of key workers. Because of them, and their efforts, those key workers are able to carry on their critical roles in responding to COVID-19. They have kept their schools open out of hours, over the weekends, on bank holidays, and Easter. And it is really heartening and humbling to see the way that they have responded to this crisis. And there are teachers, teaching assistants, and many others, who are helping our children and their parents to keep learning at home. I know that home schooling isn't easy, so I want to say also thank you to parents and carers for their efforts at this time. By keeping their children at home, they are helping us to keep people safe, and reducing pressure on our education system, and on our NHS. My primary concern is, and always will be, the health and well-being of our children, of our young people, and of all the staff in our education settings. With regard to your five principles, which you've set out today, regarding when schools will reopen, they're very clear that they require a judgment from you. So could you outline when you think that schools might reopen? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Hefin. I am very clear that schools will move to a new phase—because, already, schools are open in many settings; we will move to a new phase when it is safe to do so and when I have advice from the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer that it is safe to do so. I have made very clear in my statement that that is not imminent. I know that in some cases there has been speculation that a return to normal could be with us quite shortly. I'm clear that a return to normal is not imminent, and therefore I'm not in a position to give a date as to when we will see more schools opening up to more children. hefin david am: Have you been given any indication at all by the chief medical officer as to when, in the longer term, it might be? kirsty williams am: No, I have not been given a date. What I have done today is publish the principles that will aid me in, as you said, me making a decision. So, clearly, we will be relying on the advice of our medical and scientific advisers, but the principles are very clear. Firstly, we will need to consider any decision to have more children returning to school in the context of the safety and the physical and the emotional well-being of children and young people and the staff. It will have to be taken in the context of the wider Welsh Government response to dealing with this pandemic. Thirdly, it is absolutely crucial in making any decisions that we have clearly communicated that to parents and to staff, on the information that we have used to reach any decisions, to build confidence for parents and professionals, but also to give them time to plan. And we also have to look at—and it's been paraphrased quite a lot today—if we are looking at certain groups of children accessing more education within a school setting, which groups they should be. And, finally, how do we operationalise that? How do we make those settings as safe as they possibly can be, and how do we tackle some of the difficult challenges of everything from ensuring that we have adequate numbers of workforce available, to the very real questions about how you would do social distancing in the context of education, school transport issues, how you would avoid people gathering at the school gate, for instance? So, there are very practical issues that would need to be considered and thought through very, very carefully before we could return, before what we could see is a move from where we are now to the next phase of education, and new approaches to what schooling may look like. But, again, I must be absolutely clear to you, members of the committee, and to people watching: it is not feasible, in this sense, that we would move from where we are now to what all of us would regard as normal education and what the operation of schools looked like before the start of this pandemic. hefin david am: So, what is clear from what you've said is that it's going to be phased return. Just reading some of the things that you've said today, can you answer that question? And can I also ask: you said that guiding principle No. 3 will be having the confidence of parents, staff and students, based on evidence and information, so they can plan ahead. What will that evidence and information be, and how will you know that you've got the confidence of parents to return? kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, primarily, we will need to take a lead from our scientific and medical advisers. I want to also say that we are obviously working on a four-nation basis and keeping in very close contact with my counterparts in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. But we're also looking beyond the United Kingdom to approaches to education in the face of this pandemic. So, recently I was able to talk to educationalists and Ministers in Iceland, other parts of Europe, North America, South America and Australia. And, clearly, we will need to be very clear, as today is an attempt to be very clear with parents and our teaching professionals, and the unions that represent them, about the basis of that evidence. hefin david am: And could I just ask, with regard to the principles, do they then apply to further education and universities? kirsty williams am: Well, of course, when we are discussing these challenges, we are doing that with our colleagues in both the school sector but also our colleagues in the FE sector, and we're in close contact with colleagues in higher education to share thinking on these matters. hefin david am: But these principles don't apply in those circumstances; these are principles for schools only. kirsty williams am: These principles are applying to both, and our work in this area is applying to both schools and FE colleges. But I want to be absolutely clear: we are working with representatives of the HE sector to include them in this work. And I have received, not assurances, but from discussions that I've had with Universities Wales and vice-chancellors, they are very keen to be kept apprised of these approaches, because they may well wish to implement something similar within their own institutions. I've got a couple of supplementaries now; firstly, from Suzy Davies, and then I'm going to go to Siân Gwenllian. Now, it is clear that any decisions that need to be taken on reopening schools would have to be made in the context of all of the other issues that the Welsh Government has to take into account. And it is entirely clear that the approach of Government towards testing hasn't been sufficiently developed for us to even start to think about removing restrictions. So, wouldn't it be dangerous, if truth be told, to start to discuss reopening schools when we haven't had the necessary testing in place for the majority of the population? And doesn't it convey a mixed message that we're starting to relax some of these restrictions when, in reality, the restrictions are still in place and still need to be in place robustly? kirsty williams am: First of all, thank you very much, Siân, for that important question. Can I be absolutely clear, and I thought I had been pretty clear in answering Hefin David, that we are not relaxing any of the restrictions with regard to education? As I said to Hefin, it is not imminent that we would see a further phase in the next stage of education here in Wales. What I have done today is to provide clarity on the nature of the principles that I would use when coming to any discussion. It is the responsibility of me, as the Minister, and indeed of the wider Government, to begin to think about planning for the future. But I have been absolutely clear: we are not moving to an imminent change in how education is operating at the moment. And I'm also very, very clear that should we be given the opportunity to see more children in our schools, I will only do that when it is safe for me to do so, when I've been advised by the CMO that I am able to do that, and we have given sufficient time and planning to the sector to respond. It is not going to be easy, and we will need to give them, as a sector, time to be able to address. But if I have not been clear enough, let me say it again: we are not relaxing any issues around schools at present, nor is that imminent. Minister, in your consideration of introducing a phased return to school, in due course, have you taken into consideration how things like school absences are going to be managed? Because, regardless of the amount of good work you do on messaging, there will still be some families that don't realise that going back to school is for their particular family. Will there be a relaxation of, effectively, what we would call truancy rules? Or is that something that schools will be getting guidance on much up-front? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Suzy. As I said in my statement earlier today, returning to school will not be a return to normal, and in recognition of this, I've already made it clear that I will seek, in all opportunities, to reduce the burdens on school. That includes various data collection, the suspension of performance measures and removing the requirement to undertake literacy and numeracy testing, and, clearly, school attendance will want to be an important factor of that. I'm keen to go on now to talk about the current situation as being faced by our children and young people in schools with some questions from Siân Gwenllian. sian gwenllian am: Since yesterday, the Welsh Government has started publishing data on the number of schools that are open, the number of children attending those schools, and the number of staff involved, and they have been making this information available as per capita of the population. On average, I think it's 1 per cent of the children of Wales that actually attend these locations, and some 5 per cent of the staff. So, can you analyse those figures a little further? Can you tell us how many children, according to this data, are children of key workers, and how many are vulnerable children? kirsty williams am: Thank you very much, Siân. As you quite rightly say, on average, we have 518 school hubs open each day, with up to 4,200 children attending. We have seen an increase in the number of attendances since the start of what would have been the traditional summer term. We have approximately 5.6 per cent of the teaching population working in those hubs, and at present, 85 per cent of the children who are attending are the children of key workers, the remainder being vulnerable children. These are small numbers, but we have seen an increase in those numbers since the start of what would have been the traditional summer term. How much confidence do you therefore have that the arrangements are effective in terms of the safety of staff and children at these locations? kirsty williams am: Thank you once again for that. The smooth operation of the hubs, with regard to health and safety, is, of course, of paramount importance. What we have seen since schools closed for traditional statutory purposes and moving to their repurposed function—we have seen a change of pattern over time. So, following my announcement on, I believe, 18 March, the week after, we saw a large number of settings open and operating. As local authorities have been able to understand the demand for those places—from critical workers and vulnerable children—we have seen more local authorities move to a hub model, and we have been able to publish guidance to local authorities on how issues around safe working in those hubs should be followed, and we've been able to give guidance in that regard. Local authorities are asked by us to report any incidents where they are concerned about operation issues on the ground. sian gwenllian am: As I mentioned earlier, testing is crucially important in dealing with this crisis. So, how many school staff have been tested for COVID because they may have experienced symptoms and so on? And how many of those have tested positive? kirsty williams am: My understanding from Public Health Wales is that 15 teachers have been tested for COVID-19, and I believe two of those results have come back as positive. Can I make it absolutely clear, the week before last, Welsh Government issued new guidance around who should be tested? I want to make it absolutely clear to those professionals working in our hubs, if they or a member of their family are exhibiting any of the symptoms, however mild, of COVID-19, they can and they should be tested. And the final question from me on this: how important is testing going to be in this next phase, as you start to think about relaxing restrictions? kirsty williams am: Obviously, the ability to be able to test, to trace and to quarantine will be critical to the next phase and will be a very, very important and significant building block in all aspects of the Government's work to respond to this pandemic. We've got some questions now on the impact on particular groups of children, from Dawn Bowden. Just following on from your answer to Siân Gwenllian earlier about the number of vulnerable children in school, what's being done specifically to facilitate more of those children coming into a school setting or hub at the moment? I'm thinking about the 600 you've talked about, and I know, in one of my local authority areas of Merthyr, which is a very small authority, we're talking about the number of children identified as vulnerable running into thousands, not hundreds, and that's just in one authority. So, this is a particularly difficult issue to address, I appreciate, but how are we going to get more of these children into the hubs? kirsty williams am: Okay, Dawn. The first thing to say is that the issue of vulnerable children attending settings is one that is a challenge to not just Wales, but also to my colleagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. I'm pleased to say that we are working across Government departments—myself, obviously, and colleagues in education—with colleagues in social services to have a cross-Government approach to these issues. I think the first thing to say is that these are complex messages, because the overriding public health message from our Government has been to stay at home and children should be kept at home as much as possible, and to make sure that our hubs run smoothly, safely and effectively, we do need to limit the number of children who are attending those hubs. So, firstly, the fact that numbers are small is in some ways a success of our public health messages, because parents have been heeding those messages, but, of course, all of us will have concerns for some children who remain at home. So, I'm pleased to say that we have seen a doubling in the last week of the number of children. We're working with local authorities and they have assured us that children and young people with a social worker have been risk assessed on a multi-agency basis and are receiving support in a number of ways, and that includes having conversations about some of those children attending the hubs. Of course, some of our children who would be classed as vulnerable—and our definition of 'vulnerable' is one that is shared between the systems in England and Wales—could be children with a statement of special educational needs. For some of those children who, perhaps, have very intense health needs, actually, staying at home is the appropriate thing for that child and that family to do, and we're looking to support families, and local authorities and local education systems are looking to support families, in a number of ways. We also know that just because you don't have a social worker or a statement of special educational needs does not mean that a child may not be vulnerable, and schools are very aware of the needs of those children and have been carrying out regular telephone check-ins where they can—if the age of the child is appropriate—just to keep in touch with those families and those individual children. But we will continue to work across Government to encourage, where it is appropriate, children to attend settings, and, if it is not appropriate for children to be in a setting, that there is contact with those children and young people to ensure that they remain, and their families remain, supported. It's encouraging to hear you talk about the ongoing safeguarding of children that are at home and I assume, within that, appropriate referral mechanisms are still in place if teachers or anybody has any particular concern about a child. Similarly, with special educational needs, whereas some of those children benefit clearly from a one-to-one provision in a school, and they may not respond as well to remote working, or remote contact, with an SEN advisor, are you considering in any way any relaxation of the lockdown rule in particular for those children in terms of them being able to access the support that they need for their particular educational needs? kirsty williams am: Well, first of all, Dawn, you're absolutely right: my expectation is that schools should remain in contact with children and continue to identify vulnerable children, and schools should continue to refer children to children's services if they have any concerns, and that would also, of course, be the case for youth workers who may be keeping in contact with children. So, there is a professional expectation on all those that are working with our children and young people that, despite the circumstances they find themselves in, they should continue to report and refer cases if they see anything or hear or are told anything that makes them concerned about a child's welfare and safety. With regard to children with additional learning needs, I am aware that that can present a number of challenges to families and children, and perhaps Steve Davies could give some further details. We have been keen to work with local authorities to ensure specialist provision, where that is appropriate—so, if I could give you an example of my own local authority in Powys, they have two specialist centres available for children with more profound additional learning needs, and those centres are available—recognising, however, that, even with the provision of specialist hubs, it can be a challenge for some children with additional learning needs to find themselves outside of a routine. Hubs are often staffed on a rota basis and therefore children could be faced with staff that they are unfamiliar with. So, even when local authorities—and the vast, vast majority of them do—have specialist services in place, sometimes that might not be the best thing for a child's health and well-being. But perhaps Steve can give us further details of the conversations that have been taking place with directors of education to ensure that children with additional learning needs have access to the hubs and specialist support. steve davies: Yes, myself and colleague Albert Heaney—colleague-director—have been in regular touch with directors of education and directors of social services to make sure that these children and young people's needs are catered for. We are very aware of all of the special schools—profound and multiple learning difficulties, EBD schools and pupil referral units—that have been kept open in their own way, but also, in some cases, as hubs, to deliver those services for those children's needs, and we're pleased that the directors and the local authorities have responded so constructively. So, we have the details of every school that's open, the pupils who are attending, and we are clear that the risk assessments that the Minister referred to for children with special needs, as well as wider vulnerable groups—they are having risk assessments to make sure that, where there is a need identified for a pupil that is not currently attending a hub, then the local authority can be working with that child and with the parents. How is that, in practical terms, being applied if those children are not actually in school? kirsty williams am: You're right, Dawn: we have to consider how we can support children not only in their learning during this time, but also to recognise the very real impact that the pandemic will have on all of our mental health and well-being—recognising, of course, it is absolutely natural for all of us, including children and young people, to have fears and anxieties at this time. But, of course, there are issues around those children that would have currently been receiving school counselling, and also being able to be in a position to respond to a potential growth in the number of children that are receiving support. So, the additional money will be made available to local authorities to be able to increase and ramp up services to support children and families. In the immediacy, of course, that will have to be done in different ways than perhaps we've traditionally delivered services in the past, because of social distancing and lockdown rules, but we want to get some of these systems in place now, rather than waiting for everything to go back to normal. We need to be able to plan to offer services in the here and now, but also be able to plan for what potentially could be an increase in the demand of those services. So, we've been in close touch with local authorities, asking them what they believe that they will need and how they can use additional financial resources, and we've been very pleased to be able to secure that for them. dawn bowden am: So, that would include things like telephone and video support as well, I guess, then. So, that would include remote counselling as in a fashion that we're doing now, but also, as and when some of the restrictions are perhaps removed, looking at an enhanced family therapy, or a therapy approach. So, when we talk about counselling, I think it's important to recognise that there will be some flexibility around this money and it does not necessarily mean that local authorities have to use it on a one-to-one basis. That might not be appropriate for some children, especially our younger children and their families, and they can use that money to provide counselling or therapy—in the widest possible terms—that is the best method to support individual children and their families. But, clearly, we're having to do that in the confines of lockdown and social distancing at the moment. Some of that money can also be used to support the professional learning and the professional development of counsellors, because, of course, they may be being asked to work in a different way and we need to make sure that they have the appropriate skills and abilities to do that. lynne neagle am: Dawn, before you ask your final question, I've got a couple of supplementaries—firstly from Suzy, and then from Hefin. My question goes back to the comment you made earlier, Minister, about the number of children doubling—sorry, vulnerable children doubling—after the Easter break, if we can call it that. So, was that figure a recovery of a number of children that had been there before the Easter break, and are the people who are there still the same people as were there right at the beginning of the crisis and the lockdown? kirsty williams am: Suzy, what I believe that we're seeing in our schools is new pupils coming into school. So, there has been, I know, a real effort on behalf of educationalists and social services staff to really reach out to families and to make sure that they're aware of the support that is available out there for them and their children, and to be able to give them the confidence that there are—that the hubs are available for them. Those numbers are still small and, I believe, potentially, there is an opportunity to build on that and to have further conversations with families about the support that is available for vulnerable children, whether that—. The initial response—local authorities and schools worked incredibly fast and incredibly quickly to set up these hubs. We've seen an evolution in the weeks since that time and I am sure that we will continue to see some evolution in approaches. I imagine there are many, many parents in exactly the same position—I've heard from them. Should I have heard something or should I be proactive in pursuing it? kirsty williams am: I don't want to comment on personal cases— hefin david am: But there are many others in this position. kirsty williams am: —but what I would say is that if parents have concerns and want to have a conversation about what support is available to them and their children, they should contact their local education authority to have a conversation as to what support is available. dawn bowden am: Yes, my last question is really about the potential for the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their more affluent peers. Is that a concern for you? I'm thinking particularly in relation to those less affluent families in having access to technology and so on. What kind of concerns do you have about that and what are we looking to do to try to ensure that that doesn't actually play out? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Dawn. All of the statistics would tell us that learning loss and the gap, potentially, will affect those more vulnerable children the most. Clearly, we will want to consider that as we think about what the new normal for education may look like, or as we develop into future phases. Depending on where that child is in their educational journey, of course, the needs and the potential for loss are slightly different. So, for instance, when we're thinking about very young children, we could be thinking about a lack of social interaction and the development of oracy skills. Of course, that, potentially, then will have a knock-on to their ability to learn to read and then to write, for instance. For other children who are, perhaps, older and heading towards formal examinations, the challenge when they return to school will be a slightly different one. I'm not sure, Chair, whether you want me to give some further details about our continuity-of-learning plan and how we are looking to address digital disadvantage now, or whether there are questions later. lynne neagle am: Well, I've got a question on that coming up, so, if it's okay, Dawn, we'll go on to that now. Before we do that, I was just going to ask how the Welsh Government is paying due regard to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and, obviously, the right children and young people have to an education. I was going to ask you about the risk of inequality due to varying access to digital resources, which are so important in ensuring continuity of learning. Officials are very aware of our responsibilities towards children's rights in this regard and we are doing whatever we can to ensure that children have an equal opportunity and have equal access to learning at this time. We are fortunate in the regard that, because of previous decisions and investments, we have a strong base on which to build because we have our Hwb digital learning platform and because we have invested heavily in the national purchasing of Microsoft Office and Google for Education tools, which are available to all families. We have become the first, I think—we're certainly the first in the UK, and I'm not sure whether we're the first across the world, but I think we probably are—to deploy, for instance, Adobe Spark nationally. Officials are working with local authorities to ensure that all children have access to both the hardware and the connectivity they need to be able to participate in digital learning at this particular time. Just a final question from me: how exactly are we communicating to parents what the expectations are of them in terms of delivering this education at home now? Are there, for example, guidelines on recommended hours of home learning per day of the week or volume of work to be completed? How are we ensuring that parents know how best to lead their children through this at the moment? kirsty williams am: Firstly, can I recognise what a challenge this is? We've just heard from Hefin who is carrying on his day job as the Assembly Member, but is obviously trying to do that as well as care for and provide learning for his children, and I know, Chair, that you're doing the same, and I'm certainly trying to do the same, and it's a real challenge, it's not easy. Stay Learning' policy statement, advice is available to parents and carers on the Hwb platform as to what they best can do to support their children. I think the really important message that I've been trying to give to parents is not to be too hard on ourselves. And if they have concerns, they should be in contact with their child's school, but we do have specific advice and guidance to parents on the Hwb platform. Okay, we'll go on then to questions on higher education and post 16, and we'll come back to examinations, if that's okay. Before we leave continuity of learning, do you mind if I just ask this one question? lynne neagle am: No, that's fine. suzy davies am: Your comment, Minister, on working with local authorities to make sure that individuals have hardware: can you just give us a bit of detail on what working with local authorities actually means? In the process of that, is there any data gathering going on for those pupils who are being educated at home and the levels at which they're engaging? You know, are they sticking with it, or how many are dropping out? Because I think the two of those perhaps go together. So, I'm hoping to make an announcement tomorrow, if not later on this week, about some specific details around support for hardware and connectivity. We're working closely with local authorities to understand just that: to understand from the schools the number of schools that—and a number of them have already done this—have been lending Chromebooks, iPads and laptops to children, and also identifying children who are not perhaps engaging in the activities that have been made available. The first is to use the stock of equipment that they already have to be able to provide hardware to students. So, we have purchased on a national basis software that, when applied to an old piece of kit, essentially turns it into an out-of-the-box Chromebook. Because, as you can imagine, just like other things during a pandemic, there has been a rush to buy new stuff on the market and then there is a scramble and nobody can get what they need. So, we're utilisng kit that is already available in schools and local authorities, and we will look to backfill that to schools at a later point out of our EdTech investment programme. The other issue is, once a child has a Chromebook or a laptop or a device, issues around connectivity. So, we're also looking to purchase on a national level and distribute Mi-Fi connectivity, so students will be able to have access to Wi-Fi where they don't have that already. That's why we need to work closely with local authorities and schools to identify the level of that need and to make sure the stuff gets to the right children. So, if a child hasn't been engaging, is that because they just don't want to and they're voting with their feet—but clearly teachers need to have a conversation about that—or is that because the child simply does not have the ability to do that, and therefore we need to get that stuff out to those children? So, rather than just simply leaving it to local authorities to scramble around in a very crowded market to get the stuff that they will need, we're trying to do that on a national basis and deploy that to local authorities. So, our officials have been having conversations with each of our local authorities to ascertain what's already happened, and there is very good practice out there—schools have been proactive—but where there are gaps, what can we do as a national Government to be able to assist them to do that? We are repurposing some of the resources that we had previously identified for our EdTech investment, using those resources to fill this particular gap. When will vocational learners know what is happening with their assessments, and how will those who have no choice but to wait for a vocational assessment be supported? kirsty williams am: Okay. That's a very good question, Janet, because I know that there has been some concern and anxiety around vocational qualification students and how quickly we've been able to provide certainty for them. You'll be aware that Qualifications Wales have been able, in the last week, to be able to give that greater clarity. They have also published their approach to how health and social care qualifications will be managed, because, of course, those are part of the first set of reformed quals that we have done on a Wales basis. You are right, there are a group of students who fall into the category where there are technical qualifications that require a certificate of competency to be industry ready—I hope I've explained that correctly—and, therefore, we are working to understand how we can accommodate those students in these particular circumstances. But, at this stage, there may be some delay for that element of their qualification being delayed to a further date. What are your expectations for how A-level and GCSE qualifications will be awarded this summer, following the ministerial direction that you have issued to Qualifications Wales? For example, how is an appropriate balance being taken between recognising the progress of pupils in their coursework, mock examinations, and other work to date, and also, the potential of pupils who might have performed particularly well in their examinations this summer? kirsty williams am: Well, Janet, I understand—and today is a day where some students would have been undertaking practical examinations—I understand how devastating it has been to both students and teachers alike for the decision I had to take to cancel this summer's exam series. Qualifications Wales has made it very clear—and for people who would like more information, I would urge them to look at Qualifications Wales's website—how they will go about giving, allocating, and awarding a grade to our A-level and GCSE students. Firstly, teachers will be asked to submit a grade they believe that student would have obtained, should they have taken an exam. And, of course, teachers will have a range of data and their own professional judgment that they will use in awarding that grade. Once that information has been submitted to Qualifications Wales, there will be a process by which that data will be moderated; moderated from centre to centre and across the nation, thus giving us the chance to award a student a fair grade whilst being, and remaining, true to ensuring that we have a robust qualifications system, and allowing those students who find themselves at a critical stage of their education, where they are looking to move on to the next stages—that they will have the grades that will allow them to make decisions about their future. We're going to go on now, then, to the questions on higher and further education from Suzy Davies. I suppose my first question just goes back to the 16-year-olds at the moment and those who are looking forward to either going to college, the older ones going to university, there'll be apprenticeships, all kinds of future pathways for post 16. What's happening at school level, or even at college level, to get those students ready for the next steps, because, obviously, they're not in their usual environments and getting their usual programme of teaching? kirsty williams am: No, that's quite right, Suzy, and I should have said in answer to Janet's question, as well—I'm sure people already know, but just to get the point across—that A-level results day and GCSE day will run as normal across not just Wales, but England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is really important. You're right, Suzy—for those people that are coming to the end of one part of their education this is a particularly challenging time. You'll be aware that, last week, on Hwb, we were able to launch a programme for year 13 students to help them get ready for university. I'm very grateful to the HE sector in Wales, who've worked really hard with us on that. So, for instance, if you were a year 13 student or even a year 12 student that was thinking about or interested in areas around social policy, you could have tuned into a social policy lecturer at Swansea University. If you go to the Hwb website, you will be able to see that there are subject listings, everything from animal science through to law, politics, history and science, with links through to higher education and further education courses that students can avail themselves of. There's also a section on preparation for essential study skills, whether that is report writing or academic writing. So, there is a range of activities and courses available for year 13, so that children—'children'; they're all children to me—young people can get themselves—. They don't have to stop learning, and they can get themselves ready for the next stage of their education. Again, for those children, perhaps, who are coming to the end of their GCSEs, there is a range of information, either within their own schools or within their local colleges about things that can keep them learning. So, for instance, I'm aware of one school where you can go onto the website and there are recommendations of, for instance, what you could be reading over the summer if you're interested in doing this particular A-level in September. I know that there are also moves in schools and in colleges to be able to make sure that those children don't miss out on really important careers advice at this time, as well, and information, so they can make informed decisions. I know that people are working hard to link up children to advice services that are available so that they can make those really important future decisions with the advice of either a teacher or other professional so that they've got those options. You'll be aware that, for the last couple of years, we've been able to send Welsh children to the Yale global summer school. That's devastating for those year 12s who had worked so hard and had won a place on that programme. They will now be able to attend the Yale global scholars programme virtually and remotely, because Yale have moved that programme online. Before I move on to my next question, can you give me some sort of sense of how that Hwb domain is being populated? Where is all this information being sourced from? Presumably, they'll be working with partners, but what does that look like? kirsty williams am: Oh, my goodness. Yes, absolutely— suzy davies am: [Inaudible.] kirsty williams am: Yes, we're working very hard. So, everything from our work with the BBC, for instance, and BBC Bitesize through to our FE colleges and our HE institutions, as well as other organisations in the third sector who are looking to provide those opportunities. Can I just say that, last week, we were looking at, every day, in the region of well over 150,000 logins a day into Hwb? suzy davies am: Well, that's great. Just going back to some of Janet's questions and the assessed grades, I want to talk to you about the unconditional offers and where we are with that at the moment for entry to universities, because there's going to be a scramble now of the available students for further education, but primarily higher education institutions, across the UK. Is the moratorium on unconditional offers still standing? Are there conversations going on to extend that moratorium? Otherwise, this scramble is going to potentially negatively affect our universities quite considerably. We continue to keep in close touch with colleagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland and in the Westminster Government around these issues. Officials are also in touch with UCAS, and in the last couple of days I've had at least three meetings with representatives of the Welsh higher education sector to discuss these matters. I think they're getting, around now, the money going into their bank account that they would normally have expected at this time of year. suzy davies am: What's happening to those students who would normally be living in digs somewhere but are now living at home? Are they likely to be asked to reimburse part of the cost, because obviously it's not as expensive to live at home as away, and what's likely to be happening with the maintenance loans over the summer holiday period, potentially? Because we've had a period now where students can't top up their maintenance loans by going out and working on weekends or working in the evenings, or whatever, so their income has been impacted. Just in the round, what kind of conversations are happening around that? Again, it's probably a four-nation approach, I would imagine. You are correct to say that our student support regime does allow for a lower payment to be made to those students that stay at home during their studies, but I want to reassure students that there will be no change to their student support payments just because they have left their universities and have decided to go home. Also, we are continuing, it should be important to say, to pay education maintenance allowance at this time for our FE students that are eligible for that, even though, obviously, for EMA there is an attendance requirement, but clearly that is not appropriate to enforce at the moment. You are correct—this is a worrying time for many students in higher education, especially for those who are looking to graduate at this time and are going out into an economy that has been tremendously badly hit by the pandemic. At this time, we continue to have conversations with NUS Wales about what can be done within a Welsh context, but, as you quite rightly say, also within a UK context, to support students who may have been affected. We are continuing—on our webpage we have a frequently asked questions section that advises students in the first instance, especially when it comes, for instance, to the cost of accommodation—to have those discussions, and I'm very grateful that, in some cases, some of our institutions have been able to waive or partially waive accommodation fees where students have vacated their accommodation and have returned to their usual home address. But we will continue to have dialogue with NUS Wales and with our counterparts across the country to look to see what more we can do to support students at this time. suzy davies am: Thank you for that answer, and, yes, I was pleased to see that announcement through the NUS as well, so well done to those accommodation providers who have a heart. I think we'll all have seen the Universities UK document that explains some of the difficulties that they're going to be running into if this proceeds much further. My understanding is that the main emphasis at the moment is to try and get all the universities across the UK through this initial period of difficulty by releasing as much money as possible. I can see that your figure to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales was a little bit down on last year's letter—not that there's been a remit letter yet, but an indication. Are you releasing that money earlier so that they can use it more swiftly, or does that not matter? lynne neagle am: Before you come in, Minister, that is going to have to be the last question, just to make you aware of that, because we are coming up to the end of our time. kirsty williams am: Of course, Suzy, we are working closely with Universities Wales and have a lot of sympathy for the proposals that have come forward from Universities UK, which Wales's universities have been a part of forming. Stability in the first instance is really important to us, which is why we've been able to give an indication to HEFCW about resources that are available, and we've been very clear to HEFCW that we want to be as flexible as possible in how they use those resources to support institutions. That potentially would mean reprofiling the way in which money gets out to institutions, but clearly we will need to have an ongoing discussion about how we respond to the immediacy of the issues facing HE, how we can get stability for the next academic year, and how we then can support the sector through what is a really challenging time for them. We will do that in a Welsh context and we will continue to do that also in a UK context, because you will have seen the scale of some of the figures that have been talked about in terms of the impact on the HE sector at this time. Well, we have come to the end of our time, and, as to anything that we didn't ask, we will have to write to the Minister. Can I just thank the Minister and her officials for your attendance today? We know how busy you are dealing with the pandemic and we very much welcome this opportunity to have this discussion with you. Can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Okay<doc-sep>I'm very pleased to welcome Meilyr Rowlands, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector, Estyn; Jassa Scott, strategic director at Estyn; and Claire Morgan, strategic director at Estyn. Thank you for the papers upfront, in which you say that the most striking feature of the education system, looking forward, of course is the curriculum and the change that that's bringing. How can we be sure that, during this period of change, standards don't slip? And also, from the point of view of scrutiny, will we be back in a situation where we're being told, 'You can't compare one set of results against the previous year's results, because of the nature of the change'? meilyr rowlands: Bore da, bawb. I think any kind of major educational reform has got risks attached to it, particularly if those changes were made too quickly. I think this process of reform has been going on in the background for a few years now, so I think there is a track record of standards and provision not slipping. So, overall, I think we can be fairly confident that standards won't slip during this period of preparation. suzy davies am: Can I just ask: is that based on your evidence around primary schools, where the sort of ethos that we've seen in the curriculum has been already articulated through the foundation phase? meilyr rowlands: The track record I'm talking about is across the board, so it's very difficult to think of anything that's actually got worse over the last three or four years, so it's difficult to say that standards of provision is slipping. It might not be improving as quickly as we would like, but the purpose of major curriculum and, more generally, educational reform is to make sure that we do get a more substantial sort of improvement. A large number of schools and teachers and leaders have been part of preparing the new curriculum and all the associated work, as well as doing the day job. I think their commitment and their engagement with curriculum reform, and engagement with wider education reform, is to be congratulated. So, I think going forward, we must make sure that that is continued; that this process that's called co-construction—engaging with the profession, making sure that they're behind all the changes—continues. I think that's what's going to make sure that we don't see any slippage. suzy davies am: Okay, and on that point of comparing year on year, we will be able to make those comparisons legitimately then? meilyr rowlands: Yes, certainly, in terms of our inspection outcomes and our inspection work, yes. Can I just ask you then about the difference in preparedness between primary and secondary schools, which I've just mentioned previously, and also what your views are on the impact of funding for schools on that as well? Because we're in a situation where a number of primary schools have got surplus funds, sometimes that's because of end of year additional funds just being magicked up, but there is a serious worry that so many secondary schools are in deficit and that, overall, secondary schools are in deficit. Is there a correlation between those two positions, that secondary schools may be less ready for this than primary schools? meilyr rowlands: I think it's probably true to say that secondary schools have a greater challenge than primary schools generally in terms of preparedness for the new curriculum. With any sort of education reform, you've got that danger of people wanting to see change as soon as possible on the one hand, and on the other hand you need time to pilot things, to make sure that people have the right professional learning and make sure that there's opportunity for evaluation and thinking and so forth. suzy davies am: Sorry, that could be difficult to do if a school doesn't have money to create that space, couldn't it? meilyr rowlands: Yes. One, about the difference between primary and secondary: I think what I'm saying there is I think the fact that the new curriculum is going to be brought in for all the years in primary, but it's going to be phased in year by year for secondary is a recognition of that difference. In terms of funding, probably everyone in this room, and certainly me included, would like to see more money for the education system—any educationalist would like to see that. But, you know, that is a decision for local and central Government to decide how much they can afford. suzy davies am: Can I ask, just to keep it on track, are you finding that that's having an impact on secondary schools particularly—their ability to make space to get their heads around the curriculum? meilyr rowlands: I don't think you can make that straightforward correlation. But if you do look at surpluses and reserves, they have been more or less constant for primary schools over a long period of time, but they have declined for secondary schools. So, I think there probably is an argument for saying that we need to look at the funding of secondary schools in particular because, overall, they're in deficit now. The other thing that's worth saying about funding is that even a small decrease in real terms can be disproportionately time consuming to manage. So, you know, if you have a large school and you have to maybe make one member of staff redundant, it can have a real big effect on the morale in the school. But also the time it takes for the headteacher and the senior staff to make those decisions can take their eye off the educational ball because they're looking at these financial and staffing issues. The final question from me is: there's a general concern about the number of teachers that we have in the system at the moment, particularly at secondary level and in particular subjects as well. How do you think we can improve that? What impact is it likely to have on the ability of secondary schools to really get a grip on this? meilyr rowlands: Obviously, the most important resource for the education system is the teachers. So, it is a concern that recruitment is getting more and more difficult and that targets for initial teacher training are not being hit. And we're not seeing them hit, if I remember correctly, even in primary, let alone secondary. So, there is a challenge, and I think we've got to look at this in the round. We've got to make sure that we have both a long-term strategy and a shorter term strategy for this. So, long term, we've got to make sure that education is an attractive option for young people and more mature people to want to go into. I think there's a general acceptance now that that needs to be higher up on the agenda, that people need to take that seriously, and there's work going on regarding the workload issue. suzy davies am: I suppose what I'm coming to, and I will finish with this, Chair, is, we're asking our existing workforce to undertake a fair bit of continuous professional development—let's call it that—in order to get ready for this curriculum when they've barely got time for lunch as it is. Do you think that's going to have an impact on the ability of secondary schools to get to grips with this, albeit that there'll be a phasing in? meilyr rowlands: Yes. I think the new curriculum, one of the things about the new curriculum is that it re-professionalises the profession. And one of the reasons why teaching maybe hasn't been that attractive a profession is that teachers in the past have just been delivering a set curriculum, and now they've got a much more creative part in deciding for themselves how to teach something and what to teach. I think we need to have a much more varied set of routes into teaching, so I welcome some of the part-time Open University courses, for example. So, there are lots of ways—we were talking about maybe converting people from primary into secondary, particularly in Welsh-medium, where there's a shortage. Just before going on to that, just to pick up on that last point that you made about the shortage of teachers and losing teachers during the first year of their training. Has Estyn done any themed work on that particular issue, or do you intend to do anything on that? Also, looking at the financial incentives and how they compare with the situation in England, for example; do we need, perhaps, to think about financial incentives, not just for specific subjects, but for going to schools where there are particular issues, perhaps? meilyr rowlands: Well, yes, there are currently discussions ongoing between us and the Government about working in those early years for teachers. I know that Professor Mick Waters is looking at this currently, and we've had the discussion with him. Now, we are, of course, looking at initial teacher training, but we haven't looked at the first couple of years for many a year. And for your information, I've commissioned a piece of work on that particular issue, and that work will be published in due course. sian gwenllian am: In terms of the secondary schools, that’s where the problem lies, isn’t it, rather than the primary sector. How much of a concern is it to you that children’s chances of going to a secondary school that is good or better appear to be 50:50, and that, indeed, over 10 per cent of secondary schools are judged to be failing and 12 per cent are under Estyn review? How much of a concern is that to you? meilyr rowlands: Well, it is of concern to us, of course. I hope that we will have an opportunity to talk about the positive aspects of the education system in Wales, because there are a number of good things we can report also. The primary sector, the special sector, post-16—there are many sectors that are doing well, and I think a story that's particularly positive this year is that we have seen pupil referral units improving. We have seen examples of excellent practice in that sector for the first time in many a year, and we've also seen excellent practice in independent special schools, which is also a sector—. But, you're right, of course, the biggest concern for the system, I would say, is secondary schools, and that is an issue of leadership, and also of the quality of the teaching and learning. So, I believe that there is a need to find a long-term solution, as I mentioned previously, and also a short-term solution to this problem. In the long term, to improve the quality of teaching and learning—well, that’s the main aim of the new curriculum. It will take time, as we mentioned previously; it will take longer in secondary schools, and that's for a number of reasons, and I have discussed the challenges that are additional for secondary schools in previous annual reports. It’s more difficult to engage with the parents of older children than younger children, and that’s an important factor. That’s one of the reasons why I believe it’s important that we do have community schools that ensure that the parents are part of the school’s life and take an interest in the education of their children. We also know that qualifications take a very prominent role in secondary schools’ mindsets, and, in some cases, perhaps excessively so. So, we need to ensure that those qualifications are reformed as a result of the reform of the curriculum, and, of course, Qualifications Wales is carrying out that work currently. In primary schools, for example, the greatest and most obvious difference, I would say, is that you’ve got one teacher who looks after a child for a whole year, and that teacher can identify the needs of the pupil very well over a period of time, getting to know the child and, possibly, the family very well. It’s much more complicated for secondary school to do that; there have to be systems put in place for that. But in the short term, what is important is that those schools that cause concern receive much more support, and that is why I am glad and do welcome what's being piloted currently, which is a system of supporting these schools, the multi-agency approach, that is. So, that is something that we have been calling for for quite a long period of time and piloted ourselves a few years ago. sian gwenllian am: You said previously that it's a cause of concern for you that these schools that are failing or underachieving are not identified early enough. Are there signs that that's improving? meilyr rowlands: Well, one of the things that's very positive about this pilot scheme is that it's not just the schools that are officially causing concern that are a part of the pilot scheme, that is, the schools that we have identified, through inspections, as needing to be put in a statutory category. So, there are schools involved in the pilot scheme that the authorities and the consortia have identified themselves as schools that are at risk of causing concern. I believe that it's fair to say that we have not reached a point yet where we have a system of agreed criteria in relation to identifying these schools yet. I think that there has been initial work that has been commissioned or that is about to arrive in relation to that, and the types of measures you would expect us to take account of would be dissatisfaction from parents, staff leaving, a change in leadership. We use surveys with the children, for instance, and that gives you quite a good idea of whether a school is possibly facing difficulties. So, there's not one single criteria alone that will tell you, 'This is a school that is at risk of causing concern', but taken together, having a set of criteria that everyone has agreed would be a good way of monitoring schools, I believe. Well, we'll be coming on to that middle tier later on, and perhaps that's where the problem lies, namely that if there isn't an agreed system from consortia and yourselves, perhaps that's where the focus needs to be. meilyr rowlands: I would say that it's not the identification of the schools that is the greatest problem. The greatest problem is ensuring that there is support for them and that the support is multi-agency support, where all the agencies that support these schools are working together. sian gwenllian am: Well, how long does it take, therefore, for a school to move from an improvement category, in terms of special measures, to be escalated then? Because one sees sometimes that there's an excellent school, and within five years' time, it's in the red. meilyr rowlands: Well, that would be something quite unusual—to move from excellent to red. claire morgan: On average, secondary schools that are in need of special measures take just over two years, on average. With primary schools, of course, it's much shorter because the issues are far less complex; it's easier to bring about improvements in teaching. When you've got large numbers of staff, you've got large secondary schools, it takes time to actually bring about those improvements, but it is a long time, just over two years, when you think that some pupils, maybe in key stage 4 for the two years—. Certainly, we want to see schools coming out of category much quicker, and this is where the multi-agency approach certainly is a positive step. They focus on bringing about improvement in the areas of the school that are weakest, and it is the responsibility of everybody involved—that is: ourselves, the regions, local authorities, the schools themselves and their governing bodies—to look at how they can best support the school to bring about that improvement. So, it's getting an agreement on what the issues are, and then planning the support so that we avoid duplication, but that we support the school in the areas they need more support. But, as Meilyr already said, there are some schools involved in that particular pilot that are at danger of causing serious concern. And just finally from me, for the time being at least, the financial situation; we've spoken about that already this morning. If funding was injected into the system tomorrow, say, what would you spend it on? What aspects would benefit from that additional funding? meilyr rowlands: Were you asking about something specific there? sian gwenllian am: In the schools themselves, if you were a school leader, what would you— meilyr rowlands: Oh, if I were a school leader. How would you use any additional funding that would flow into the school? meilyr rowlands: It's difficult to make that decision, because every school is different. It is important, of course, that leaders do have the power and the ability to make those decisions themselves. But, certainly, in the short term, the type of thing I would have thought would be to prepare for the new curriculum. The schools that have been a part of developing the curriculum have been in a fortunate position in that they've had plenty of time to think about this. So, it's now time—and this was the chief message of my annual report this year—for every school in Wales to start to think. Because I think that the new curriculum is truly an opportunity to take a forward step in terms of how we teach and learn within schools. But that means that time is needed for schools to think this through and, in that thinking, to contact the community, to talk to their children as well, to see what the community in its broader sense would like to see being in the new curriculum, because it's up to every school. Although the new curriculum sets a framework, it is up to each and every school to decide what they're going to teach, and what they're teaching in order to prepare their young people for this new world that we have in the twenty-first century. Therefore, to give you a somewhat superficial answer, I would be setting time aside for the training of teachers. jassa scott: Can I just add one thing there? I think what we've seen over the years recently is that local authorities, to some extent, have safeguarded the funding that goes to the schools, but the effect of that is that we've seen less funding going into some of the local authority services; for example, those services that support well-being, that promote attendance, and that perhaps support behaviour and assistance for schools. So, I think that all of those factors contribute to how schools can support and assist their pupils, and to improve themselves. So, I think that side of things is important as well—in the school or in the local authority, if funding is available, it should be allocated to all of those things so that those services can also support the children to succeed. lynne neagle am: Just before we move on to the middle tier, if I can just ask about the quality of teaching? There's been a consistent message from Estyn that that is the weakest part of the system in Wales. The Government recognises that and has invested a very significant amount of money in that area, yet it's still an issue again in your annual report. What is your assessment of whether we are seeing the improvements we need to see in the quality of teaching? meilyr rowlands: I think, in nearly all the elements of our framework, the picture is fairly similar. So, in terms of quality of teaching, we have seen gradual but quite small-scale improvements in primary. In secondary, it's more or less level; we haven't seen it getting particularly better or particularly worse. One of the things that's really important to realise is that the curriculum is about the quality of teaching. It is about the teaching and learning; those are two sides of the same coin, if you like. From the perspective of the pupil, it's the learning; from the perspective of the teacher, it's the teaching. I think there's no doubt and I think there's general agreement that, in order to have a step change in the quality of teaching and learning—. I think it was Einstein who said that if you keep on doing the same thing, you'll get the same result. So, you're going to have to change something, and what's changing is the curriculum. And that's exactly what all schools need to do now: to think how does this new curriculum affect them in their particular school, in their particular circumstances, in the context of their particular children. How can they use this opportunity now to improve the teaching and learning in their school? lynne neagle am: Siân. sian gwenllian am: It does cause one concern, because if the teaching and learning standards just stay the same in the secondary sector, and we know that 12 per cent of secondary schools are under Estyn review and 11 per cent of them are in special measures, we're talking about half of the schools almost, and no improvement in the teaching quality in general. So, there is a major cohort of children captured in that situation, and then there's a new curriculum that comes in. I see the opportunities, but these schools that are doing well are going to go, 'Wow, up there', but schools are there in the bottom layer and one is genuinely concerned about those children in those schools. Isn't that where the focus should be and any additional funding that's allocated? You talked about releasing teachers for training, but perhaps it's in those particular schools that we need to focus. meilyr rowlands: I do agree that the best schools will welcome the opportunities and that their standards will improve even more. But then, with regard to the other schools, in a way, there are two very broad categories, which are those that need only a little support just to help them to improve—. And I believe that the new curriculum and the general support that's going to be surrounding that will be the solution for those schools. But you're right to say that there is another smaller cohort that has a much greater need for support, and they're going to find coping with the new curriculum difficult, because they'll also have many other problems. And you're not talking about a huge number of schools—some 200 secondary schools is what we have in Wales, so that percentage is relatively small, the number is relatively small—but they need much greater support. I don't think it's enormous, but certainly there's a certain amount of funding that is needed to offer those schools that support. The Minister recently told the committee that a number of recent Estyn inspections of local authorities' education services have been disappointing. Do you agree? That, of course, is based on the inspections carried out under the current cycle. But of those nine we've put three into category—we've identified them as causing concern—and they're Pembrokeshire, Powys and Wrexham. So, we've talking quite a bit about secondary schools this morning, and I think that, again, is a factor in those local authorities. You say that the proportion of secondary schools causing concern is a challenge for several local authorities and for the system as a whole. Which local authorities are these—you've probably named them all—and have these been inspected yet under the current cycle? meilyr rowlands: I think you're taking about three secondary schools in a category in Pembrokeshire, Wrexham and Torfaen. So, we've inspected Pembrokeshire and Wrexham already, but we haven't inspected Torfaen yet. And we've inspected Powys and Newport, but we haven't inspected Gwynedd yet. So, in answer to your question: we've inspected most of those, but not all of them. What is your latest assessment of how well the regional consortia are supporting and driving school improvement? Does this vary across the different regions? meilyr rowlands: It certainly does vary, but I'll ask Jassa to go into more detail. jassa scott: We haven't directly inspected the regional consortia since—I think 2017 was the last time we did some direct monitoring with them. But I think, over the last three years, we do feel that they've improved their knowledge. So, they did take a little while to embed, and I think that came across when we did the work that we did with them back in 2017. But, more recently, they've improved their knowledge of individual schools' strengths and areas for improvement, and they are using this knowledge better to support and challenge schools, and particularly schools causing concern. But obviously, as we've been talking about this morning, there's still work to do. I think they've prioritised well the work that schools are doing around literacy and numeracy, but their support for schools to develop digital competence has been a bit weaker. Even though we've had the framework as an early part of the curriculum developments there, we haven't seen quite the focus that we've seen on other areas. I think for schools causing concern, what we found—and we do look at their work through our local authority inspection, so we are getting some first-hand evidence of their impact through that—they're not always focused, in those schools causing concern, on improving teaching and learning, so actually getting in and looking and working with teachers and with staff to actually make improvements there. I think, generally, their support for secondary schools has had less impact across the consortia than it has for primary schools, and I think sometimes that's because they're struggling to recruit appropriate specialists, to support with secondary, or perhaps they don't have the depth of strong practice that we talked about earlier within their region. So, they're having to work a bit harder to find effective practice, to share practice and to get the secondary expertise and knowledge to support those schools. We will be, over the next year, looking specifically at the work of consortia to support curriculum reform work. But that's one of the areas we've discussed, about doing some specific work on over the next year to look in a bit more depth. janet finch-saunders am: So, what is the cycle of inspections for regional consortia, and how robust are those inspections? What areas do you cover? jassa scott: Well, regional consortia aren't actually statutory entities at the moment, and we don't have specific inspection powers relating to regional consortia. So, on each of our local authority inspections, there will be, usually, an area that we're looking at that relates to school improvement, and that would involve us looking at the work of the consortia that the local authority has commissioned. What we've agreed with Welsh Government is that, over the next few years, we will take a thematic approach. So, the first area that we've said is that we'll look specifically at how each of them is supporting curriculum reform, and report on that. So, that will report specifically on the different ones, but it wouldn't be the same as doing an inspection of their work at this time. janet finch-saunders am: Should they be on a statutory footing? jassa scott: Well, I think that's something to be discussed over the next few years. There's, obviously, local government legislation that has been debated recently, which has the potential to create corporate joint committees, and school improvement was one of the areas that is being considered there. So, there may be an opportunity, if that's created, to think how we then adapt inspection to look specifically at that. I think we do get a handle on their work through the local authority and, ultimately, it's looking at what that consortia brings to that local authority and to the schools and the pupils in that area that's the important bit, I think, ultimately, to see the impact there. So, we are looking at them in that way, and then taking that thematic approach, but we'll keep reviewing it over the next couple of years. And what are Estyn's views on the latest position regarding regional working in south-west and mid Wales? Would it be preferable for school improvement advisers to be based in the consortium, Education through Regional Work, rather than each local authority employing their own, as is the case at present? meilyr rowlands: If I can just go back to the last question as well, what we did in order to inspect regions was we paused our local authority inspection cycle back in 2014, I think, for about three years. So, then, we spent time looking at regions, basically, because we didn't have the resource to do both at the same time. So, we're in negotiation with Welsh Government currently, so that, going forward, we can look at local authorities and regions at the same time. If regions become statutory entities, that would be in legislation, and then you could have legislation that gives us directly the powers to inspect them, which we don't currently have. But, as Jassa said, currently, what we intend to do in the short is to do some thematic work on that. In terms of ERW, they were the region that, at the end of the last cycle of regional inspections, we were still monitoring. So, for example, the chair of the joint committee has resigned, the managing director remains a temporary appointment and there are no clear plans for a permanent leadership. Some of the leadership team have left—the capacity has gone down—and various staff that were appointed last summer have already left. The budget has not been agreed and certain key meetings—executive board and joint committee meetings—have been cancelled. So, we are particularly worried about ERW, and, because of that, we will be going in to visit them in April—next month—and we'll be visiting all of the authorities to make sure that they do have a plan for an appropriate school improvement service going forward. jassa scott: Yes, I think you asked a specific question about, you know, which is better. I think our view has been that, generally, the local authorities are too small to deliver that whole range of school improvement services, particularly given the national reform agenda at the moment. We felt last summer, when we went to ERW, that they'd managed to reach the best possible model, given the constraint they've placed, collectively, on themselves—that they want to deliver aspects of school improvement locally, through the local authorities, and have some central capacity. So, we felt that, given that they wanted to do some locally and some centrally, enough thought had been put into that structure last summer and that it could be workable. There were key aspects such as support for secondary schools causing concern and there was some capacity centrally that could support areas such as Powys. Unfortunately, as Meilyr has described, some of those aspects have since been disbanded or those staff who were on secondment have gone back, so I think it is a key risk, particularly for some of those authorities you've talked about that are causing concern, such as Powys or Pembrokeshire—that they haven't necessarily got that local capacity to support their schools causing concern. So, you've got some concerns within school capacity and you've got concerns about local authority capacity, and what you don't have there now is that collective capacity centrally that might support them. So, that's why we're going to go and do a slightly more detailed link visit to try to understand how they are mitigating the risks that we see are arising as a result of some of those things that have happened recently. Our understanding is that there's a joint committee meeting of ERW on 19 March, so, hopefully, after that point, we'll have a little bit more information about how they're planning to manage that collective set of services going forward—it's a little bit of an unknown at the moment. meilyr rowlands: You were asking, 'Would it be better for every authority to have their own team?' But, before regions were invented, if you like, we were saying consistently that they tended to be too small. So, you had Cynnal in the north west, you had the Education and School Improvement Service, you had Gwent—so, they naturally did come together in groups, maybe a little bit smaller than the current regions, but they, of their own accord, produced something not very dissimilar to a region. lynne neagle am: Siân, did you have a supplementary? sian gwenllian am: Yes, just on ERW. Does the fact that there is a dispute on the highest level feed down to the school and to the children? Are the children in south-west and mid Wales affected by this? Are standards decreasing in that part of Wales? meilyr rowlands: Well, it's difficult to say directly, but we have inspected nine authorities and two of those are in that area, so, the lack of support at that level, as Jassa was saying, may be the reason why those authorities are suffering difficulties. jassa scott: And it is clear that many people across that area are expending energy and time discussing these issues. Any reorganisation does take energy out of the system, so it is clear that that time isn't then being spent, perhaps, on investment in improving schools and supporting staff in schools. So, as Meilyr says, it's not clear, but a lot of energy is being expended in that particular discussion that is ongoing. janet finch-saunders am: What disadvantages could there be from Neath Port Talbot's intention to withdraw from regional working via ERW? And I've got to be honest, up in the north, I know that there are concerns about regional consortia, and when local authorities are under pressure financially, it questions, sometimes, the value of regional consortia. So, what disadvantages could there be from Neath Port Talbot's intention to withdraw from regional working via ERW? meilyr rowlands: I think we've talked in general terms and we feel that local authorities probably are too small on their own. In general terms, you can't say that any particular authority couldn't, maybe, put things together in such a way that it's effective. Also, it has a knock-on effect on the rest of the consortium, if one withdraws. I don't know whether, Jassa, you've got anything to add to the general points we've made. jassa scott: I think, what you've alluded to there, it has the potential to be a destabilising factor across the whole of the national model that we've got for supporting school improvement at a time where Welsh Government are kind of relying heavily on that consortium model to help support curriculum reform and to drive professional learning and be the conduit for lots of the aspects of reform that we've talked about. So, I think that potential risk of any destabilising across the system is a disadvantage generally. And I think it's just what I've already talked about in terms of being a distraction at a crucial time for support where schools need to feel that they're confident in where they need to go for support. I should say that we're planning, as part of that visit that we do in April, to survey schools in that region about the support that they're getting, be that from their authority or from the central teams in ERW. That's something we did at the time when we did the inspections previously, and we thought it would be helpful to get some first-hand views of any disadvantages or impact that they might be feeling, really. And then, finally, for me:what involvement has Estyn had with the strategic education delivery group chaired by Professor Dylan Jones and what are your expectations for how it will improve the work of the middle tier? meilyr rowlands: We've been members of that group right from the beginning. I personally am on it and colleagues are on it as well, and I'm a member of the sub-group that does some of the background work for that group as well, and Estyn has given several presentations to that group. The rather obvious thing is that you get all the strategic educational organisations together in one room, but it had never been done before, as far as I know. I'm a very firm believer in making those relationships, building those relationships, so that people understand what each of us contributes to the whole of the education system. We need to have that forum to be able to make sure that we're clear about what each of our roles is. In your report you talked about in early settings where skills development is less effective, that children begin to feel at a very early age that they can't do certain things. I don't know whether that is anecdotal evidence or is that specific outcome-based evidence—whatever, it's quite worrying. But what do you think the long-term effect on a child's development has in that respect? claire morgan: It's probably worth saying that skill development is a strength in about three quarters of our schools—primary schools and early years settings. But in a minority of schools and settings, as you've picked up, children are often introduced to things too early. So, they're introduced to phonics, they're introduced to learning to read, when they're not at that developmental stage. And really, long term, it means the children lose confidence, because if they're introduced to these things too early they don't succeed, they tend to need additional support, and it can give them a negative impression, it can give them negative thoughts about their ability. So, we need to address that, and really it's about— dawn bowden am: Sorry, what sort of age range are we talking about here? claire morgan: These would be children from three to five. dawn bowden am: And is there something, then, in that—and I don't think there's much we can do about that, but it may be in terms of the way that the schools or the early learning settings address this—you will have children at a very young age that have almost a year's difference in their age group, so they're born just before 1 September or just after 1 September? So, that's a huge gap, isn't it, at that point in their development? claire morgan: Yes. dawn bowden am: Is that not being addressed in a way that those children are being taught and approached at that age? claire morgan: Yes. In terms of reading and literacy skills, we still remain quite low in the Programme for International Student Assessment ratings for reading, and I know there is a particular concern about the impact on boys in that regard. What do you think are the most pressing priorities that face them around reading and literacy? meilyr rowlands: I think literacy has been, and still is, and still needs to be a top priority. , literacy clearly is something that underpins the rest of education, so it really does need to be a top priority. For example, we've given a lot of attention to writing over the years, and making sure that children get the opportunity to write in an extended way, not just short sentences, but having the opportunity to have extended writing, and there's some evidence that that now is beginning to have an effect. So, it's not just reading small little snippets—we need to encourage children to have a love for reading and read whole books. So, I gave a little bit of attention to that in the annual report—that that needs attention. I think the other thing I would emphasise is that this is not just for the foundation phase, it's not just for very young children—it's really important at key stage 2 and in secondary school. One of the things we have been worried about, and I think there was some reflection of this in PISA, is that there are strengths in reading in Wales. So, PISA, for example, said that children in Wales are very good at comparing lots of little snippets, but what they're saying, and they're saying this themselves, is that the love of books is decreasing, and the number of children who read regularly whole books. So, I think there is something there for teachers to set and model a good example, to show their own interest in reading, to encourage children to read themselves. dawn bowden am: It's probably a wider societal problem as well, isn't it? I'm thinking about gaming, electronic gaming, computers. I think there is some sort of link with the digital world, and the way people read—the actual technique of reading, is evolving. But I think reading is so important, and developing a complex vocabulary is so important in being able to communicate, in order to get a good job, to have enjoyment out of life—all of those things are so important. We ourselves are going to give this quite a lot of priority in future, so we're doing a major piece of work on language acquisition, which will cover some of this next year. Every year one of our thematics is the major bit of work we do, and we try to support that with a conference. So, that will be the focus that we give to our work next year—it is on language acquisition. Just one other supplementary on that, I guess, is whether you have a good idea of how many young people are coming out of school at 16—so, those that are not staying on to do A-levels—and are coming out with an inability to read or white. Do we know what the figure is for that? meilyr rowlands: I can't tell you that off the top of my head, but I'm sure that there will be evidence. jassa scott: There has been a shift in that there's been continued emphasis in post-16 education and training around literacy and picking that up. In apprenticeships they'll use essential skills and so on to try and get that basic level of literacy as well, so there is an emphasis. I think one of the worrying indications, maybe, that post-16 sectors find is that sometimes even when learners are coming out with a basic qualification in a GCSE, potentially in English or a literature subject, they don't necessarily have a really good foundation of some of the basic skills as well. Could I just move you on—? Sorry— meilyr rowlands: The only thing I would add to that is, I guess, it's quite small, the number of people who don't have basic reading. I think one of the things we need to emphasise is that learning reading is something you do throughout your life, and what we need to do is to develop, in particular, pupils' higher level reading skills. The fact that they can just read isn't the end of the story; they need to be developing those higher level reading skills and continuing to widen the range of things they read, and be able to develop their vocabulary at a higher level. meilyr rowlands: Absolutely, yes—those higher level skills of comprehension and inference and those sorts of things. Can I just move you on, then, to numeracy and whether you can tell us if you're satisfied with the progress in numeracy, because I think we were doing better on the PISA results in maths in Wales than we did previously? So, what are your thoughts on that? meilyr rowlands: I think there is a fairly clear good news story here. PISA shows improvements and a lot of that can be attributed, I think, to the new GCSE mathematics numeracy. I think there's much less predictability in that work; you can't approach it in a formulaic way, either the pupils or the teachers in terms of teaching it. It's about applying what you've learnt in the core mathematics lessons to new situations in subjects across the curriculum. I think that that GCSE numeracy has built on the work that's been done lower down on the national numeracy framework, which has the same philosophy of applying that mathematics knowledge in a problem-solving situation. My final question, Chair, is: in your view, to what extent is Wales on track to meet the target of 500 points in each of the domains in the 2020-1 cycle for PISA? meilyr rowlands: I think that that target is somewhat arbitrary, but assuming that we continue on this journey that we are on—the current change programme of the new curriculum and so forth—I think we would expect to see those improvements we've seen in science and in mathematics to continue. The only other thing I would add is that there is some research that indicates or suggests that the effect of schools is greater on mathematics and science than on reading, and the reason for that is you don't do a lot mathematics or science in the home. But the attitude towards reading is very much dependent on family and community factors, more so, maybe, than mathematics and science. So, I think that's another reason why I think a community-school approach is really important. You need to get everybody on board; it's not just what the teacher does in the classroom—it's important that the whole family and the community thinks that reading is important. dawn bowden am: Just on numeracy, it was interesting because one of the schools in my constituency have actually contacted my office and a number of other organisations across the constituency to ask us how we use maths in our work. So, they're obviously trying to relate that now to everyday life and working, which I thought was quite good. lynne neagle am: We've got some questions now around progress of specific groups of pupils. If I can start and ask you how concerning is it that the gap between pupils eligible for free school meals and other pupils has not narrowed in the last 10 years, especially given the £475 million pupil deprivation grant investment. I think secondary schools and the issue of poverty were the two things I've noted in the annual report. I think it is worth also remembering that compared to other countries, for example, in PISA, we do compare quite well in terms of equity. There's also an argument that maybe poverty and austerity have increased, so that we're in a way running to keep still. So, there are a lot of caveats to be made around the fact that that poverty gap hasn't closed, but that's not to say that schools can't do something about it, and I've suggested in the annual report a sort of a two-pronged approach. I think there is evidence in the international research that teaching and learning, better teaching and learning, helps disadvantaged poor pupils disproportionately. So, I think improving teaching and learning, and we discussed that earlier this morning about how the new curriculum is really all about improving the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom. So, that's one approach, and then the other approach, which I've also mentioned earlier, is having a community-focused approach to schools. It's very difficult for children to do well in school if they've got all kinds of things happening in their background. So, it's important that schools can maybe signpost those families to other services that can support them and help them. It's challenging for schools to go down this route, and I think the more help we can give schools to take that approach, the better. They have better engagement from parents, from the families, and that then reflects back on the work of the children. jassa scott: And we've just published a collection of good practice about how schools support vulnerable learners, and we'll be teasing out the aspects around community-focused schools a lot more in a report that we'll publish in the next couple of months. So, we've kind of drilled down and looked at what some schools are doing in that area in a bit more detail. Obviously, I think we've all been to schools where the PDG is actually used to engage parents more for exactly the reasons you say. But I just wanted to interrogate the deprivation gap a little bit, because, of course, even though, as you say, there's perhaps more equity in Wales, one of the reasons for that is because our children from better-off backgrounds do less well, and considerably less well than their peers in the other parts of the United Kingdom. So, whereas their attainment gaps are pretty dreadful, that's one of the reasons—that our better-off children aren't doing as well as perhaps they might do. Is that a concern as well? We don't want this rush to the middle, do we? meilyr rowlands: I think it's essential that all groups of pupils do as well as they possibly can, absolutely. So, it's not quite the same issue, but we've talked about the importance of making sure that more able and talented children do well. meilyr rowlands: They're not the same, clearly, because you have more able and talented children from poor backgrounds. Differentiation is a challenge for schools, but it's absolutely essential that all groups of children do as well as they possibly can. So, in things like PISA, in terms of reading, for example, we can't just say it's that group that needs to improve—all the groups need to improve. And I think that's why something like the new curriculum gives schools more scope to tailor their teaching and learning to the particular groups that they have, whether they’re more able, whether they're advantaged or whether they're disadvantaged. Pupils' confidence in their school's ability to help them with their emotional and mental well-being is much less at secondary school and that's been a consistent theme as well from your reports. As we mentioned earlier, we do pupil surveys before all our inspections, and across a number of those indicators, like, 'How well does the school listen? Do adults in school care about me? How well does the school deal with bullying?'—quite a lot those ones around well-being do tail off. Nine out of 10 pupils at key stage 2 have that confidence, down to half at key stage 4, as you say. And I think there are a number of factors that we think contribute to that: I think one of the factors is that pupils face, sometimes, more challenges as they get older in those teenage years, but they also become more reflective and perhaps more discerning. And I think what we find in secondary schools is perhaps secondary school pupils notice sometimes the differences between their everyday life that they experience in school and perhaps the messages that they're getting about well-being in terms of their lessons, in terms of assemblies and in terms of school policies and so on. So, they are probably more discerning in noticing those differences and maybe there are some of those differences also there in primary school, but the pupils don't notice. I think we've already touched upon things like the differences in the way that, at primary school, you would tend to have a go-to adult, which is your teacher. The best secondary schools find ways to make sure that pupils do feel that level of support and feel there are trusted people, but it's more of a challenge to make sure that that happens, because of the way they're operating. We still have some concerns about personal and social education and the health and well-being support, which we've made a recommendation about in the past in some of our thematic reports, but also recently in some of our secondary school inspection reports. And I think I already touched upon the fact that sometimes, when the budget is tight, it can be some of those—they're not peripheral in their importance, but they're not the teacher in the classroom: well-being support assistants and so on and family liaison workers—staff in the school who perhaps really support that pastoral care that the school as a whole can provide—it may be that those are the roles that are less prevalent at times of less funding. So, I think there are some great members of staff doing a really good job, but perhaps they're not those members of staff who can support teachers and support pupils in creating that kind of caring environment. So, I think there's not an obvious answer and part of it is that they do become more discerning and perhaps more vocal in those responses generally, as they get older. And that might explain some of the difference with primary, where, generally, they're quite positive about everything across most of the schools that we ask. lynne neagle am: So, it's not that secondary schools—because you've said that in a previous inspection report—are just not as good at prioritising mental health and well-being. jassa scott: I think there's an element that it's more of a challenge for a secondary school to provide an effective set of support from that whole-staff awareness of some of the challenges. And one of the pieces of work we've done recently is around adverse childhood experiences, and we have found that primary schools have taken that and embraced it. So, maybe not every member of staff has the same level of understanding, but also those staff aren't spending the same amount of time with pupils. So, in terms of getting to know pupils, picking up on signs that they may be struggling, or that there might be concerns—it's much more of a challenge. You've got to work a lot harder as a secondary school to make sure that staff have that knowledge and that you've got the tracking systems that can put those different bits of  information together to actually mean that you can target support where it's needed. Obviously, we've had one case in north Wales, in an independent school, where there were serious concerns. What's that done to your desire to monitor and check what's going on in these independent schools? Are they regulated sufficiently? jassa scott: I'll pick up on that as well. So, some have boarding provision, and where they have boarding provision, Care Inspectorate Wales would look at the boarding side of it, we'd look at the educational side of it. There are others where they may have a linked children's home, which can be another room in the same house, or it can be a number of miles away, and similarly there CIW would look at the residential aspects of the care and we'd look at the school. So, I think, there's a focus in the independent school standards regulations, which is a minimum that all schools have to meet to maintain a registration. There is a focus in that on how that school looks after and cares for its pupils, and there are focuses on that element of boarding provision where relevant, and the national minimum standards that the care inspectorate look at that have aspects around supporting well-being as well. What we do find in our inspections is that, overall, we generally find that pupils' well-being develops, they make good progress, and that care, support and guidance that schools give is good. What we mean by that, really, practically, is that they are developing their resilience and their self-esteem. In special schools, this might mean particularly that those pupils learn to manage their anxieties better so that they improve their behaviour, which may be one of the reasons why they're in that specialist setting. In mainstream independent schools, what we find is that people develop their tenacity, their curiosity for learning—their resilience in that way. For example, there was one school where we found that they weren't making appropriate referrals to child and adolescent mental health services. So, these schools do operate independently by their nature, and their awareness, perhaps, of some of the guidance and support that is out there—sometimes, maybe, there can be more to be done, and I think we've talked to Welsh Government about that. suzy davies am: What's Estyn's role in that—to bring that level of awareness to those schools? jassa scott: I think we do through our inspection guidance, and the independent school standards do refer to Welsh Government guidance—it's something like 'Keeping learners safe', which is a really key document, which supports safeguarding and caring across schools. So, I think the other area is that sometimes we don't have the intelligence about what—. So, for example, if there's been a safeguarding referral from a school, we don't necessarily always get that information, which means that when we do go to inspect, we may not have the full picture to help us tailor our inspection activity. So, that's something we've raised— lynne neagle am: [Inaudible.]—be brief and brief in answers. Do you mind if I move on to the next question? lynne neagle am: We're going to have to skip those, I'm afraid, and talk to the last set of questions, just because of the time pressures. What role, if any, did Estyn have in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's latest review of progress in school improvement when they visited Wales in late 2019? meilyr rowlands: Well, we were interviewed. Therefore, the three of us had an interview with the OECD officials and we offered evidence to them. And I think that, when the report is published, you will see that the OECD does draw on our broader evidence and will be quoting our reports—the annual report and some of our thematic reports. How significant a role do you believe the national evaluation and improvement resource will play in raising school standards? meilyr rowlands: I think that it's very important. It's Claire who has been specifically tasked with that, so I'll ask Claire to speak about it. claire morgan: I think working together with the practitioners, the regions and representatives from local authorities is a great opportunity to develop a national approach, because we know across Wales there's some excellent practice, but we know there are schools that struggle to bring about improvement. So, this national resource has the potential to provide schools with detailed guidance on how they can approach not only self-evaluation, but, more importantly, how they can bring about that improvement. Half of those have been involved in developing the tools and approaches right from the start, and 22 new schools have come on board this year. But we anticipate that there will be lots of tools and approaches within that resource that schools can use to improve the quality of self-evaluation throughout the school, primaries, secondaries, PRUs and special schools. But it will focus on establishing a culture within the school that focuses on improvement, that establishes a reflective culture where all staff are involved in development. So, we're hoping that this tool—it's still currently in development, but we hope that that will support schools really well. And, with regard to comparison of performance, does the lack of comparative attainment data raise difficulties when you're inspecting and drawing conclusions and standards in schools? meilyr rowlands: Not really, no. I think there was a bit of a myth that a lot of this performance data was just for Estyn, but actually it never has been. We look at standards, we look at teaching and learning in the classroom, we look at well-being, we look at care support and guidance, we look at leadership, we look at all of these things, and we look at it based on first-hand evidence—what we actually see in the classroom. So, we're quite happy to continue to inspect schools, and we in fact support having less emphasis on data because, although data is useful, and we hope that schools will continue to analyse their data and use that data to help them self-improve and self-evaluate, we don't actually need it and it has actually created a bit of a high-stakes culture. We've come to the end of our time, so can I thank you all for your attendance? As usual, you'll receive a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting. Paper to note 1 is a ministerial update on the emotional and mental health of children and young people in Wales—next steps for 'Mind over matter'. Paper to note 2 is a letter from the Minister for Housing and Local Government regarding teachers' pay and pensions, and paper to note 3 is a letter to the Minister for Education from us regarding the school funding review. Can I then propose under Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Great

The Welsh government has introduced a new phase of innovation schools, inviting previous pioneers to apply. While there are both downsides and upsides to this program, the focus should now shift away from the original pioneers and towards schools with specific strengths. The PISA results in maths have shown improvement, attributed to the new GCSE mathematics numeracy. It is also positive to see more application of mathematics knowledge in problem-solving situations. Schools have a greater impact on mathematics and science than reading. The reopening of schools is still uncertain, as an exact date has not been provided by the chief medical officer. The only certainty is the five principles published earlier regarding school reopening. Currently, only a small percentage of children and staff are attending schools, with an average of 518 school hubs open each day. However, there has been an increase in attendance since the summer term. To help year 13 students prepare for university, a program has been launched on Hwb, offering subject listings and links to higher education and further education courses. Preparation for essential study skills and career advice is also available. A committee member raised concerns about the lack of a GBA+ analysis for COVID-19 relief programs, emphasizing the importance of considering women in decision-making processes.

Question: What were User Interface's suggestions and thoughts on the general functionalities, invisible features, functional features, and style of the remote control? Article: So , we will first start by summarizing the the previous meeting and the decision we've taken . I will take notes during this meeting so that you can look at my folder to see the summary of this meeting afterwards . We'll then t take decision in concert and then we will define the nest next task , to have to be done before the next meeting . We have also the lightening feature for the remote control to be easy to find , and for fast development and low cost we have decided to have no L_C_D_ no voice features . So the conceptual specification by Industrial Designer , the specification of the U_I_ by or U_I_ user interface: Abdul al-Hasred is my name . industrial designer: I_D_ you want ? project manager: Maybe I can switch slide on your request . industrial designer: and I think a remote control is , as I s mentioned previously , you just have a a very simple chip and the the user interface is just done usually by push button and in our case we are using a a wheel control . So I was looking basically for that chip , which is very very standard , and I just looked for the wheel sensor and the standard push button . The push button are usually extremely cheap , but I just have one problem and this is related with the wheel sensor , which seems to be quite expensive . industrial designer: And I think we if we could just talk about that if we really need a wheel sensor or if we can not if if we could combine something with the push button . Yeah project manager: So will will will this with including all possible things , so buttons , wheel and the chip , be lower than twelve Euros to produce ? industrial designer: I I th But I don't think that we should We should talk about the design of the box also which needs some money . project manager: Okay user interface: Also have to say industrial designer: But user interface: Did you receive the email about the voice recognition ? industrial designer: that's all user interface: No ? project manager: You received something industrial designer: yeah . But I guess it could be project manager: And could it be adapted ? user interface: I guess it's possible . project manager: Okay and there can recognize some commands and stuff ? user interface: Yeah you reco recognize commands and you can record new commands and stuff , so if they already have it as as a chip project manager: Okay . project manager: Okay maybe we can just listen to this presentation and then take decision later on according to those news . industrial designer: Yeah but I think it's yeah Sorry , I haven't written my personal references . the I I just want to mention the the problem of the the r wheels sensor which is much more expensive than any push button , project manager: Okay . , what is the purpose of the light ? industrial designer: Just to to make something which is slightly more design that a squarey box with a rubber user interface: Is project manager: You can easily find the button in the dark or so ? user interface: But But in th in the dark Yeah but is going to be always turned on , the light ? project manager: It will be turned on when the when the user move the remote control I think , no ? user interface: But if you move it then you have it , you don't need to find it . user interface: But if you move it then you have to have some sensor to when you move it to detect your movement . industrial designer: I don't think that this is really expensive , but at the end this is plenty of unexpen eh very cheap devices but the bill starts to be user interface: Okay . Yeah , but I expected also the wheel would be cheap but you tell me that it is very expensive so , industrial designer: First of all I was thinking to have a a continuous light user interface: yeah . industrial designer: and you w when t you you you you press the on button you have the light on your remote control , when you want to turn off your device user interface: . project manager: But it can be battery consuming , no ? To have the light always on ? industrial designer: Yeah , a little bit . user interface: So I just look at some current designs on the web , of usually more complicated remote controls . And let's look at two of them because th even though they have many buttons they look quite simple . And in our case we just reject the buttons what we don't need and it become even simpler . project manager: And also does it fit well in hand ? Because it was th your wrist problem with the usage . We have all these buttons as you can see , but most of them , we just need the ones in the middle . user interface: So , from the bottom or whatever is there , the the numbers and then the top , until the ten also , this middle part , project manager: Yeah . So it's basically more or less how we would like it , with a big volume control , big channel control , and mute and power , yeah ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: So basically , w software we will build will look more or less the same as these two . user interface: Yeah , if you have , for example I think that the volume and the buttons that are there on the top are not very easy to reach with your thumb . Will be down or user interface: So that they're separate a bit , project manager: Okay . and it's easy to press the other the big buttons , but , it's not that difficult to press the the channel buttons either . Usually what I have noticed that people put the plastic cover on things that you normally don't mess with , like buttons for t tuning the channels and stuff like that . user interface: We could use the some wheels can be pushed down , could use the push down of the wheel for the record if we want . user interface: so we could just basically use one just wheel and user could use just the wheel to do everything with the channels in that case . So we can move to the Is there any question ? For designer of user interface ? or we can move to the next part , maybe , and discuss afterwards ? Okay . marketing: Can I ? So now the recent investigation we we have done fo of the remote control . So , the most important aspect for remote controls is to be fancy look and feel and not current functional look and feel . marketing: And the third most important aspect is to to is that the co remote control should be easy to use . And there is a fashion watchers in Paris and Milan that have detected the following trends , fruits and vegetables will be the most important theme for clothes , shoes , and furnitures . So , maybe if our remote control have to be a fruit form or vegetable form project manager: Okay . project manager: marketing: I don't know which material can be spongy , project manager: Yeah . marketing: and if you project manager: This is good also for user interface: Well , wou wou I think we can certainly just put the electronics in a spongy thing , industrial designer: Yeah . We could say that if you throw it , you have a sensor , and you throw it and hits the television and turns it off . And you know here the more iz important aspect is the fancy look and feel , after is technological innovative , and after the easy to use . marketing: Yeah that's why project manager: Has it ? marketing: Yeah that's why I think we have to keep that if it's possible . You know the pear , is like that and it's it's easy to to have in in hand project manager: Yeah , and it's ergonomic as well . D D Is is there anything you want to add ? user interface: Is there any fruit that is spongy ? marketing: project manager: I don't think so . I think we we can have like yeah a pear is good , fit well , or banana as you told . industrial designer: And for maybe look and feel , what about a a piece of ice , with blue L_E_D_ inside ? project manager: But that's not in the trend . user interface: You can make it marketing: project manager: The trend is spongy , and vegetable fruits . marketing: project manager: I think p spongy is good because it it will be robust as well . project manager: So , I think we can keep the wheel because it's easy , it's innovative , even if the cost is a bit higher , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: and we also have to find a , so , a fruit like pear or banana wit any others idea you have . What kind of fr fruit would you like to to control your T_V_ with ? marketing: user interface: . industrial designer: You y you don't use the banana when the banana is curving like that , user interface: Two of the button , yeah . industrial designer: but when the banana is curving like that , with the wheel on the top and to control , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and here you have a a push button to marketing: But you don't have project manager: I think it's a good idea , yeah . user interface: Yeah so you can just have just have this curve , yeah , and you move your hand here to press the buttons and then you move on the other side . user interface: So you can have it on on two sides and it'll be cool , project manager: Yeah . user interface: no ? project manager: I think it's a good design and it's innovative as well then . industrial designer: If you if you start with fancy fruits and fra s and tha user interface: Ah-ha . industrial designer: Oh , yeah marketing: project manager: Yeah it's really really a good point . marketing: user interface: Now who are recording this meeting ? project manager: I think it So One second . So , so for marketing: project manager: sorry , for component , so industrial designer: So project manager: we have to think about those aspects , sorry . what do you mean by case ? project manager: I think it's the box that should be spongy , banana's shape . project manager: industrial designer: I just want to have so something to prin to to fix my my components onto that box , and that's it . user interface: But the thing is that the buttons and the wheel have to be industrial designer: Spongy also . user interface: if it's spongy then the buttons and the wheel have to if it's spongy then it's going to move , right ? So , it's going to be bend a lot . user interface: So if we try to push the buttons , it project manager: No the button would be user interface: You think it's possible ? project manager: In fact it it should be something odd shaped , with a spongy cover . Button , where do we want some buttons ? user interface: Well , usually hold 'Kay , we want it to be good also for the left-hand users , right ? industrial designer: Yeah . Sa let's say that th o It has to be basically you can only take two sides , one on ths this side where is the thumb and the other side where there is yeah also the thumb . Or you could use use this one , but I don't know if it's very comfortable , to use this one for the wheel . user interface: This for the wheel and then this for the buttons ? project manager: Yeah I think it's okay for both right and left . user interface: So if the left , we have the op project manager: I think you can turn it this way also . user interface: Yeah , the problem is if you have buttons and wheel then when you turn it around , the buttons are on the other side . project manager: And moreover , th the button ar are lighted so you you immediately identify the right side , because you have light on buttons . user interface: So the buttons have to be here and the wheel has to be Y Yeah I know , but if you hold with your left hand , and the wheel is here , and the buttons are here , then when you turn it around the buttons will be on the other side . No you you I think you will use it only on the right or left hand , whether you are righty or lefty . project manager: So , for interface we said also that we have this banana shape with button on the s on the side . I think it's we defined everything according to what we should what the decision we should take , yeah . That is to say , check if it fit the the requirement given by the users , but according to your presentation it seems to be okay . project manager: So so to prepare the prototype I would suggest that the Industrial Designer and the User Interface Designer work together . project manager: You feel free to express what you want to say ? You don't feel too constrained ? user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: user interface: Maybe you can make project manager: Okay , so user interface: okay <doc-sep>Okay and the agenda will be the opening and that's the product manager or secretary that's me and the presentations from the Christine and Agnes and from Mister Ed . And finally in this meeting we have to decide marketing: project manager: and we are to take a decision on the remote control concept and the functional design So we have forty minutes , I think it's little bit low , but I I hope we can finish it up so I'll handle to the the functional team , to the Christine , okay , to discuss about the components concept . So project manager: industrial designer: we were looking he specifically at the components the following components , the case , the power supply , the means of communications with the television set . In instance we had talked about using some sort of speech recognition , project manager: industrial designer: you have to have microphone well no you don't actually I haven't have to have microphone in the device , but maybe you do have it a a way marketing: industrial designer: it has to it has to hear the speaker user interface: industrial designer: and , so it could be in the television set , could be in the device , but somewhere you have to put the microphone , and a w a way of making beeps or sounds so you can find it when it's gets lost . Our method for going about this is we've looked at the histo hi historical record , what's worked , what hasn't and then we also we wanted to evaluate some new materials marketing: industrial designer: and we contacted manufacturing for their input because , course , we m might come up and choose the material that then manufacturing didn't have the technologies or capabilities to offer us , so this is the approach that we took during our our research . marketing: industrial designer: So for the case , we told we were making a specifica specific assumption that it would be curved in design . marketing: industrial designer: Course , you know , I wanted it to be expandable and shrinkable , but that doesn't seem to b be one of the choic non-option we can we can really seriously explore , user interface: industrial designer: so then we were thinking about rubber , but unfortunately that's been eliminated because of the heat factor user interface: industrial designer: and th there might be some problems with the m how it's goes with the board . and then th plastic also has this problem of melting and it's brittle it gets brittle after a while , user interface: industrial designer: so we still had titanium and and wood available , but unfortunately titanium's also been eliminated , user interface: industrial designer: the m people in manufacturing said that you couldn't make d curved cases out of titanium , although how Apple did it with th PowerBook I'm not su quite sure but nevertheless they've eliminated all of our options except wood . marketing: industrial designer: And a as she said , it's an environmentally friendly material , so we're we're currently proposing , marketing: industrial designer: we'll get to all my personal preferences in just a second . marketing: industrial designer: So then there's this other matter of the chips and well we could use a simple design on the board , user interface: project manager: industrial designer: these simple chips , but that's only works for the bu you don't get very much intelligence with this simple one . And then there was the regular which I regret that I've forgotten exactly why I'm eliminating that one . the other option was this advanced chip on print , and we liked th we we found that it it includes this infrared sender , marketing: industrial designer: which w 'member the beam was that was an important component of finding the right chip . marketing: industrial designer: And manufacturing has told us that they've recently developed a a sensor and a speaker that would be integrated into this advanced chip on print , so we we now jumping right to our personal preferences I I'd really think we should , you know , use some of some really exotic woods , like , user interface: industrial designer: you know , well you guys come from tropical countries so you can kinda think of some trees and some nice woods . I think that people will might really want to design their own cases , you see , they could do sort of a this three-dimensional design on the internet , and then they could submit their orders , kinda like you submit a custom car order , you know , and you can choose the colour and the size of the wheels and the colours of the leather and things like that , and then I think we should go with the solar cells as well as the microphone and speaker on the advanced chip . So this is the findings of our research marketing: industrial designer: and my recommendations for the new remote control w would be to have have it be made out of wood . Do you have any problems with that ? project manager: Can you go back one slide ? industrial designer: I'm not sure , how do I Oh , I know , let's see . project manager: Yes , question , what's mean exactly , advanced chip on print ? What's the meaning of that ? industrial designer: I think it's a multiple chip design and it's maybe printed on to the circuit board . project manager: Yeah , is it means it's on the yeah is it on a micro-proc micro-processor based or industrial designer: I don't know , but I'll find out more at our next meeting . project manager: Okay , tha that would be great , so if you find out from the technology background , okay , so that would be good . user interface: Why was the plastic eliminated as a possible material ? industrial designer: Because it gets brittle , cracks user interface: user interface: industrial designer: I don't know , speak for yourself , I'm planning to be around for a while . user interface: Although I think marketing: user interface: I think with wood though you'd run into the same types of problems , wouldn't you , it chips , it if you drop it , industrial designer: marketing: user interface: it's I'm not su industrial designer: project manager: So so you're not convinced about the the wood , yes . user interface: industrial designer: you're what ? marketing: Actually , I'm ready to sell it . user interface: I think if you re if you use really good quality wood , then it might work , marketing: I'm ready to sell it . industrial designer: You think ? And you could you could sell oils with it , to take care of it . user interface: but you can't just use marketing: No y no no no , the o the only w the only wood you can use are the ones that are hard , extremely hard wood , user interface: Yeah , exactly , yeah . industrial designer: Well I'm glad you user interface: marketing: That's actually very innovative idea . marketing: industrial designer: marketing: Well , it's actually a very innovative n different idea that you know you can choose your colour of wood , your type of wood . marketing: it's each person is gonna have their own personalised , individualised speech recognition remote control in wood , that's not on the market . user interface: project manager: Yeah , so it it's looks good the the design the functional design , what about yo you ? marketing: user interface: in terms of comments on this or in terms of my own project manager: Yes , in t yes , in term in terms of comments first marketing: In turns of wow . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: She works in the cubicle next to me so she's she was already a little bit prepared for this . user interface: marketing: Wood ? user interface: I think we can get the quality materials then it shouldn't influence the design principles too much , which you'll see with my presentation . marketing: user interface: One thing we'd have to check though is what the users whether how quickly the novelty wears off of having industrial designer: Yeah , you wouldn't wanna have to have splinters in your hand while you're using your user interface: Yeah , for example . So , have to see how kid-friendly it is and and all that , marketing: industrial designer: It's really good if your dog gets ahold of it , they can use it for teething . user interface: but marketing: user interface: marketing: They do that anyway with the rubber and plastic , industrial designer: Yeah , they do it with other materials as well , yeah . So , it's a very short presentation , 'cause I'm actually gonna draw you the layout on the board so if you want to just go straight to the second slide , which basically shows , sort of marketing: user interface: I took the ideas that we were talking about last time and tried to put that into the remote control so the things that y you can actually see on it are the on off switch , volume and channel control , the menu access button , ergonomic shape , which I completely agree with Christine's idea to have it sort of molded , so it's slightly more ergonomic and comfortable to hold than the r standard very straight remote controls . And actually the other thing with the wood if we take your customising idea , is that people can actually do sort of quasi-measurements on their hand size , so if someone has larger hands , you have a wider remote control . , one thing I thought might be kind of interesting is to put a flip screen on it , just like you have on flip phones , marketing: user interface: so that you don't have this case where someone sits on the remote control or accidentally puts their hand on it , especially if you have little kids around , they're not pressing the buttons while you're trying to watch a T_V_ show and accidentally change the channel or turn it off . user interface: And also you had issues with the batteries running out , marketing: user interface: so I thought maybe we could put a little battery life-light on it that kind of goes dimmer and dimmer and dimmer as your battery is starts to die . And in terms of invisible features , audio and tactile feedback on button presses and , like you said , speech recognition . user interface: So , in terms of what this thing would actually look like marketing: user interface: Despite working in interface design , I'm not the greatest artist in the world , so you'll have to forgive me . You'd have something like this with an on-off switch fairly big , sort of in the corner and by itself , so you don't accidentally turn your T_V_ off while you're trying to manoeuvre other buttons . And then you have sort of one of those toggle displays for , oops , channels and volume , sort of for surfing channels and then volume , so the volume would be the up and down , 'cause volume goes up and down and then channels left to right . And then on one side you would have an access to the menu on your T_V_ project manager: user interface: and on the other side a way to turn off the voice control . So that if the user doesn't want to use their voice , they can just turn it off and you don't have the remote control accidentally changing things on you . user interface: so again you can have a little L_C_D_ light somewhere , the flip thing and Have I forgotten anything ? I don't think so . project manager: user interface: which is one of the things I really wanted to keep , is keep it simple , not have too many buttons , not have too many functionalities thrown into it . Think the design can pretty much carry over to everything , although with the wood the flip screen might have to do something slightly different . But you also have to d start watching out for the weight , 'cause depending on how much the the flip screen will add to the weight of the remote control , you don't want it to start getting too heavy . user interface: But that's the general layout with the general functionalities , if we come up with something else . As you can see , there's still lots of space on the actual remote control and if you do it customisably , you can make this thing fairly small or fairly o large , depending on personal preferences . user interface: So , that's pretty much all I had to say , everything else in terms of design issues . the centering of the key pad and the channel is just depending on where your thumb is and you tend to use the the volume control and the browsing more than the actual number pad , so that would be sort of in direct line of where your thumb goes when you are holding the remote control , industrial designer: user interface: So once we decide exactly what we want , then we can figure out the exact positioning , but more or less I think it should go along those lines . We've been giving simple questionnaires in different areas because th obviously we have to see what the com consumers are looking for today , 'cause trends change very very quickly . In six months maybe this idea is already gone out the window , so it's gonna be a question how fast we can act . This is what we know from the last from the questionnaires from the the all the p surveys we've done , fancy and feel-good , that's what we've been looking for , something that feels good in the hand , that's easy to use . Looking for next generation of innovation , because all the remotes out there now , they're all very similar , they all do the same thing , project manager: industrial designer: marketing: we have to have something completely different . Okay ? Easy to use , has always has become has become another major interest that , with the whiteboard we can see that it's a remote that's easy to use . And I think this is another thing that's interesting is the consumers actually willing to pay the price for exciting tel technology . So even if we have a product that may be more expensive , if it comes out right , if they look it looks and feels good and has technology . The second one , there is about forty-five thousand different buttons on it , which makes it fairly hard to read , very hard to use . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: The first one , I see that they put in a display . Now there's something else with the little flip-up , now we're adding all kinds of things in , user interface: marketing: but with the little flip-up , if you have a little display on the flip-up that when you close it everything is locked . marketing: Maybe the display also makes it easier to use , because sometimes when you're looking for buttons , maybe if you see a display user interface: industrial designer: Context-sensitive instructions , depending on what the tel what mode the T_V_ or the D_V_D_ or something else is in . marketing: Okay Because I've seen mostly the standard ones , user interface: Especially you might need something like that for training the speech recognition and marketing: yeah . marketing: So maybe if we can incorporate the easiness of use , trendy , fancy , feels good , with a display , wood , designer wood , designer colours user interface: industrial designer: user interface: project manager: industrial designer: You know , maybe what you could do is when somebody orders the device id you could send them like a b some sort of a foam rubber ball , marketing: we might've user interface: Oh yeah . user interface: Yeah , so it's really molded to to your specific industrial designer: To t an and then you would know like what the geometry of their hands would be and marketing: project manager: marketing: How hard they squeeze ? user interface: industrial designer: Yes you'd know what kind of wood to get . user interface: But th for that you'd also have to do sort of an average across families and things like that if unless everyone has their own personal remote . industrial designer: That's right , that's right , you wouldn't wanna go too far down that . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: No , but incorporating the three obviously it'd be something totally new on the market , totally different user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: and from user interface: Well , already the customisability is a really good sort of new gimmick . marketing: Right , you take it apart , and put on another face , take it off and put on another face user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: We'd also have to wor consider that who we were gonna get to make these custom cases in terms of manufacturing processes , we might wanna learn about labour laws . project manager: industrial designer: You know in different countries and stuff wher so we can do it cheap , but you don't wanna exploit labour in third world countries . industrial designer: So actually you could turn it y turn around and say that you're par the reason the cost is high for the device is because you're paying a a working wage to the person who made the device . project manager: Yeah , but we can get a production in , countries like , India industrial designer: Cost of living is low . project manager: yes , yes , countries like India or China or Malaysia , so you can go a better features and better price and you can sell more . So industrial designer: Good , well th that'd be something that manufacturing would have to explore more project manager: Yeah , yeah , so Yes . project manager: So Yeah , so industrial designer: Yeah marketing: We're here to design , come up with a nice product . project manager: Yes , but that that we can that we can talk about the production later , okay , depends on the the quantity , okay . project manager: So we don't need to have our own fabric factory or something , industrial designer: project manager: so we can have a tie-up with who the do the fabric , okay , for the different electronics items , then we can have a business tie-up and to get to cut the cost , okay , to sell more . So , but le let's decide first about the components concept and interface concept , okay , if is acceptable for both of you , what Ed was talking . And your design whether you want with the display or without display or just a simple , so user interface: I think it depends , I think it's a good idea , but we need to really think about how useful it's gonna be because theoretically with the T_V_ you already have a big display right in front of you . user interface: So , if we're trying to keep costs down , then maybe sacrificing the display is a way to go . user interface: it depends on how much putting a display costs and what it would be used for industrial designer: . user interface: 'cause if it's only used for one little thing , then putting in a big display case or a big display that's probably expensive just to do the training on the chip for the speech recognition or whatever , may not be the most cost-efficient way to go , project manager: user interface: but that's just sort of speculation , . industrial designer: What do you think Ed ? Do you he liked the display in one of the concepts that you showed , do you know how much it costs , to to add a little display like this ? marketing: No . No industrial designer: Do you wanna take an action item to go find out ? marketing: no p spec It's 'cause we have to find out cost on it . industrial designer: So the the advanced chip on print is what what we've we've deci we've determined marketing: industrial designer: and the engineering industrial design is the recommendation , and I think we've kinda come to some agreement regarding this concept of a wooden case . user interface: What about the buttons , would Would the buttons be wood too , or industrial designer: I don't think so , no , project manager: I don't think so . industrial designer: so you have that tactile experience of project manager: Don't looks nice . Yeah , so what we'll do is , we will stick with the the simple design for time being until th Ed find outs about the how much it's cost to the extra , in case we go for the display . project manager: maybe what you can do is , both of you , you can come up with the the prototype , okay , the model . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: So are we done with this meeting ? project manager: Yeah , I hope , if is it okay if they will come up with the prototype design , okay . Then they can show you how it looks like , and then we can submit to the I will submit to the management . Okay ? Then meantime you can come up with the price , how much it's cost as extra for the display . user interface: project manager: Of course you'll make money too , industrial designer: project manager: so it it's not only pay-out , you make money too , your commission . user interface: marketing: user interface: marketing: project manager: Okay , so , any questions ? user interface: No . project manager: So , by next meeting , so , please come up with the the prototype , okay , then , then we can proceed from there . project manager: So thanks for all your efforts and coming for the meeting again , and see you soon then <doc-sep>project manager: Right w welcome to the the first meeting of Real Reaction's development meetings for our our new television remote control . this follows our very successful entry into the the consumer market over the last year or so which we want to to build on , taking advantage of the the the latest developments in in technology and the the latest feelings in in consumer design and and demand and we want to make this the the very best product th that's possible for everybody , one that everybody wants , at a good price for the consumer and at a good price for the company . project manager: I'll just go round th the table , Andrew , marketing , m Kendra with the designing the the the User Interface and Kate with the the industrial design . What's the the th th project is is here to do , is is to to get this this project up and moving , ev everybody is is free to say wh whatever they want , everybody has a contribution to make and everybody feel free to interrupt me at any time to to say what you want to say . in in terms of the immediate meeting the everybody knows everybody else , everybody's worked for the the company for a while , if if an anybody feels that they need to say more about themselves please do , if if if anybody wants to b briefly give their their background so that everybody's quite clear what everybody everybody's experience is please do so . in fact I'd I'd I'd welcome anybody to say something briefly about themselves , in fact we will do that by by going round the table quickly and and saying what what contribution you you're looking to make . marketing: Oh my name's Andrew I'm a I'm the Market Research person for this for this meeting and this project for creating this new remote control and yeah I'll be presenting information statistics on what people want to want to get from this new design , what people want to like and from a fashion point of view and the practicality point of view . user interface: I'm Kendra and I'm the Us User Interface Designer and I haven't had a whole lot of experience in this kind of thing before but I'm m so I'll be working on the design . project manager: Right at least means you haven't got any preconceived ideas so . industrial designer: I'm the Industrial Designer and I'll just be I guess presenting about the the inter workings of our little remote control and yeah . project manager: Okay , very very quickly , this I don't want to make this meeting too structured because the the whole idea is that it's a you know a think tank . Everybody says what they what they want to say , and we don't want to be constrained by kind of convention or slides on screens or or anything else but briefly th th this is what we want to do . The the remote control needs to be original , there has to be something about it that other remote controls don't have so that as soon as people see it they think yes that's different , I want one , and that goes along with being trendy , you know the I want it scenario . User-friendly as as we all know , remote controls can be very user-unfriendly so we want to make ours one that people can pick up marketing: project manager: and think oh yes that's it's obvious how that works , and they also want to look at the price and think oh yeah that's something that I may not need another remote control but it's such a nice one I'm gonna have one . And last but not least , or indeed first of all , it it must make the company money , and we make the company money by producing what the consumer wants . The the further work to be done is i the the functional design , what it what it must actually do , the conceptual design , how we actually present that to the consumer and th the the detailed design i is how we get that into production . now th the main design tool that we have available to us at the moment is is the white board and let us very quickly do what i what it says in the in the in the prompt slide here , In fact I suggest to avoid everybody untangling themselves from the the the wires , that we don't do that , So I I everybody knows what whiteboard is so we'll we'll do a virtual drawing on the on on the whiteboard of of your your own favourite animal , but le let's go round the table , your favourite animal . project manager: and why ? marketing: it's it's got nice contrast with black and white and project manager: -huh . marketing: I feel they're underdog kind of status project manager: Oh right marketing: and they're , the project manager: my my wife says my beard looks like a badger's arse 'cause of the the white streaks in it . user interface: I just I li I like the way they look and they're just nice animals and I like how they can fly or swim or walk around or whatever . user interface: project manager: I'm not sure that I've got any favourite animal to be quite honest , I think homo sapien industrial designer: project manager: because of their their overall ability to user interface: marketing: Make mobile phones and T_V_ remotes project manager: Sorry ? industrial designer: marketing: to make T_V_ remotes . project manager: Indeed absolutely yes , industrial designer: project manager: tha that's Okay and w we need to keep in mind here that the we want to sell this for for twenty five Euro , we want to m make an overall profit for the the company of fifty million Euros so we're we're looking at selling a lot of these ag across the the entire planet and and we're looking at a gross profit of fifty percent . so we're not only looking at a a very trendy original product , we're looking at making it at a very good price . , okay , would anybody like t like to to start by giving their o sort of quick views of of current remote controls . user interface: Well I think I find a lot of them really complicated to use with all the different buttons and it's handiest when you have one that works both the D_V_D_ player or whatever and the T_V_ as well . , but that it's easy to if you can switch back and forth instead of having to press a bunch of different buttons project manager: No . user interface: and so I think it's is best when they're clearly labelled and you can see which buttons you're supposed to use , you know . project manager: Any any thoughts about buttons or any oth other way of approaching the p the the problem ? Or anybody else , strong feelings about remote controls ? Are there you know , bad ones they've used or good ones they've used or ones that they've lost and never found again ? industrial designer: I think it's important that you should be able to when you when you press the buttons it'll actually pick up the signals from kind of anywhere and you shouldn't have to like contort yourself and twist your remote control to get it the T_V_ to actually pick up the signal . marketing: Think a lot of the time , remotes that come with T_V_ players and T_V_s and D_V_ players , like they aren't industrial designer: . marketing: like an area that's put a lot of effort into , they're very boring , very plain . marketing: Like it's very a very like making a a stylish remote control would be a very like Easily put us one step ahead of the current competition . project manager: what so wh what's in in what particular style features are you thinking about ? marketing: . industrial designer: marketing: So if you want , something that looks like something that makes you think oh what's this ? Like this pen doesn't really look like a pen , project manager: -huh . project manager: d no do you think there's a risk if it doesn't look like remote control , people won't see it as a remote control and marketing: I suppose suppose that's up to the marketing to to make make people aware of the product . Any other thoughts about th the physical appearance of a of remote controls ? user interface: I think something that's comfortable to hold because sometimes you get the remote controls that are just those big , rectangular things industrial designer: . user interface: and they're kind of awkward to hold onto , marketing: user interface: so something that's more comfortable that fits in a person's hand better . project manager: th the thing that i immediately comes to mind is computer mouses which y you get all sorts of shapes in the shops industrial designer: . project manager: some from personal experience which look nice industrial designer: project manager: but aren't particularly comfortable . marketing: Well from the mouse idea you could , remote is a piece of plastic with the big rubber buttons sticking out of it which you press , whereas if you want could all be flat and the buttons are very kind of almost subtle that instead of being raised out of the device you push into device you see , like a mouse button . project manager: Yes , the only thing is if if you're watching television in a in a a darkened room you need to be able to industrial designer: . user interface: But maybe they could be concave instead of sticking up to have them be kind of down so you could feel them industrial designer: . project manager: Yeah , that's must admit I don't think I've ever seen one with concave buttons , that's certainly be different . do we need it to I can't think of any re remote controls that I know of that actually light up at all . So , Andrew have you had any thoughts yet about how we might market something which there are already millions out there and that we want to t take over the entire the planet with ? industrial designer: user interface: marketing: - , especially if we try to sell , what two million of them . Oh sorry , four million of 'em , but I think if w if we market it as as not as not well this you c you could either market it as the point of view we could have the two we could have parallel marketing s schemes where you've got one where it appeals to people that want to have the new device that looks cool , is fashionable industrial designer: . marketing: and like you just it's it's like it's one that rather than ra I wan I want rather than a kind of a need relationship with the device , project manager: marketing: but that might considering the act what the device is for and the nature of some people might not like respond to having a device that they just looks nice , therefore they want it so make it practical at the same time . I think it's this is gonna have to appeal to people that want device that can enhance their living room project manager: Okay , yeah , yeah , well marketing: So , I dunno we'll have to decide which which angle we're gonna go to or both . project manager: I d I think an any any facets that we identify w we aim need to aim for for all of . industrial designer: Oh I think it's it's remote controls are kind of a unique object 'cause it's you depend on them so much , but you don't i i it's you sort of just assume they're always gonna work , you don't think of them as a comp like a computer can break down and you're kinda like oh well fair enough there's all these complex things going on , it's gonna something's gonna get messed up eventually . They they just need to be very very dependable because people sort of take them for granted and then if your remote control breaks it's God forbid you actually get up and manually change the channel project manager: Indeed . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: it just it needs to be very effective , very always dependable . I don't think we should make it too small I 'cause I think it needs to it can't be too big like you were saying big an and huge and awkward , but also if you make it too small kinda like you know how mobile phones are getting smaller and smaller , it's just gonna end up under a couch cushion somewhere and yeah . project manager: Okay , and colours , materials ? Kendra , anyone ? user interface: Well , most I think most of the remote controls now are either just black or grey , project manager: . user interface: so maybe we should go with something different or be able to I was just thinking of what they're doing with mobile phones now how you can get the different what are they called ? Like the face-plates project manager: Yeah . user interface: that you change so we could have maybe I don't know if it would be feasible to do something with that , where you can change the face-plates or have kind of a variety project manager: -huh . Have it kind of look how they want to , different colours , things like that , project manager: Right . Okay that's Again I don't think that's ever been done before , user interface: project manager: it's the sort of the sort of thing that would get people thinking yes that's something that I haven't got and might need so . Andrew , any thoughts about how we might market interchangeable fronts on on the remote control ? marketing: well we could either market it together by getting control in a set colour or with like you buy it with several like you ge you get the f the face-plates with it when you buy or as a separate thing , but maybe thinking of that , it's considering the nature of the device , maybe a second thing like a second campaign to market new facials for your to your might go a bit astray industrial designer: . marketing: since it is the kind of thing where y you generally get one and then forget about it . marketing: Unless you were trying to project manager: I think industrial designer: Well you could come up with like novelty ones , like they've done with the the mobile phones , you can get like different you know scenes from different movies and stuff on the remote control marketing: . marketing: Oh industrial designer: and sorta stagger the release of them marketing: it's that's a that's a good idea . industrial designer: and get people like oh I want that cover on it now and that'll keep them spending money . then we'll we will reconvene in in thirty minutes and try to get some of these ideas more formalised <doc-sep>industrial designer: How are you today ? How was your business trip to Boston ? project manager: well , actually I didn't go , didn't feel like it . user interface: You have the same message of Windows cannot marketing: user interface: sen oh stand-by . user interface: project manager: I'm sure you've had a mail from our account manager about it . Ruud is here as the Marketing Expert , Roo is here as the User Interface Designer and Sebastian is here in the role of Industrial Designer . project manager: we're going to do a little tool training for the tools we are going to use during the meetings we are going to have here . then I will tell you a little bit about my idea of the project plan , and we will have a discussion . is there any room for a little presentation ? maybe during the discussion section ? project manager: There is ? Yeah , there is . user interface: project manager: okay , this new product we are are g are going to develop , it's a remote control , a television remote control . Those are kind of easy goals , and I'm sure we can find more goals for the for the product we are going to develop . we will discuss later on more ideas about how the remote should look and how it sh it should function and all those kind of things . we are going to use a a pred a project method during this development , which consists of three different design stages . the functional design , the conceptual design and the detailed design , all of these stages mean that we do some individual work , prepare , and then meet to discuss our the the the progressions , yes . project manager: the first stage , the functional design we are going to search for the user requirements , and we will make a specific specification of that . the second is the technical functional design , what effect should the remote have ? Well in this case control t the the television I think . to presentate , to show us a file you'll need to place it in your project documents folder , which is on your desktop , at least it should be . project manager: sensors , so do not grab it here , but a lit more a little bit more to the to the end . you can insert a new slide or or white-board file by either using the insert function or by clicking the next button or the blank button . user interface: or should we only use it in the in the meetings ? project manager: Yeah , in the meetings , only in the meetings . to oh well , I'm I wrote down the documents should be in the project documents folder if you want to discuss it with us . as a little training I will ask Ruud first to draw your own animal on a new slide with a different colour and a different line width than the one now selected . marketing: project manager: Roo , could you do the same please ? But a different animal with a different colour and a different line width . Well , it looked more than a bunny than a cat , but it works , industrial designer: Well , I'll give it a try . user interface: project manager: Okay , so you can use this at any time during the presentation if you want to . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: project manager: we we will focus this internationally , so the product will be sold , if there is market interest , in in more than one country . And the production costs should not be more than twelve Euro fifty , so we should keep that in mind by w w during the development , because , well , those are important numbers . industrial designer: Yes , I have some technical issues which I would like to present to you before we start the discussion , because there might be some project manager: Limitations . I would like to think about the implementation of of things , and the technical possibilities and impossibilities . So if someone of you comes up with ideas , I'll try to translate them in technical functions , but there might be some impossibilities . and I also will remind people of some new technical possibilities which are available and which might be interesting to implement in our product . industrial designer: I have some initial ideas about some things which are maybe nice to take with you in the upcoming discussion . user interface: And for a cell phone ? industrial designer: Well , there should be some interoperabi interoperability between them . We're not living in the nineteen eighties anymore , so infrared is not project manager: industrial designer: is not really hot technical stuff anymore . user interface: But Yeah , but the infrared , it's , well , a little bit old-fashioned , if you would call it like that . user interface: But all the T_V_s are equipped with infrared , so industrial designer: But it's cost-effective . user interface: Or you shou sh use a industrial designer: So marketing: user interface: you should equip infrared and Bluetooth together in one remote . So that's just my role , I'll just give you everybody some technical input , and I think now the time is to have a little discussion about what the product should be and how it should look , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so the the main por the main points you are telling us are focus on the inter operability , industrial designer: Yes , project manager: and industrial designer: so one thing one remote control should control one or more pieces of equipment , project manager: Okay , and and industrial designer: and the way of communicating with these equipments . there are other things like how to make it trendy , which is I think most Ru Ruud's role . project manager: H how do you think the remote should function for the user ? user interface: Well , I had a few things in mind . well , the interoperability , just like Sebastian said , the remote should work on different T_V_s or even different Yeah , what is it , devices ? project manager: Yep . user interface: so i i I think it's a universal remote control for customers to buy just new in a store . user interface: It's not for for for Philips or whatever to buy our remote for their own product , project manager: Okay , so we're we're going business to consumer , user interface: right ? project manager: not we're we're it's not a user interface: Yeah , I do I don't know that . industrial designer: We're not developing this product for a specific vendor , are we ? project manager: No . industrial designer: we're just developing this product , and we want to sell it to a very broad public , so it should fit to every device . project manager: Ruud , y do you agree ? marketing: Yeah , I think I think they're right , yeah . user interface: Well , the techni fu technical function what you said is just by pressing the button you should change the state of the T_V_ . user interface: Well , that's just the fu the technical function is pure what should the remote control do , wh what is his task as an as an device . but furthermore industrial designer: And you you see the buttons as a as a means of doing this ? user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Or are there any o other controls ? user interface: Yeah , or maybe you want a touch-screen or industrial designer: Are there only any other cont Well , user interface: But industrial designer: I I've seen these remote controls with this little stick which you can move forward , sidewords . And it's very easy for a user to to switch user interface: They're very vu vulnerable . industrial designer: to to switch b between channels or change between tracks on a on a C_D_ , on on a chapters , you know , on a D_V_D_ player . point at a T_V_ , I think it's it's quite disturbing when you always have to point directly to the T_V_ , industrial designer: user interface: Yeah , just don't even point it , so in that case infrared should maybe be restriction to that . project manager: industrial designer: is that are there restriction for the range , the operating range too ? So when you're not able to point at the device the range is very limited . For T_V_ , you're always in in the neighbourhood of a T_V_ , so I don't think think the range should be a problem to that , industrial designer: user interface: but if you want to get it working with a radio , and you're in outside your garden with just one speaker , then maybe the range should be industrial designer: project manager: Okay , gentlemen , just a reminder , we d we have five minutes left for this meeting industrial designer: Okay . user interface: You should able to feel the buttons without it mis you have to know what you do without looking at the buttons , so it should be as user interface for feeling should be good to understand . user interface: And of course you don't always know where all buttons are , so it should be visible al in dark too . user interface: So when it's dark project manager: user interface: Those are two really user interface project manager: I'll write down glow in the dark . industrial designer: Do do you project manager: do you have anything already w ab idea about how the market will respond to the such a product ? Or what we should take in account when developing such a product ? marketing: I think most most things have already been said , like control multiple devices . project manager: Because ? marketing: well , he said about n abo what he said about pointing . Okay , Sebastian , did you have any other ideas ? industrial designer: well yes , I had , about three minutes ago , project manager: user interface: industrial designer: but I've seem to forget them forgot them . industrial designer: would it be nice for a user to have display on this remote control , on which you can see functions ? Which makes it easier to operate it . Well , maybe I but it it can be quite simple , industrial designer: I I don't know . project manager: Yeah , yeah , okay , because because we wa we want to develop a trendy product . project manager: Yeah , industrial designer: Well , that's more project manager: twelve Euro fifty , yeah . I think the the financial part of this project implicates that it's not going to be a high high-end product . project manager: So maybe we could for example only light the buttons that are applicable at that moment or user interface: But Necessary , yeah . user interface: 'Cause I think Bluetooth industrial designer: It's use a lot of project manager: Well does it ? user interface: Yeah , I know it from the cell phone . industrial designer: Well , cell phones have integrated Bluetooth also and , well , it's it seems to work quite okay . user interface: But you can't you can't use Bluetooth all the time , twenty four hours a day . next meeting starts in thirty minutes and , well , you know your o your individual actions or your personal coach will probably email you about th it

The User Interface team proposed incorporating audio or tactile feedback into the buttons of the remote control to ensure that users are aware that their commands are being understood. They suggested options such as speech recognition and the ability to turn off voice control to prevent accidental instructions being sent to televisions. The team also agreed with the Industrial Designer's idea of creating an interoperable universal remote control that can be used with any device. They emphasized that the main function of the remote control is to change the state of the TV through button presses. In terms of voice activation and lighting, the User Interface team suggested adopting a voice chip already available in the manufacturing division and ensuring a continuous light to make the remote easier to locate. They acknowledged that the cost of a motion sensor may be higher than expected. Additionally, they recommended making the remote control comfortable to hold and designing concave buttons to enhance the tactile experience for customers.

Question: What were the key points discussed regarding the tax return? Article: professor e: I was saying Hynek 'll be here next week , Wednesday through Friday , through Saturday , and , I won't be here Thursday and Friday . But my suggestion is that , at least for this meeting , people should go ahead , cuz Hynek will be here , and , you know , we don't have any Czech accent yet , as far as I know , so There we go . So other than reading digits , what 's our agenda ? phd f: I don't really have , anything new . Do you think that would be the case for next week also ? Or is is , ? What 's your projection on ? phd f: . professor e: Cuz the one thing the one thing that seems to me we really should try , if you hadn't tried it before , because it hadn't occurred to me it was sort of an obvious thing is , adjusting the , sca the scaling and , insertion penalty sorta stuff . phd f: And , so I 've tried playing around a little bit with , the insertion penalties and things like that . So , i it it 's not the direction that you were working with that we were saying what 's the , what 's the best you can do with with mel cepstrum . professor e: which , I guess So , to first order , you have other things you were gonna do , but to first order , I would say that the conclusion is that if you , do , some monkeying around with , the exact HTK training and @ @ with , you know , how many states and so forth , that it it doesn't particularly improve the performance . In other words , that even though it sounds pretty dumb , just applying the same number of states to everything , more or less , no matter what language , isn't so bad . Right ? And I guess you hadn't gotten to all the experiments you wanted to do with number of Gaussians , phd f: Right . professor e: but , let 's just If we had to if we had to draw a conclusion on the information we have so far , we 'd say something like that . professor e: so the next question to ask , which is I think the one that that that Andreas was dre addressing himself to in the lunch meeting , is , we 're not supposed to adjust the back - end , but anybody using the system would . professor e: So , if you were just adjusting the back - end , how much better would you do , in noise ? , because the language scaling and insertion penalties and so forth are probably set to be about right for mel cepstrum . professor e: But , they 're probably not at all set right for these things , particularly these things that look over , larger time windows , in one way or another with with LDA and KLT and neural nets and all these things . In the fa past we 've always found that we had to increase the insertion penalty to to correspond to such things . So , I think that 's , @ @ that 's kind of a first - order thing that that we should try . phd f: So for th so the experiment is to , run our front - end like normal , with the default , insertion penalties and so forth , and then tweak that a little bit and see how much of a difference it makes professor e: So by " our front - end " take , you know , the Aurora - two s take some version that Stephane has that is , you know , our current best version of something . , y don't wanna do this over a hundred different things that they 've tried but , you know , for some version that you say is a good one . You say you you have for the noisy How about for the for the mismatched or or or or the or the medium mismatched conditions ? Have you ? When you adjusted those numbers for mel cepstrum , did it ? phd f: I I don't remember off the top of my head . I would need to Well , I did write down , So , when I was doing I just wrote down some numbers for the well - matched case . Looking at the I wrote down what the deletions , substitutions , and insertions were , for different numbers of states per phone . Also , eh , eh , sometimes if you run behind on some of these things , maybe we can get someone else to do it and you can supervise or something . phd f: I probably will have time to do that and time to play a little bit with the silence model . Cuz , the the other That , in fact , might have been part of what , the difference was at least part of it that that we were seeing . professor e: Part of it might just be that the SRI system , they they they always adjust these things to be sort of optimized , phd f: Is there ? professor e: and phd f: I wonder if there 's anything that we could do to the front - end that would affect the insertion professor e: Yes . phd f: What could you do ? professor e: Well , part of what 's going on , is the , the range of values . So , if you have something that has a much smaller range or a much larger range , and taking the appropriate root . professor e: You know ? If something is kind of like the equivalent of a bunch of probabilities multiplied together , you can take a root of some sort . If it 's like seven probabilities together , you can take the seventh root of it or something , or if it 's in the log domain , divide it by seven . professor e: But but , that has a similar effect because it changes the scale of the numbers of the differences between different candidates from the acoustic model phd f: Oh , right . , it 's more directly like the the language scaling or the , the model scaling or acoustic scaling , phd f: That 's interesting . professor e: but you know that those things have kind of a similar effect to the insertion penalty phd f: professor e: So , phd f: So if we know what the insertion penalty is , then we can get an idea about what range our number should be in , professor e: I think so . So that 's why I think that 's another reason other than curiosity as to why i it would in fact be kinda neat to find out if we 're way off . professor e: I 'm sure you 've already looked at this bu in these noisy cases , are ? We are seeing lots of insertions . professor e: I know the VAD takes pre care of part of that , phd f: Yeah . I don't I don't know about the Aurora front - end , but phd b: I think it 's much more balanced with , when the front - end is more robust . Wha - what 's a typical number ? phd b: I don't I don't know . professor e: but it it it wouldn't surprise me if there 's still phd b: professor e: in in the the the old systems we used to do , I I , I remember numbers kind of like insertions being half the number of deletions , as being and both numbers being tend to be on the small side comparing to to , substitutions . phd f: Well , this the whole problem with insertions was what I think , we talked about when the guy from OGI came down that one time and and that was when people were saying , well we should have a , voice activity detector professor e: Right . phd f: that , because all that stuff that we 're getting thr the silence that 's getting through is causing insertions . , the fact that some get by may be less of a critical thing if you , get things in the right range . If you 're operating in the wrong range , that 's why just in general , if you change what these these penalties and scaling factors are , you reach some point that 's a that 's a minimum . We do have to do well over a range of different conditions , some of which are noisier than others . But , I think we may get a better handle on that if we if we see , we ca it 's if we actually could pick a a a more stable value for the range of these features , it , could Even though it 's it 's it 's true that in a real situation you can in fact adjust the these these scaling factors in the back - end , and it 's ar artificial here that we 're not adjusting those , you certainly don't wanna be adjusting those all the time . And if you have a nice front - end that 's in roughly the right range phd f: . professor e: I remember after we got our stuff more or less together in the previous systems we built , that we tended to set those scaling factors at kind of a standard level , and we would rarely adjust them again , even though you could get a phd f: professor e: for an evaluation you can get an extra point or something if you tweaked it a little bit . But , once we knew what rou roughly the right operating range was , it was pretty stable , and , we might just not even be in the right operating range . phd f: So , would the ? , would a good idea be to try to map it into the same range that you get in the well - matched case ? So , if we computed what the range was in well - matched , and then when we get our noisy conditions out we try to make it have the same range as ? professor e: No . I I I What what I 'm saying phd f: Oh , I wasn't suggesting change it for different conditions . I was just saying that when we pick a range , we we wanna pick a range that we map our numbers into professor e: Yeah . phd f: we should probably pick it based on the range that we get in the well - matched case . It depends how much we wanna do gamesmanship and how much we wanna do , i if he it to me , actually , even if you wanna be play on the gamesmanship side , it can be kinda tricky . So , what you would do is set the set the scaling factors , so that you got the best number for this point four five times the you know , and so on . You know ? As for these other things , it may turn out that , it 's kind of reasonable . But then , Andreas gave a very reasonable response , and he 's probably not gonna be the only one who 's gonna say this in the future of , you know , people people within this tight - knit community who are doing this evaluation are accepting , more or less , that these are the rules . But , people outside of it who look in at the broader picture are certainly gonna say " Well , wait a minute . You 're doing all this standing on your head , on the front - end , phd f: Yeah . professor e: when all you could do is just adjust this in the back - end with one s one knob . professor e: And so we have to at least , I think , determine that that 's not true , which would be OK , or determine that it is true , in which case we want to adjust that and then continue with with what we 're doing . And as you say as you point out finding ways to then compensate for that in the front - end also then becomes a priority for this particular test , phd f: Right . professor e: what 's old with you that 's developed ? phd b: I 'm sorry ? professor e: You OK . What 's old with you that has developed over the last week or two ? phd b: Mmm . phd f: Mainly working on what ? phd b: On the report of the work that was already done . phd f: How about that ? Any - anything new on the thing that , you were working on with the , ? phd c: I don't have results yet . professor e: What was that ? phd f: The the , grad a: Voicing thing . professor e: what what 's what 's going on now ? What are you doing ? phd c: to try to found , nnn , robust feature for detect between voice and unvoice . And we w we try to use the variance of the es difference between the FFT spectrum and mel filter bank spectrum . But we don't have res we don't have result of the AURO for Aurora yet . phd c: and professor e: So you 're training neural networks now ? phd c: No , not yet . professor e: So , what wha wh wha what what 's going on ? phd c: Well , we work in the report , too , because we have a lot of result , professor e: - huh . phd c: they are very dispersed , and was necessary to to look in all the directory to to to give some more structure . I if I can summarize , basically what 's going on is that you 're going over a lot of material that you have generated in furious fashion , f generating many results and doing many experiments and trying to pull it together into some coherent form to be able to see wha see what happens . And phd f: Is this a report that 's for Aurora ? Or is it just like a tech report for ICSI , phd c: No . But that you put it all together so that it 's you 've got you 've got a clearer structure to it . You know what things are , you have things documented , you 've looked things up that you needed to look up . professor e: So so , I I think it 's good to pause , and to gather everything together and make sure it 's in good shape , so that other people can get access to it and so that it can go into a report in June . But I think to to really work on on fine - tuning the report n at this point is is probably bad timing , I I think . Well , we didn't we just planned to work on it one week on this report , not no more , anyway . But phd f: Are you discovering anything , that makes you scratch your head as you write this report , like why did we do that , or why didn't we do this , phd b: . We just noticed that , wh while gathering the result that for some conditions we didn't have everything . It 's difficult to say what it will give , because when we look at the Aurora the TI - digits experiments , they have these three conditions that have different noises , and apparently this system perform as well on the seen noises on the unseen noises and on the seen noises . phd f: Could you say it again ? What what exactly did they do ? phd b: They used some parts of the , Italian database to train the voice activity detector , I think . The rules as I understand it , is that in principle the Italian and the Spanish and the English no , Italian and the Finnish and the English ? were development data phd b: Yeah . professor e: So , and it is true that the performance , on the German was , even though the improvement wasn't so good , the pre the raw performance was really pretty good . professor e: So And , it it doesn't appear that there 's strong evidence that even though things were somewhat tuned on those three or four languages , that that going to a different language really hurt you . professor e: You 'd really like to have something that needed no particular noise at all , maybe just some white noise or something like that a at most . professor e: That 's something I 'd like to understand before we actually use something from it , phd f: I think it 's professor e: because it would phd f: it 's probably something that , mmm , the you know , the , experiment designers didn't really think about , because I think most people aren't doing trained systems , or , you know , systems that are like ours , where you actually use the data to build models . professor e: except that , that 's what we used in Aurora one , and then they designed the things for Aurora - two knowing that we were doing that . phd f: And they didn't forbid us right ? to build models on the data ? professor e: No . But , I think I think that it it it probably would be the case that if , say , we trained on Italian , data and then , we tested on Danish data and it did terribly , that that it would look bad . You know , maybe there 's parameters that other people have used you know , th that they have tuned in some way for other things . So it 's it 's , We should we should Maybe that 's maybe a topic Especially if you talk with him when I 'm not here , that 's a topic you should discuss with Hynek phd b: phd f: Do we know anything about the speakers for each of the , training utterances ? phd b: What do you mean ? We we phd f: Do you have speaker information ? professor e: Social security number phd f: That would be good . professor e: What kind of information do you mean ? phd f: Well , I was thinking about things like , you know , gender , you know , gender - specific nets and , vocal tract length normalization . I d I don't I didn't know what information we have about the speakers that we could try to take advantage of . , again , i if you had the whole system you were optimizing , that would be easy to see . But if you 're supposedly just using a fixed back - end and you 're just coming up with a feature vector , w w I 'm not sure , having the two nets Suppose you detected that it was male , it was female you come up with different phd f: Well , you could put them both in as separate streams or something . phd b: Do you have something simple in mind for , vocal tract length normalization ? phd f: no . And so I I , you could maybe use the ideas a similar idea to what they do in vocal tract length normalization . You know , you have some sort of a , general speech model , you know , maybe just a mixture of Gaussians that you evaluate every utterance against , and then you see where each , you know , utterance like , the likelihood of each utterance . You divide the the range of the likelihoods up into discrete bins and then each bin 's got some knob , setting . , that really doesn't sound like a real - time thing with less than two hundred milliseconds , latency that and where you 're not adjusting the statistical engine at all . You know , you can only Right ? phd f: Oh , professor e: Each frame comes in and it 's gotta go out the other end . professor e: But as far as , Like I thought BBN did a thing with , vocal tract normalization a ways back . With with , l trying to identify third formant average third formant using that as an indicator of phd f: I don't know . You know , third formant I if you imagine that to first order what happens with , changing vocal tract is that , the formants get moved out by some proportion phd f: professor e: So , if you had a first formant that was one hundred hertz before , if the fifty if the vocal tract is fifty percent shorter , then it would be out at seven fifty hertz , and so on . Whereas the third formant which might have started off at twenty - five hundred hertz , you know , might be out to thirty - seven fifty , you know so it 's at So , although , you frequently get less distinct higher formants , it 's still third formant 's kind of a reasonable compromise , and phd f: professor e: So , I think , eh , if I recall correctly , they did something like that . professor e: You know ? That 's more like looking at third formant over over a turn or something like that , phd b: But on the other hand , male female is a is a is a much simpler categorization than figuring out a a factor to , squish or expand the the spectrum . Y you could imagine that , just like we 're saying voiced - unvoiced is good to know , male female is good to know also . professor e: But , you 'd have to figure out a way to to to , incorporate it on the fly . , I guess , as you say , one thing you could do is simply , have the the male and female output vectors you know , tr nets trained only on males and n trained only on females or or , you know . I don't know if that would really help , because you already have males and females and it 's - putting into one net . So is it ? phd f: Is it balanced , in terms of gender the data ? phd b: Mmm . There is something perhaps , I could spend some days to look at this thing , cuz it seems that when we train networks on let 's say , on TIMIT with MSG features , they they look as good as networks trained on PLP . But , when they are used on on the SpeechDat - Car data , it 's not the case oh , well . The MSG features are much worse , and so maybe they 're , less more sensitive to different recording conditions , or Shou professor e: Shouldn't be . What what 's the , ? Do you kno recall if the insertions were were higher with MSG ? phd b: I don't know . professor e: so , MSG is very , very dif Eh , PLP is very much like mel cepstrum . professor e: So , if it 's very different , then this is the sort of thing I 'm really glad Andreas brought this point up . And even though we 're not allowed to do that , again we maybe could reflect that back to our use of the features . professor e: So if it if in fact , The problem might be that the range of the MSG features is quite different than the range of the PLP or mel cepstrum . But , it 's d it 's after Well , it 's tandem features , so Mmm . We we have estimation of post posteriors with PLP and with MSG as input , professor e: Yeah . professor e: But i it it it it doesn't necessarily You know , they could be , Do - doesn't tell you what the variance of the things is . professor e: Right ? Cuz if you 're taking the log of these things , it could be , Knowing what the sum of the probabilities are , doesn't tell you what the sum of the logs are . So we should look at the likelihood , or or what ? Or well , at the log , perhaps , and professor e: Yeah . professor e: Or what you know , what you 're the thing you 're actually looking at . But professor e: What do they look like ? phd f: No And so th the , for the tandem system , the values that come out of the net don't go through the sigmoid . Whatever they are at that point , are they something for which taking a square root or cube root or fourth root or something like that is is gonna be a good or a bad thing ? So . professor e: and that 's something that nothing nothing else after that is gonna , things are gonna scale it , you know , subtract things from it , scale it from it , but nothing will have that same effect . Cuz if if the log probs that are coming out of the MSG are really big , the standard insertion penalty is gonna have very little effect professor e: Well , the Right . It 's something that , and then it 's going through this transformation that 's probably pretty close to It 's , eh , whatever the KLT is doing . professor e: But still it 's it 's not gonna probably radically change the scale of things . It may be entirely off and and it may be at the very least it may be quite different for MSG than it is for mel cepstrum or PLP . So that would be So the first thing I 'd look at without adjusting anything would just be to go back to the experiment and look at the , substitutions , insertions , and deletions . And if the if the , i if there 's a fairly large effect of the difference , say , the r ratio between insertions and deletions for the two cases then that would be , an indicator that it might might be in that direction . But , professor e: Anything else ? phd b: my my point was more that it it works sometimes and but sometimes it doesn't work . phd b: And it works on TI - digits and on SpeechDat - Car it doesn't work , and professor e: Yeah . professor e: and And , sometimes , you know , there 's enough evidence for something to work and then it 's harder , it breaks . professor e: so it 's But it but , i it it could be that when you say it works maybe we could be doing much better , even in TI - digits . Well , there is also the spectral subtraction , which , I think maybe we should , try to integrate it in in our system . phd b: But , professor e: O phd b: I think that would involve to to mmm use a big a al already a big bunch of the system of Ericsson . Because he has spectral subtraction , then it 's followed by , other kind of processing that 's are dependent on the , if it 's speech or noi or silence . phd b: And there is this kind of spectral flattening after if it 's silence , and and s I I think it 's important , to reduce this musical noise and this this increase of variance during silence portions . This was in this would involve to take almost everything from from the this proposal and and then just add some kind of on - line normalization in in the neural network . Well , I took a lot of time just getting my taxes out of the way multi - national taxes . So , I 'm I 'm starting to write code now for my work but I don't have any results yet . , i it would be good for me to talk to Hynek , I think , when he 's here . grad d: Do you know what his schedule will be like ? professor e: he 'll be around for three days . I 'll , You know , he 's he 'll he 'll be talking with everybody in this room So . phd f: But you said you won't you won't be here next Thursday ? professor e: Not Thursday and Friday . That 's just that 's that 's one of the big advantages of not making much money is the taxes are easier . professor e: Have to do So you you have to do two returns ? grad d: Mmm . For tw That 's right , ju phd f: But not for this next year ? professor e: Two thousand . grad d: I 'll I 'll still have a bit of Canadian income but it 'll be less complicated because I will not be a considered a resident of Canada anymore , so I won't have to declare my American income on my Canadian return . I just , continuing looking at , ph , phonetic events , and , this Tuesday gonna be , meeting with John Ohala with Chuck to talk some more about these , ph , phonetic events . No , why don't you say something about what it is ? grad a: Oh , you oh , you want you want details . I thought we 'd , you know grad a: I was hoping I could wave my hands . So , once wa I I was thinking getting getting us a set of acoustic events to , to be able to distinguish between , phones and words and stuff . And , once we we would figure out a set of these events that can be , you know , hand - labeled or or derived , from h the hand - labeled phone targets . , we could take these events and , do some cheating experiments , where we feed , these events into an SRI system , eh , and evaluate its performance on a Switchboard task . grad d: Hey , Barry ? Can you give an example of an event ? grad a: Yeah . professor e: Whose paper is it ? grad a: this is a paper by Hubener and Cardson Benson Bernds - Berndsen . phd f: There 's , in my mind , anyways , there 's a difference between , acoustic features and acoustic events . And I think of acoustic features as being , things that linguists talk about , like , professor e: So , stuff that 's not based on data . Versus an acoustic event , which is just some something in the acoustic signal that is fairly easy to measure . professor e: when we did the SPAM work , there we had we had this notion of an , auditory @ @ auditory event . , there 's certainly a bunch of a bunch of places where you know that neurons are gonna fire because something novel has happened . But there 's certainly other things beyond what we talked about there that aren't just sort of rapid changes , but phd f: It 's kinda like the difference between top - down and bottom - up . You know , you look at the phone and you say this phone is supposed to be you know , have this feature , this feature , and this feature . phd f: What ? And then that you know , that may map to this phone sometimes , and sometimes it may not . And , and then from that point on , I would , s design robust event detectors , in a similar , wa spirit that Saul has done w , with his graphical models , and this this probabilistic AND - OR model that he uses . , eh , try to extend it to , to account for other other phenomena like , CMR co - modulation release . And , and maybe also investigate ways to to modify the structure of these models , in a data - driven way , similar to the way that , Jeff Jeff , Bilmes did his work . , and while I 'm I 'm doing these , event detectors , you know , I can ma mea measure my progress by comparing , the error rates in clean and noisy conditions to something like , neural nets . , and So so , once we have these these , event detectors , we could put them together and and feed the outputs of the event detectors into into the SRI , system , and , and test it on on Switchboard or , maybe even Aurora stuff . professor e: By the way , there 's , a couple people who are gonna be here I forget if I already told you this , but , a couple people who are gonna be here for six months . professor e: there 's a Professor Kollmeier , from Germany who 's , quite big in the , hearing - aid signal - processing area and , Michael Kleinschmidt , who 's worked with him , who also looks at auditory properties inspired by various , brain function things . professor e: So , I think they 'll be interesting to talk to , in this sort of issue as these detectors are are , developing . professor e: So , he looks at interesting interesting things in in the different ways of looking at spectra in order to to get various speech properties out . And like I say , I I encourage you to go ahead and meet , next week with , Hynek

Grad D, who had both Canadian and US income, informed the team that he needed to file taxes in both countries for the previous year.

Question: Summarize the discussion about finance, veterans, budget, and disabilities. Article: anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): I call this meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number 22 of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. A reminder to all members that in order to avoid issues with sound, members participating in person should not also be connected to the video conference. For those joining via video conference, I would like to remind you that, when speaking, you should be on the same channel as the language you are speaking. I understand we don't have any ministerial announcements today, so we'll proceed to presenting petitions. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during a meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. For members participating in person, we ask that they please come and drop the signed certificate off at the table once the petition is presented. Chair, it's an honour to rise in meeting number 22 of the COVID-19 committee, otherwise known as something like the House of Commons. I'm here to present two petitions containing hundreds of signatures on the issue of the treatment of Falun Gong practitioners by the People's Republic of China, particularly the practice that's alleged of involuntary organ harvesting. The petitioners ask the Government of Canada to condemn this practice and to publicly call for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong in the People's Republic of China. The second petition is from residents throughout SaanichGulf Islands concerned about what was, at the time this petition was submitted, a future problem. It remains an issue, and I present it on behalf of petitioners who wish the Government of Canada not to put public funds into purchasing or maintaining the Trans Mountain pipeline or towards any expansion of the pipeline. The petitioners note the pandemic is having a devastating impact on many Canadians nationwide, especially those who have low to modest income, small business gig workers, freelancers, artists, film industry workers, non-salaried workers and individuals on fixed incomes such as seniors and those on disability. It further notes that rent, mortgage and utility payments are due at the end of each month, putting countless Canadians at risk of losing their housing. To that end, the petitioners are calling for the government to immediately enact a nationwide rent freeze, eviction freeze, mortgage freeze and utility freeze, enforce mortgage deferrals for homeowners without penalty or interest charges from financial institutions and provide direct assistance in the form of a monthly, universal, direct payment of $2,000 per month for all, with an additional $250 per child immediately. Trans Mountain, in building the pipeline, brings massive environmental and economic risk with no substantial benefit to British Columbia or to local residents. Approximately 40,000 barrels of oil have already leaked from existing Kinder Morgan pipelines, including two major spills in Burnaby since 2007. Chair, that just this past weekend there was yet another spill to the tune of 1,195 barrels here in British Columbia. There is no known scientific technology to clean up the bitumen when there is a spill, and the number of tankers would go from eight to 34 per month into the Burrard Inlet. I want to remind all members in the House that when presenting a petition, the idea is to be as concise as possible. The petitioners are calling for the government to immediately act to prevent this new oil pipeline from proceeding through British Columbia. The first petition reflects the outrage of my constituents at the ever-expanding order in council from the government banning more and more firearms. In particular, the petitioners highlight the failure of the government to act on the issue of illegal guns. The petitioners note that virtually all violent crimes committed in Canada, including the recent shooting in Nova Scotia, involve illegal firearms in the hands of those who are already not permitted to possess them. First of all, it asks that we reverse the order in council banning certain firearms, but also that we propose measures that will effectively address the illegal use of firearms by criminals while respecting the rights of law-abiding citizens. It also asks that we ensure that substantial changes to firearms laws in future actually be made by Parliament, not by the government acting in an unaccountable manner. The second petition deals with Bill C-8, which is the government's bill around conversion therapy. They're asking the government to support amendments to fix the definition to address the issue of conversion therapy and ensure that the definition is correct and doesn't criminalize certain forms of counselling that individuals may voluntarily enter into. The third petition is regarding Bill S-204, a bill in the Senate that seeks to make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad to receive an organ without consent, dealing especially with the horrific practice of forced organ harvesting and trafficking in China. There's been much discussion in this House about the need to do better in terms of long-term care. Rather than working to do better in long-term care, unfortunately we've seen the government removing vital safeguards in the area of euthanasia. I think our focus should be on assisting life rather than removing safeguards that are required in association with the euthanasia regime. The petitioners are particularly concerned about the government's plan to remove a 10-day reflection period that normally takes place. That period can already be waived under certain circumstances, but Bill C-7 proposes to remove it entirely as well as reduce the number of witnesses involved. The petitioners are quite concerned about what's going on in Bill C-7 and call for it to be stopped or amended. Racialized and marginalized communities have been disproportionally affected by the pandemic. We need to do the same for the climate crisis, because humanity and our planet are too big to fail. At risk of neglect and assault, many of the most vulnerable older persons reside in our long-term care facilities. They are the seniors who have built our country and shaped our communities, who have shown us resilience, courage and selflessness, who have made us stronger, and whose work and teachings continue to inspire us. We have not been there for them in the same way they've been there for us throughout their lives. The Canadian Forces report, alongside the climbing disproportionate death toll in our long-term care facilities, has reconfirmed the ugly, indefensible reality of elder abuse and neglect in Canada. In my community, we mourn the deaths of 68 seniors from one long-term care facility alone, Camilla Care. the chair: Before proceeding, I just want to bring up to the members in the background that we want to keep it as simple and as parliamentary as possible in keeping it neutral. michael barrett (leedsgrenvillethousand islands and rideau lakes, cpc): During these trying times, the residents of LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes have risen to the challenge. They've made sacrifices and gone above and beyond to make the lives of their neighbours better and to keep our communities safe. It would be impossible to list everyone who has emerged as a community hero, but I'd like to highlight a few, like Lily, an eight-year-old from Elgin who raised funds for her local food bank by building and selling squirrel picnic tables, and Louise Boardman from Spencerville who's making masks for long-term care facilities and selling others in support of the Breast Cancer Action centre. The Knights of Columbus in Prescott raised funds and are distributing some $27,000 in support of charitable groups throughout the region. Who can forget our top-notch health care workers like Hannah and Mary at the Brockville COVID-19 testing centre? It is the people of LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes that make it so great. Chair, the Indian Act enshrined racism into Canadian law in 1876, and, through residential schools, the child welfare system, our legal system and our police, we criminalized and tore apart indigenous peoples. The deaths of Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi and the assault on Chief Allan Adam are recent examples of systemic racism within the RCMP. Anti-black racism has resulted in more young black men being jailed, children being streamed or excluded from schools and negative police interaction due to profiling. It is now time to reimagine and rework our institutions, starting with our police, to ensure that all Canadians can achieve their truest potential. andranne larouche (shefford, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. That's why the increase in the old age security benefit and the guaranteed income supplement must be extended beyond the pandemic. In three weeks, our seniors will receive their first cheque, when they should be receiving their second. A date must also be announced for the new horizons for seniors program, which helps several groups develop projects to break the isolation of seniors. In closing, I would like to mention the organization Justice alternative et mdiation that during the pandemic, along with other organizations in Shefford, has set up the project Une histoire pour la tienne, which also serves to mark this day. It's a virtual meeting between young people and seniors, allowing them to exchange some inspiring life experiences. Since age prejudice is very much present, I applaud this project, which aims to make us understand each other better and judge each other less. Chair, in the time of this terrible crisis affecting all Canadians, when we are all thinking about how best to deal with it, let's all think about the people around us. Let's show our representation not only to those in the sector of sanctioned workers, but also to all those Canadians who day by day stand up and make a difference. I want to acknowledge and celebrate all the contributions made by the people of Brampton Centre, all religious institutions, civil society and community organizations like Knights Table in my riding. Chair, whether graduating from elementary school, high school, Georgian College or graduating from colleges or universities across the country, I am proud of the accomplishments of all the graduates across BruceGreyOwen Sound. I would also like to congratulate and thank all the teachers and parents who have adapted to teaching online or from home and who have supported these graduates over the course of their academic careers. I'd like to extend special congratulations to Cameron Lovell, who just graduated from grade eight, as well as to Neebeesh and Neebin Elliott, originally from the Nawash unceded first nation on the Bruce Peninsula, who will be headed to Michigan State University, and to Jared Lumley from Owen Sound, who just graduated from my alma mater, the Royal Military College of Canada. The college motto of Truth, Duty, Valour is something all Canadians should aspire to live by. serge cormier (acadiebathurst, lib.): Today I pay tribute to RichardLosier, an entrepreneur, visionary and builder who died on June9, 2020, surrounded by his family. In1968, he co-founded St.Isidore Asphalte, a company that now has more than 200employees. He was unifying and generous, a philanthropist who cared about young people and never missed an opportunity to improve their lives. I met Mr.Losier when I was 14years old, and I can say that he has been a positive influence in my life. Every time I met him, he gave me a lot of advice and encouragement, which I've never forgotten. I offer my most sincere condolences to his children, Richard Jr., Ronald, Nathalie, Caroline and Stphane, and to his family and friends. julie dabrusin (torontodanforth, lib.): Hello from my community in east end Toronto. People talk about how a city the size of Toronto can be cold, but that's far from the truth in my community. Wong of Earl Grey Senior Public School, who delivered home-baked cookies and handwritten notes to all of his students, or Monsieur Steve, who's offering online French classes, or the teachers of Riverdale Collegiate, who paraded through our streets to celebrate our graduates. Our local Michael Garron Hospital put out a call for community members to sew masks and received over 60,000 masks, including those made by Lisa Tancre of Chartwell Avondale Retirement Residence. Restaurants, even while facing adversity, have been generously donating food, like the members of the Leslieville BIA or Mezes. There are so many more stories of generosity that I could share, but I'm out of time. Chair, on Saturday night, Calgarians, particularly those in the northeast, in my riding of Calgary Skyview, witnessed a devastating storm, the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. Homes, vehicles, community buildings and structures suffered significant damage due to large hail, floods and high winds. My heart aches for those who have been impacted by the storm in an already incredibly difficult time, but we are resilient. We know that in the coming weeks there will be a lot of cleanup required, both to personal property and in the community. I'd like to express my sincere gratitude to the people of West Nippissing who organized Pride activities to celebrate the LGBTQ community in June. I thank the public servants for their dedication to the Nickel Belt community and the Valley East and Rayside-Balfour areas. Chair, when COVID-19 began spreading across Ontario, Markham, like many other communities, was unprepared. When Markham residents heard about these shortages, my office was flooded with calls from people who had PPE and wanted to donate. Since then my office has been able to deliver tens of thousands of PPE supplies to front-line health care workers and five masks to each family in need. This pandemic has shown that no matter what the challenge is, the Markham community will overcome it. As we start to see local businesses reopen, it is important for all of us to remember to follow best practices outlined by local public health. It is important for all of us to respect social distancing, to protect all workers and their families. the chair: Again, my apologies for skipping over there, but now we'll to to Ms. Chair, in commemoration of Italian Heritage Month, I would like to pay tribute to the Colombo Lodge and Italian Cultural Centre in Kamloops, British Columbia. Recently they began Colombo Cares take-home dinners with proceeds distributed to different non-profit organizations throughout the region. Last month they very generously gave away hundreds of dinners to Royal Inland Hospital staff and paramedics for their tireless work throughout the pandemic. In their own words they say, Colombo Lodge is very proud of the Italians that have made Kamloops their home. Community members of Italian ancestrypast and presenthave helped and continue to help Kamloops prosper as a giving, welcoming and inclusive community. People are worried about what will happen when the CERB runs out in two weeks' time, and the coming tourism season looks very grim. The province itself is in serious financial crisis due to the pandemic and the decline in oil prices. The federal government must overhaul and enhance the fiscal stabilization program to help Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and other oil-producing provinces through this crisis. This is a challenge and an opportunity to transition to a sustainable energy future, but it will require significant investment and support by government to keep the industry strong and make this a just transition for workers. marie-hlne gaudreau (laurentideslabelle, bq): Mr.Chair, all 44elected municipal officials in the riding of LaurentidesLabelle and I have sent a letter to the government asking that cellular and high-speed Internet networks be made available to all. The territorial complexity of the Laurentians means that there are areas where the signal is weak, unstable or non-existent. Also, because of the lockdown, Internet failures are being felt, and they prevent distance learning, telemedicine and teleworking, among other things. How can our municipalities develop economically if they can't provide their community with adequate communication tools? We are therefore calling on the government to put the interests of its people first by investing massively right now in the construction of high-speed Internet and cellular infrastructure. kevin waugh (saskatoongrasswood, cpc): I rise today to pay tribute to Sir Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of Great Britain and one of the greatest leaders history has ever known. In what can only be called a lifetime of service, Churchill's contributions to the Commonwealth and to the world are without equal. During the Second World War he led the allied forces in Europe against the tyranny and fascism of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. When our world was in its darkest hour, Churchill's leadership was a beacon of hope and freedom. I am reminded of something he once said, All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope. Sir Winston Churchill himself embodied all of these great things and will forever be a symbol of freedom, democracy and hope. Chair, I would like to add my voice to the recognition and celebration of Pride Month, which is celebrated annually during June. However, I know the ongoing pandemic will not stop us from showing our love and support for the LGBTQ+ community. To celebrate Pride Month this year, my office distributed 3,000 pride maple leaf pins across the country; whoever asked received one. Although the majority was sent to constituents in my riding, over 500 pins were sent to the neighbouring ridings of LanarkFrontenacKingston, LeedsGrenvilleThousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, and HastingsLennox and Addington. Please note that we will suspend the proceedings twice to allow employees who provide support for the sitting to substitute for each other safely. grard deltell (louis-saint-laurent, cpc): Mr.Chair, I am very pleased to take part in today's meeting of this parliamentary committee. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Mr.Chair, I thank the hon. I agree with him that Canada and Canadians are doing an excellent and difficult job in the fight against coronavirus. As for the economy, our government is there for Canadians, for workers and for businesses, and it will continue to be. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, Canadians know that the government is there to support them. grard deltell: Canadians and Quebeckers also know that the Government of Quebec will table its economic update this week. members and to Canadians what the government is doing for the economy the chair: We return to Mr.Deltell. Chair, it is a real pleasure for me to explain to the minister and everybody in the House of Commons that today the Saskatchewan government will table its economic update. Chair, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to share with Canadians what our government is doing to support workers, businesses and the economy. We see governments acting correctly for their people, except for the Liberal government, which cannot table an economic update. When will the Liberal government table an economic update, which Canadians would like to see? the chair: The honourable Deputy Prime Minister. Chair, I am delighted to share with the member opposite and with Canadians what we are doing practically that has meaning for Canadians. Everybody is working hard in Canada, and the business community would like to know where the Liberal government is going. I've spoken about the CEBA, and let me point out that more than $26 billion of support has been given through that essential program. grard deltell: Mr.Chair, this is starting to get interesting; the minister is revealing some of these expenses. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I will continue in French by explaining what our government is doing for Canadians and workers the chair: Mr.Deltell. Chair, this is a little bit concerning for all Canadians, because this government cannot say when they will table the economic update, cannot identify how much money they have spent in the last three months and cannot say what is the deficit of Canada. christine normandin (saint-jean, bq): Mr.Chair, there are times when Quebec and the provinces are not just two solitudes, but they get along and speak as one, such as when the time comes to tell the government to mind its own business. On reading section91 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which sets out the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, nowhere do I find that the federal government must meddle by attaching conditions to health transfers. Will the government do the only thing within its authority, which is to take the cheque, sign it and put it in the mail? hon. We fully understand the importance of federal support for the provinces, especially in our national fight against the coronavirus. I would also like to point out the importance of the support of the Canadian Armed Forces, who are doing an important and excellent job in Quebec and Ontario today, right now. christine normandin: Mr.Chair, I am glad to see that there is recognition of the importance of transferring this money. My question is whether it can be transferred unconditionally; that's what I'm asking. In the past, we have seen that it takes a long time to negotiate conditions with the federal government. We saw it in the case of the Quebec City tramway, and we are still seeing it now in the case of transfers for housing in Quebec, for which there is no agreement and, therefore, no transfer of money. member said in her first question that the only thing the federal government had to do on health care was to sign the cheques. I can't agree because, today, at this time, at the request of the Premier of Quebec, the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces are in Quebec today; they're there to save the lives of seniors the chair: We now return to Ms.Normandin. What I'm saying is that, at present, the provinces are unanimously asking that there be no conditions. This is where there should be negotiations so that we can work, among other things, to send money to people living with disabilities, to make sure we fight CERB fraud and to make sure that court time limits are effective in the current crisis. Can the government focus on the issue in order to respect the provinces and transfer money for health care? hon. member that the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces are in Quebec today at the request of the Province of Quebec. member will agree with me that being there for Quebec's seniors, that saving the lives of Quebec's seniors, is much more than simply signing cheques. I think we all should thank these people who are working for Canada, for Quebec, and who are doing an important and excellent job. christine normandin: Mr.Chair, I think the Deputy Prime Minister misunderstood me when I was talking about the importance of acting quickly. Negotiations between the government and the provinces take an awfully long time because the federal government decides to place conditions where there shouldn't be any. Right now, the only important thing is to transfer the money quickly so that it can be used in our hospitals and our long-term care facilities, where the need is desperate. chrystia freeland: Mr.Chair, I would like to point out the extent to which the federal government is there to support the provinces, including Quebec. We have increased funding to the provinces and territories by $500million to help them prepare for COVID-19 outbreaks. This funding is in addition to the $40billion that we already provide annually to the provinces and territories. Chair, I thank the member opposite for the extremely important question, and I'll take this opportunity to acknowledge the work that he has done for many years fighting racism in Canada. Chair, I thank the Deputy Prime Minister very much for the response, but there are some specific actions we need to take. When someone is in need of a wellness check or a mental health check, money, financing and support should go to mental health workers and health care workers, not the police. Chair, the member quite rightly began his questions by speaking about systemic racism against indigenous people in Canada, and I would like to speak about that for a moment. Chair, will the Liberal government commit to a review of the use of force as outlined for the RCMP? Will the Liberals commit to that change? hon. Chair, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety had many conversations last week with the RCMP. Will the Prime Minister or the Liberal government commit to something simple and ensure that at the federal level, racial profiling, street checks and carding are expressly prohibited? hon. Chair, sadly, I can't agree that rooting out systemic racism is going to be simple, but I can agree that racial profiling is absolutely inappropriate. jagmeet singh: Well, I'm going to try to get another commitment from the government, because they don't seem able to commit to something as clear as ending racial profiling. We know that millions of Canadians in a couple of weeks are going to be faced with the reality of their CERB ending. These families are worried about how they're going to put food on the table, because they can't return to a job. Will the Liberal government commit today so that those families will have some concrete support, yes or no? hon. Chair, let me be clear, as I was in my previous answer, that our government clearly is opposed to racial profiling. We know that Canadian workers, Canadian families, continue to need the chair: We'll now pause for a short time to allow staff to change within the safety parameters for the COVID-19 virus, and as we resume, we will go to Ms. Chair, the Prime Minister has mandated his ministers, and I quote, to govern in a positive, open and collaborative way. Opposition parties have little opportunity to hold the ruling party to account, private members' bills cannot be tabled and legislation cannot be debated. Trudeau himself, help us understand how all of this fits into his definition of so-called open government? the honourable pablo rodriguez (leader of the government in the house of commons): Well, Mr. Chair, we're here, right? We're here, and the opposition is asking questions. They have more time than before, so I don't know why they're not happy about it. rachael harder: That's like when I'm asking for a full meal and your handing me a few jellybeans and saying, Why aren't you happy with that? Mr. It's like switching a light on and off when it's convenient for the Prime Minister and for the Liberal Party. Trudeau do the right thing, turn the lights on and get back to work for Canadians? hon. Chair, on this side of the House, we're all actually working very hard and we're answering the questions from the opposition. On the Liberal Party website, under the platform commitment, it says that Parliament works best when its members are free to do what they have been elected to do, and that is be the voice for their communities and hold the government to account. The thing is, I think we've reached a balance whereby MPs can come from different places, mostly around Ottawa, and ask questions; but also we can have colleagues from across the country asking questions. rachael harder: Does the Prime Minister value democracy, or does he still look up to China's basic dictatorship? hon. Chair, we're answering all the questions from the opposition, not only from the people in this room, but we're answering the chair: It's back to Ms. I'd like to know from her why it is not important to her that her colleagues participate directly. Trudeau wrote to his ministers and said to them that they continue to raise the bar on openness, effectiveness and transparency. Trudeau has shut it down and has prevented us from being able to do to the good work that Canadians expect us to do. Chair, do they want to talk about shutting down Parliament? How about the time they prorogued Parliament twicenot only once, but twice? The Conservative government shut down Parliament twice. I want to remind honourable members that questions and answers are being given, and we want to hear both sides. rachael harder: In 2014, the leader of the Liberal Party developed a policy resolution entitled Restoring Trust in Canada's Democracy. At the time, the Prime Minister said, Canadians want their Members of Parliament to be effective voices for their communities in Ottawa, and not merely mouthpieces in their communities for an all-too-powerful Prime Minister. Chair, I'd like to know why my colleague wants to shut down the voices of her colleagues who could not speak and could not participate in this room. Chair, how would we vote on private members' bills, for example? As you know, it is not a government vote or a party vote; it's per row. Chair, through youthat we have electronic voting, yes or no? the chair: We'll go on to Mr. Chair, we know that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has champagne tastes and London flats, but it's his champagne mortgages that Canadians are concerned about. Specifically, why did the minister only disclose the complete extent of his personal debt to the Chinese government on June 4 of this year? hon. Chair, as you know, since the minister entered politics, his two mortgages and other liabilities and assets have been fully disclosed to the Ethics Commissioner and placed on the online public registry. We're in the middle of a pandemic here, trying to help Canadians, and the best they can do is ask questions about the chair: We will go back to Mr. garnett genuis: When the minister owes over a million dollars to the Chinese government, people have a right to ask him questions. I still don't know why they ask the chair: We'll now go back to Mr. Where is the minister? Why is he hiding? Why won't he answer questions about his personal debt to the Chinese government? hon. What is the impact on the decision-making? Three-quarters of Canadians don't want Huawei involved in our 5G network. Will the minister put the interests of Canadians ahead of the interests of his creditors and say no to Huawei? hon. We have been absolutely clear with allies and with Canadians that we never have and never will compromise Canadians' national interests. Chair, that is not an answer, and it is completely out of step with what our allies have already recognized. Reports are emerging of multiple deadly viruses exported from Winnipeg's microbiology laboratory to the Wuhan Institute of Virology right before scientists were expelled for policy breaches. In spite of that, scientific co-operation between Canadian institutions and the military-affiliated Wuhan Institute of Virology is continuing. Why hasn't the government put in place new guidelines to prevent the export of sensitive pathogens and information to China? hon. Chair, he's right that in 2019 the National Microbiology Laboratory shared lab samples with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The National Microbiology Laboratory routinely shares samples with other labs to help advance the international community's understanding of viruses and the research that is ongoing around those viruses. There are strict protocols in place for these transfers, and these samples were transported according to Canadian laws and regulations. Chair, I think Canadians would be concerned to hear that it's routine to transport viruses to Chinese military-affiliated labs. When Champagne was the parliamentary secretary for finance, the government decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, bankrolling Chinese state-controlled development projects in Asia with weak standards in labour, human rights and environment. Will the minister put Canadian taxpayers ahead of his personal creditors and support a pullout from the Communist Party-controlled development bank? hon. Chair, my colleague is trying to connect the dots, and I don't know exactly where he is going from here, but everything is public. I'm sure this exchange will also be available on Google, and the public can draw their own conclusions. We have failures on 5G, failures when it comes to the transport of deadly viruses and failures when it comes to giving over $400 million to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. It's time for the minister to settle his debt with the Communist government and not settle it on the backs of Canadians. michael barrett: Canada's ambassador to the United Nations sent a letter last week to all member states of the UN promising that Canada would consider providing more funding for UNRRA, the same UNRRA that is a front for Hamas, which allows weapons of terror to be stored in schools and provides textbooks that call for the destruction of Israel. Do these Liberals have no shame when it comes to their quest for a seat on the UN Security Council? hon. More than ever, Canada is playing a positive role by being a champion in diversity and inclusion, supporting the global fight against COVID-19, addressing climate change, leading peace and security efforts and helping the most vulnerable. A seat on the Security Council will allow Canada to be a strong voice for a fairer, more inclusive and prosperous the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Chair, I received a letter from Bob Anderson this week, who's advocating for his neighbours like Jean Grevelding, who owns a cottage at Butternut Bay. Of course, our priority is and always has been and always must be the protection of the health and safety of Canadians. That's why we put in place these restrictions for non-essential travel and have required, through the Public Health Agency of Canada, a 14-day quarantine. I don't know the specifics of the person for whom you advocate, but we want to make sure that if they come into Canada, it is for an essential purpose and that they do it safely and respect the quarantine that has been put in place. michael barrett: With nine branches throughout my riding, the Royal Canadian Legion offers a great deal to veterans and rural communities alike. They have been experiencing hardship and a loss of revenue, to the point where they may be forced to shut their doors. The Zone G2 commander and local mayors such as Roger Haley have reached out to me expressing their dire need. Will the government offer support to Legions across the country so they can continue to carry out their vital work for our veterans? hon. Indeed, we're doing everything we can to make sure that we help the Legions and other groups that do so much to help veterans right across the country. michael barrett: On May 21, the minister stated that her team was working as quickly as it could to fill the gaps in CEBA. It has now been three weeks, and many business owners, such as mortgage broker Corinna Smith-Gatcke, are still left in the lurch amid the delays, which are pushing businesses closer to shutting their doors for good. Those businesses can absolutely have access to the loan at their financial institution this Friday, and I would encourage them to go and see their bank or credit union. I want businesses to know that nothing is more important for us than making sure they get the support they need during this difficult time. michael barrett: The County Road 43 expansion project is critical for my riding and the region as a whole. This project will widen the road, increasing safety for the 18,000 motorists who travel the road every day. It's been 334 days since the provincial and local governments announced funding, but there has been nothing from this Liberal government. Today, there is still nothing, and for the last month the minister's team has not even found the time to respond to my request for an update. We're always happy to work with members of Parliament, but they must also work with provinces and territories so that projects are advanced by them to our office. MacAulay read ombudsman Dalton's May 2020 report, Financial Compensation for Canadian Veterans: A comparative analysis of benefit regimes? hon. Wagantall, we'll freeze the time so that there's no extra time taken. MacAulay has read ombudsman Dalton's May 2020 report, Financial Compensation for Canadian Veterans: A comparative analysis of benefit regimes. I've done everything and worked with him in order to make sure that we bring the proper compensation to veterans the chair: We'll go back to Mrs. cathay wagantall: As a result of that study, are the financial outcomes Canada seeks to provide for ill and injured veterans now clearly defined within the Department of Veterans Affairs? hon. Chair, as the member would know, I am to bring a report to the veterans affairs committee, and there are a number of things done in order to make sure that report is the chair: We'll go back to Mrs. cathay wagantall: Then I would suggest that we get our committee up and going as it should be. lawrence macaulay: Well, of course, lockdown, but just under $90 million that the government put in supplementary estimates to make sure we address the backlog for Veterans Affairs. cathay wagantall: Minister, are Canadian Armed Forces members provided with a copy of this document? hon. In Ombudsman Dalton's recent report, did any one of these three provide the best compensation in all nine scenarios that were studied? hon. lawrence macaulay: Of course, as she knows, there's been a lot of work done in order to make sure that we provide the proper compensation to veterans. cathay wagantall: In the undisclosed settlement of Sean Bruyea's legal case against Seamus O'Regan and the Liberal government, a joint statement says ...Canadians, especially all Veterans and their families, are encouraged to enter the public debate about policies and programs that affect our Veterans and their families. lawrence macaulay: I can assure you that anybody is welcome to enter any discussion on compensation of veterans. We're always open to what we can do in order to make sure that we provide appropriate compensation. I don't think the term would be appropriate, but it would provide some compensation to veterans who truly deserve it. Ms.Larouche, did I understand correctly that the interpretation didn't work for both speakers? ms. andranne larouche: The sound didn't allow the interpreters to do their job. the chair: In that case, I would ask both members to maybe put their mike a little bit close to their mouth. cathay wagantall: On a point of order, quite often while I'm trying to speak, there are lots of other voices in the background. the chair: I would ask everyone to please be on mute, as well as for anyone in the chamber to please refrain from speaking loudly. cathay wagantall: You said next question, so we're not going backwards, Chair? the chair: Did we have an answer from Minister MacAulay? No? We'll go to Minister MacAulay to finish up the answer. Then, because of all of the confusion, we'll start at one minute and 45 seconds when we get going again. cathay wagantall: Should I repeat the question, sir? the chair: Please do. In the undisclosed settlement to Sean Bruyea's legal case against Seamus O'Regan and the Liberal government, a joint statement says, Canadians, especially all Veterans and their families, are encouraged to enter the public debate about policies and programs that affect our Veterans and their families. Anybody is quite open to indicate whatever they wish in order to make sure we provide as appropriate a compensation as possible. You can never totally compensate veterans truly for what they deserve, but we want to make sure we provide the best compensation possible. cathay wagantall: If that's the case, is Minister MacAulay aware of the practice of red-flagging veterans' files? hon. cathay wagantall: Since the deputy minister has indicated that he runs the department, will the minister ask him for the names of veterans and the dates and the reasons that they are, or have been, red-flagged by VAC? hon. I will do anything I can to make sure that the veterans the chair: We'll go back to Ms. cathay wagantall: Do the most ill and injured still receive from the pension up to $300,000 less for life? hon. Chair, as you know and as the Prime Minister indicated when the pension for life was put in place, it was stated that if anybody receives lessthe Prime Minister himself indicated it quite clearlythat must be adjusted. cathay wagantall: For veterans in similar circumstances, should the date of their application for compensation be a factor in determining whether they're treated equitably? hon. Retired Major Mark Campbell in my riding of Sturgeon RiverParkland lost both legs in the line of duty in Afghanistan. He is an avid sport shooter, but understandably, due to his disability, he is very limited in the kinds of firearms he can use, and all of these firearms have now been banned under the Liberal OIC. My question to the Minister of Public Safety is this: Did their department do a legal analysis and consider the section 15 charter rights of disabled Canadians not to be discriminated against when they passed their OIC? hon. bill blair: Yes, there was a very thorough analysis done by the justice department to ensure that the prohibitions we put in place were, in fact, charter compliant. We have prohibited them, and we believeand this has been echoed by many people across the countrythat this will make Canadians safer. Chair, is the minister aware that the AR-15 is the most popular sporting rifle in Canada, and is he aware that disabled veterans like Major Mark Campbell are unable to participate in the sport of sport shooting because of his OIC? hon. bill blair: I can assure the member that what I am aware of is that the AR-15 and other weapons like them have been used in mass killings in Canada on many occasions, such as at cole Polytechnique, at Dawson College, again at the Quebec mosque and in Moncton. The AR-15s in particular were also used at the terrible tragedy in places like Sandy Hook, where a bunch of kids were killed, so there is no place for the chair: We will go to Mr. Chair, it has been months since the Liberals shut down this Parliament and months since the Minister of Finance should have presented a budget or at least an economic update to Canadians. Well, that didn't stop Stephen Harper and the Conservatives from tabling a budget in the depth of the last great recession. We're working for Canadians and bringing forward supports to make sure that businesses, workers and Canadians can put food on the table and pay their rent. We will continue to support Canadians, and when we have a clear projection to present, we will do that. Chair, the results are in, and businesses aren't happy with the so-called support programs from these Liberals. When is the government going to recognize that their business support plans have been an absolute failure with only a fraction of the billions promised being accessible to businesses? hon. We had the BCAP, which is critically important to providing liquidity to support the SMEs that make up 85% of the jobs in our sector. We are helping hard-working Canadians, small businesses and large businesses right across the country, but in particular in our energy sector. He tweeted recently to praise the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and the North West Redwater Partnership refinery in my riding. Can the minister tell us what, if any, support they have given to the innovative carbon capture and sequestration technology in this country? hon. Chair, we see carbon capture and sequestration as an integral part of lowering emissions, making emissions more competitive and making our oil and gas industry more competitive. dane lloyd: I note that the minister couldn't name a single example of government support for carbon capture, utilization and sequestration technology. We have spent a lot of time talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, but Canadians are living with another horrific reality, that being the intensifying opioid overdose epidemic. Reports indicate that in the past four years, 14,000 Canadians have died, and the numbers during COVID-19 have been skyrocketing, with British Columbia seeing a 39% increase this year alone. When is the government going to take this scourge seriously and take action to save the lives of Canadians? hon. Chair, I share the member's deep sadness about the number of lives we've lost to opioid overdose. Our government has been steadily making it easier for people who live with substance use to access medications to treat substance use, such as prescription Suboxone and methadone. We have made it easier to rapidly establish safe injection sites in communities and have supported community-based projects that work with people who are using substances. We need to understand that this is a complex issue, and we need to support people to get the help they need. carol hughes (algomamanitoulinkapuskasing, ndp)): The hon. louise chabot (thrse-de blainville, bq): MadamChair, I will come back to the bill introduced last week. As parliamentarians, we felt like we were watching a very bad play, as I imagine the public did. However, the government did not see fit to negotiate with the opposition parties, even though it is in a minority position. One of the things we proposed was to split the bill so that we could give this support to people with disabilities, but the Conservatives did not want to do that. We came back and asked for time to negotiate and give support to people with disabilities, but the government defeated the motion. We asked that the House be recalled today so that we could pass this part of the bill concerning support for people with disabilities, but we are still in the dark. We know this pandemic has deeply affected the lives and health of all Canadians and has disproportionately affected Canadians with disabilities in particular. From the very beginning, we've taken a disability-inclusive approach to our emergency response to ensure that Canadians with disabilities get the support they need. That is why we announced a one-time payment of $600 for persons with disabilities to address these expenses. We're confident that this measure, along with other investments, will benefit Canadians with disabilities, and we hope to get the support of the other parties very soon. louise chabot: MadamChair, I remind you that this measure wasn't passed because we weren't allowed to do so. We've tried here, in the House, to provide the means to give that support, so I ask again, can the government be counted on to give a response to people with disabilities? hon. It contained assistance for the disabled, of course, but it also contained assistance for our seasonal workers, as well as a number of other measures that the Bloc Qubcois opposed. They refused to debate and, when the question of splitting the bill came up, the Conservatives refused to do that. This bill proposed changes to the wage subsidy program, it was supposed to make the CERB more flexible, it proposed fines for fraudsters and, since there was a little section about a benefit for the disabled, the government took it for granted that we would support it without any negotiations with the parties. However, we set one very important condition: that the Liberal Party must get its hands out of taxpayers' pockets in terms of the wage subsidy. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, as we listen to the Bloc Qubcois members, we might think that they invented peanut butter and apple pie. This bill contained a number of measures that all Quebeckers and all Canadians needed, but the Bloc Qubcois refused to debate it. No, we did not follow the Bloc Qubcois' example in splitting the bill; we had thought of it a long time previously. louise chabot: We asked on a number of occasions for the House to be able to sit starting today to pass the part of the bill dealing with those with disabilities. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, my colleague knows very well that things are not as simple as that. I hope that, one day, we will be able to pass this bill and be able to provide assistance for those living with disabilities. yasmin ratansi (don valley east, lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair. Several measures have been implemented for phasing out coal, making polluters pay, providing climate incentives, investing in green technologies and much more, which all together have created a climate plan that is doing more to cut pollution than any other in Canada's history. One area of particular interest is our government's work to protect 25% of Canada's land and 25% of its oceans by 2025. Could the minister update this House on the new conservation projects announced on June 5, World Environment Day, and on how our government is protecting our environment? hon. seamus o'regan: Madam Chair, protecting nature is an important part of how we will address climate change and the very real challenges it presents. That's why on June 5, World Environment Day, our government announced over 60 conservation projects under development across Canada. They'll conserve Canadian nature and biodiversity and protect species at risk, enhance ecological integrity and connectivity, and enhance the size of Canada's vast network of protected areas. Nearly half of these projects are indigenous-led, with the aim of creating indigenous-protected conserved areas. Madam Chair, projects like these move us closer to our goal of protecting 25% of Canada's lands and oceans by 2025. By working together in partnership with the provinces, territories, municipalities, indigenous peoples and Canadians, together we can protect our natural environment for generations to come. Ratansi, since you have 25 seconds left, we will go to the honourable member for Surrey Centre. randeep sarai (surrey centre, lib.): Madam Chair, there are many small and medium-sized businesses in my riding of Surrey Centre. They saw a decrease in business or needed to close their doors completely in order to adhere to public safety measures to manage the spread of COVID-19. These measures helped keep our most vulnerable citizens safe and ensured that our hospital and health care providers did not become overwhelmed with a sharp spike in cases. Thanks to our government's COVID-19 emergency response, many of these businesses have been able to keep their employees and access important liquidity through the Canada emergency business account, which provides loans to small businesses and non-profits, and the Canada emergency wage subsidy, which is helping businesses to keep and rehire their employees while their revenues are down by providing up to 75% of wages for up to 24 weeks. As we begin to reopen the economy and Canadians across the country return to the job market, those benefits will be even more important to help businesses and industries rehire their staff and make important adjustments to align with public health guidelines to gradually increase their operations. Can the minister please update the committee on how many Canadian businesses have taken advantage of CEBA and CEWS since applications for each have been opened? hon. mary ng: Madam Chair, I want to begin by thanking the member for Surrey Centre for all the work he does to support his constituents and small businesses. Canadians across the country need to know our government has been working tirelessly and will continue to work tirelessly on their behalf. This is why we put in place the important programs to help them get through this crisis during this difficult time, programs such as the wage subsidy program. The wage subsidy has helped these businesses keep their employees on the payroll and are now helping in their rehiring as they slowly and safely restart. There are 348,000 businesses being helped with the wage subsidy program, and this means that 2.6 million workers are being helped. Businesses are also being helped through the interest-free $40,000 loan they can access through CEBA to help stay afloat and pay their expenses during this crisis. I'm pleased to inform this House that to date more than 669,000 the acting chair (mrs. Madam Chair, with so many recent reports and videos of police using force, sometimes deadly force, and violence against indigenous and black people in Canada, I've called for the public safety committee to reconvene. If the members agree, will the minister come to the committee and provide concrete answers as to how the government intends to address racism inherent in Canada's law enforcement, and in particular the RCMP? hon. Madam Chair, indigenous people, black Canadians and other racialized people are far too often experiencing systemic racism and disparate outcomes within the entire criminal justice system. In order to respond appropriately, I think it's necessary to begin by acknowledging the lived experience of people who've known bias and discrimination at the hands of the police and our courts and within our prisons. We remain committed to working with all racialized people and all of the members of this House to ensure that we work toward social justice for all Canadians, and I look forward to discussing the member's motion further with him. jack harris: Will the minister and the government commit to facilitating such a meeting of this committee virtually? hon. bill blair: Madam Chair, the decisions of the committee are the committee's, so I'm sure that this will be a discussion within the committee, but if called, I will certainly be pleased to come with my officials to provide the committee with whatever support and information it needs to contribute to this very important discussion. jack harris: In light of what we've seen with Chief Adam in Fort McMurray and the RCMP accepting that the actions were reasonable, will the minister commit to a full review of the use of force by the RCMP, in particular the philosophy, tactics and training that is given to RCMP officers in dealing with the public? hon. bill blair: I thank the member and I want to assure him, first of all, that this is work that is ongoing, not just in the RCMP but throughout the police community. May I also take this opportunity, Madam Chair, to say that I think all police training has to begin with one very important principle, and that's the preservation of all life and the respect for all Canadians. We're committed to continuing to work with indigenous communities, racialized communities and with police services and all participants in the criminal justice system to make sure that it is fair for all Canadians. lindsay mathyssen (londonfanshawe, ndp): Madam Chair, we need more justice for black, indigenous and racialized people in Canada. This government recognizes that systemic racism exists but refuses to collect race-based data that would allow us to quantify and truly address this injustice. bardish chagger (minister of diversity and inclusion and youth): Madam Chair, our government agrees that it's important that we collect data, and that's exactly why, in the anti-racism secretariat and the anti-racism strategy, there is a commitment to have money go to Statistics Canada to collect race-based data. lindsay mathyssen: Madam Chair, we know that Statistics Canada will start to collect job numbers based on race. This will allow us to identify systemic racism where it is and where we need to ensure a fair and more equal job market for black, indigenous and racialized people in Canada. Why is this government refusing to follow suit so we can tackle systemic racism everywhere, in every sector? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I'd like to thank my honourable colleague for her question. She's absolutely correct in her assessment that we need to collect more data, reliable data, data that will help us deal with some of the challenges we're seeing with systemic discrimination, but, more broadly, we want to make sure that we continue to engage with an anti-racism strategy that will allow us to collect that disaggregated data. That is why we allocated $6.2 million to that initiative through Statistics Canada, but we know we must do more and we will do more. lindsay mathyssen: We know that all people are susceptible to catching COVID-19, but health authorities are clear that parts of cities like Montreal and Toronto have been more impacted than others. For black and racialized people living in these cities, this data is a matter of life and death. Will the government collect and share disaggregated data so we can identify and erase systemic racism, yes or no? hon. bardish chagger: Madam Chair, making decisions based on science and evidence is essential for our government. It is exactly the step we will take moving forward and that's why we are making those investments to ensure that data exists. I look forward to continuing to work not only with all ministers, departments and agencies, but all allies and all parties to get this work done. carol hughes): Mr.Blaney, the honourable member for BellechasseLes EtcheminsLvis, has the floor. steven blaney (bellechasseles etcheminslvis, cpc): Thank you, MadamChair. Last week, my plumber told me that, each time Justin Trudeau comes down the steps to make announcements totalling several billion dollars, he feels like someone is rifling through his pockets. My question is simple and goes to the Minister of Finance: where is this money coming from? hon. steven blaney: The answer I would have liked is simple: we are borrowing the money and we are going to have to pay it back one day. That is another Liberal craze: they borrow money, they make campaign promises, and off they go. Under the Conservative government, the Chantier Davie in Lvis had 1,700workers for the supply ship Asterix. david lametti (minister of justice and attorney general of canada): MadamChair, we are very proud of the Chantier Davie and we completely understand its role in the system. We are going to establish the process for the polar ice-breaker, which is essential for the work of the Coast Guard in northern communities, and we are going to make sure that the acting chair (mrs. There is money in the Canada summer jobs program: in my constituency alone, $150,000has been approved. What is the minister waiting for in order to confirm those positions? In my constituency, and everywhere else in the country, our young people want to work. What is the government waiting for in order to send some cash to the Canada summer jobs program? hon. We are introducing flexibilities into the system to enable employers to be able to hire summer students. The money is available; where is the announcement? MadamChair, our young people are not the only ones who want to work. Let me use Jessie Gito as an example; he has been working at Plate2000 in Saint-Anselme for years. When the time came to renew his work permit, he found out that he has to have some biometric tests. Is the minister going to allow Jessie Gito and the thousands of other temporary foreign workers who want to work to be able to do so until the government biometric testing centres reopen? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, it is important for the honourable member to recognize that we are in the early recovery stage of the pandemic. We will ensure that we support both our students and our temporary foreign workers to make sure we get the recovery right. We've introduced flexibilities into the program to ensure that employers are able to take advantage of the program and give opportunities to young people. Then, when the government's biometric testing centres are open again, he will gladly go to one. Young people want to work in agriculture as well, and the minister has told us that the government wants young people working and that their files will be processed as quickly as possible. She wants to create 700positions and she knows that people can fill in an application on a first-come first-served basis. Of those 700positions, how many have been confirmed to date? The good weather has arrived, the corn is starting to grow, and this is the time when farmers need the young workers. marie-claude bibeau (minister of agriculture and agri-food): MadamChair, the program for young workers in agriculture is open. This is a program that is not only intended to provide summer jobs, but also to interest young people in making a career in agriculture. doug shipley (barriespringwateroro-medonte, cpc): Thank you, Chair. Over the course of the pandemic, has the government been using all avenues possible to source much-needed PPE in Canada? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, we have been very clear that we have a made-in-Canada initiative that has engaged companies across the country. Over 700 companies have retooled and scaled up their operations for personal protective equipment to help front-line health care workers. doug shipley: Madam Chair, I need to ask very quickly which ministry and minister are responsible for the sourcing of PPE in Canada. I work with the Minister of Health and the minister for procurement , and we coordinate with the provinces and territories to make sure there are appropriate levels of PPE to help front-line health care workers and essential workers across the country. For over 37 years, it has provided front-line health care workers with an extensive line of PPE and other essential products required when dealing with respiratory illnesses. Southmedic currently employs over 700 people, and it has been recognized as one of Canada's best-managed companies by Deloitte on numerous occasions. Since the beginning of the pandemic, both I and the member for BarrieInnisfil have been attempting to obtain some assistance for Southmedic from the federal government. I received a letter back from the minister dated May 27 indicating that this issue of Southmedic falls under the mandate of the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. When will the federal government reach out and help this great Canadian company and therefore ensure that all front-line workers will have the proper PPE they require? hon. navdeep bains: Madam Chair, I'd like to thank my honourable colleague for his question. Since then, we've seen over 6,000 companies step up to offer solutions and ideas, and over 700 companies have retooled their efforts. I acknowledge that some companies are still engaging with the government, and we'll continue to explore all possible options to make sure we continue to procure the necessary levels of personal protective equipment to protect Canadians and to protect front-line health care workers. Moving on to a different issue, while walking to my office this morning, I stopped at my local small family-run coffee shop and was discussing the current economic situation with the two owners of the establishment. The only thing keeping them hopeful is that soon the public service will start returning to work, and therefore their business will begin to return. Could the government please give us some indication as to what the plans are for returning the civil service back to work safely, and when? hon. This is a very important topic, but I'd like to take the opportunity first to thank our public servants, who have worked very hard in the last few weeks, both personally and professionally. In fact, today is a wonderful day to say that, because today is the start of National Public Service Week. They've been at work for the last few monthsin different circumstances, but they have been working very hard to deliver the services and the support Canadians need and deserve. carol hughes): Next we'll go to the honourable member for SelkirkInterlakeEastman, Mr. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): Thank you, Madam Chair. First of all, I want to thank the great men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces for the fantastic job they're doing in Operation LASER, serving on the front lines battling COVID-19. Can the Minister of National Defence give the House an update on exactly where we are at with the number of Canadian Armed Forces members who have been infected with COVID-19? hon. sajjan (minister of national defence): Madam Chair, I want to echo the member opposite's comments in thanking our Canadian Armed Forces members. Currently, we have 13 active cases in the Canadian Armed Forces, but in the long-term care facilities we currently have 50 cases. james bezan: Through you, Chair, Minister Sajjan, does that number of active cases include the active cases that are in long-term care facilities right now in Operation LASER? hon. sajjan: Madam Chair, as I stated, the 50 cases are strictly from the long-term care facilities. Sajjan say how many of those cases in long-term care facilities are active and how many are recovered? hon. What I can say to break it down further is that in Quebec we currently have 36 and in Ontario we have 14. The President of the Treasury Board has said, The Canadian Armed Forces will be present as long as their presence is needed in Quebec. This contradicts what Prime Minister Trudeau is saying, which is that we have a hard deadline of June 26 for the withdrawal of our troops for Operation LASER. We've been in very extensive discussions with the Province of Quebec, with my counterpart Minister Guilbault, and we are working very diligently to ensure we have a sustained, appropriate response to the request from Quebec for assistance. That response will result in a transition from the currently deployed Canadian Armed Forces to the deployment of paid volunteers, trained personnel who will take on the important role of providing services to those Canadians who need our help in Quebec. The Department of National Defence auditors have called out the Liberal government for mismanagement over the $553-billion investment in our Canadian military through the defence policy. This is a $553-billion investment in our armed forces, and only three people are managing it. Could the minister tell us how that is even possible? Is this the reason that over 100 projects are currently behind schedule? hon. sajjan: Madam Chair, first of all, I want to highlight the unprecedented investment that we're making in defence. When it comes to the management of this, it's conducted by me and the minister of procurement . Are we going to see more cuts because you have been unable to actually roll out these dollars? hon. carol hughes): Before I go to the next speaker, I want to remind members that they are to address their questions and comments directly through the chair. david yurdiga (fort mcmurraycold lake, cpc): Madam Chair, the Canada summer jobs program has many challenges. I've seen many indigenous communities in my riding rejected for funding even though they had received funding in previous years. Here are a few examples of communities that were rejected: Beaver Lake Cree Nation, Buffalo Lake Mtis Settlement and the Mtis Nation of Alberta, Region 1. Could the Prime Minister explain why so many indigenous communities have been denied funding from the Canada summer jobs program? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, we recognize the important role that the Canada summer jobs program plays in supporting employers and young workers in our community across the country every year. We're working very hard to help employers adapt to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and are supporting young Canadians as they begin to look for summer employment. We are introducing increased flexibilities into the Canada summer jobs program to hire youth, while also providing more supports to employers that deliver essential services to Canadians. Why are so many indigenous communities left out of the Canada summer jobs program? This is very important to my community and to communities throughout the province. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we, of course, value the important role that the Canada summer jobs program plays in all communities, including indigenous communities in Canada. I will certainly have an off-line conversation with the honourable member, if he so wishes, about a particular issue, but I can assure him that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to assist employers to introduce flexibilities the acting chair (mrs. david yurdiga: Madam Chair, in my riding, the City of Cold Lake has been in dispute with the federal government for many years over payment in lieu of taxes. Could the Minister of Public Services and Procurement give me a rough estimate of when I will receive a response from the minister's office to my first letter, from 2017, and my letters from 2018, 2019 and 2020? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, I can assure the honourable member that I will go to the minister, and we will come back with an answer to his question. david yurdiga: How much longer does the minister intend to perpetuate the ongoing PILT dispute, which is in excess of $11 million, with the City of Cold Lake? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, once again, I can assure the honourable member that I will speak with the minister and get an answer to his question. david yurdiga: Well, do you know what? I've been writing letters to the department for many years. When you say you're going to get back to me, I really have a hard time believing that. Will the minister agree to follow the prior recommendations of the dispute advisory panel that were accepted by the minister? hon. david lametti: Madam Chair, I can assure the honourable member that I will check with the minister and that she will return to the member in due course. david yurdiga: Madam Chair, the drug Trikafta has been proven to increase the quality of life for 90% of cystic fibrosis patients. Two weeks ago, my office sent a letter to the Minister of Health about the boy in my riding named Cael, who through the special access program is able to get Trikafta in Canada. I requested that the minister use her powers to fast-track Trikafta for commercial use, but I have yet to receive a response back. patty hajdu: Madam Chair, I'm glad to hear that Cael was able to access Trikafta through the special access program. In fact, that program is very helpful for people who are seeking access to medication that's not currently marketed in Canada. As the member opposite knows, Vertex has not applied to market Trikafta in Canada, but we look forward to their application, and I encourage him to write a letter to the manufacturer to also encourage them. I was very troubled to hear that a CBC radio host in the Yukon felt compelled to resign because, as an indigenous person, she could not speak her truth. While we know the Broadcasting Act states that the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of indigenous peoples, it would seem there are some challenges. Therefore, does the Minister of Heritage share the concern of some journalists that problems of systemic racism in Canada are still existing within the institution of the CBC, and will the government now acknowledge the need to recognize the jurisdiction of indigenous governments? hon. steven guilbeault (minister of canadian heritage): Thank you, Madame Chair; and I thank the member for this important question. As stated by the Prime Minister on numerous occasions, our government recognizes that systemic racism exists in Canada, and we have made a commitment to do everything we can to combat it in whichever organization of the Canadian government. I understand these issues to be ones that challenge societal norms, that are not politically expedient to address because they can lose you votes, even though addressing them is morally right and a smart thing to do. In the justice system, examples include mandatory minimum penalties, defunding police, and even investing in restorative justice. Surely now these issues are politically less of a consideration than the tragic reality of even more slain indigenous Canadians at the hands of police, or thousands of indigenous people still incarcerated or living in poverty. Will this government please finally commit to the necessary work originally promised in 2015 and repeal in the justice system the vast majority of mandatory minimum penalties, assuring the necessary discretion for judges, and meaningfully invest in restorative justice measures? hon. david lametti: Madame Chair, I thank the honourable member for her question, as well as for her work as Minister of Justice, and indeed my predecessor. This is a time when we recognize systemic over-incarceration of indigenous peoples, of black peoples, in our criminal justice system. This is a time when we need to look at all potential options to reduce what is a shameful overrepresentation in our criminal justice system. Too often racialized peoples and indigenous peoples have experienced prejudice and systemic discrimination in our justice system, and that has to change. Many of the deaths are related to COVID-19 measures that have prevented people from accessing supervised consumption sites, so they are overdosing alone. While the provinces welcomed the federal backing of safe supply exemption back in March, it is to expire in September of 2020. Will the government provide the necessary supports to the province and help support safe supply initiatives in the provinces? hon. patty hajdu: It's been a pleasure to work with the Province of British Columbia on innovative ways to work on the tragic situation of opioid overdose. I remain committed to working with the province and in fact any province that wants to work towards solutions that treat people who use substances with the dignity they deserve. We're working closely with our partners to make sure that we can prevent more lives from being lost. carol hughes): We will go to the honourable member for South OkanaganWest Kootenay, Mr. richard cannings (south okanaganwest kootenay, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. They've been serving great food for 40 years, but now they're struggling, because they don't qualify for the emergency wage subsidy. The new owner can't use a year-to-year comparison to apply for the wage subsidy because he didn't own the restaurant last spring. He is forced to use receipts from January and February, the darkest doldrums of the restaurant year, to compare with the results from May, traditionally one of their best months. When will the government fix this inequity and let Theo's compete and survive? hon. mona fortier: Madam Chair, the Canada emergency wage subsidy is supporting over 2.5 million workers across the country. To help even more businesses support their workers and rehire people as they reopen, our government is extending the CEWS, and we will continue to extend the CEWS for an additional 12 weeks to August 29 to ensure that Canadian workers continue to have the support they need during these very difficult times. By extending eligibility, our government is ensuring that more Canadian workers in more sectors have the support they need. richard cannings: The owner just wants to be able to apply for the wage subsidy, and right now he cannot, and he will not be able to. Canada's forest sector has been declared essential during this pandemic, but it's been hit hard after a very difficult 2019. Despite soft markets and thousands out of work, government support programs have left many Canadian forest product companies behind. In my riding, the pulp mill in Castlegar is closing for the month of July because local sawmills aren't producing enough wood chips. What is the government going to do to finally support Canadian forestry workers and communities? the acting chair (mrs. carol hughes): The time is almost up, but I will allow for the answer from the honourable minister. In fact, in Quebec, partnering with Les Bois Francs DV Inc., we have widened market access to our products and updated technology systems. In Vancouver we're working with FPInnovations to create the indigenous forest sector technical support program. carol hughes): Now we go to the honourable member for SkeenaBulkley Valley, Mr. taylor bachrach (skeenabulkley valley, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to pick up where my colleague left off, with B.C.'s forest industry. are multiple rounds of mill shutdowns and start-ups, and in some cases this has made it difficult for forestry workers to qualify for EI. My question to the minister is this: Will the minister work to make the EI program more flexible for forestry workers, similar to what this government has done for oil and gas workers? hon. That has been key in the inactive and orphan well program, which we are working on with the provincial governments of Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Alberta. The focus on workers has assured that success, and we will continue to focus on workers in all the industries, particularly our natural resource industry, as they go through this extraordinarily difficult time. taylor bachrach: Madam Chair, reforestation is a very important part of the forest industry in the riding I represent, and people were keenly interested to hear this government's plan to plant two billion trees in the next 10 years. I'm wondering if the minister could tell us how many trees are going to be planted under this program by the end of this season. We are working with forestry associations, the industry and with individual companies to ensure this tree-planting season will be one of the largest the country has ever seen. rhal fortin (rivire-du-nord, bq): MadamChair, last week, the government introduced BillC-17 and the Minister of Justice sent us briefing notes in which he said that it was important to suspend a number of time limits and to extend others, and that the failure to do so could have important repercussions on Canadians, their families, their situations, their finances and their ability to exercise their rights. We have addressed the mandatory time limits in federal legislation as well as certain time limits that courts may not be able to handle. The minister's briefing notes say that, among other things, when it comes to divorcewhich means children are involved people are waiting on custody rights, child support and visitation rights. The minister pointed out that the national security review would require consultations if no decision is made in the prescribed time frame. rhal fortin: MadamChair, what a coincidence, because I beseech my colleague opposite to debate it with us. Last week, the leader of the Bloc Qubcois asked the Liberal government to debate BillC-17 today. Richard Wagner, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who is hardly a dimwit or greenhorn, told us that the justice system needs to be modernized. As recently as this past Saturday in LaPresse, Justice Wagner said that it is essential that the Criminal Code be amended to address the backlog of court proceedings. When will the Liberal government opposite pull up its socks, do its job, govern the federation, sit down with the opposition and discuss the vital matters in BillC-17? hon. pablo rodriguez: MadamChair, if I were my colleague, I would be a little embarrassed, because the bill was sent to the Bloc Qubcois several days in advance. When we asked for the support of the Bloc Qubcois and the other parties to debate itwe were not even asking them to vote in favour of the billthey refused. For example, we asked the Liberals to put the money back into the wage subsidy fund and to commit to dip into it no longer. pablo rodriguez: Can my colleague explain to me what the emergency wage subsidy has to do with a bill about justice? This is an absolutely fundamental piece of legislation. rhal fortin: MadamChair, I would like nothing better than to explain it to him, but I must remind him that he is the leader of the party in power, the party that is supposed to govern the country. I am thinking of families, child support, child custody, labour law disputes in Federal Court, marine transportation, interprovincial transportation, aviation, banks, and those with grievances waiting for a Federal Court ruling. The whole system, the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, everything is on hold because nobody in the government wants to do their job. However, when we asked the Bloc Qubcois if they wanted to debate the bill, they said no, instead of doing what they usually do and saying yes. When the CERB runs out, many workers in my riding of Essex will not have sufficient hours to collect their EI benefits. Because of the shutdown, a mom-to-be who had just returned to work in January, and several hundred of her fellow employees, may not have the 600 hours required for regular or EI parental benefits. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, the Canada emergency response benefit has been providing much-needed help to Canadian workers across the country who have stopped working due to COVID-19. We know that there is still a lot of uncertainty for many Canadian workers, and we know that many will be exhausting their benefits in the weeks to come. We will have more to share soon, as early as this week, on our continuing efforts to support Canadian workers and make sure that help is available during this the acting chair (mrs. We will continue to make sure that we make the necessary investments in the EI delivery system and modernize it to continue to meet the acting chair (mrs. mary ng: Madam Chair, today we are seeing small businesses that have been helped, whether it is getting access to the small business loan, which some are also using in the restart as they are safely restarting, or getting help with their payroll, helping them keep their employees the acting chair (mrs. How will the government incentivize workers to return to their jobs when recalled? the acting chair (mrs. mary ng: The Canada emergency wage subsidy is an excellent program to help those employees stay employed and for those employers who are looking at rehiring them right now during this restart process. chris lewis: Madam Chair, many of my constituents are in a committed cross-border relationship and have not been able to see their partners in quite some time. bill blair: Madam Chair, as we said from the outset, we've implemented restrictions at the U.S. border on non-essential travel with a single purpose in mind: to protect the health and safety of Canadians. As the member is aware, just last week we introduced new measures that allow people in family relationships to stay together as long as they commit to the necessary 14-day period of quarantine. chris lewis: Madam Chair, with regard to child care, as our economy continues to open, parents are facing a stark choice: Who will care for their children? What's the plan to provide access to child care so parents can confidently return to work? hon. ahmed hussen: Madam Chair, we are of course committed to continuing to make the record investments that we've been making in child care. We're committed to creating an additional 250,000 before-school and after-school child care spaces. It sounds as though this government has a desire to force parents to choose between their job and care for their child

The discussion primarily focused on various financial issues that arose during the pandemic, specifically concerning foreign businessmen, veterans, rural communities, and a road widening project. Detailed questions and answers were provided regarding veterans' compensation and pension. Dane Lloyd inquired about the government's budget during the economic recession, with the aim of presenting an economic update and creating job opportunities. Louise Chabot raised concerns about a bill related to disabilities that had not been passed.

Question: What was discussed about IBM and the pre-processing required for the IBM transcripts? Article: phd a: Why is it so cold in here ? professor b: so , we haven't sent around the agenda . So , i , any agenda items anybody has , wants to talk about , what 's going on ? postdoc g: I c I could talk about the meeting . phd a: Well , I had a just a quick question but I know there was discussion of it at a previous meeting that I missed , but just about the the wish list item of getting good quality close - talking mikes on every speaker . professor b: OK , so let 's let 's So let 's just do agenda building right now . You were gonna starting to say something ? postdoc g: Well , you you , already know about the meeting that 's coming up and I don't know if if this is appropriate for this . phd e: What meeting ? professor b: We can so we can ta so n NIST is NIST folks are coming by next week postdoc g: OK . professor b: I think phd e: Who 's coming ? professor b: John Fiscus postdoc g: An - anything else , strike anybody ? phd a: we started running recognition on one conversation but it 's the r isn't working yet . phd e: Wha phd a: the main thing would be if anyone has , knowledge about ways to , post - process the wave forms that would give us better recognition , that would be helpful to know about . professor b: Yeah , so , phd e: What about , is there anything new with the speech , nonspeech stuff ? phd c: Yeah , we 're working more on it but , it 's not finished . postdoc g: I had thought under my topic that I would mention the , four items that I I , put out for being on the agenda f on that meeting , which includes like the pre - segmentation and the and the developments in multitrans . professor b: Alright , why don't we start off with this , u u I guess the order we brought them up seems fine . So the one issue was that the the , lapel mike , isn't as good as you would like . Right ? phd a: Ri - , professor b: Is that is that basically the point ? phd a: yeah , the And actually in addition to that , that the the close talking mikes are worn in such a way as to best capture the signal . And the reason here is just that for the people doing work not on microphones but on sort of like dialogue and so forth , or and even on prosody , which Don is gonna be working on soon , it adds this extra , you know , vari variable for each speaker to to deal with when the microphones aren't similar . phd a: So And I also talked to Mari this morning and she also had a strong preference for doing that . And in fact she said that that 's useful for them to know in starting to collect their data too . Right , so one th grad h: Well , so professor b: well one thing I was gonna say was that , i we could get more , of the head mounted microphones even beyond the number of radio channels we have because I think whether it 's radio or wire is probably second - order . grad h: So it 's towards the corner of your mouth so that breath sounds don't get on it . grad h: And then just sort of about , a thumb or a thumb and a half away from your from your mouth . phd a: But we have more than one type of professor b: How am I d phd a: for instance , you 're phd c: Yeah . phd a: But if we could actually standardize , you know , the the microphones , as much as possible that would be really helpful . professor b: Well , it doesn't hurt to have a few extra microphones around , phd d: Yeah . professor b: so why don't we just go out and and get an order of of if this microphone seems OK to people , I 'd just get a half dozen of these things . grad h: Well the onl the only problem with that is right now , some of the Jimlets aren't working . grad h: And so , w , I 've only been able to find three jacks that are working . phd e: Can we get these , wireless ? grad h: So professor b: No , but my point is phd a: But y we could just record these signals separately and time align them with the start of the meeting . professor b: R r right grad h: I I 'm not sure I 'm follow . Say that again ? professor b: Right now , we 've got , two microphones in the room , that are not quote - unquote standard . professor b: Also what we 've talked before about getting another , radio , grad h: Right . professor b: So , so we should go out to our full complement of whatever we can do , but have them all be the same mike . I think the original reason that it was done the other way was because , it w it was sort of an experimental thing and I don't think anybody knew whether people would rather have more variety or or , more uniformity , phd a: Right . phd a: Well , for short term research it 's just there 's just so much effort that would have to be done up front n , professor b: Yeah . phd e: Is it because You you 're saying the for dialogue purposes , so that means that the transcribers are having trouble with those mikes ? Is that what you mean ? phd a: Well Jane would know more about the transcribers . postdoc g: a couple times , so , yeah , the transcribers notice And in fact there 're some where , ugh well , there 's it 's the double thing . postdoc g: And he 's always they always they just rave about how wonderful Adam 's Adam 's channel is . , " Baaah ! " phd a: Even if if you 're talking on someone else 's mike it 's still you w postdoc g: Yeah , but it 's not just that , it 's also you know you professor b: Yeah . postdoc g: It 's also like n no breathing , no You know , it 's like it 's it 's , professor b: Yeah . postdoc g: it 's really it makes a big difference from the transcribers ' point of view grad h: Yeah , it 's an advantage when you don't breath . professor b: When we 're doing grad h: Yeah , I think that the point of doing the close talking mike is to get a good quality signal . professor b: Yeah , probably yeah , to the store we talked about and that grad h: Yep . postdoc g: And there was some talk about , maybe the h headphones that are uncomfortable for people , to grad h: Yep . So , as as I said , we 'll do a field trip and see if we can get all of the same mike that 's more comfortable than than these things , which I think are horrible . grad h: And , you know , we 're researchers , so we all have big heads . OK , so , Jonathan Fiscus is coming on the second of February and I 've spoken with , u u a lot of people here , not everyone . , and , he expressed an interest in seeing the room and in , seeing a demonstration of the modified multitrans , which I 'll mention in a second , and also , he was interested in the pre - segmentation and then he 's also interested in the transcription conventions . postdoc g: And , So , it seems to me in terms of like , i i it wou You know , OK . So the room , it 's things like the audio and c and audi audio and acoustic acoustic properties of the room and how it how the recordings are done , and that kind of thing . OK , in terms of the multi - trans , well that that 's being modified by Dave Gelbart to , handle multi - channel recording . grad h: Oh , I should 've I was just thinking I should have invited him to this meeting . I I , @ @ didn't didn't see it , yesterday but I 'm going to see it today . And , that 's that will enable us to do nice , tight time marking of the beginning and ending of overlapping segments . In terms of , like , pre - segmentation , that that continues to be , a terrific asset to the to the transcribers . What what I 'm doing right now is I 'm trying to include some information about which channel , there 's some speech in . I 'm just trying to do this by comparing energies , normalizing energies and comparing energies of the different channels . phd c: And so to to give the transcribers some information in which channel there 's there 's speech in addition to to the thing we we did now which is just , speech - nonspeech detection on the mixed file . So I 'm I 'm relying on on the segmentation of the mixed file postdoc g: This is good . phd c: but I 'm I 'm trying to subdivide the speech portions into different portions if there is some activity in in different channels . postdoc g: Excellent , so this 'd be like w e providing also speaker ID potentially . professor b: something I guess I didn't put in the list but , on that , same day later on in or maybe it 's No , actually it 's this week , Dave Gelbart and I will be , visiting with John Canny who i you know , is a CS professor , postdoc g: Oh . You know , maybe they 'd wanna stick an array mike here when we 're doing things phd e: That would be cool . professor b: or or maybe it 's it 's not a specific array microphone they want phd d: Yeah . professor b: but they might wanna just , you know , you could imagine them taking the four signals from these these table mikes and trying to do something with them , I also had a discussion So , w , we 'll be over over there talking with him , after class on Friday . I had a , discussion today with , Birger Kollmeier who 's a , a German , scientist who 's got a fair sized group doing a range of things . But but , he does stuff with auditory models and he 's very interested in directionality , and location , and and , head models and microphone things . And so , he 's he and possibly a student , there w there 's , a student of his who gave a talk here last year , may come here , in the fall for , sort of a five month , sabbatical . phd e: That that reminds me , I had a a thought of an interesting project that somebody could try to do with the data from here , either using , you know , the the mikes on the table or using signal energies from the head worn mikes , phd d: phd e: and that is to try to construct a map of where people were sitting , professor b: Right . phd e: And so you could plot out who was sitting next to who professor b: A little bit , phd e: and professor b: he didn't do a very extreme thing but just it was just sort of phd d: Yeah , yeah . professor b: e e given that , the the the block of wood with the the the two mikes on either side , grad h: professor b: if I 'm speaking , or if you 're speaking , or someone over there is speaking , it if you look at cross - correlation functions , you end up with a phd d: Yeah . professor b: if if someone who was on the axis between the two is talking , then you you get a big peak there . And if if someone 's talking on on on , one side or the other , it goes the other way . professor b: And then , it it it even looks different if th t if the two two people on either side are talking than if one in the middle . Well I was just thinking , you know , as I was sitting here next to Thilo that , when he 's talking , my mike probably picks it up better than your guys 's mikes . phd e: So if you just looked at grad h: Oh , that 's another cl cue , phd d: Yeah . phd e: yeah , looked at the energy on my mike and you could get an idea about who 's closest to who . professor b: Yeah , well you have to the appropriate normalizations are tricky , and and and are probably the key . phd a: You just search for Adam 's voice on each individual microphone , you pretty much know where everybody 's sitting . postdoc g: Can I ask one thing ? , so , Jonathan Fiscus expressed an interest in , microphone arrays . postdoc g: is there b And I also want to say , his he can't stay all day . He needs to , leave for , from here to make a two forty - five flight grad h: Oh , so just morning . postdoc g: So it makes the scheduling a little bit tight but do you think that , that , i John Canny should be involved in this somehow or not . professor b: Probably not but I I 'll I 'll I 'll know better after I see him this Friday what what kind of level he wants to get involved . professor b: he might be excited to and it might be very appropriate for him to , or he might have no interest whatsoever . grad h: Is he involved in Ach ! I 'm blanking on the name of the project . NIST has has done a big meeting room instrumented meeting room with video and microphone arrays , and very elaborate software . Is is he the one working on that ? professor b: Well that 's what they 're starting up . professor b: well I think they 've instrumented a room but I don't think they they haven't started recordings yet . They don't have the phd e: Are they going to do video as well ? grad h: . grad h: Oh , cuz what what I had read was , they had a very large amount of software infrastructure for coordinating all this , both in terms of recording and also live room where you 're interacting the participants are interacting with the computer , and with the video , and lots of other stuff . professor b: All all I know is that they 've been talking to me about a project that they 're going to start up recording people meet in meetings . professor b: And one one notable difference u u actually I can't remember whether they were going to routinely collect video or not , but one one , difference from the audio side was that they are interested in using array mikes . The reason I didn't go for that here was because , the focus , both of my interest and of Adam 's interest was , in impromptu situations . And we 're not recording a bunch of impromptu situations but that 's because it 's different to get data for research than to actually apply it . professor b: And so , for scientific reasons we thought it was good to instrument this room as we wanted it . But the thing we ultimately wanted to aim at was a situation where you were talking with , one or more other people i , in in an p impromptu way , where you didn't didn't actually know what the situation was going to be . And therefore it would not it 'd be highly unlikely that room would be outfitted with with some very carefully designed array of microphones . It was just , you know , yet another piece of research and it seemed like we had enough troubles just phd e: So there 's no like portable array of mikes ? professor b: No . So there 's there 's , there 's a whole range of things there 's a whole array of things , that people do on this . professor b: So , the , the big arrays , places , like , Rutgers , and Brown , and other other places , they have , big arrays with , I don't know , a hundred hundred mikes or something . professor b: And it 's and , in fact at one point we had a a proposal in with Rutgers where we were gonna do some of the sort of per channel signal - processing and they were gonna do the multi - channel stuff , but it d it d we ended up not doing it . grad h: And then they have little ones too professor b: And then they had the little ones , yeah . grad h: but but they don't have our block of wood , right ? professor b: Yeah , our block of wood is unique . professor b: But the But the No , there are these commercial things now you can buy that have four mikes or something phd a: professor b: and and , So , yeah , there 's there 's there 's a range of things that people do . professor b: so if we connected up with somebody who was interested in doing that sort of thing that 's that 's a good thing to do . , whenever I 've described this to other people who are interested on the with the acoustic side that 's invariably the question they ask . Just like someone who is interested in the general dialogue thing will always ask " , are you recording video ? " phd a: Right , professor b: right ? phd a: right . professor b: And and the acoustic people will always say , " well are you doing , array microphones ? " So it 's it 's a good thing to do , but it doesn't solve the problem of how do you solve things when there 's one mike or at best two mikes in in this imagined PDA that we have . , I know that having an array of , I would imagine it would be more expensive to have a an array of microphones . But couldn't you kind of approximate the natural sis situation by just shutting off , channels when you 're later on ? , it seems like if the microphones don't effect each other then couldn't you just , you know , record them with an array and then just not use all the data ? grad h: It 's it 's just a lot of infrastructure that for our particular purpose we felt we didn't need to set up . professor b: Yeah , if ninety - nine percent of what you 're doing is c is shutting off most of the mikes , then going through the postdoc g: OK . professor b: But if you get somebody who 's who who has that as a primary interest then that put then that drives it in that direction . grad h: That 's right , if someone if someone came in and said we really want to do it , phd a: Right . That would be fine , phd e: So to save that data you You have to have one channel recording per mike in the array ? grad h: Buy more disk space . professor b: But then , you know , there 's it there 's phd e: What you save , if you 're going to do research with it . yeah professor b: There 's I I don't know what they 're going to do and I don't know how big their array is . Obviously if you were gonna save all of those channels for later research you 'd use up a lot of space . grad h: Well their software infrastructure had a very elaborate design for plugging in filters , and mixers , and all sorts of processing . But I think in practical situations you would have some engine of some sort doing some processing to reduce this to some to the equivalent of a single microphone that was very directional . professor b: Right ? phd a: it seems professor b: So phd e: Sort of saving the result of the beam - forming . phd a: it seems to me that there 's you know , there are good political reasons for for doing this , just getting the data , because there 's a number of sites like right now SRI is probably gonna invest a lot of internal funding into recording meetings also , which is good , but they 'll be recording with video and they 'll be You know , it 'd be nice if we can have at least , make use of the data that we 're recording as we go since it 's sort of this is the first site that has really collected these really impromptu meetings , and just have this other information available . So , if we can get the investment in just for the infra infrastructure and then , I don't know , save it out or have whoever 's interested save that data out , transfer it there , it 'd be g it 'd be good to have have the recording . grad h: You mean to to actually get a microphone array and do that ? phd a: Well , if Even if we 're not grad h: And video and phd a: I 'm not sure about video . That 's sort of an video has a little different nature since right n right now we 're all being recorded but we 're not being taped . , but it definitely in the case of microphone arrays , since if there was a community interested in this , then grad h: Well , but I think we need a researcher here who 's interested in it . professor b: See the problem is it it took , it took at least six months for Dan to get together the hardware and the software , and debug stuff in in the microphones , and in the boxes . And so I think we could get a microphone array in here pretty easily and , have it mixed to to one channel of some sort . professor b: But , e I think for , how we 're gonna decide For for maximum flexibility later you really don't want to end up with just one channel that 's pointed in the direction of the the the p the person with the maximum energy or something like that . , you you want actually to you want actually to have multiple channels being recorded so that you can And to do that , it we 're going to end up greatly increasing the disk space that we use up , we also only have boards that will take up to sixteen channels and in this meeting , we 've got eight people and and six mikes . phd a: Well if there 's a way to say time to sort of solve each of these f those professor b: Yeah . phd a: So suppose you can get an array in because there 's some person at Berkeley who 's interested and has some equipment , and suppose we can as we save it we can , you know , transfer it off to some other place that that holds this this data , who 's interested , and even if ICSI it itself isn't . , and it it seems like as long as we can time align the beginning , do we need to mix it with the rest ? I don't know . phd a: it 's just it 's worth considering as sort of grad h: And y it 'd certainly gets skew . phd a: once you make the up front investment and can sort of save it out each time , and and not have to worry about the disk space factor , then it mi it might be worth having the data . I mentioned that , b as a practical matter , grad h: Just professor b: but the real issue is that , there is no way to do a recording extended to what we have now with low skew . professor b: which would mean that the sampling times and so forth would be all over the place compared to this . So it would depend on the level of pr processing you were doing later , but if you 're d i the kind of person who 's doing array processing you actually care about funny little times . And and so you actually wou would want to have a completely different set up than we have , phd a: I see . But what we could do is if there was someone else who 's interested they could have a separate set up which they wouldn't be trying to synch with ours which might be useful for for them . phd a: Right , at least they 'd have the data and the transcripts , professor b: And then we can offer up the room , phd a: and Right . professor b: Yeah , we can o offer the meetings , and the physical space , and and yeah , the transcripts , and so on . phd a: But it 's if it 's impossible or if it 's a lot of effort then you have to just balance the two , professor b: Well I thi phd a: so professor b: yeah , the thing will be , u u in in again , in talking to these other people to see what you know , what what we can do . phd e: Is there an interest in getting video recordings for these meetings ? professor b: Right , so we have we phd e: grad h: Yes , absolutely . But it 's exactly the same problem , that you have an infrastructure problem , you have a problem with people not wanting to be video taped , and you have the problem that no one who 's currently involved in the project is really hot to do it . Internally , but I know there is interest from other places that are interested in looking at meeting data and having the video . So it 's just postdoc g: Yeah , w although I m I I have to u u mention the human subjects problems , that i increase with video . There 's the fact that then , if i I I 've heard comments about this before , " why don't you just put on a video camera ? " But you know , it 's sort of like saying , " , well we 're primarily interested in in some dialogue things , but , why don't we just throw a microphone out there . " , the thing is , once you actually have serious interest in any of these things then you actually have to put a lot of effort in . professor b: So I think NIST or LDC , or somebody like that I think is much better shape to do all that . postdoc g: I it it occurred to me , has Don signed a human subject 's form ? grad h: Oh ! Probably not . postdoc g: A permission form ? grad h: Has Don have you s did you si I thought you did actually . grad h: Didn't you read a digit string ? phd e: You were here at a meeting before . postdoc g: Did you sign a form ? grad f: Did I ? I don't know . professor b: Yeah , we we postdoc g: But I just grad f: Can I verbally consent ? postdoc g: you know . You 're on recor you 're being recorded postdoc g: o grad f: Yeah . phd a: and professor b: we don't we don't perform electro - shock during these meetings , grad f: I don't care . phd e: How big is the data set ? postdoc g: Oh , it 's what is one meeting . I didn't want to have any conflicts of , you know , of of when to stop transcribing this one or So I wanted to keep it clear whose data were whose , and and and so phd e: - huh . postdoc g: And , meetings , you know , I think that they 're they go as long as a almost two hours in some in some cases . So , you know , that means you know , if we 've got two already finished and they 're working on , right now all eight of them have differe , additional data sets . postdoc g: And , also Dan Ellis 's innovation of the , the multi - channel to here really helped a r a lot in terms of clearing clearing up h hearings that involve overlaps . But , just out of curiosity I asked one of them how long it was taking her , one of these two who has already finished her data set . , these still , when they 're finished , that means that they 're finished with their pass through . They still need to be edited and all but But it 's word level , speaker change , the things that were mentioned . OK , now I wanted to mention the , teleconference I had with , Jonathan Fiscus . postdoc g: He , he in indicated to me that they 've that he 's been , looking , spending a lot of time with I 'm not quite sure the connection , but spending a lot of time with the ATLAS system . But it looks to me like that 's the name that has developed for the system that Bird and Liberman developed for the annotated graphs approach . postdoc g: So what he wants me to do and what we what we will do and , is to provide them with the u already transcribed meeting for him to be able to experiment with in this ATLAS System . And they do have some sort of software , at least that 's my impression , related to ATLAS and that he wants to experiment with taking our data and putting them in that format , and see how that works out . I I I explained to him in in detail the , conventions that we 're using here in this in this word level transcript . And , you know , I I explained , you know , the reasons that that we were not coding more elaborately and and the focus on reliability . He 's he 's very , independently he asked , " well what about reliability ? " So , he 's interested in the consistency of the encoding and that sort of thing . OK , phd a: Sorry , can you explain what the ATLAS I 'm not familiar with this ATLAS system . postdoc g: Well , you know , at this point I think , well Adam 's read more in more detail than I have on this . But , there there is a way of viewing , whenever you have coding categories , and you 're dealing with , a taxonomy , then you can have branches that that have alternative , choices that you could use for each each of them . grad h: Is is Is ATLAS the his annotated transcription graph stuff ? I don't remember the acronym . The the one the what I think you 're referring to , they they have this concept of an an annotated transcription graph representation . grad h: And that 's basically what I based the format that I did I based it on their work almost directly , in combination with the TEI stuff . And so it 's it 's a data representation and a set of tools for manipulating transcription graphs of various types . phd e: Is this the project that 's sort of , between , NIST and and , a couple of other places ? postdoc g: And I looked through them and they mainly had to do with this , this , tree structure , annotated tree diagram thing . postdoc g: So , and , you know , in terms of like the conventions that I 'm a that I 've adopted , it there there 's no conflict at all . And , " oh , and how 'd you handle this ? " And I said , " well , you know , this way " and And and we had a really nice conversation . , OK , now I also wanted to say in a different a different direction is , Brian Kingsbury . I told him he could SSH on and use multi - trans , and have a look at the already done , transcription . And what he said was that , what they 'll be providing is will not be as fine grained in terms of the time information . And , that 's , You know , I need to get back to him and and , you know , explore that a little bit more and see what they 'll be giving us in specific , phd a: . phd e: The p the people postdoc g: but I just haven't had time yet . phd e: The the folks that they 're , subcontracting out the transcription to , are they like court reporters postdoc g: Sorry , what ? Yes . phd e: or postdoc g: Apparently Well , I get the sense they 're kind of like that . Like it 's like a pool of of somewhat , secretarial I don't think that they 're court reporters . Like medical transcriptionist type people grad h: Nu - it 's mostly it 's for their speech recognition products , phd e: But aren't they 're postdoc g: Yep . grad h: Well they they do send it out but my understanding is that that 's all this company does is transcriptions for IBM for their speech product . grad h: So most of it 's ViaVoice , people reading their training material for that . postdoc g: Up to now it 's been monologues , as far my understood . postdoc g: Brian himself downloaded So So , Adam sent them a CD and Brian himself downloaded , cuz , you know , we wanted to have it so that they were in familiar f terms with what they wanted to do . postdoc g: And then what he 's going to do is check it , a before they go be beyond the first one . professor b: So if they hear something off in the distance they don't they just go phd e: OK . grad h: Well , but that 's OK , because , you know , you 'll do all them and then combine them . phd e: Well if you 're tran if you got that channel right there postdoc g: d , in my case phd c: Yeah . postdoc g: Yeah , I I would think that it would be kind of hard to come out with Yeah . phd a: I I think it 's sort of hard just playing the you know , just having played the individual files . phd a: there are a lot of words that are so reduced phonetically that make sense when you know what the person was saying before . phd e: Yeah , that 's phd a: it sort of depends where you are in postdoc g: And especially since a lot of these phd d: Yeah . grad h: And the answer is we don't actually know the answer because we haven't tried both ways . postdoc g: Well , except I can say that my transcribers use the mixed signal mostly grad h: So . postdoc g: unless there 's a huge disparity in terms of the volume on on the mix . In which case , you know , they they wouldn't be able to catch anything except the prominent channel , grad h: Right . postdoc g: Yeah , well phd a: Actually , are th so are they giving any time markings ? grad h: Right . phd a: In other words , if postdoc g: Well , I have to ask him . postdoc g: But but the , I did want to say that it 's hard to follow one channel of a conversation even if you know the people , and if you 're dealing furthermore with highly abstract network concepts you 've never heard of So , you know , one of these people was was transcribing the , networks group talk and she said , " I don't really know what a lot of these abbreviations are , " " but I just put them in parentheses cuz that 's the that 's the convention and I just " Cuz you know , if you don't know grad h: Oh , I 'd be curious to to look at that . grad h: The networks group meetings are all phd e: Given all of the effort that is going on here in transcribing why do we have I B M doing it ? Why not just do it all ourselves ? professor b: it 's historical . , some point ago we thought that , it " boy , we 'd really have to ramp up to do that " , phd c: - huh . phd d: No , just professor b: you know , like we just did , and , here 's , a a , collaborating institution that 's volunteered to do it . professor b: And it still might be a good thing phd e: I 'm just wondering now phd a: Actu yeah , Mar - Mari asked me the same question as sort of professor b: but phd e: Well , I 'm I 'm wondering now if it 's grad h: Well we can talk about more details later . Let 's see what comes out of it , and and , you know , have some more discussions with them . It 's very a real benefit having Brian involved because of his knowledge of what the how the data need to be used and so what 's useful to have in the format . grad h: So , Liz , with with the SRI recognizer , can it make use of some time marks ? phd a: OK , so this is a , grad h: I I guess I don't know what that means . phd a: and actually I should say this is what Don has b , he 's already been really helpful in , chopping up these So so first of all you , for the SRI front - end , we really need to chop things up into pieces that are f not too huge . , but second of all , in general because some of these channels , I 'd say , like , I don't know , at least half of them probably on average are g are ha are have a lot of cross - ta sorry , some of the segments have a lot of cross - talk . , it 's good to get sort of short segments if you 're gonna do recognition , especially forced alignment . So , Don has been taking a first stab actually using Jane 's first the fir the meeting that Jane transcribed which we did have some problems with , and Thilo , I think told me why this was , but that people were switching microphones around in the very beginning , so the SRI re phd c: No , th Yeah . They they were not switching them but what they were they were adjusting them , phd a: and they They were not phd c: so . phd a: So we have to sort of normalize the front - end and so forth , and have these small segments . phd a: So we 've taken that and chopped it into pieces based always on your your , cuts that you made on the mixed signal . Right ? phd a: the problem is if we have no time marks , then for forced alignment we actually don't know where you know , in the signal the transcriber heard that word . And so grad h: Oh , I see , phd a: if if it 's a whole conversation and we get a long , you know , par paragraph of of talk , grad h: it 's for the length . phd a: And , I think with phd e: Well you would need to like a forced alignment before you did the chopping , right ? phd a: No , we used the fact that So when Jane transcribes them the way she has transcribers doing this , whether it 's with the pre - segmentation or not , grad h: It 's already chunked . And maybe they choose the chunk or now they use a pre - segmentation and then correct it if necessary . That 's great , cuz the recognizer can grad h: it 's all pretty good sized for the recognizer also . phd a: Right , and it it helps that it 's made based on sort of heuristics and human ear I think . phd a: Th - but there 's going to be a real problem , even if we chop up based on speech silence these , the transcripts from I B M , we don't actually know where the words were , which segment they belonged to . phd e: Why not do a a a forced alignment ? grad h: That 's what she 's saying , is that you can't . phd a: If you do a forced alignment on something really grad h: Got six sixty minutes of phd a: well even if you do it on something really long you need to know you can always chop it up but you need to have a reference of which words went with which , chop . postdoc g: Now wasn't I thought that one of the proposals was that IBM was going to do an initial forced alignment , phd a: So postdoc g: after they grad h: Yeah , but professor b: I I think that they are , grad h: We 'll have to talk to Brian . professor b: yeah , I 'm sure they will and so we we have to have a dialogue with them about it . professor b: it sounds like Liz has some concerns phd a: Maybe they have some you know , maybe actually there is some , even if they 're not fine grained , maybe the transcribers professor b: and phd a: I don't know , maybe it 's saved out in pieces or or something . postdoc g: I just you know , it 's like I got over - taxed with the timing . But the it is true that the segments I haven't tried the segments that Thilo gave you but the segments that in your first meeting are great . phd a: Right , cuz postdoc g: Well , I I was thinking it would be fun to to , if if you wouldn't mind , to give us a pre - segmentation . postdoc g: maybe you have one already of that first m of the meeting that , the first transcribed meeting , the one that I transcribed . phd c: I 'm sure I have some postdoc g: Do you have a could you generate a pre - segmentation ? grad h: February sixteenth I think . phd c: but but that 's the one where we 're , trai training on , so that 's a little bit grad h: Oh . phd c: It 's a little bit at odd to postdoc g: Oh , darn . phd a: And actually as you get transcripts just , for new meetings , we can try postdoc g: - huh . So it 'd be good for just to know as transcriptions are coming through the pipeline from the transcribers , just to sort of we 're playing around with sort of , parameters f on the recognizer , postdoc g: phd a: The first meeting had I think just four people , phd c: Four speakers , yeah . postdoc g: Yeah , Liz and I spoke d w at some length on Tuesday and and I and I was planning to do just a a preliminary look over of the two that are finished and then give them to you . I guess the other thing , I I can't remember if we discussed this in the meeting but , I know you and I talked about this a little bit , there was an issue of , suppose we get in the , I guess it 's enviable position although maybe it 's just saying where the weak link is in the chain , where we we , we have all the data transcribed and we have these transcribers and we were we 're the we 're still a bit slow on feeding at that point we 've caught up and the the the , the weak link is is recording meetings . OK , two questions come , is you know what how how do we , it 's not really a problem at the moment cuz we haven't reached that point but how do we step out the recorded meetings ? And the other one is , is there some good use that we can make of the transcribers to do other things ? So , I I can't remember how much we talked about this in this meeting but there was grad h: We had spoken with them about it . postdoc g: And there is one use that that also we discussed which was when , Dave finishes the and maybe it 's already finished the the modification to multi - trans which will allow fine grained encoding of overlaps . , then it would be very these people would be very good to shift over to finer grain encoding of overlaps . It 's just a matter of , you know , providing So if right now you have two overlapping segments in the same time bin , well with with the improvement in the database in in the , sorry , in the interface , it 'd be possible to , you know , just do a click and drag thing , and get the , the specific place of each of those , the time tag associated with the beginning and end of of each segment . professor b: One one was , we had s had some discussion in the past about some very high level labelings , postdoc g: Yeah . The types of overlaps professor b: types of overlaps , and so forth that that someone could do . And the third one is is , just a completely wild hair brained idea that I have which is that , if , if we have time and people are able to do it , to take some subset of the data and do some very fine grained analysis of the speech . For instance , marking in some overlapping potentially overlapping fashion , the value of , ar articulatory features . professor b: You know , just sort of say , OK , it 's voiced from here to here , there 's it 's nasal from here to here , and so forth . , as opposed to doing phonetic , you know , phonemic and the phonetic analysis , grad h: professor b: and , assuming , articulatory feature values for those those things . postdoc g: Also if you 're dealing with consonants that would be easier than vowels , wouldn't it ? , I would think that that , being able to code that there 's a a fricative extending from here to here would be a lot easier than classifying precisely which vowel that was . professor b: but I think also it 's just the issue that that when you look at the u w u u when you look at Switchboard for instance very close up there are places where whether it 's a consonant or a vowel you still have trouble calling it a particular phone postdoc g: grad h: Yeah , but but just saying what the professor b: because it 's you know , there 's this movement from here to here postdoc g: Yeah , I 'm sure . professor b: and and and it 's so I phd e: You 're saying r sort of remove the high level constraints and go bottom - up . Maybe there 's there 's even a better way to do it but it but but that 's , you know , sort of a traditional way of describing these things , phd e: professor b: and , actually this might be a g neat thing to talk to postdoc g: That 's nice . professor b: some sort of categories but but something that allows for overlapping change of these things and then this would give some more ground work for people who were building statistical models that allowed for overlapping changes , different timing changes as opposed to just " click , you 're now in this state , which corresponds to this speech sound " and so on . phd a: So this is like gestural , these g professor b: Yeah , something like that . professor b: actually if we get into that it might be good to , haul John Ohala into this phd a: Right . phd a: But is is the goal there to have this on meeting data , postdoc g: Excellent . phd a: like so that you can do far field studies of those gestures or , or is it because you think there 's a different kind of actual production in meetings that people use ? Or ? professor b: No , I think I think it 's for for for that purpose I 'm just viewing meetings as being a a neat way to get people talking naturally . And then you have i and then and then it 's natural in all senses , phd e: Just a source of data ? phd a: I see . professor b: in the sense that you have microphones that are at a distance that you know , one might have , and you have the close mikes , and you have people talking naturally . And the overlap is just indicative of the fact that people are talking naturally , phd a: - huh . professor b: right ? So so I think that given that it 's that kind of corpus , phd d: Yeah . professor b: if it 's gonna be a very useful corpus , if you say w OK , we 've limited the use by some of our , censored choices , we don't have the video , we don't and so forth , but there 's a lot of use that we could make of it by expanding the annotation choices . professor b: And , most of the things we 've talked about have been fairly high level , and being kind of a bottom - up person I thought maybe we 'd , do some of the others . professor b: people have made a lot of use of of TIMIT and , w due to its markings , and then the Switchboard transcription thing , well I think has been very useful for a lot of people . professor b: So phd a: I guess I wanted to , sort of make a pitch for trying to collect more meetings . phd a: I actually I talked to Chuck Fillmore and I think they 've what , vehemently said no before but this time he wasn't vehement and he said you know , " well , Liz , come to the meeting tomorrow professor b: Yeah . Go to their meeting tomorrow and see if we can try , to convince them postdoc g: professor b: Cuz they have something like three or four different meetings , phd a: because they have And they have very interesting meetings from the point of view of a very different type of of talk than we have here professor b: right ? postdoc g: phd e: You mean in terms of the topic topics ? phd a: Well , yes and in terms of the the fact that they 're describing abstract things and , just dialogue - wise , professor b: And then the other thing is , I don't know if this is at all useful , but I asked Lila if I can maybe go around and talk to the different departments in this building to see if there 's any groups that , for a free lunch , professor b: Yes . grad h: You mean non - ICSI ? phd a: non - ICSI , non - academic , grad h: Yeah , I guess you you can try phd a: you know , like government people , grad h: but phd a: I don't know . , it seems like we we had this idea before of having like linguistics students brought down for free lunches grad h: Well , tha I think that 's her point . phd a: Right , and then we could also we might try advertising again because I think it 'd be good if if we can get a few different sort of non - internal types of meetings postdoc g: Yeah . phd e: Does does John Ohala have weekly phonetics lab meetings ? postdoc g: grad h: And I think , if we could get phd a: So I actually wrote to him and he answered , " great , that sounds really interesting " . grad h: But , it would be nice if we got someone other than me who knew how to set it up and could do the recording phd a: So grad h: so u I didn't have to do it each time . phd a: and I was thinking professor b: He - he 's supposed he 's supposed to be trained to do it . , the other thing is that there was a number of things at the transcription side that , transcribers can do , like dialogue act tagging , grad h: It 's not that hard . phd a: disfluency tagging , things that are in the speech that are actually something we 're y working on for language modeling . So if you wanna process a utterance and the first thing they say is , " well " , and that " well " is coded as some kind of interrupt u tag . , and things like that , th postdoc g: Of course some of that can be li done lexically . phd a: A lot of it can be done postdoc g: And I also they are doing disfluency tagging to some degree already . phd a: I think there 's a second pass and I don't really know what would exist in it . But there 's definitely a second pass worth doing to maybe encode some kinds of , you know , is it a question or not , postdoc g: postdoc g: I wanted to whi while we 're , so , to return just briefly to this question of more meeting data , I have two questions . One of them is , Jerry Feldman 's group , they they , are they I know that they recorded one meeting . professor b: I think there 's we should go beyond , ICSI but , there 's a lot of stuff happening at ICSI that we 're not getting now that we could . So th there was the thing in Fillmore 's group but even there he hadn't What he 'd said " no " to was for the main meeting . phd e: Well , and and the other thing too is when they originally said " no " they didn't know about this post - editing capability thing . professor b: there 's there 's , the networks group , I don't Do they still meeting regularly or ? grad h: Well , I don't know if they meet regularly or not but they are no longer recording . professor b: But , ha ha have they said they don't want to anymore or ? grad h: ugh , what was his name ? professor b: i i postdoc g: Joe Sokol ? grad h: Yeah . professor b: OK , so they 're down to three or four people grad h: They and they stopped Yeah . postdoc g: We might be able to get the administration grad h: Well he was sort of my contact , so I just need to find out who 's running it now . phd a: Yeah , it One thing that would be nice postdoc g: I don't know phd a: and this it sounds bizarre but , I 'd really like to look at to get some meetings where there 's a little bit of heated discussion , like ar arguments and or emotion , and things like that . Some group , " yes , we must " grad h: Who 's willing to get recorded and distributed ? phd a: Well , you know , something phd c: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , I don't think the more political argumentative ones would be willing to phd a: professor b: Yeah , with with with potential use from the defense department . phd a: No , but maybe stu student , groups or , film - makers , or som Something a little bit colorful . Yeah , th there 's a problem there in terms of , the commercial value of of st , postdoc g: Yeah , of course there is this problem though , that if we give them the chance to excise later we e might end up with like five minutes out of a f of m one hour phd d: Film - maker . phd a: And I don't mean that they 're angry phd d: Is postdoc g: of Yes . phd a: but just something with some more variation in prosodic contours and so forth would be neat . So if anyone has ideas , I 'm willing to do the leg work to go try to talk to people but I don't really know which groups are worth pursuing . postdoc g: Well there was this K P F A grad h: No that 's postdoc g: but OK . phd a: Or postdoc g: And I had one other one other aspect of this which is , Jonathan Fiscus expressed primar y a major interest in having meetings which were all English speakers . phd e: Did he mean , did he mean and non - British ? grad h: Well phd c: The all native . phd e: He said British was OK ? postdoc g: But but Sure , sure , sure . professor b: Why ? grad h: British is English ? phd c: postdoc g: Yeah . professor b: Well , I don't I don't I don't think if he didn't say that postdoc g: Native speaking . grad h: So , why would he care ? phd e: Knowing the application phd a: That 's professor b: I remember wh I I remember a study phd a: I was thinking , knowing the , n National Institute of Standards , it is all professor b: I remember a study that BBN did where they trained on this was in Wall Street Journal days or something , they trained on American English and then they tested on , different native speakers from different areas . professor b: it was Swiss w Yeah , so it 's so I think , you know , if he 's if he 's thinking in terms of recognition kind of technology I I I think he would probably want , American English , postdoc g: All America , OK . It it yeah , unless we 're gonna train with a whole bunch of postdoc g: I think that the Feldman 's meetings tend to be more that way , aren't they ? , I sort of feel like they have professor b: I think so , grad h: Maybe . grad h: And maybe there are a few of with us where it was professor b: Yeah . grad h: you know , Dan wasn't there and before Jose started coming , professor b: Yeah . professor b: So , what about what about people who involved in some artistic endeavor ? phd d: Yeah . phd a: Exactly , that 's what I was professor b: You 'd think like they would be phd d: A film - maker . phd a: something where there there is actually discussion where there 's no right or wrong answer but but it 's a matter of opinion kind of thing . phd a: Yeah , we could phd e: A any department that calls itself science phd d: Department . phd d: Computer sci grad h: That postdoc g: We could get Julia Child . phd a: I 'm I 'm actually serious grad h: That 's phd a: because , you know , we have the set up here grad h: Got a ticket . grad f: I know grad h: I could phd a: Not not professor b: Put a little ad up saying , " come here and argue " . grad h: and they they they expressed willingness back when they thought they would be doing more stuff with speech . grad h: But when they lost interest in speech they also stopped answering my email about other stuff , so . phd a: Or people who are really h professor b: They could have a discussion about te grad f: I grad h: We should probably bleep that out . grad f: I heard that at Cal Tech they have a special room someone said that they had a special room to get all your frustrations out that you can go to and like throw things and break things . professor b: Yeah , now that is not actually what we grad f: So we can like post a grad h: Th - that 's not what we want . grad f: No , not to that extent phd a: Well , far field mikes can pick up where they threw stuff on the wall . professor b: Yeah , but we don't want them to throw the far field mikes is the thing . postdoc g: It 'd be fun to get like a a p visit from the grad h: There was a dorm room at Tech that , someone had coated the walls and the ceiling , and , the floor with mattresses . professor b: What did we mean by that ? Remember @ @ ? grad h: Liz wanted to talk about methods of improving accuracy by doing pre - processing . phd a: Well I think that that was just sort of I I already asked Thilo professor b: Oh , you already did that . phd a: but that , it would be helpful if I can stay in the loop somehow with , people who are doing any kind of post - processing , whether it 's to separate speakers or to improve the signal - to - noise ratio , or both , that we can sort of try out as we 're running recognition . , so , i is that Who else is work I guess Dan Ellis and you phd c: Dan , yeah . professor b: he 's he 's interested in in fact we 're look starting to look at some echo cancellation kind of things . professor b: Which grad h: I am not sure how much that 's an issue with the close talking mikes , professor b: ? grad h: but who knows ? professor b: Well , let 's w i isn't that what what you want phd a: I don't know . I 'm bad professor b: t No , so No , i w wha what you what you want when you 're saying improving the wave form you want the close talking microphone to be better . professor b: And the question is to w to what extent is it getting hurt by , by any room acoustics or is it just , given that it 's close it 's not a problem ? phd a: It doesn't seem like big room acoustics problems to my ear professor b: phd a: but I 'm not an expert . grad h: e I bet with the lapel mike there 's plenty , room acoustic phd a: That that may be true . phd a: But I don't know how good it can get either by those the those methods grad h: Yeah . grad h: So I I think it 's just , phd a: Oh , I don't know . phd a: All I meant is just that as sort of as this pipeline of research is going on we 're also experimenting with different ASR , techniques . phd e: So the problem is like , on the microphone of somebody who 's not talking they 're picking up signals from other people and that 's causing problems ? phd a: R right , although if they 're not talking , using the the inhouse transcriptions , were sort of O K because the t no one transcribed any words there and we throw it out . phd a: But if they 're talking at all and they 're not talking the whole time , so you get some speech and then a " - " , and some more speech , so that whole thing is one chunk . And the person in the middle who said only a little bit is picking up the speech around it , that 's where it 's a big problem . postdoc g: You know , this does like seem like it would relate to some of what Jose 's been working on as well , the encoding of the phd d: Yeah . postdoc g: And and he also , he was phd a: The energy , phd d: Yeah , phd a: right . postdoc g: I was t I was trying to remember , you have this interface where you i you ha you showed us one time on your laptop that you you had different visual displays as speech and nonspeech events . Because , eh , it 's possible , eh , eh , in a simp sample view , to , nnn , to compare with c with the segment , the the kind of assessment what happened with the the different parameters . And only with a different bands of color for the , few situation , eh , I consider for acoustic event is enough to @ @ . phd d: I I I see that , eh , you are considering now , eh , a very sophisticated , eh , ehm , eh , @ @ set of , eh , graphic s eh , eh , ehm , si symbols to to transcribe . No ? Because , before , you you are talking about the the possibility to include in the Transcriber program eh , a set of symbols , of graphic symbol to t to mark the different situations during the transcription postdoc g: Oh , I w - huh . No ? postdoc g: Well , you 're saying So , symbols for differences between laugh , and sigh , and and and slam the door and stuff ? phd d: Yeah . postdoc g: Or some other kind of thing ? phd d: No ? To to mark postdoc g: Well , I wouldn't say symbols so much . The the main change that I that I see in the interface is is just that we 'll be able to more finely c , time things . postdoc g: But I I also st there was another aspect of your work that I was thinking about when I was talking to you phd a: . postdoc g: which is that it sounded to me , Liz , as though you and , maybe I didn't q understand this , but it sounded to me as though part of the analysis that you 're doing involves taking segments which are of a particular type and putting them together . postdoc g: And th so if you have like a p a s you know , speech from one speaker , then you cut out the part that 's not that speaker , phd a: postdoc g: and you combine segments from that same speaker to and run them through the recognizer . Is that right ? phd a: Well we try to find as close of start and end time of as we can to the speech from an individual speaker , postdoc g: phd a: because then we we 're more guaranteed that the recognizer will for the forced alignment which is just to give us the time boundaries , because from those time boundaries then the plan is to compute prosodic features . phd a: And the sort of more space you have that isn't the thing you 're trying to align the more errors we have . , so , you know , that that it would help to have either pre - processing of a signal that creates very good signal - to - noise ratio , postdoc g: phd a: which I don't know how possible this is for the lapel , or to have very to have closer , time you know , synch times , basically , around the speech that gets transcribed in it , or both . So I just wanted to see , you know , on the transcribing end from here things look good . And then the issue of like global processing of some signal and then , you know , before we chop it up is is yet another way we can improve things in that . You can , The problem is just that the acoustic when the signal - to - noise ratio is too low , you you 'll get , a an alignment with the wrong duration pattern or it phd e: Oh , so that 's the problem , is the the signal - to - noise ratio . It 's not the fact that you have like , what he did is allow you to have , words that were in another segment move over to the at the edges of of segmentations . phd a: Right , things things near the boundaries where if you got your alignment wrong phd e: It 's that there are problems even in inside the alignments , because of the fact that there 's enough acoustic signal there t for the recognizer to to eat , as part of a word . So , yeah , bottom bottom line is just I wanted to make sure I can be aware of whoever 's working on these signal - processing techniques for , detecting energies , phd d: Yeah . professor b: O K , tea has started out there I suggest we c run through our digits and , postdoc g: OK <doc-sep>professor f: We can say the word " zero " all we want , phd g: I 'm doing some professor f: but just phd g: square brackets , coffee sipping , square brackets . phd d: There 's gonna be some zeros from this morning 's meeting because I noticed that professor f: u phd d: Barry , I think maybe you turned your mike off before the digits were Oh , was it during digits ? Oh , so it doesn't matter . phd b: So it 's not it 's not that bad if it 's at the end , but it 's in the beginning , it 's bad . grad a: Yeah , you wanna you wanna keep them on so you get good noise noise floors , through the whole meeting . Yeah I did have to run , but grad e: Is there any way to change that in the software ? grad a: Change what in the software ? grad e: Where like you just don't like if you if it starts catching zeros , like in the driver or something in the card , or somewhere in the hardware Where if you start seeing zeros on w across one channel , you just add some random , @ @ noise floor like a small noise floor . grad a: certainly we could do that , but I don't think that 's a good idea . professor f: Well , I u I actually don't know what the default is anymore as to how we 're using the the front - end stuff but for for when we use the ICSI front - end , grad a: As an argument . professor f: but , there is an there is an o an option in in RASTA , which , in when I first put it in , back in the days when I actually wrote things , I did actually put in a random bit or so that was in it , grad e: OK . professor f: but then I realized that putting in a random bit was equivalent to adding adding flat spectrum , grad e: Right . Gee ! Here we all are ! grad a: so the only agenda items were Jane was Jane wanted to talk about some of the IBM transcription process . professor f: There 's an agenda ? grad a: I sort of condensed the three things you said into that . And then just I only have like , this afternoon and maybe tomorrow morning to get anything done before I go to Japan for ten days . So if there 's anything that n absolutely , desperately needs to be done , you should let me know now . professor f: Yeah , I guess you first you have to do the first one , grad a: Yeah . professor f: Oh they they had some extension that they announced or something ? phd g: Well yeah . Liz had sent them a note saying " could we please have another " I don't know , " three days " or something , and they said yes . phd d: And then she said " Did I say three ? grad a: Oh , phd d: I meant four . " grad a: that was the other thing , phd g: But u grad a: Dave Gelbart sent me email , I think he sent it to you too , that , there 's a special topic , section in si in Eurospeech on new , corp corpors corpora . grad e: Huh ! grad a: And , professor f: Oh ! phd b: I got this mail from grad a: I s forwarded it to Jane as I thought being the most relevant person . So , I thought it was highly relevant postdoc c: Yeah I 'm professor f: That 's grad a: have you did you look at the URL ? postdoc c: Yeah . phd b: Was this SmartKom message ? I think Christoph Draxler sent this , postdoc c: Yeah . grad a: but obviously I can't , really do , most of it , postdoc c: Yeah . For instance that Morgan , accounted for fifty - six percent of the Robustness meetings in terms of number of words . postdoc c: because is it partly , eh , c correctly identified words ? Or is it or just overall volume ? phd g: No . I think it 's he 's he 's in all of them , postdoc c: Oh . phd g: we didn't mention Morgan by name grad a: and he talks a lot . professor f: Well we have now , but phd g: We we we something about grad a: Did you identify him as a senior member ? phd g: No , we as identify him as the person dominating the conversation . professor f: I get these AARP things , but I 'm not se really senior yet , but phd g: Right professor f: phd g: . professor f: but , other than that delightful result , what was the rest of the paper about ? phd g: well it was about it had three sections professor f: You sent it to me but I haven't seen it yet . , the one was that the just the the amount of overlap grad a: The good , the bad , and the ugly . phd g: s in terms of in terms of number of words and also we computed something called a " spurt " , which is essentially a stretch of speech with , no pauses exceeding five hundred milliseconds . , and we computed how many overlapped i spurts there were and how many overlapped words there were . , for four different corpora , the Meeting Recorder meetings , the Robustness meetings Switchboard and CallHome , and , found and sort of compared the numbers . , and found that the , you know , as you might expect the Meeting Recorder meetings had the most overlap , but next were Switchboard and CallHome , which both had roughly the same , almost identical in fact , and the Robustness meetings were had the least , so One sort of unexpected result there is that two - party telephone conversations have about the same amount of overlap , grad a: I 'm surprised . phd g: sort of in gen you know order of magnitude - wise as , as face - to - face meetings with multiple grad a: I have I had better start changing all my slides ! phd g: Yeah . Also , I in the Levinson , the pragmatics book , in you know , textbook , there 's I found this great quote where he says you know you know , how people it talks about how how how people are so good at turn taking , postdoc c: phd g: and so they 're so good that generally , u the overlapped speech does not is less than five percent . grad e: Did he mean face like face - to - face ? Or ? phd g: Well , in real conversations , grad e: . phd b: But postdoc c: Well , of course , no , it doesn't necessarily go against what he said , cuz he said " generally speaking " . phd b: And in f phd g: Well , he he made a claim grad a: Well phd g: Well grad a: phd b: But professor f: Yeah , we we have pretty limited sample here . phd b: Five percent of time or five percent of what ? grad a: Yeah , I was gonna ask that too . phd b: Yeah , so postdoc c: It 's i it 's not against his conclusion , phd g: So but still but still u postdoc c: it just says that it 's a bi bell curve , and that , you have something that has a nice range , in your sampling . So there are slight There are differences in how you measure it , but still it 's You know , the difference between between that number and what we have in meetings , which is more like , you know , close to in meetings like these , you know , close to twenty percent . professor f: But what was it like , say , in the Robustness meeting , for instance ? phd g: That grad a: But phd g: Robustness meeting ? It was about half of the r So , in terms of number of words , it 's like seventeen or eigh eighteen percent for the Meeting Recorder meetings and about half that for , the Robustness . professor f: Maybe ten percent ? grad a: But I don't know if that 's really a fair way of comparing between , multi - party , conversations and two - party conversations . phd b: Then then then you have to grad a: that 's just something phd d: Yeah , I just wonder if you have to normalize by the numbers of speakers or something . phd b: Then Yeah , then normalize by by something like that , postdoc c: Yeah , that 's a good point . phd g: but this obvious thing to see if if there 's a dependence on the number of participants . grad a: You have a lot of a lot of two - party , subsets within the meeting . phd g: And and and then and we also d computed this both with and without backchannels , postdoc c: phd g: so you might think that backchannels have a special status because they 're essentially just grad a: - huh . So , did we all said " - huh " and nodded at the same time , phd g: R right . phd g: But , even if you take out all the backchannels so basically you treat backchannels l as nonspeech , as pauses , grad a: You know , it goes down from maybe For Switchboard it goes down from I don't know f I don't know f fourteen percent of the words to maybe I don't know , eleven percent or something it 's it 's not a dramatic change , grad a: phd g: so it 's Anyway , so it 's That was that was one set of results , and then the second one was just basically the the stuff we had in the in the HLT paper on how overlaps effect the recognition performance . , but mostly we added one one number , which was what if you , basically score ignoring all So so the the conjecture from the HLT results was that most of the added recognition error is from insertions due to background speech . So , we scored all the recognition results , in such a way that the grad a: Oh by the way , who 's on channel four ? You 're getting a lot of breath . phd g: OK , so so if you have the foreground speaker speaking here , and then there 's some background speech , may be overlapping it somehow , and this is the time bin that we used , then of course you 're gonna get insertion errors here and here . phd g: Right ? So we scored everything , and I must say the NIST scoring tools are pretty nice for this , where you just basically ignore everything outside of the , region that was deemed to be foreground speech . And where that was we had to use the t forced alignment , results from s for so That 's somewhat that 's somewhat subject to error , but still we we , Don did some ha hand - checking and and we think that based on that , we think that the results are you know , valid , although of course , some error is gonna be in there . But basically what we found is after we take out these regions so we only score the regions that were certified as foreground speech , the recognition error went down to almost , the level of the non - overlapped speech . So that means that even if you do have background speech , if you can somehow separate out or find where it is , the recognizer does a good job , grad a: That 's great . phd g: even though there is this back grad a: Yeah , I guess that doesn't surprise me , because , with the close - talking mikes , the the signal will be so much stronger . , grad a: What what sort of normalization do you do ? phd g: so , well , we just @ @ we do u you know , vit grad a: in you recognizer , in the SRI recognizer . phd g: Well , we do , VTL vocal tract length normalization , w and we you know , we we , make all the features have zero mean and unit variance . grad a: Over an entire utterance ? professor f: And grad a: Or windowed ? phd g: Over over the entire c over the entire channel . We just took the old So this is actually a sub - optimal way of doing it , grad a: Right . So the recognizer didn't have the benefit of knowing where the foreground speech a start professor f: Were you including the the lapel in this ? phd g: Yes . professor f: And did the did did the la did the the problems with the lapel go away also ? Or phd g: it Yeah . professor f: fray for for insertions ? phd g: It u not per , not completely , but yes , professor f: Less so . So we have to professor f: you still phd g: Well I should bring the should bring the table with results . professor f: I would presume that you still would have somewhat higher error with the lapel for insertions than phd g: Yes . professor f: Cuz again , looking forward to the non - close miked case , I think that we s still phd g: And then , the third thing was , we looked at , what we call " interrupts " , although that 's that may be a misnomer , but basically we looked at cases where , so we we used the punctuation from the original transcripts and we inferred the beginnings and ends of sentences . So , you know postdoc c: Di - did you use upper - lower case also , or not ? phd g: postdoc c: U upper lower case or no ? phd g: ? postdoc c: OK . phd g: No , we only used , you know , periods , question marks and exclamation . And we know that there 's th that 's not a very g , we miss a lot of them , postdoc c: Yeah . That 's OK but phd g: but but it 's f i i postdoc c: Comma also or not ? phd g: No commas . And then we looked at locations where , if you have overlapping speech and someone else starts a sentence , you know , where do these where do other people start their turns not turns really , but you know , sentences , phd b: Ah . phd g: So we only looked at cases where there was a foreground speaker and then at the to at the so the the foreground speaker started into their sentence and then someone else started later . phd b: Somewhere in between the start and the end ? phd g: OK ? And so what phd b: OK . phd g: Sorry ? phd b: Somewhere in between the start and the end of the foreground ? phd g: Yes . phd g: So , the the question was how can we what can we say about the places where the second or or actually , several second speakers , start their " interrupts " , as we call them . phd g: w And we looked at this in terms of grad a: On T - closures , only . phd g: So so we had we had u to for for the purposes of this analysis , we tagged the word sequences , and and we time - aligned them . , and we considered it interrupt if it occurred in the middle of a word , we basically you know , considered that to be a interrupt as if it were at at the beginning of the word . phd g: And then we looked at the the locatio the , you know , the features that the tags because we had tagged these word strings , that that occurred right before these these , interrupt locations . phd b: Tag by phd g: And the tags we looked at are the spurt tag , which basically says or actually Sorry . So whether there was a pause essentially here , because spurts are a defined as being you know , five hundred milliseconds or longer pauses , and then we had things like discourse markers , backchannels , disfluencies . , filled pauses So disfluen the D 's are for , the interruption points of a disfluency , so , where you hesitate , or where you start the repair there . , repeated you know , repeated words is another of that kind of disfluencies and so forth . So we had both the beginnings and ends of these so , the end of a filled pause and the end of a discourse marker . We just looked at the distribution of words , and so every " so yeah " , and " OK " , and " - huh " were were the were deemed to be backchannels and " wow " and " so " and " right " , were Not " right " . But so , we sort of just based on the lexical , identity of the words , we we tagged them as one of these things . So , and then we looked at the disti so we looked at the distribution of these different kinds of tags , overall , and and and particularly at the interruption points . And , we found that there is a marked difference so that for instance after so at the end after a discourse marker or after backchannel or after filled pause , you 're much more likely to be interrupted than before . So pauses are always an opportunity for So we have this little histogram which shows these distributions and , phd d: I wonder phd g: you know , it 's it 's it 's not No big surprises , but it is sort of interesting from grad a: It 's nice to actually measure it though . In other words if you weren't going to pause you you will because you 're g being interrupted . professor f: But he yeah , he 's he 's right , y maybe you weren't intending to pause at all , but You were intending to stop for fifty - seven milliseconds , phd g: Right . And and we so we wrote this and then , we found we were at six pages , and then we started cutting furiously phd b: Oops . phd g: and threw out half of the material again , and played with the LaTeX stuff and grad a: Made the font smaller and the narrows longer . phd g: but we s we put Oh , I I grad a: Took out white space . phd g: you know the the gap between the two columns is like ten millimeters , phd b: Yeah . phd d: Wasn't there wasn't there some result , Andreas professor f: Yeah phd d: I I thought maybe Liz presented this at some conference a while ago about , backchannels phd g: Well phd d: - i i do you rem phd g: y We didn't talk about , prosodic , properties at all , phd d: Right . But phd g: although that 's I I take it that 's something that Don will will look at grad e: Yeah , we 're gonna be looking at that . postdoc c: Well , I didn't know about Liz 's finding on that , phd d: About postdoc c: but I know of another paper that talks about something phd d: - huh . phd d: It made me think about a cool little device that could be built to to handle those people that call you on the phone and just like to talk and talk and talk . And you just have this little detector that listens for these drops in pitch and gives them the backchannel . phd g: There 's actually there 's this a former student of here from Berkeley , Nigel Nigel Ward . phd g: He did a system , in he he lives in Japan now , and he did this backchanneling , automatic backchanneling system . phd g: It 's a very phd d: Oh ! phd g: So , exactly what you describe , phd d: Huh . And it 's apparently for Japa - in Japanese it 's really important that you backchannel . Actually for a lot of these people I think you could just sort of backchannel continuously and it would pretty much be fine . Where the barber who was afraid of scissors was playing a a tape of clipping sounds , and saying " - huh " , " yeah " , " how about them sports teams ? " phd g: Anyway . So the paper 's on - line and y I I think I I CC ' ed a message to Meeting Recorder with the URL so you can get it . So I I 'm actually about to send Brian Kingbury an email saying where he can find the the s the m the material he wanted for the s for the speech recognition experiment , so but I haven't sent it out yet because actually my desktop locked up , like I can't type anything . b so if there 's any suggestions you have for that I was just gonna send him the phd d: Is it the same directory that you had suggested ? phd g: I made a directory . phd g: He does ? postdoc c: And he and he 's phd g: Yeah but but but he has to postdoc c: I 'd hafta add him to Meeting Recorder , I guess , phd g: he prefe he said he would prefer FTP postdoc c: but OK . phd g: and also , the other person that wants it There is one person at SRI who wants to look at the , you know , the the data we have so far , postdoc c: OK . So what I did is I @ @ I made a n new directory after Chuck said that would c that was gonna be a good thing . Right ? The same the same as the mailing list , professor f: Yeah , phd g: and professor f: the No vowels . , professor f: Yeah phd g: and then under there actually Oh and this directory , is not readable . So , in other words , to access anything under there , you have to be told what the name is . phd g: So , and the directory for this I call it I " ASR zero point one " because it 's sort of meant for recognition . professor f: So anyone who hears this meeting now knows the grad a: Beta ? phd g: And then then in there I have a file that lists all the other files , so that someone can get that file and then know the file names and therefore download them . If you don't know the file names you can't professor f: Is that a dash or a dot in there ? phd g: you can grad a: Don't don't don't say . So all I all I was gonna do there was stick the the transcripts after we the way that we munged them for scoring , because that 's what he cares about , and , and also and then the the waveforms that Don segmented . , just basically tar them all up f w for each meeting I tar them all into one tar file and G - zip them and stick them there . grad a: I , put digits in my own home directory home FTP directory , phd g: And so . phd d: So we could point Mari to this also for her March O - one request ? phd g: OK . phd d: Or phd g: Oh ! phd d: You n Remember she was phd g: Oh she wanted that also ? phd d: Well she was saying that it would be nice if we had they had a Or was she talking Yeah . She was saying it would be nice if they had eh the same set , so that when they did experiments they could compare . grad e: I phd g: But yeah , we can send I can CC Mari on this so that she knows phd d: Yeah . phd d: so I was gonna probably put it grad a: We can put it in the same place . , so either we should regenerate the original versions , or , we should just make a note of it . And so I but OK so but for the other meetings it 's the downsampled version that you have . Oh that 's th important to know , OK so we should probably give them the non - downsampled versions . Alright , then I 'll hold off on that and I 'll wait for you grad e: Probably by tomorrow phd g: gen grad e: I can I 'll send you an email . Yeah , definitely they should have the full bandwidth version , grad e: Yeah , because I I think Liz decided to go ahead with the downsampled versions cuz we can There was no s like , r significant difference . grad e: It does take up less disk space , and apparently it did even better than the original than the original versions , phd g: Yeah . Good that Well , it 's a good thing that grad a: OK , I think we 're losing , Don and Andreas at three - thirty , right ? OK . professor f: So , that 's why it was good to have Andreas , say these things but So , we should probably talk about the IBM transcription process stuff that postdoc c: OK . So , you know that Adam created , a b a script to generate the beep file ? professor f: . But but you were gonna to use the originally transcribed file because I tightened the time bins and that 's also the one that they had already in trying to debug the first stage of this . And , my understanding was that , I haven't I haven't listened to it yet , grad a: postdoc c: but it sounded very good and and I understand that you guys were going to have a meeting today , before this meeting . , just so that while I 'm gone , you can regenerate it if you decide to do it a different way . So , Chuck and Thilo should , now more or less know how to generate the file postdoc c: Excellent . grad a: and , the other thing Chuck pointed out is that , since this one is hand - marked , there are discourse boundaries . So what what we 're probably gonna do is just write a script , that if two , chunks are very close to each other on the same channel we 'll just merge them . grad a: So , and that will get around the problem of , the , you know " one word beep , one word beep , one word beep , one word beep " . phd d: Yeah , in fact after our meeting , this morning Thilo came in and said that , there could be other differences between the already transcribed meeting with the beeps in it and one that has just r been run through his process . phd d: So tomorrow , when we go to make the , chunked file for IBM , we 're going to actually compare the two . So he 's gonna run his process on that same meeting , postdoc c: Great idea ! phd d: and then we 're gonna do the beep - ify on both , and listen to them and see if we notice any real differences . phd g: Beep - ify ! postdoc c: OK , now one thing that prevented us from apply you you from applying Exactly . Wel - we just wanna if if there 're any major differences between doing it on the hand postdoc c: - huh . phd g: So this training meeting , w un is that some data where we have very , you know , accurate time marks ? for postdoc c: I went back and hand - marked the ba the bins , I ment I mentioned that last week . phd d: But the but there 's yeah , but there is this one issue with them in that there 're there are time boundaries in there that occur in the middle of speech . phd g: Because phd d: So Like when we went t to When I was listening to the original file that Adam had , it 's like you you hear a word then you hear a beep and then you hear the continuation of what is the same sentence . grad a: It 's i phd d: So there are these chunks that look like that have grad a: that 's not gonna be true of the foreground speaker . So you 'll you 'll have a chunk of , you know , channel A which starts at zero and ends at ten , and then the same channel starting at eleven , ending at fifteen , and then again , starting at sixteen , ending at twenty . Right , so that 's three chunks where actually we w can just make one chunk out of that which is A , zero , twenty . postdoc c: Yeah , I thought that was phd d: So if you were to use these , you have to be careful not to pull out these individual postdoc c: Yeah . phd g: Oh ! it Right , w what I would I was interested in is having a se having time marks for the beginnings and ends of speech by each speaker . phd g: So , it I don't care that you know , there 's actually abutting segments that we have to join together . phd g: But what we do care about is that the beginnings and ends are actually close to the speech inside of that phd d: Yeah , I think Jane tightened these up by hand . phd g: OK , so what is the sort of how tight are they ? professor f: it looks much better . I just wanted to get it so tha So that if you have like " yeah " in a swimming in a big bin , then it 's phd g: No , no ! I don grad a: Let me make a note on yours . phd g: I it 's f That 's fine because we don't want to th that 's perfectly fine . You always want to have a little bit of pause or nonspeech around the speech , say for recognition purposes . , but just just u w you know get an id I just wanted to have an idea of the of how much extra you allowed so that I can interpret the numbers if I compared that with a forced alignment segmentation . postdoc c: but but my main goal was , in these areas where you have a three - way overlap and one of the overlaps involves " yeah " , and it 's swimming in this huge bin , I wanted to get it so that it was clo more closely localized . But are we talking about , I don't know , a tenth of a second ? a ? You know ? How how much how much extra would you allow at most postdoc c: I I wanted to I wanted it to be able to l he be heard normally , phd g: postdoc c: so that if you if you play back that bin and have it in the mode where it stops at the boundary , it sounds like a normal word . postdoc c: Now sometimes you know , it 's these are involved in places where there was no time . postdoc c: some cases , there 're some people , who who have very long segments of discourse where , you know , they 'll they 'll breath and then I put a break . postdoc c: But other than that , it 's really pretty continuous and this includes things like going from one sentence into the u one utterance into the next , one sentence into the next , w without really stopping . i they , i you know in writing you have this two spaces and a big gap phd g: postdoc c: But but i some people are planning and , you know , a lot we always are planning what we 're going to say next . postdoc c: But , in which case , the gap between these two complete syntactic units , which of course n spoken things are not always complete syntactically , but but it would be a shorter p shorter break than maybe you might like . postdoc c: But the goal there was to not have the text be so so crudely parsed in a time bin . , because from a discourse m purpose it 's it 's more it 's more useful to be able to see and also you know , from a speech recognition purpose my impression is that if you have too long a unit , it 's it doesn't help you very much either , cuz of the memory . postdoc c: So , that means that the amount of time after something is variable depending partly on context , but my general goal when there was sufficient space , room , pause after it to have it be kind of a natural feeling gap . postdoc c: Which I c I don't know what it would be quantified as . You know , Wally Chafe says that , in producing narratives , the spurts that people use tend to be , that the the what would be a pause might be something like two two seconds . postdoc c: I was interested that you chose , you know , the you know that you use cuz I think that 's a unit that would be more consistent with sociolinguistics . phd g: Well we chose , you know , half a second because if if you go much larger , you have a y you know , your your statement about how much overlap there is becomes less , precise , postdoc c: Yeah , I also used I think something around zero point five seconds for the speech - nonspeech detector phd g: and it 's also based Liz suggested that value based on the distribution of pause times that you see in Switchboard and and other corpora . postdoc c: In any case , this this , meeting that I hand I I hand - adjusted two of them I mentioned before , phd g: postdoc c: and I sent I sent email , phd g: OK , postdoc c: so phd g: So so at some point we will try to fine - tune our forced alignment postdoc c: And I sent the path . phd g: maybe using those as references because you know , what you would do is you would play with different parameters . And to get an object You need an objective measure of how closely you can align the models to the actual speech . So , I will phd b: Yeah and hopefully the new meetings which will start from the channelized version will will have better time boundaries and alignments . postdoc c: But I like this idea of , for our purposes for the for the IBM preparation , n having these joined together , phd b: Yeah . phd b: And and in in the in the previous version where in the n which is used now , there , the backchannel would would be in - between there somewhere , so . Well , phd b: but postdoc c: that 's that 's right , but you know , thi this brings me to the other f stage of this which I discussed with you earlier today , phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: which is the second stage is , w what to do in terms of the transcribers adjustment of these data . , the tr so the idea initially was , we would get , for the new meetings , so the e EDU meetings , that Thilo ha has now presegmented all of them for us , on a channel by channel basis . And , so , I 've assigned I 've I 've assigned them to our transcribers and , so far I 've discussed it with one , with And I had a about an hour discussion with her about this yesterday , we went through EDU - one , at some extent . And it occurred to me that that basically what we have in this kind of a format is you could consider it as a staggered mixed file , we had some discussion over the weekend a about at at this other meeting that we were all a at , about whether the tran the IBM transcribers should hear a single channel audio , or a mixed channel audio . And , in in a way , by by having this this chunk and then the backchannel after it , it 's like a stagal staggered mixed channel . And , it occurred to me in my discussion with her yesterday that , the the the maximal gain , it 's from the IBM people , may be in long stretches of connected speech . So it 's basically a whole bunch of words which they can really do , because of the continuity within that person 's turn . So , what I 'm thinking , and it may be that not all meetings will be good for this , but but what I 'm thinking is that in the EDU meetings , they tend to be driven by a couple of dominant speakers . And , if the chunked files focused on the dominant speakers , then , when when it got s patched together when it comes back from IBM , we can add the backchannels . It seems to me that , you know , the backchannels per - se wouldn't be so hard , but then there 's this question of the time @ @ , marking , and whether the beeps would be y y y And I 'm not exactly sure how that how that would work with the with the backchannels . And , so And certainly things that are intrusions of multiple words , taken out of context and displaced in time from where they occurred , that would be hard . So , m my thought is i I 'm having this transcriber go through the EDU - one meeting , and indicate a start time f for each dominant speaker , endpoi end time for each dominant speaker , and the idea that these units would be generated for the dominant speakers , and maybe not for the other channels . grad a: Yeah the only , disadvantage of that is , then it 's hard to use an automatic method to do that . The advantage is that it 's probably faster to do that than it is to use the automated method and correct it . I think I I think , you know , the original plan was that the transcriber would adjust the t the boundaries , and all that for all the channels but , you know , that is so time - consuming , and since we have a bottleneck here , we want to get IBM things that are usable s as soon as possible , then this seemed to me it 'd be a way of gett to get them a flood of data , which would be useful when it comes back to us . postdoc c: Oh also , at the same time she when she goes through this , she 'll be If there 's anything that was encoded as a pause , but really has something transcribable in it , then she 's going to , make a mark w , so you know , so that that bin would be marked as it as double dots and she 'll just add an S . And in the other in the other case , if it 's marked as speech , and really there 's nothing transcribable in it , then she 's going to put a s dash , and I 'll go through and it and , you know , with a with a substitution command , get it so that it 's clear that those are the other category . But , the transcribable events that , I 'm considering in this , continue to be laugh , as well as speech , and cough and things like that , so I 'm not stripping out anything , just just you know , being very lenient in what 's considered speech . Yeah ? phd d: Jane ? In terms of the this new procedure you 're suggesting , u what is the grad a: It 's not that different . phd d: So I 'm a little confused , because how do we know where to put beeps ? Is it i d y is it postdoc c: Oh , OK . postdoc c: So what it what it what it involves is is really a s , the original pr procedure , but only applied to , a certain strategically chosen s aspect of the data . grad a: We pick the easy parts of the data basically , postdoc c: So grad a: and transcriber marks it by hand . grad a: And because phd d: But after we 've done Thilo 's thing . Oh , OK , postdoc c: Yes ! grad a: I didn't I didn't understand that . phd g: So , grad a: OK , leave the mikes on , and just put them on the table . postdoc c: We start with the presegmented version grad a: Let me mark you as no digits . phd b: You start with the presegmentation , r yeah ? postdoc c: Yeah . And then , the transcriber , instead of going painstakingly through all the channels and moving the boundaries around , and deciding if it 's speech or not , but not transcribing anything . OK ? Instead of doing that , which was our original plan , the tra They focus on the dominant speaker phd d: So what they do is they identify who 's the di dominant speaker , and when the speaker starts . postdoc c: So , you 're still gonna phd b: And you just postdoc c: So we 're It 's based on your se presegmentation , that 's the basic thing . phd b: and you just use the s the segments of the dominant speaker then ? For for sending to to IBM or ? postdoc c: Yeah . phd d: So , now Jane , my question is when they 're all done adjusting the w time boundaries for the dominant speaker , have they then also erased the time boundaries for the other ones ? postdoc c: postdoc c: That 's that 's why she 's notating the start and end points of the dominant speakers . So , on a you know , so i in EDU - one , i as far as I listened to it , you start off with a a s section by Jerry . So Jerry starts at minute so - and - so , and goes until minute so - and - so . And he starts at minute such - and - such , and goes on till minute so - and - so . And then meanwhile , she 's listening to both of these guys ' channels , determining if there 're any cases of misclassification of speech as nothing , and nothing as speech , phd d: phd d: So she does the adjustments on those guys ? postdoc c: But you know , I wanted to say , his segmentation is so good , that , the part that I listened to with her yesterday didn't need any adjustments of the bins . So this is not gonna be a major part of the process , at least least not in not on ones that that really phd d: So if you don't have to adjust the bins , why not just do what it for all the channels ? postdoc c: - ? phd d: Why not just throw all the channels to IBM ? postdoc c: Well there 's the question o of whether Well , OK . She i It 's a question of how much time we want our transcriber to invest here when she 's gonna have to invest that when it comes back from IBM anyway . postdoc c: So if it 's only inserting " - "s here and there , then , wouldn't that be something that would be just as efficient to do at this end , instead of having it go through I B M , then be patched together , then be double checked here . But But then we could just use the the output of the detector , and do the beeping on it , and send it to I B phd d: Without having her check anything . postdoc c: Well , I guess grad a: I think we just we just have to listen to it and see how good they are . phd b: For some meetings , I 'm I 'm sure it i n postdoc c: I 'm I 'm open to that , it was professor f: Yeah , if it 's working well , phd b: That 's And some on some meetings it 's good . professor f: that sounds like a good idea since as you say you have to do stuff with the other end anyway . the detector , this phd d: Yeah , we have to fix it when it comes back anyhow . postdoc c: Now , you were saying that they they differ in how well they work depending on channel s sys systems and stuff . So we should perhaps just select meetings on which the speech - nonspeech detection works well , postdoc c: But EDU is great . phd b: and just use , those meetings to to to send to IBM and , do the other ones . , my my my impression is that it 's better for meetings with fewer speakers , and it 's better for for meetings where nobody is breathing . phd d: So in fact this might suggest an alternative sort of a a c a hybrid between these two things . Yeah ? phd d: So the the one suggestion is you know we we run Thilo 's thing and then we have somebody go and adjust all the time boundaries phd b: Yeah . phd d: There 's a a another possibility if we find that there are some problems , phd b: Yeah . phd d: and that is if we go ahead and we just run his , and we generate the beeps file , then we have somebody listen beeps file . And erase phd d: And they listen to each section and say " yes , no " whether that section is phd b: Yeah . And it just You know , there 's a little interface which will for all the " yes " - es it then that will be the final beep file . postdoc c: That 's interesting ! Cuz that 's that 's directly related to the e end task . it wouldn't be that much fun for a transcriber to sit there , hear it , beep , yes or no . I don't know , I I think I 'm I 'm really tending towards grad a: One and a half times real time . professor f: what 's the worst that happens ? Do the transcribers as long as th on the other end they can say there 's there 's something conventions so that they say " huh ? " phd d: Yeah . professor f: i i It i phd d: We can just catch it at the catch everything at this side . phd d: Well maybe that 's the best way to go , postdoc c: How interesting ! phd d: just grad a: it just depends on how postdoc c: Well EDU phd b: Yeah , grad a: Sorry , go ahead . phd b: u u u postdoc c: So I was gonna say , EDU - one is good enough , phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: maybe we could include it in this in this set of , this stuff we send . phd b: Yeah there 's I I think there are some meetings where it would would It 's possible like this . grad a: Yeah I I think , we won't know until we generate a bunch of beep files automatically , listen to them and see how bad they are . phd d: We won't be able to s include it with this first thing , grad a: If postdoc c: . phd d: because there 's a part of the process of the beep file which requires knowing the normalization coefficients . phd d: Right , except I don't think that the c the instructions for doing that was in that directory , right ? I I didn't see where you had gener grad a: No , but it 's easy enough to do . phd b: What professor f: But I but I have a phd b: Doing the gain ? It 's no problem . professor f: But but but I I I have another suggestion on that , which is , since , really what this is , is is is trying to in the large , send the right thing to them and there is gonna be this this post - processing step , why don't we check through a bunch of things by sampling it ? phd d: professor f: Right ? In other words , rather than , saying we 're gonna listen to everything grad a: I didn't mean listen to everything , I meant , just see if they 're any good . So y you do a bunch of meetings , you listen to to a little bit here and there , phd d: Yeah . professor f: if it sounds like it 's almost always right and there 's not any big problem you send it to them . professor f: And , you know , then they 'll send us back what we w what what they send back to us , postdoc c: Oh , that 'd be great . professor f: and we 'll we 'll fix things up and some meetings will cost more time to fix up than others . grad a: And we should just double - check with Brian on a few simple conventions on how they should mark things . grad a: Yeah , cuz @ @ what I had originally said to Brian was well they 'll have to mark , when they can't distinguish between the foreground and background , professor f: Yeah . But if we send them without editing , then we 're also gonna hafta have m , notations for words that are cut off , phd d: phd d: And they may just guess at what those cut - off words are , postdoc c: Yeah . phd d: but w we 're gonna adjust everything when we come back grad a: But what what we would like them to do is be conservative so that they should only write down the transcript if they 're sure . postdoc c: which professor f: i Can I maybe have have an order of it 's probably in your paper that I haven't looked at lately , but postdoc c: Certainty . professor f: an order of magnitude notion of of how on a good meeting , how often , do you get segments that come in the middle of words and so forth , and in a bad meeting how often ? phd b: . postdoc c: Was is it in a in a what what is the t professor f: Well he 's saying , you know , that the the EDU meeting was a good good meeting , postdoc c: In a good meeting , what ? phd b: Yeah . professor f: right ? postdoc c: Oh I see , professor f: and so so so it was almost it was almost always doing the right thing . And then , in a bad meeting , or p some meetings where he said oh he 's had some problems , what does that mean ? postdoc c: - huh . professor f: So does one of the does it mean one percent and ten percent ? Or does it mean five percent and fifty percent ? postdoc c: OK . professor f: phd b: So professor f: Or Maybe percentage isn't the right word , postdoc c: Just phd b: Yeah th professor f: but you know how many how many per minute , or You know . phd b: Yeah , the the problem is that , nnn , the numbers Ian gave in the paper is just , some frame error rate . So that 's that 's not really What will be effective for for the transcribers , is They have to yeah , in in they have to insure that that 's a real s spurt or something . So the speech the amount of speech that is missed by the detector , for a good meeting , I th is around or under one percent , I would say . For yeah , but there can be more There 's There 's more amount speech , more amount of Yeah well , the detector says there is speech , but there is none . Now what about in a meeting that you said we 've you 've had some more trouble with ? phd b: I can't really hhh , Tsk . That 's really I I did this on on four meetings and only five minutes of of every meet of of these meetings so , it 's not not that representative , but , it 's perhaps , Fff . Yeah , it 's perhaps then it 's perhaps five percent of something , which s the the frames speech frames which are which are missed , but , I can't can't really tell . So I So i Sometime , we might wanna go back and look at it more in terms of how many times is there a spurt that 's that 's , interrupted ? phd b: Yeah . professor f: Something like that ? postdoc c: The other problem is , that when it when it d i on the breathy ones , where you get breathing , inti indicated as speech . professor f: And phd b: So postdoc c: And I guess we could just indicate to the transcribers not to encode that if they We could still do the beep file . professor f: Yeah again I I think that that is probably less of a problem because if you 're if there 's If if a if a word is is split , then they might have to listen to it a few times to really understand that they can't quite get it . professor f: Whereas if they listen to it and there 's don't hear any speech I think they 'd probably just listen to it once . professor f: So there 'd you 'd think there 'd be a a factor of three or four in in , cost function , postdoc c: OK . phd b: Yeah , so but I think that 's n that really doesn't happen very often that that that a word is cut in the middle or something . professor f: So so what you 're saying is that nearly always what happens when there 's a problem is that is that , there 's some , nonspeech that that is b interpreted as speech . phd b: Yeah , it 's professor f: You know , if they they hear you know , a dog bark and they say what was the word , they you know , they phd b: Yeah , I als I professor f: Ruff ruff ! phd b: Yeah I also thought of there there are really some channels where it is almost , only bre breathing in it . I 've got a a P - a method with loops into the cross - correlation with the PZM mike , and then to reject everything which which seems to be breath . phd b: So , I could run this on those breathy channels , and perhaps throw out grad a: That 's a good idea . But I think I th Again , I think that sort of that that would be good , phd b: Yeah . professor f: But I think none of this is stuff that really needs somebody doing these these , explicit markings . Oh , I 'd be delighted with that , I I was very impressed with the with the result . professor f: Yeah , cuz the other thing that was concerning me about it was that it seemed kind of specialized to the EDU meeting , and and that then when you get a meeting like this or something , phd b: Yeah . professor f: and and you have a b a bunch of different dominant speakers postdoc c: Oh yeah , interesting . professor f: Whereas this sounds like a more general solution postdoc c: Oh yeah , I pr I much prefer this , professor f: is postdoc c: I was just trying to find a way Cuz I I don't think the staggered mixed channel is awfully good as a way of handling overlaps . phd d: And we can just , you know , get the meeting , process it , put the beeps file , send it off to IBM . I would phd d: Do what ? phd b: listen to it , and then grad a: Or at least sample it . professor f: make sure you don't send them three hours of " bzzz " or something . phd b: And there 's there 's one point which I yeah , which which I r we covered when I when I r listened to one of the EDU meetings , professor f: Great . grad a: - huh phd b: And i the speech - nonspeech detector just assigns randomly the speech to to one of the channels , so . - I haven't - I didn't think of of s of this before , grad a: What can you do ? phd b: but what what shall we do about s things like this ? postdoc c: Well you were suggesting You suggested maybe just not sending that part of the meeting . postdoc c: But phd b: But , sometimes the the the laptop is in the background and some somebody is is talking , and , that 's really a little bit confusing , but grad a: It 's a little bit confusing . phd b: that 's that 's a second question , " what what will different transcribers do with with the laptop sound ? " postdoc c: Would you would professor f: What was the l what was the laptop sound ? postdoc c: Yeah , go ahead . postdoc c: Well , so So my standard approach has been if it 's not someone close - miked , then , they don't end up on one of the close - miked channels . phd b: when thi when this is sent to to the I M - eh , I B M transcribers , I don't know if if they can tell that 's really postdoc c: Yeah , that 's right . grad a: postdoc c: Well , they have a convention , in their own procedures , which is for a background sound . grad a: Right , but , in general I don't think we want them transcribing the background , cuz that would be too much work . grad a: Right ? For it because in the overlap sections , then they 'll phd d: Well I don't think Jane 's saying they 're gonna transcribe it , but they 'll just mark it as being there 's some background stuff there , grad a: But that 's gonna be all over the place . phd d: right ? grad a: How w how will they tell the difference between that sort of background and the dormal normal background of two people talking at once ? phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: Oh , I think I think it 'd be easy to to say " background laptop " . grad a: How would they know that ? phd d: But wait a minute , why would they treat them differently ? phd b: Yeah . postdoc c: Well because one of them grad a: Because otherwise it 's gonna be too much work for them to mark it . postdoc c: Oh , I s background laptop or , background LT wouldn't take any time . grad a: Sure , but how are they gonna tell bet the difference between that and two people just talking at the same time ? postdoc c: And phd b: Yeah . Acoustically , can't you tell ? phd b: It 's really good sound , so postdoc c: Oh is it ? Oh ! professor f: Well , isn't there a category something like , " sounds for someone for whom there is no i close mike " ? phd b: Yeah that would be very important , grad a: But how do we d how do we do that for the I B M folks ? postdoc c: Yeah . grad a: How can they tell that ? phd d: Well we may just have to do it when it gets back here . grad a: And they 'll just mark it however they mark it , postdoc c: That sounds good . postdoc c: Well , as it comes back , we have a when we can use the channelized interface for encoding it , then it 'll be easy for us to handle . postdoc c: But but if if out of context , they can't tell if it 's a channeled speak , you know , a close - miked speaker or not , then that would be confusing to them . postdoc c: I don't know , I it doesn't I don't Either way would be fine with me , I don't really care . Do you think we should send the that whole meeting to them and not worry about pre - processing it ? professor f: Yes ma ' postdoc c: Or , what is we we should leave the part with the audio in the , beep file that we send to IBM for that one , or should we start after the that part of the meeting is over in what we send . professor f: Which part ? phd b: With postdoc c: So , the part where they 're using sounds from their from their laptops . phd b: with the laptop sound , or ? just postdoc c: w If we have speech from the laptop should we just , excise that from what we send to IBM , or should we i give it to them and let them do with it what they can ? phd d: I think we should just it it 's gonna be too much work if we hafta worry about that I think . postdoc c: And give them freedom to to indicate if it 's just not workable . professor f: Cuz , I wouldn't don't think we would mind having that transcribed , if they did it . grad a: I think phd d: Yeah , e grad a: As I say , we 'll just have to listen to it and see how horrible it is . grad a: - , and and they 're very it 's very audible ? on the close - talking channels ? phd b: What what I would Yeah . postdoc c: OK , so we read the transcript number first , right ? grad a: Are we gonna do it altogether or separately ? phd b: So What time is it ? professor f: why don't we do it together , postdoc c: quarter to four . professor f: One , two , three , go ! postdoc c: It 's kind of interesting if there 're any more errors in these , than we had the first set . phd d: Do you guys plug your ears when you do it ? grad a: I do . professor f: I haven't been , phd d: How can you do that ? professor f: no . phd b: Perhaps there are lots of errors in it phd d: Gah ! grad a: Total concentration . Are you guys ready ? phd d: You hate to have your ears plugged ? professor f: Yeah <doc-sep>grad e: I think it 's actually phd d: What is what is that ? grad e: it depends on if the temp files are there or not , that at least that 's my current working hypothesis , phd d: Ah . grad e: that I think what happens is it tries to clear the temp files and if they 're too big , it crashes . phd b: When the power went out the other day and I restarted it , it crashed the first time . grad e: no , it doesn't it doesn't clear those necessarily , phd d: Oh wait It it doesn't clear them , OK . grad e: It 's i they 're called temp files , but they 're not actually in the temp directory they 're in the scratch , so . phd d: But that 's usually the meeting that I recorded , and it neve it doesn't crash on me . phd b: Well this wasn't Actually , this wasn't a before your meeting , this was , Tuesday afternoon when , Robert just wanted to do a little recording , grad e: Oh well . professor c: I don't know when would be a good excuse for it , but I just can't wait to be giving a talk t and and and use the example from last week with everybody t doing the digits at once . You know ? You wanted to pe keep people from listening in , you could like have that playing outside the room . Everybody give the reports about what they were doing at exactly the same time , phd d: And we 'll just all leave , phd b: And then we 'll we 'll go back later and review the individual channels , professor c: yeah . phd b: If you wanna know what professor c: Actually isn't that what we have been doing ? phd d: Yeah . professor c: What are we doing ? grad e: I Since I 've been gone all week , I didn't send out a reminder for an agenda , so . professor c: Yeah , and I 'm just grad e: Do we have anything to talk about or should we just read digits and go ? phd b: I wouldn't mind hearing how the conference was . professor c: What conference ? phd d: I had one question about grad e: Yeah , really . The next , phd d: Next weekend ? grad e: Next weekend , week from phd f: right ? professor c: That is right . phd d: Sorry , not not not the days coming up , but phd f: It 's like the grad e: A week from Saturday . phd d: So , are we do we have like an agenda or anything that we should be professor c: No , but that would be a good idea . professor c: Why don't we w phd f: So so the deal is that I can , I can be available after , like ten thirty or something . I don't know how s how early you wanted to professor c: They 're not even gonna be here until eleven or so . grad e: Eurospeech is due on Friday and then I 'm going down to San , San Jose Friday night , so , if you know , if we start nice and late Saturday that 's a good thing . grad e: They 're flying from somewhere to somewhere , professor c: Yeah , and they 'll end up here . professor c: So , i I I will be , he 's taking a very early flight phd f: Oh . professor c: and we do have the time work difference running the right way , but I still think that there 's no way we could start before eleven . grad e: But , yeah maybe an agenda , or at least some things to talk about would be a good idea . professor c: Well we can start gathering those those ideas , but then we we should firm it up by next next Thursday 's meeting . postdoc a: Will we have time to , to prepare something that we in the format we were planning for the IBM transcribers by then , or ? grad e: Oh yeah . grad e: So have you heard back from Brian about that , Chuck ? phd b: Yes , he 's I I 'm sorry , I should have forwarded that along . , oh I I think I mentioned at the last meeting , he said that , he talked to them and it was fine with the beeps they would be That 's easy for them to do . So , oh , though Thi - Thilo isn't here , but , I I have the program to insert the beeps . What I don't have is something to parse the output of the channelized transcripts to find out where to put the beeps , but that should be really easy to do . So do we have a meeting that that 's been done with , postdoc a: He 's he 's grad e: that we 've tightened it up to the point where we can actually give it to IBM and have them try it out ? postdoc a: He generated , a channel - wise presegmented version of a meeting , but it was Robustness rather than EDU so I guess depends on whether we 're willing to use Robustness ? phd b: Well for this experiment I think we can use pre pretty much anything . phd b: This experiment of just grad e: Well we had we had talked about doing maybe EDU as a good choice , though . phd b: Well we 've talked about that as being the next ones we wanted to transcribe . phd b: But for the purpose of sending him a sample one to f grad e: Yeah , maybe it doesn't matter . phd b: I I don't think it matte postdoc a: I 'll I 'll I 'll , get make that available . grad e: OK , and has it been corrected ? postdoc a: Oh , well , wait . grad e: Hand - checked ? Cuz that was one of the processes we were talking about as well . phd b: Right , so we need to run Thilo 's thing on it , postdoc a: That 's right . postdoc a: I think they 're coming phd b: And we probably don't have to do necessarily a whole meeting for that if we just wanna send them a sample to try . What would be a good number of minutes ? phd b: I don't know , maybe we can figure out how long it 'll take @ @ to to do . grad e: I don't know , it seems to me w we probably should go ahead and do a whole meeting because we 'll have to transcribe the whole meeting anyway sometime . professor c: Yes except that if they had if there was a choice between having fifteen minutes that was fully the way you wanted it , and having a whole meeting that didn't get at what you wanted for them It 's just dependent of how much grad e: Like I I guess if we have to do it again anyway , but , professor c: Yeah . phd b: I guess , the only thing I 'm not sure about is , how quickly can the transcribers scan over and fix the boundaries , postdoc a: phd b: and , is it pretty easy ? grad e: I think it 's gonna be one or two times real time at Wow , excuse me , two or more times real time , right ? Cuz they have to at least listen to it . professor c: Can we pipeline it so that say there 's , the transcriber gets done with a quarter of the meeting and then we you run it through this other other stuff ? , grad e: Well the other stuff is I B I 'm just thinking that from a data keeping - track - of - the - data point of view , it may be best to send them whole meetings at a time and not try to send them bits and pieces . So the first thing is the automatic thing , and then it 's then it 's then it 's the transcribers tightening stuff up , grad e: Right . professor c: OK , so you might as well ha run the automatic thing over the entire meeting , and then and then , you would give IBM whatever was fixed . postdoc a: And have them fix it over the entire meeting too ? grad e: Right . professor c: Well , yeah , but start from the beginning and go to the end , right ? So if they were only half way through then that 's what you 'd give IBM . The I guess the question on my mind is do we wait for the transcribers to adjust the marks for the whole meeting before we give anything to IBM , or do we go ahead and send them a sample ? Let their professor c: Why wouldn't we s @ @ w i if they were going sequentially through it , why wouldn't we give them i are we trying to get something done by the time Brian comes ? phd b: Well I I , I don't know . professor c: So if we if we were , then it seems like giving them something , whatever they had gotten up to , would be better than nothing . grad e: Well , I don't think , h they they typically work for what , four hours , something like that ? postdoc a: I gue . grad e: I think the they should be able to get through a whole meeting in one sitting . I would think , unless it 's a lot harder than we think it is , which it could be , certainly . postdoc a: If it 's got like for speakers then I guess if phd b: We 're just doing the individual channels , grad e: Or seven or eight . phd b: So it 's gonna be , depending on the number of people in the meeting , postdoc a: I guess there is this issue of , you know , if if the segmenter thought there was no speech on on a particular stretch , on a particular channel , grad e: Well postdoc a: and there really was , then , if it didn't show up in a mixed signal to verify , then it might be overlooked , so , the question is " should should a transcriber listen to the entire thing or can it g can it be based on the mixed signal ? " And I th eh so far as I 'm concerned it 's fine to base it on the mixed signal at this point , and grad e: That 's what it seems to me too , in that if they need to , just like in the other cases , they can listen to the individual , if they need to . postdoc a: What what aspect ? professor c: So you 're talking about tightening up time boundaries ? phd b: Yeah . professor c: So how do you grad e: So , they have the normal channeltrans interface where they have each individual speaker has their own line , phd b: Yeah . grad e: but you 're listening to the mixed signal and you 're tightening the boundaries , correcting the boundaries . grad e: Right , so so you 'll have to I phd d: It will miss them . It will it will miss grad e: - huh ! phd d: Yeah , you have to say " - huh " more slowly to to get c grad e: Sorry . phd d: So it will miss stuff like that which phd b: I grad e: Well , so so that 's something that the transcribers will have to have to do . postdoc a: Yeah , but presumably , most of those they should be able to hear from the mixed signal unless they 're embedded in the heavil heavy overlap section when in which case they 'd be listening to the channels anyway . phd b: That 's that 's what I 'm I 'm concerned about the part . phd b: Can't we couldn't we just have , I don't know , maybe this just doesn't fit with the software , but I guess if I didn't know anything about Transcriber and I was gonna make something to let them adjust boundaries , I would just show them one channel at a time , with the marks , and let them adju postdoc a: Oh they can grad e: Well , but then they have to do but then they for this meeting they would have to do seven times real time , and it would probably be more than that . grad e: Right ? Because they 'd have to at least listen to each channel all the way through . postdoc a: And if phd b: But i but it 's very quick , postdoc a: - huh . postdoc a: w Well , the other problem is the breaths grad e: I just don't think postdoc a: cuz you also see the breaths on the waveform . I 've I 've looked at the int , s I 've tried to do that with a single channel , and and you do see all sorts of other stuff besides just the voice . grad e: Yeah , and I I think that they 're going much more on acoustics than they are on visuals . postdoc a: What you the digital what the digital task that you had your interface ? , I know for a fact that one of those sh she could really well she could judge what th what the number was based on the on the waveform . Yeah , I found the same thing that when I was scanning through the wave form I could see when someone started to read digits just by the shapes . professor c: So I don't I 'm I 'm now entirely confused about what they do . grad e: But professor c: So , they 're they 're looking at a mixed signal , or they 're looking what what are they looking at visually ? postdoc a: Well , they have a choice . But I 've I 've tried looking at the single signal and and in order to judge when it when it was speech and when it wasn't , grad e: Oh . postdoc a: but the problem is then you have breaths which which show up on the signal . professor c: But the procedure that you 're imagining , people vary from this , is that they have the mixed signal wave form in front of them , postdoc a: Yes . professor c: and they have multiple , well , let 's see , there isn't we don't have transcription yet . So but there 's markers of some sort that have been happening automatically , postdoc a: Yes . professor c: and those show up on the mixed signal ? postdoc a: Oh , professor c: There 's a @ @ clicks ? grad e: N the t postdoc a: they show up on the separate ribbons . postdoc a: and and i i it 'll be because it 's being segmented as channel at a time with his with Thilo 's new procedure , then you don't have the correspondence of the times across the bins across the ribbons you could have professor c: And is there a line moving across the waveform as it goes ? grad e: Yes . professor c: OK , so The way you 're imaging is they kind of play it , and they see oh this happened , then this happened , then and if it 's about right , they just sort of let it slide , postdoc a: Yeah . professor c: and if it if it there 's a question on something , they stop and maybe look at the individual wave form . professor c: They they might look at it , right ? grad e: Well , the problem is that the the interface doesn't really allow you to switch visuals . grad e: The problem is that that the Tcl - TK interface with the visuals , it 's very slow to load waveforms . grad e: And so when I tried that that was the first thing I tried when I first started it , postdoc a: Oh , oh . You can you can switch quickly between the audio , grad e: right ? postdoc a: but you just can't get the visual display to show quickly . So you have to It takes , I don't know , three , four minutes to Well , it takes it takes long enough phd d: Yeah , it 's very slow to do that . postdoc a: It takes long enough cuz it has to reload the I I don't know exactly what it 's doing frankly cuz but it t it takes long enough that it 's just not a practical alternative . phd d: That w grad e: Well it it does some sort of shape pre - computation so that it can then scroll it quickly , grad g: But you can cancel that . grad g: Oh , really ? postdoc a: Now you could set up multiple windows , each one with a different signal showing , and then look between the windows . grad e: we we could do different interfaces , grad g: What if you preload them all ? grad e: right ? , so so we could use like X Waves instead of Transcriber , postdoc a: Yeah . grad g: What if you were to preload all the channels or or initially grad e: Well that 's what I tried originally . grad g: like doesn't grad e: So I I actually before , Dave Gelbart did this , I did an interface which showed each waveform and ea a ribbon for each waveform , grad g: grad e: but the problem with it is even with just three waveforms it was just painfully slow to scroll . So you just scroll a screen and it would , you know go " kur - chunk ! " grad g: Oh , OK . postdoc a: You know , I am thinking if we have a meeting with only four speakers and , you know , you could fire up a Transcriber interface for , y you know , in different windows , multiple ones , one for each channel . And it 's sort of a a hack but it would be one way of seeing the visual form . grad e: I think that if we decide that we need that they need to see the visuals , we need to change the interface so that they can do that . professor c: So phd d: That 's actually what I thought of , loading the chopped up waveforms , you know , that that would make it faster grad e: An But isn't grad g: . phd b: The problem is if if anything 's cut off , you can't expand it from the chopped up phd d: So . phd d: Right , but if you a at some point grad e: And wouldn't that be the same as the mixed signal ? phd d: No , the individual channels that were chopped up that it 'd be nice to be able to go back and forth between those short segments . phd d: Cuz you don't really nee like nine tenths of the time you 're throwing most of them out , but what you need are tho that particular channel , or that particular location , grad e: Yeah . phd d: might be nice , cuz we save those out already , to be able to do that . But it won't work for IBM of course , it only works here cuz they 're not saving out the individual channels . postdoc a: Well , I I do think that this this will be a doable procedure , professor c: Yeah . postdoc a: and , then when they get into overlaps , just have them systematically check all the channels to be sure that there isn't something hidden from from audio view . Yeah , hopefully , The mixed signal , the overlaps are pretty audible because it is volume equalized . The only problem is is , you know , counting how many and if they 're really correct or not . phd d: I don't know that you can locate them very well from the mixed signal , grad e: Right but but once once you know that they happen , you can at least listen to the close talking , phd d: but you would know that they were there , and then you would switch . professor c: But right now , to do this limitation , the switching is going to be switching of the audio ? Is what she 's saying . professor c: So grad e: Right , so so professor c: so they 're using their ears to do these markings anyway . grad e: did Dave Did Dave do that change where you can actually just click rather than having to go up to the menu to listen to the individual channels ? postdoc a: Yes . postdoc a: I 'm not sure what click what click on the ribbon ? Yeah , you can get that grad e: Yeah . postdoc a: oh , oh , get you can get the , you can get it to switch audio ? , not last I tried , grad e: Yeah . grad e: We should get him to do that because , I think that would be much , much faster than going to the menu . There 's a reason I disagree , and that is that , you it 's very good to have a dissociation between the visual and the audio . There 're times when I wanna hear the mixed signal , bu but I want to transcribe on the single channel . postdoc a: Maybe , I just don't I don't see that it 's a grad e: Just something so that it 's not in the menu option so that you can do it much faster . postdoc a: Well , that 's the i I I think that might be a personal style thing . grad e: Well it just seems to me that if you wanna quickly " well was that Jane , no , was that Chuck , no , was that Morgan " , right now , you have to go up to the menu , and each time , go up to the menu , select it , listen to that channel then click below , and then go back to the menu , select the next one , and then click below . postdoc a: Yeah , it could be faster , but , you know , th in the ideal world Yeah . grad e: What ? postdoc a: No I I agree that 'd be nice . professor c: So , Done with that ? Does any I forget , does anybody , working on any any Eurospeech submission related to this ? grad e: I would like to try to do something on digits but I just don't know if we have time . Yeah there was that we that 's right , we had that one conversation about , what what what did it mean for , one of those speakers to be pathological , was it a grad e: Right , and I haven't had s chance to sit down and listen . phd f: Oh , I haven't I haven't listened to them either , grad e: I was going to do that this afternoon . phd f: but there must be something wrong , grad e: Well , Morgan and I were were having a debate about that . phd f: unless our grad e: Whereas I think it it 's probably something pathologic and actually Stephane 's results , I think confirm that . He s he did the Aurora system also got very lousy average error , like fifteen or or , fifteen to twenty percent average ? But then he ran it just on the lapel , and got about five or six percent word error ? So that that means to me that somewhere in the other recordings there are some pathological cases . So I 'll I 'll listen to it and find out since you 'd actually split it up by segment . phd b: Did you run the Andreas the r SRI recognizer on the digits ? grad e: Oh , I thought he had sent that around to everyone , phd f: Yeah . grad e: did you just sent that to me ? phd f: No , I d I didn't . phd b: I it wasn't phd f: But , yeah , if you take grad e: It was bimodal . phd f: So if you Yeah , it 's actually , it it was trimodal , actually grad e: Oh , was it trimodal , OK . phd f: trimodal , so professor c: There 's zero , a little bit , and a lot . phd f: there were t there was there was one h one bump at ze around zero , which were the native speakers , professor c: Yeah . phd b: This is error you 're talking about ? professor c: Oh was it fifteen ? phd f: whe phd b: OK . And then there was another distinct bump at , like , a hundred , which must have been some problem . phd f: I can't imagine that grad g: What is patho what do you mean by pathological ? grad e: Just just something really wrong with grad g: I 'm sorry , I don't grad e: A bug is what , phd f: In the recording grad g: Oh . phd f: And there was this one meeting , I forget which one it was , where like , six out of the eight channels were all , like had a hundred percent error . grad e: Which probably means like there was a th the recording interface crashed , grad g: Right . grad e: or there was a short you know , someone was jiggling with a cord phd f: But grad e: or , I extracted it incorrectly , phd f: But grad e: it was labeled grad g: grad e: it was transcribed incorrectly , something really bad happened , and I just haven't listened to it yet to find out what it was . phd f: So , if I excluded the pathological ones , by definition , those that had like over ninety - five percent error rate , and the non - natives , then the average error rate was like one point four or something , professor c: What we 're calling . phd f: which which seemed reasonable given that , you know , the models weren't tuned for for it . phd b: And it didn't matter whether it was the lapel or whether it was the phd f: It was just a @ @ . I haven't split it up that way , phd d: But there 's no overlap during the digit readings , so it shouldn't really matter . professor c: No , but there 's a little difference , phd f: So it should grad e: There 's a lot . professor c: And so , cuz because what he was what I was saying when I looked at those things is it it I was almost gonna call it quadrimodal because because there was a whole lot of cases where it was zero percent . But if you p if you actually histogrammed it , and it was a nice , you know , it it was zero was the most of them , professor c: Yeah . phd f: And then there was the bump for the non - natives and then the pathological ones , professor c: I see . postdoc a: You did you have , something in the report about , about , for f , forced alignment ? professor c: Yeah . postdoc a: Have you have you started on that ? phd f: Oh , well , yeah , so I 've been struggling with the forced alignments . So the scheme that I drew on the board last time where we tried to , allow reject models for the s speech from other speakers , most of the time it doesn't work very well . So , and the I haven't done , the only way to check this right now was for me to actually load these into X Waves and , you know , plus the alignments , and s play them and see where the professor c: . phd f: And it looks And so I looked at all of the utterances from you , Chuck , in that one conversation , I don't know which You probably know which one , it 's where you were on the lapel and Morgan was sitting next to you and we can hear everything Morgan says . phd f: But and and some of what you , you also appear quite a bit in that cross - talk . So , I actually went through all of those , there were I think fifty - five segments , in in X Waves , and and sort of did a crude check , and more often than not , it it gets it wrong . So there 's either the beginning , mostly the beginning word , where th you , you know , Chuck talks somewhere into the segment , but the first , word of what he says , often " I " but it 's very reduced " I , " that 's just aligned to the beginning of someone else 's speech , in that segment , which is cross - talk . So , I 'm still tinkering with it , but it might well be that we can't get clean alignments out of this out of those , channels , so . phd d: Right , but that 's , that was our plan , phd f: Yeah , right . phd d: but it 's clear from Dan that this is not something you can do in a short amount of time . phd d: So so we you know , we had spent a lot of time , writing up the HLT paper and we wanted to use that , kind of analysis , professor c: Yeah . phd d: but the HLT paper has , you know , it 's a very crude measure of overlap . It 's not really something you could scientifically say is overlap , it 's just whether or not the , the segments that were all synchronized , whether there was some overlap somewhere . phd d: And , you know , that pointed out some differences , so he thought well if we can do something quick and dirty because Dan said the cross - cancellation , it 's not straight - forward . If it were straight - forward then we would try it , but so , it 's sort of good to hear that it was not straight - forward , thinking if we can get decent forced alignments , then at least we can do sort of a overall report of what happens with actual overlap in time , but , phd b: I didn't think that his message said it wasn't straight - forward . grad e: Well if we 'd just professor c: Well phd b: I thought he 's just saying you have to look over a longer time window when you do it . phd d: and the but there are some issues of this timing , in the recordings professor c: Yeah . phd d: and phd b: So you just have to look over longer time when you 're trying to align the things , you can't you can't just look grad e: Well . are you talking about the fact that the recording software doesn't do time - synchronous ? Is that what you 're referring to ? professor c: grad e: That seems to me you can do that over the entire file and get a very accurate phd f: I don't thi I d I don't think that was the issue . phd f: The issue was that you have to you have have you first have to have a pretty good speech detection on the individual channels . phd d: And it 's dynamic , so I guess it was more dynamic than some simple models would be able t to so so there are some things available , and I don't know too much about this area where if people aren't moving around much than you could apply them , and it should work pretty well if you took care of this recording time difference . phd d: but then if you add the dynamic aspect of adapting distances , then it wasn't I guess it just wasn't something that he could do quickly and not in time for us to be able to do something by two weeks from now , so . So , so I don't know what we can do if anything , that 's sort of worth , you know , a Eurospeech paper at this point . phd b: Well , Andreas , how well did it work on the non - lapel stuff ? grad e: Yeah . phd f: we would really need , ideally , a transcriber to time mark the you know , the be at least the beginning and s ends of contiguous speech . , and , you know , then with the time marks , you can do an automatic comparison of your of your forced alignments . phd b: Because really the the at least in terms of how we were gonna use this in our system was to get an ideal an idea , for each channel about the start and end boundaries . phd b: We don't really care about like intermediate word boundaries , so phd f: No , that 's how I 've been looking at it . phd f: I don't care that the individual words are aligned correctly , phd b: Yeah . phd f: but you don't wanna , infer from the alignment that someone spoke who didn't . So that 's why I was wondering if it phd f: so , so phd b: maybe if it doesn't work for lapel stuff , we can just not use that phd f: Yeah . phd b: and phd f: I haven't I ha just haven't had the time to , do the same procedure on one of the so I would need a k I would need a channel that has a speaker whose who has a lot of overlap but s you know , is a non - lapel mike . grad e: ! phd f: So , I grad e: So a meeting with me in it . phd f: maybe someone can help me find a good candidate and then I would be willing to phd b: We c you know what ? Maybe the best way to find that would be to look through these . phd f: you know , hand phd b: Cuz you can see the seat numbers , and then you can see what type of mike they were using . And so we just look for , you know , somebody sitting next to Adam at one of the meetings phd d: Actually y we can tell from the data that we have , phd f: From the insertions , maybe ? phd d: yeah , there 's a way to tell . phd f: fr fr from the phd d: It might not be a single person who 's always overlapping that person but any number of people , phd f: Right . phd d: and , if you align the two hypothesis files across the channels , you know , just word alignment , you 'd be able to find that . So so I guess that 's sort of a last ther there 're sort of a few things we could do . Another one was to try to get somehow align Thilo 's energy segmentations with what we have . But then you have the problem of not knowing where the words are because these meetings were done before that segmentation . phd b: What what is why do you need the , the forced alignment for the HLT for the Eurospeech paper ? phd d: Well , I guess I I wanted to just do something not on recognition experiments because that 's ju way too early , but to be able to report , you know , actual numbers . Like if we if we had hand - transcribed pe good alignments or hand - checked alignments , then we could do this paper . But without knowing where the real words are , in time phd b: So it was to get it was to get more data and better to to squeeze the boundaries in . phd d: To to know what an overlap really if it 's really an overlap , or if it 's just a a a segment correlated with an overlap , phd b: Ah , OK . phd d: and I guess that 's the difference to me between like a real paper and a sort of , promissory paper . So , if we d it might be possible to take Thilo 's output and like if you have , like right now these meetings are all , grad e: Ugh ! I forgot the digital camera again . phd d: grad e: Every meeting ! phd d: you know , they 're time - aligned , so if these are two different channels and somebody 's talking here and somebody else is talking here , just that word , if Thilo can tell us that there 're boundaries here , we should be able to figure that out grad e: phd d: Yeah , if you have two and they 're at the edges , it 's like here and here , and there 's speech here , then it doesn't really help you , so , phd b: Thilo 's won't put down two separate marks in that case phd d: Well it w it would , but , we don't know exactly where the words are because the transcriber gave us two words in this time bin grad e: Thilo 's will . phd d: and we don't really know , postdoc a: Well it 's a merging problem . If you had a if you had a s if you had a script which would phd d: yeah it 's postdoc a: I 've thought about this , and I 've discussed I 've discussed it with Thilo , phd d: if you have any ideas . I would postdoc a: the , I I in principle I could imagine writing a script which would approximate it to some degree , but there is this problem of slippage , grad e: Well maybe Maybe that will get enough of the cases to be useful . grad e: You know s cuz it seemed like most of the cases are in fact the single word sorts , or at least a single phrase postdoc a: Well they they can be stretched . postdoc a: I wouldn't make that generalization cuz sometimes people will say , " And then I " and there 's a long pause phd d: Yeah . postdoc a: and finish the sentence and and sometimes it looks coherent and and the it 's it 's not a simple problem . But it 's really And then it 's coupled with the problem that sometimes , you know , with with a fricative you might get the beginning of the word cut off and so it 's coupled with the problem that Thilo 's isn't perfect either . , we 've i th it 's like you have a merging problem plus so merging plus this problem of , not grad e: Right . ! postdoc a: y i i if the speech - nonspeech were perfect to begin with , the detector , that would already be an improvement , but that 's impossible , you know , i that 's too much to ask . postdoc a: And so i and may you know , it 's I think that there always th there would have to be some hand - tweaking , but it 's possible that a script could be written to merge those two types of things . I 've I 've discussed it with Thilo and in terms of not him doing it , but we we discussed some of the parameters of that and how hard it would be to in principle to write something that would do that . phd d: I guess in the future it won't be as much as an issue if transcribers are using the tightened boundaries to start with , then we have a good idea of where the forced alignment is constrained to . postdoc a: Well , it 's just , you know , a matter of we had the revolution we had the revolution of improved , interface , one month too late , phd d: So I 'm no I don't know if this grad e: Oh . postdoc a: but it 's like , you know , it 's wonderful to have the revolution , phd d: Oh it 's it 's a postdoc a: so it 's just a matter of of , you know , from now on we 'll be able to have things channelized to begin with . grad e: I was just thinking about the fact that if Thilo 's missed these short segments , that might be quite time - consuming for them to insert them . phd d: But he he also can adjust this minimum time duration constraint and then what you get is noises mostly , postdoc a: Yeah . phd d: but that might be OK , an grad e: It might be easier to delete something that 's wrong than to insert something that 's missing . And you can also see in the waveform exac grad e: What do you think , Jane ? phd d: yeah . professor c: If you can feel confident that what the yeah , that there 's actually something phd d: Yeah . Cuz then then you just delete it , and you don't have to pick a time . phd d: I think it 's postdoc a: Well the problem is I you know I I it 's a it 's a really good question , and I really find it a pain in the neck to delete things because you have to get the mouse up there on the t on the text line and i and otherwise you just use an arrow to get down , i it depends on how lar th there 's so many extra things that would make it one of them harder than the other , or or vice versa . But , you know , in principle , like , you know , if one of them is easier then to bias it towards whichever one 's easier . grad e: Yeah , I guess the semantics aren't clear when you delete a segment , right ? Because you would say You would have to determine what the surroundings were . phd d: You could just say it 's a noise , though , and write , you know , a post - processor will just all you have to do is just grad e: If it 's really a noise . phd d: or just say it 's just put " X , " you know , like " not speech " or something , postdoc a: I think it 's easier to add than delete , frankly , phd d: and then you can get Yeah , or postdoc a: because you have to , maneuver around on the on both windows then . grad e: But I think it 's the semantics that are that are questionable to me , that you delete something So let 's say someone is talking to here , and then you have a little segment here . Well , is that part of the speech ? Is it part of the nonspeech ? , w what do you embed it in ? phd d: There 's something nice , though , about keeping , and this is probably another discussion , keeping the stuff that Thilo 's detector detected as possible speech and just marking it as not speech than deleting it . Because then when you align it , then the alignment can you can put a reject model or whatever , grad e: Oh , I see . So then they could just like put Oh that 's what you meant by just put an " X " there . phd d: and you 're consistent with th the automatic system , grad e: that 's an interesting idea . phd d: whereas if you delete it grad e: So so all they So that all they would have to do is put like an " X " there . phd d: Yeah , or some , you know , dummy reject mod grad e: So blank for blank for silence , " S " " S " for speech , " X " " X " for something else . That 's actually a better way to do it cuz the a the forced alignment will probably be more consistent than postdoc a: Well , like , I think there 's a complication which is that that you can have speech and noise in s phd d: if it 's just as easy , but postdoc a: you know , on the same channel , the same speaker , so now sometimes you get a ni microphone pop and , there 're these fuzzy hybrid cases , and then the problem with the boundaries that have to be shifted around . phd d: Anyway , quick question , though , at a high level do people think , let 's just say that we 're moving to this new era of like using the , pre - segmented t you know , non - synchronous conversations , does it make sense to try to take what we have now , which are the ones that , you know , we have recognition on which are synchronous and not time - tightened , and try to get something out of those for sort of purposes of illustrating the structure and the nature of the meetings , or is it better to just , you know , forget that and tr , it 's grad e: Well , I think we 'll have to , eventually . grad e: But if we can't phd d: And maybe we can for the non - lapel , but grad e: But if we can't , then maybe we just have to phd d: is it worth if we can't then we can fake it even if we 're we report , you know , we 're wrong twenty percent of the time or ten percent of the time . grad e: Well , I 'm thinking are you talking about for a paper , or are talking about for the corpus . grad e: cuz for the corpus it would be nice if everything were phd d: Actually that 's a good question because we 'd have to completely redo those meetings , and we have like ten of them now . grad e: We wouldn't have to re - do them , we would just have to edit them . postdoc a: Well , and also , I still haven't I still haven't given up on forced alignment . phd d: No , you 're right , actually postdoc a: I think that when Brian comes , this 'll be an interesting aspect to ask him as well b grad e: When postdoc a: when Brian Kingsbury comes . And it 's like , " Who 's Ryan ? " postdoc a: Yeah , good question . phd d: no , that 's a good point , though , because for feature extraction like for prosody or something , the meetings we have now , it 's a good chunk of data grad e: Yep . postdoc a: That 's what my hope has been , phd d: So we should at least try it even if we can't , postdoc a: and that 's what that 's what you know , ever since the the February meeting that I transcribed from last year , forced alignment has been on the on the table as a way of cleaning them up later . phd d: right ? grad e: On the table , right ? postdoc a: And and so I 'm hopeful that that 's possible . I know that there 's complication in the overlap sections and with the lapel mikes , phd f: There 's postdoc a: but phd f: Yeah . phd d: we might be able , at the very worst , we can get transcribers to correct the cases where , you sort of have a good estimate where these places are because the recognition 's so poor . Right ? phd b: Yeah , we were never just gonna go with these as the final alignments . phd d: So we need some way to push these first chunk of meetings into a state where we get good alignments . phd f: I 'm probably going to spend another day or so trying to improve things by , by using , acoustic adaptation . , the Right now I 'm using the unadapted models for the forced alignments , and it 's possible that you get considerably better results if you , manage to adapt the , phone models to the speaker and the reject model to the to to all the other speech . , so phd b: Could you could you at the same time adapt the reject model to the speech from all the other channels ? professor c: That 's what he just said . phd b: Oh , not just the speech from that of the other people from that channel , phd f: Right . I don't think that would work , phd f: No , it grad e: right ? Because you 'd A lot of it 's dominated by channel properties . phd d: But what you do wanna do is take the , even if it 's klugey , take the segments the synchronous segments , the ones from the HLT paper , where only that speaker was talking . phd f: So you want to u phd d: Use those for adaptation , cuz if you if you use everything , then you get all the cross - talk in the adaptation , and it 's just sort of blurred . I thought it was higher than that , that 's pr phd d: It really it depends a lot . professor c: Well I know what we 're not turning in to Eurospeech , a redo of the HLT paper . professor c: That I don't wanna do that , grad e: Yeah , I 'm doing that for AVIOS . phd d: I think Morgan 's talk went very well it woke postdoc a: Excellent . phd d: you know , it was really a well presented and got people laughing postdoc a: Yeah . phd f: Some good jokes in it ? grad e: Especially the batteried meter popping up , phd d: Yeah . professor c: You know , that wa that was the battery meter saying that it was fully charged , grad e: It 's full . grad e: He he he was onto the bullet points about talking about the you know the little hand - held , and trying to get lower power and so on , phd f: Po - low power grad e: and Microsoft pops up a little window saying " Your batteries are now fully charged . grad e: I 'm thinking about scripting that for my talk , you know , put put a little script in there to say " Your batteries are low " right when I 'm saying that . No , i in in your case , you were joking about it , but , your case the fact that your talking about similar things at a couple of conferences , it 's not these are conferences that have d really different emphases . Whereas HLT and and Eurospeech , pretty pretty pretty similar , so I I I can't see really just putting in the same thing , grad e: Are too close , yeah . phd d: No , I d I don't think that paper is really professor c: but phd d: the HLT paper is really more of a introduction - to - the - project paper , and , professor c: Yeah . phd d: Well , yeah , it it 's probably wouldn't make sense , professor c: Or some or some , I would see Eurospeech if we have some Eurospeech papers , these will be paper p p , submissions . phd d: but professor c: These will be things that are particular things , aspects of it that we 're looking at , rather than , you know , attempt at a global paper about it . I had , one of the transcribers go through and tighten up the bins on one of the , NSA meetings , and then I went through afterwards and double - checked it so that one is really very very accurate . I sent You know that one ? phd d: Oh , so grad g: The which one ? I 'm sorry . postdoc a: I 'm trying to remember I don't remember the number off hand . grad e: Those are all postdoc a: It 's one of the NSA 's . postdoc a: I 'm sure that that one 's accurate , I 've been through it myself . phd f: oh , Darn ! grad g: Yeah , that 's the problem with the NSA speakers . phd d: And e and e and extremely hard to follow , like word - wise , grad e: So . phd d: I bet the transcri , I have no idea what they 're talking about , grad g: Yeah . phd d: so , postdoc a: I 'm sure that , they 're they 're accurate now . grad e: oh , before you l go I guess it 's alright for you to talk a little without the mike I noticed you adjusting the mike a lot , did it not fit you well ? Oh . postdoc a: Well I won I noticed when you turned your head , it would it would tilt . grad e: Maybe it wasn't just tightened enough , or phd d: Maybe the yeah , the s thing that you have tightened @ @ , phd b: Actually if if you have a larger head , that mike 's gotta go farther away which means the the balance is gonna make it wanna tip down . grad e: Cuz , I 'm just thinking , you know , we were we 're we 've been talking about changing the mikes , for a while , grad g: postdoc a: Yeah . grad e: and if these aren't acoustically they seem really good , but if they 're not comfortable , we have the same problems we have with these stupid things . postdoc a: I think it 's com This is the first time I 've worn this , I find it very comfortable . grad e: I find it very comfortable too , but , it looked like Andreas was having problems , and I think Morgan was saying it professor c: Well , but I had it on I had it on this morning and it was fine . phd b: Can I see that ? grad e: Oh , oh you did wear it this morning ? professor c: Yeah . phd b: I yeah , I don't want it on , I just I just want to , say what I think is a problem with this . If you are wearing this over your ears and you 've got it all the way out here , then the balance is gonna want to pull it this way . phd b: Where as if somebody with a smaller head has it back here , grad e: It 's more balanced . postdoc a: Oh ! phd b: Then it then it falls back this way so it 's phd d: So we have to grad e: Well wh what it 's supposed to do is the backstrap is supposed to be under your crown , and so that should be should be postdoc a: Ah . grad e: if it 's right against your head there , which is what it 's supposed to be , that balances it so it doesn't slide up . grad e: Yep , right right below if you feel the back of your head , you feel a little lump , phd b: Yeah . phd d: So I 'm not saying anything about bias towards small headsize , grad e: About heads ? phd d: but does seem , phd b: It would be an advantage . postdoc a: Well , wonder if it 's if if he was wearing it over his hair instead of under his hair . professor c: Well , we should We shou we should work on compressing the heads , and grad e: I think probably it was Yeah . , so the directions do talk about bending it to your size , which is not really what we want . phd b: The other thing that would do it would be to hang a five pound weight off the back . professor c: that 's good ! postdoc a: What did you say ? phd d: A little , grad e: wh professor c: Hang a five pound weight off the off the back . grad e: We at Boeing I used I was doing augmented reality so they had head - mounts on , and we we had a little jury - rigged one with a welder 's helmet , phd b: Counter - balance . grad e: and we had just a bag with a bunch of marbles in it as a counter - balance . If people those who talk a lot have to wear heavier weights or something , and grad e: Yeah ! professor c: and , grad e: Anyway . professor c: so , what was I gonna say ? Oh , yeah , I was gonna say , I had these , conversations with NIST folks also while I was there and and , so they they have their their plan for a room , with , mikes in the middle of the table , and , close - mounted mikes , grad e: Yep . professor c: and they 're talking about close - mounted and lapels , just cuz phd d: And arrays , professor c: sort of and the array . grad e: And arrays , professor c: Yeah , so they were phd d: which is the i interesting grad e: yep . professor c: And yeah , like multiple multiple video cameras coverin covering every everybody every place in the room , phd d: and video , right . professor c: the yeah the the mikes in the middle , the head - mounted mikes , the lapel mikes , the array , with well , there 's some discussion of fifty - nine , grad e: Fifty - nine elements . professor c: they might go down to fifty - seven Because , there is , some pressure from a couple people at the meeting for them to use a KEMAR head . professor c: but what it is is it 's dummy head that is very specially designed , grad e: Oh , that 's right . professor c: and and and , so what they 're actually doing is they 're really there 's really two recording systems . professor c: So they may not be precisely synchronous , but the but there 's two two recording systems , one with , I think , twenty - four channels , and one with sixty - four channels . And the sixty - four channel one is for the array , but they 've got some empty channels there , and anyway they like they 're saying they may give up a couple or something if for for the KEMAR head if they go go with that . grad e: Yeah , h , J Jonathan Fiscus did say that , they have lots of software for doing calibration for skew and offset between channels phd d: - grad e: and that they 've found that 's just not a big deal . I was thinking phd d: But they 're still planning to do like fake grad e: Scenario - based . grad e: But it sounded like they were pretty well thought out phd d: Yeah , th that 's true . grad e: and they 're they 're gonna be real meetings , postdoc a: grad e: it 's just that they 're with str with people who would not be meeting otherwise . phd b: Did did they give a talk on this or was this informal ? phd d: phd b: What was the , the paper by , Lori Lamel that you mentioned ? professor c: yeah , we sh we should just have you have you read it , but , I mea ba i i , we 've all got these little proceedings , postdoc a: Mmm , yeah . professor c: but , basically , it was about , going to a new task where you have insufficient data and using using data from something else , and adapting , and how well that works . , so in in fact it was pretty related to what Liz and Andreas did , except that this was not with meeting stuff , it was with grad e: Right . professor c: like I think they s didn't they start off with Broadcast News system ? And then they went to grad e: The - their Broadcast News was their acoustic models and then all the other tasks were much simpler . phd b: What was their rough what was their conclusion ? grad e: Yeah , read Wall Street Journal . phd d: Well , it 's it 's a good paper , professor c: Yeah , yeah . phd d: Bring the grad e: That It not only works , in some cases it was better , which I thought was pretty interesting , but that 's cuz they didn't control for parameters . phd b: Did they ever try going going the other direction from simpler task to more complicated tasks , grad e: acoustic models were a lot more complex . grad e: Yeah , well , one of the big problems with that is is often the simpler task isn't fully doesn't have all the phones in it , professor c: Yeah . grad e: like for the spr speech proxy thing that I did ? That 's what I did . Yeah , and they have they have better adaptation than we had than that that system , grad e: Yep . professor c: yeah , we should probably what would actually what we should do , I haven't said anything about this , but probably the five of us should pick out a paper or two that that , you know , got our interest , and we should go around the room at one of the Tuesday lunch meetings and say , you know , what what was good about the conference , grad e: Present . phd d: Well , the summarization stuff was interesting , I don't know anything about that field , but for this proposal on meeting summarization , it 's sort of a far cry because they weren't working with meeting type data , but he got sort of an overview on some of the different approaches , grad e: Right . phd b: Do you remember who the groups were that we 're doing ? phd d: so . phd d: but , there 's that 's a huge field and probably the groups there may not be representative of the field , I I don't know exactly that everyone submits to this particular conference , phd b: Was were there folks from BBN presenting ? phd d: but yet there was , let 's see , this was on the last day , Mitre , BBN , and , Prager grad e: Mitre , BBN , IBM . phd d: no it was grad e: Wasn't Who who who did the order one ? phd d: this was Wednesday morning . The sentence ordering one , was that Barselou , and these guys ? grad e: Ugh ! I 'm just so bad at that . phd d: Anyway , I I it 's in the program , I should have read it to remind myself , but that 's sort of useful and I think like when Mari and Katrin and Jeff are here it 'd be good to figure out some kinds of things that we can start doing maybe just on the transcripts cuz we already have professor c: postdoc a: Well , I like the idea that Adam had of of , z maybe generating minutes based on some of these things that we have because it would be easy to to to do that just , you know , and and phd d: Right . postdoc a: it has to be , though , someone from this group because of the technical nature of the thing . grad e: Someone who actually does take notes , I 'm very bad at note - taking . phd d: But I think what 's interesting is there 's all these different evaluations , like just , you know , how do you evaluate whether the summary is good or not , grad e: I always write down the wrong things . phd d: and that 's what 's was sort of interesting to me is that there 's different ways to do it , grad e: A judge . phd d: and phd b: Was SRA one of the groups talking about summarization , no ? grad e: Yep . One of those w grad e: And as I said , I like the Microsoft talk on scaling issues in , word sense disambiguation , phd d: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , that was an interesting discussion , grad e: The professor c: I grad e: It it it was the only one It was the only one that had any sort of real disagreement about . phd d: The data issue comes up all the ti professor c: Well , I didn't have as much disagreement as I would have liked , grad e: So . professor c: but I didn't wanna I wouldn I didn't wanna get into it because , you know , it was the application was one I didn't know anything about , grad e: Yep . professor c: it just would have been , you know , me getting up to be argumentative , but but , the missing thi so so what they were saying it 's one of these things is you know , all you need is more data , sort of But I mea i wh it @ @ that 's that 's dissing it , improperly , it was a nice study . , they were doing this it wasn't word - sense disambiguation , it was phd d: Yeah yeah yeah grad e: Well , it sort of was . grad e: But it was it was a very simple case of " to " versus " too " versus " two " and " there " , " their " , " they 're " phd d: And there and their and professor c: Yeah , yeah . phd d: and that you could do better with more data , that 's clearly statistically professor c: Right . professor c: And so , what they did was they had these different kinds of learning machines , and they had different amounts of data , and so they did like , you know , eight different methods that everybody , you know , argues about about , " Oh my my kind of learning machine is better than your kind of learning machine . " And , they were started off with a million words that they used , which was evidently a number that a lot of people doing that particular kind of task had been using . And then they had this log scale showing a you know , and and naturally everything gets grad e: Them being beep , they went off to a billion . professor c: they well , it 's a big company , I didn't I didn't mean it as a ne anything negative , grad e: Yeah . professor c: but i i i phd d: You mean the bigger the company the more words they use for training ? grad e: Well , I think the reason they can do that , is that they assumed that text that they get off the web , like from Wall Street Journal , is correct , and edit it . Of course there was the kind of effect that , you know , one would expect that that you got better and better performance with more and more data . , but the the real point was that the the different learning machines are sort of all over the place , and and by by going up significantly in data you can have much bigger effect then by switching learning machines and furthermore which learning machine was on top kind of depended on where you were in this picture , so , phd b: This was my concern about the recognizer in Aurora . professor c: That phd b: That the differences we 're seeing in the front - end is b professor c: Yeah . phd d: If you add more data ? Or phd b: You know ? professor c: Yeah . So so , that was that was kind of , you know , it 's a good point , but the problem I had with it was that the implications out of this was that , the kind of choices you make about learning machines were therefore irrelevant which is not at n t as for as I know in in tasks I 'm more familiar with @ @ is not at all true . What i what is is true is that different learning machines have different properties , and you wanna know what those properties are . And someone else sort of implied that well we s you know , a all the study of learning machine we still don't know what those properties are . We don't know them perfectly , but we know that some kinds use more memory and and some other kinds use more computation and some are are hav have limited kind of discrimination , but are just easy to use , and others are phd b: But doesn't their conclusion just sort of you could have guessed that before they even started ? Because if you assume that these learning things get better and better and better , professor c: You would guess phd b: then as you approach there 's a point where you can't get any better , right ? You get everything right . phd d: It 's just no grad e: But phd b: So they 're all approaching . phd b: But what I 'm saying is that th they have to , as they all get better , they have to get closer together . phd b: But they 're all going the same way , right ? So you have to get closer . phd b: Oh they didn't ? professor c: Well grad e: They just switched position . professor c: well that 's getting cl , yeah , the spread was still pretty wide that 's th that 's true , grad e: Yep . professor c: but but , I think it would be irntu intu intuition that this would be the case , but , to really see it and to have the intuition is quite different , I think somebody w w let 's see who was talking about earlier that the effect of having a lot more data is quite different in Switchboard than it is in in Broadcast News , phd d: Well it 's different for different tasks . phd d: So it depends a lot on whether , you know , it disambiguation is exactly the case where more data is better , right ? You 're you 're you can assume similar distributions , professor c: Yeah . phd d: but if you wanted to do disambiguation on a different type of , test data then your training data , then that extra data wouldn't generalize , grad e: Right . w , I think one of them was that " Well , maybe simpler algorithms and more data are is better " . Right ? Because their simplest , most brain - dead algorithm did pretty darn well professor c: Why are you sticking with a million words ? " , their point was that this million - word corpus that everyone uses is apparently ten or fifteen years old . But anyway , I I I think it 's it 's just the the i it 's it 's it 's not really the conclusion they came to so much , as the conclusion that some of the , commenters in the crowd came up with grad e: But we could talk about this stuff , I think this would be fun to do . professor c: that , you know , this therefore is further evidence that , you know , more data is really all you should care about , and that I thought was just kind of going too far the other way , grad e: Machine - learning . professor c: and and the the , one one person ga g g got up and made a a brief defense , but it was a different kind of grounds , it was that that , i w the reason people were not using so much data before was not because they were stupid or didn't realize data was important , but in fact th they didn't have it available . , but the other point to make a again is that , machine learning still does matter , but it it matters more in some situations than in others , and it and also there 's there 's not just mattering or not mattering , but there 's mattering in different ways . , you might be in some situation where you care how much memory you 're using , or you care , you know , what recall time is , grad e: Right . professor c: or you care , you know , and and grad e: Or you only have a million words for your some new task . professor c: Yeah , or or , phd d: Or done another language , or , you so there 's papers on portability and rapid prototyping and blah - blah - blah , grad e: Yep . " professor c: And there 's cost ! phd d: So , these are like two different religions , basically . professor c: you know , so so these , th the in the in the speech side , the thing that @ @ always occurs to me is that if you if you one person has a system that requires ten thousand hours to train on , and the other only requires a hundred , and they both do about the same because the hundred hour one was smarter , that 's that 's gonna be better . because people , there isn't gonna be just one system that people train on grad e: Yep . She put this up , and it was like this is this p people kept saying , " Can I see that slide again ? " professor c: Yeah . phd d: Yeah , postdoc a: and then they 'd make a comment , and one person said , well - known person said , you know , " Before you dismiss forty - five years including my work " phd d: yeah . phd d: But th you know , the same thing has happened in computational linguistics , right ? You look at the ACL papers coming out , and now there 's sort of a turn back towards , OK we 've learned statistic you know , we 're basically getting what we expect out of some statistical methods , and , you know , the there 's arguments on both sides , grad e: Yep . grad e: Is that all all of them are based on all the others , right ? Just , you you can't say phd b: Maybe they should have said " focus " or something . And I 'm saying the same thing happened with speech recognition , right ? For a long time people were hand - c coding linguistic rules and then they discovered machine - learning worked better . And now they 're throwing more and more data and worrying perhaps worrying less and less about , the exact details of the algorithms . phd d: And and then you hit this grad e: Except when they have a Eurospeech paper . grad e: Shall we read some digits ? Are we gonna do one at a time ? Or should we read them all agai at once again

The meeting recording has been prepared and segmented specifically for delivery to IBM. A subset of the Meeting Recorder data will be manually adjusted and pre-segmented for IBM. IBM has a dedicated team responsible for transcribing meeting data, distinguishing between single and multiple channels. Prior to delivery, the files will undergo automatic pre-segmentation into speech and non-speech sections, with beeps inserted accordingly.

Question: What were the key points discussed about the roles of the computer and wizard in the meeting between Grad D and Grad C? Additionally, what was Grad E's contribution to the discussion on storage disks? Lastly, what were the updates provided by Grad B regarding the meeting on disk storage? Article: grad a: So , I think this is gonna be a pretty short meeting because I have four agenda items , three of them were requested by Jane who is not gonna be at the meeting today . Does anyone besides Jane know what the transcription status is ? phd f: sort of , I do , peripherally . phd c: Is that English ? phd f: Well first of all with IBM I got a note from Brian yesterday saying that they finally made the tape for the thing that we sent them a week or week and a half ago phd d: That 's our system . grad a: Ugh ! phd f: and that it 's gone out to the transcribers and hopefully next week we 'll have the transcription back from that . grad a: C can I have a pen ? phd f: Jane seems to be moving right along on the transcriptions from the ICSI side . phd f: Yeah , so , I guess she 's hired some new transcribers phd d: Speaking grad e: Which meetings is she transcribing ? phd f: and well we 've we 've run out of E D Us because a certain number of them are , sort of awaiting to go to IBM . phd d: So does she have transcribers right now who are basically sitting idle because there 's no data back from IBM grad e: So we 're doing some in parallel . phd d: Because I I need to ask Jane whether it 's it would be OK for her , s some of her people to transcribe some of the initial data we got from the SmartKom data collection , which is these short like five or seven minute sessions . phd d: and we want it You know , we need The Again , we we have a similar logistic set - up where we are supposed to send the data to Munich grad a: Right . phd d: And so I wanted to ask Jane if if , you know , maybe one of their transcribers could could do since these are very short , that should really be , professor b: And it 's One session is only like seven professor b: So that should have ma many fewer And it 's also not a bunch of interruptions with people and all that , phd d: Right . And some of it is read speech , so we could give them the the thing that they 're reading professor b: right ? So . phd d: And so , I guess since she 's I was gonna ask her but since she 's not around I maybe I 'll professor b: Yeah , well it certainly seems phd d: if if that 's OK with you to to , you know , get that stuff to ask her for that , then I 'll do that . Yeah , if we 're held up on this other stuff a little bit in order to encompass that , that 's OK because I I , I still have high hopes that the that the IBM pipeline 'll work out for us , so it 's phd d: Yeah . phd f: Oh , yeah , and also related to the transcription stuff , so I 've been trying to keep a web page up to date f showing what the current status is of the trans of all the things we 've collected and what stage each meeting is in , in terms of whether it 's grad a: Can you mail that out to the list ? phd f: - , yeah I will . I That 's the thing that I sent out just to foo people saying can you update these pages grad a: Oh , OK , OK . phd f: and so that 's where I 'm putting it but I 'll I 'll send it out to the list telling people to look at it . So Jane also wanted to talk about participant approval , but I don't really think there 's much to talk about . professor b: You are going to grad a: I 'm gonna send out to the participants , with links to web pages which contain the transcripts and allow them to suggest edits . phd c: So but it 's just transcripts , not the not the audio ? grad a: Nope , they 'll have access to the audio also . phd f: So , the audio that they 're gonna have access to , will that be the uncompressed version ? Or will you have scripts that like uncompress the various pieces and grad a: Oh , that 's a good point . Yeah , it 's it 's probably going to have to be the uncompressed versions because , it takes too long to do random access decompression . Yeah , I was just wondering because we 're running out of the un - backed - up disk space on grad a: Well , that was the other point . phd f: Oh , was that another one ? grad a: Yep , that 's another agenda item . grad a: So , But that is a good point so we 'll get to that , too . I 've added some stuff that indes indexes by the meeting type MR , EDU , et cetera and also by the user ID . The back - end is , going more slowly as I s I think I said before just cuz I 'm not much of a Tcl - TK programmer . So I think Don and I are gonna work on that and and you and I can just talk about it off - line more . grad e: And , also , I was just showing Andreas , I got an X Waves kind of display , and I don't know how much more we can do with it with like the prosodic stuff where we have like stylized pitches and signals and the transcripts on the bottom grad a: Oh , cool . grad e: so , right now it 's just an X Waves and then you have three windows but I don't know , it looked pretty nice and I 'm sure it think it has potential for a little something , grad a: For a demo ? grad e: yeah , for a demo . grad e: So professor b: OK , so again , the issue is For July , the issue 's gonna be what can we fit into a Windows machine , and so on , but grad e: Oh . grad e: Well , we 'll see , phd c: I 've been putting together Transcriber things for Windows so i And I installed it on Dave Gelbart 's PC and it worked just fine . phd d: Really ? So is that Because there 's some people It would be cool if we could get that to work at at SRI phd c: Yeah . phd d: because the grad a: Well Transcriber is Tcl - TK , very generic with Snack , phd d: we have m m We have more Windows machines to run the phd c: Yeah . Yeah but But the problem is the version Transcriber works with , the Snack version , is one point six whatever and that 's not anymore supported . But I just wrote an email to to the author of to the Snack author and he sent me to one point six whatever library grad a: Well I thought it was packaged with Transcriber ? phd c: and so it works . Yeah , but then you can't add our patches and then the the new version is is totally different grad a: Oh . phd c: and you can't you can't access that so you have to install First install Tcl then install Snack and then install the Transcriber thing and then do the patches . Ugh ! phd d: I I wonder if if we should contribute our changes back to the authors so that they maintain those changes along phd c: Yeah . grad a: We have Yeah b it 's just hasn't made it into the release yet . phd f: So did you put the the NT version out on the Meeting Recorder page ? Or phd c: No , I haven't done that yet . professor b: So , can some of the stuff that Don 's talking about somehow fit into this , mean you just have a set of numbers that are associated with the grad e: Yeah . phd c: So grad e: Yeah , it 's basically ASCII files or binary files , whatever representation . Just three different It 's a waveform and just a stylized pitch vector basically so it 's phd d: So So Well grad e: we could do it in Matl - you could do it in a number of different places I 'm sure . phd d: But But it would be cool if the Transcriber interface had like another window for the you know , maybe above the waveform where it would show some arbitrary valued function that is that is you know time synchron ti ti time synchronous with the wavform . Again it 's it 's It 's more Tcl - T grad e: Yeah . grad a: So someone who 's familiar with Tcl - TK has to do it , phd d: Right . grad a: But it it seems to me that I c phd c: And grad a: It doesn't seem like having that real time is that necessary . grad e: What do you mean by real time ? Do you mean like phd f: Like being able to scroll through it and stuff for the demo . phd f: Is that what you mean ? grad a: It just seems to me jus grad e: It would be cool to see it phd f: Yeah . grad e: It would be cool like to see to hear it and see it , phd c: And to hear it . grad a: Sure , but I don't think I You can do all that just statically in phd c: Yeah . grad e: I think it would lose Yeah , y grad a: Just record the audio clip and show an image and I think that 's grad e: Right , right . , no , we 're talking about on the computer and and , I think when we were talking about this before we had littl this little demo meeting , grad e: Right . professor b: we sort of set up a range of different degrees of liveness that you could have and , the more live , the better , but , given the crunch of time , we may have to retreat from it to some extent . So I think For a lot of reasons , I think it would be very nice to have this Transcriber interface be able to show some other interesting signal along with it phd d: But , Anyway , jus just looking for ways that we could actually show what you 're doing , in to people . professor b: Cuz a lot of this stuff , particularly for Communicator , certainly a significant chunk of the things that we waved our arms about th originally had t had to do with prosodics It 'd be nice to show that we can actually get them and see them . So , we have a little bit of time before that becomes critical , but we are like ninety five percent , ninety eight percent on the scratch disks for the expanded meetings . grad a: And , my original intention was like we would just delete them as we needed more space , but unfortunately we 're in the position where we have to deal with all the meeting data all at once , in a lot of different ways . grad a: Yeah , there 're a lot of transcribers , phd c: Yeah . grad a: so all of those need to be expanded , and then people are doing chunking and I want to do , the permission forms , phd f: grad a: so I want those to be live , so there 's a lot of data that has to be around . One of the things I was thinking is we we just got these hundred alright , excuse me ten , SPARC - Blade SUN - Blades . grad a: And so it seems to me we could hang scratch disk on those because they 'll be in the machine room , they 'll be on the fast connection to the rest of the machines . phd f: Well , is there Why not just hang them off of Abbott , is there a grad a: Because there 's no more room in the disk racks on Abbott . phd f: You can put two phd d: Oh you mean you put them inside the pizza boxes for the grad a: Sure . grad a: So you can just go out and buy a PC hard drive and stick it in . professor b: But if Abbott is going to be our disk server it it file server it seems like we would want to get it , a second disk rack or something . What I 'm looking for is where do we s expand the next meeting ? phd c: Yep . professor b: Well , for the next meeting you might be out of luck with those ten , mightn't you ? , you know Dave Johnson is gone for , like , ten days , grad a: Oh , I didn't know he had left already . grad e: How much space do you need for these ? professor b: I don't know what his schedule is . phd f: I I thi grad e: I have I have an eighteen gig drive hanging off of my computer . grad a: Alright ! What 's your computer 's name ? grad e: So , Samosa . grad a: And you 're o you 're offering ? grad e: I 'm not doing anything on it right now until I get new meetings to transcri or that are new transcriptions coming in I really can't do anything . grad e: not that I can't do anything , I jus phd f: I I jus I just gave Thilo some about ten gigs , the last ten gigs of space that there was on on Abbott . And So but that But grad a: Which one was that , X G ? X G ? phd c: XG . phd d: That 's also where we store the The Hub - five training set waveforms , phd c: Oops . grad a: But that won't be getting any bigger , phd d: right ? phd f: No . grad a: will it ? phd f: I don't think that 's on XG . phd d: But I 've also been storing I 've been storing the feature files there and I guess I can s start deleting some because we now know what the best features are grad e: Well phd d: and we won't be using the old ones anymore . phd d: Oh thats XA Oh that 's X phd c: Isn't that XH ? phd f: I th grad a: Not not for long . grad e: I have a lot of space and it 's not it 's n There 's very little Yeah not for long . phd d: Maybe I 'm confu grad e: But it 's not going f phd d: Oh no I 'm sorry . grad a: Yeah , it 's probably Probably only about four gig is on X on your X drive , phd c: So . grad a: but we 'll definitely take it up if you grad e: I th phd d: I think you 're right . It 's XH and D grad e: I think it 's about four or five gig cuz I have four meetings on there , phd d: The b I 'm also using DG I got that confused . grad a: The " more disk space " button ? professor b: Just press Press each meeting saying " we need more disk space " " this week " . professor b: And And how much does each meeting take ? phd f: And it 's about a gig uncompressed . phd c: It 's It 's a little bit more as I usually don't do not uncompress the all of the PZM and the PDA things . So there 's what thirty some gig of just meetings so far ? professor b: So - so So maybe there 's a hundred gig or something . Well we We haven't uncompressed all the meetings , but grad a: I would like to . it 's just a question of figuring out where they should be and hanging them , grad a: Yep . professor b: but But , we could You know , if you want to get four disks , get four disks . Well I sent that message out to , I guess , you and Dave asking for if we could get some disk . phd f: I s I sent this out a a day ago grad a: And put it where ? professor b: Right . phd f: but and Dave didn't respond so I don I don't know how the whole process works . does he just go out and get them and if it 's OK , and grad a: Yep . And just say an - e just ask him that , you know , wha what should you do . And in my answer back was " are you sure you just want one ? " So I think that what you want to do is plan ahead a little bit and figure " well , here 's what we pi figure on doing for the next few months " . So this is a question that 's pretty hard to solve without talking to Dave , phd d: Th - The phd f: I think part of the reason why Dave can't get the the new machines up is because he doesn't have room in the machine room right now . phd d: One One On - One thing to in to t to do when you need to conserve space is phd f: So he has to re - arrange a bunch of stuff . phd d: I bet there are still some old , like , nine gig disks , around and you can probably consolidate them onto larger disks and and you know recover the space . An - and so , he always has a a lot of plans of things that he 's gonna do to make things better in many ways an and runs out of time . And so I think what he 's been concentrating on is the back the back up system , rather than on new disk . Basically , we can easily get one to four disks , you just go out and get four and we 've got the money for it , it 's no big deal . , but the question is where they go , and I don't think we can solve that here , you just have to ask him . grad a: Yeah , it 's just It 's not on the net , so it 's a little awkward phd d: The only phd f: . phd d: What do you mean it 's not on the net ? grad a: It 's not phd c: It 's not bad . grad a: It 's behind lots of fire walls that don't allow any services through except S S phd d: Oh because it 's because it 's an ACIRI machine ? grad a: Yep . grad a: And also on the list is to get it into the normal ICSI net , but Who knows when that will happen ? phd d: But that can't be that hard . phd d: grad a: No , the the problem with that apparently is that they don't currently have a wire running to that back room that goes anywhere near one of the ICSI routers . If there was a person dedicated to doing it they would happen pretty easily but it 's it 's jus every ever everybody everybody has a has grad a: But Dave has to do all of them . But at any rate I think that there 's a there 's a longer term thing and there 's immediate need and I think we need a a conversation with , maybe maybe after after tea or something you and I can go down and and talk to him about it Just say " wha you know , what should we do right now ? " phd f: How long is David gonna be gone ? professor b: eleven days or something ? grad a: Oh my ! professor b: Yeah basically tomorrow and all of the week after . The only oth thing other thing I was gonna add was that , I talked briefly to Mari and we had both been busy with other things so we haven't really connected that much since the last meeting we had here but we agreed that we would have a telephone meeting the Friday after next . And I I I wanted to make it , after the next one of these meetings , so something that we wanna do next meeting is is to put together , a kind of reasonable list for ourselves of what is it , that we 've done . just sort of bulletize o e do do I can I can dream up text but this is basically gonna lead to the annual report . grad a: This is the fifteenth ? So just a week from tomorrow ? professor b: that would grad a: OK . So , we can This So that 's an phd d: Is this gotta be in the morning ? professor b: phd d: Or Because you know I Fridays I have to leave like around two . So if it could be before that would be be professor b: No , no but I I I don't need other folks for the meeting . professor b: Yeah so what I meant was on the me this meeting if I wa something I I I 'm making a major thing in the agenda is I wanna help in getting together a list of what it is that we 've done so I can tell her . professor b: but but , and then the next day , late in the day I 'll be having that that discussion with her . phd d: One thing we in past meetings we had also a you know various variously talked about the work that w was happening sort of on the on the recognition side professor b: And I wondered whether we should maybe have a separate meeting and between you know , whoever 's interested in that because I feel that there 's plenty of stuff to talk about but it would be sort of maybe the wrong place to do it in this meeting if professor b: Think so ? phd d: Well , it 's that It 's just gonna be ver very boring for people who are not you know , sort of really interested in the details of the recognition system . professor b: Well , OK , so how many how many people here would not be interested in in a meeting about recognition ? phd c: Me too . phd d: Well I know Well , Jane an Well you mean in a separate meeting or ha ha talking about it in this grad a: No . professor b: Real grad e: Watch a ball game ? professor b: Yeah , real real real men " Real men do decoding " or something like that . phd d: it it 's sort of when when the talk is about data collection stuff , sometimes I 've you know , I I 'm bored . grad a: The Nod off ? phd d: So it 's I c I can sympathize with them not wanting to i to to be you know If I cou you know this could professor b: It 's cuz y you have a So you need a better developed feminine side . phd d: I 'm professor b: There 's probably gonna be a lot of " bleeps " in this meeting . You know , whatev or whenever we feel like we phd f: Right , I was Why don't we alternate this meeting every other week ? grad a: Or just alternate the focus . grad a: Oh sor phd f: But I do I don't a lot of times lately it seems like we don't really have enough for a full meeting on Meeting Recorder . phd f: So if we could alternate the focus of the meeting grad a: Let 's read digits and go . professor b: And then if we find , you know we 're just not getting enough done , there 's all these topics not coming up , then we can expand into another meeting . Let 's chat about it with Liz and Jane when we get a chance , see what they think and phd d: phd f: and there 's lots of things , you know , details and stuff that would I think people 'd be interested in and I 'd you know , where do we go from here kind of things and So , it would be good . professor b: Yeah , and you 're you 're attending the the front - end meeting as well as the others so you have you have probably one of the best you and I , I guess are the main ones who sort of see the bridge between the two . phd d: I jus So the latest result was that yot I tested the the sort of final version of the PLP configuration on development test data for for this year 's Hub - five test set . phd d: And the recognition performance was exactly , and exactly up to the you know , the first decimal , same as with the Mel Cepstra front - end . , well i there was a little bit of a phd f: Oh ! phd d: i overall . phd d: And then the really nice thing was that if if we combine the two systems we get a one and a half percent improvement . phd d: Which u actually uses the whole N - best list from both systems to mmm , c combine that . professor b: So except the only key difference between the two really is the kind of smoothing at the end which is the auto - regressive versus the cepstral truncation . phd d: And , the phd f: But a percent and a half ? grad a: Yeah , it 's pretty impressive . phd f: That 's phd d: And And so after I told the my colleagues at SRI about that , you know , now they definitely want to , you know , have a Next time we have an evaluation they want to do , you know , basically a at least the system combination . , and , you know , why not ? professor b: Sure , why not ? phd d: . phd d: w what do you mean ? More features in the sense of front - end features or in the sense of just bells and whistles ? grad a: No , front - end features . Let 's , you know , try RASTA and MSG , and phd d: Oh Yeah . That 's the the the There 's one thing you don't want to overdo it because y every front - end You know , if you you know you basically multiply your effort by N , where N is a number of different systems phd f: Oh . So one one compromise would be to only to have the everything up to the point where you generate lattices be basically one system and then after that you rescore your lattices with the multiple systems and combine the results and that 's a fairly painless thing . phd f: Do you think we 'd still get the one and a half phd d: I I think so . Maybe a little less because at that point the error rates are lower and so if You know , maybe it 's only one percent or something but that would still be worthwhile doing . Jus - You know , just wanted to let you know that that 's working out very nicely . phd d: And then we had some results on digits , with We We So this was really really sort of just to get Dave going with his experiments . But as a result , you know , we were sort of wondering why is the Hub - five system doing so well on the digits . phd d: And the reason is basically there 's a whole bunch of read speech data in the Hub - five training set . phd d: And you c And Not all of No it 's actually , digits is only a maybe a fifth of it . professor b: A fifth of it is how much ? phd d: The rest is is read is read TIMIT data and ATIS data and Wall Street Journal and stuff like that . But a fi a fifth is how much ? phd d: A fifth would be maybe two hours something . professor b: Yeah , so that 's actually not that different from the amount of training that there was . phd d: But it definitely helps to have the other read data in there professor b: Oh yeah phd d: because we 're doing professor b: w phd d: You know the error rate is half of what you do if you train only on ti TIMIT not TIMIT TI - digits , professor b: phd d: That 's e professor b: Because because , it was apparent if you put in a bunch more data it would be better , phd d: That was e Right , right . So we only for the Hub - five training , we 're only using a fairly small subset of the Macrophone database . grad a: I could also put in focus condition zero from Hub - four from Broadcast News , which is mostly prepared speech . So , you know that might be useful for the people who train the the digit recognizers to to use something other than TI - digits . They they they experimented for a while with a bunch of different databases with French and Spanish and so forth cuz they 're multilingual tests phd d: professor b: But but yeah certainly if we , If we knew what the structure of what we 're doing there was . professor b: Once we know , then the trainable parts of it it 'd be great to run lots of lots of stuff through . And then I th guess Chuck and I had some discussions about how to proceed with the tandem system and You wanna You wanna see where that stands ? phd f: Well , I 'm phd d: phd f: Yeah , so Andreas brought over the alignments that the SRI system uses . And so I 'm in the process of converting those alignments into label files that we can use to train a new net with . phd d: An - And one side effect of that would be that it 's that the phone set would change . So the MLP would be trained on I think only forty - six or forty - eight phd f: Right . phd d: which is smaller than the than the phone set that that we 've been using so far . phd d: And that that that will probably help , actually , phd f: So it 's a little different ? phd d: because the fewer dimensions e the less trouble probably with the as far as just the , Just You know we want to try things like deltas on the tandem features . And so , you know , fewer dimensions in the phone set would be actually helpful just from a logistics point of view . Although we , it 's not that many fewer and and and we take a KLT anyway so we could phd d: Right . And then we wanted to s just limit it to maybe something on the same order of dimensions as we use in a standard front - end . So that would mean just doing the top I don't know ten or twelve or something of the KLT dimensions . My impression was that when we did that before that had very little he didn't lose very much . phd d: But then And then something Once we have the new M L P trained up , one thing I wanted to try just for the fun of it was to actually run like a standard hybrid system that is based on you know , those features and retrain MLP and also the you know , the dictionary that we use for the Hub - five system . professor b: And the b And the base u starting off with the base of the alignments that you got from i from a pretty decent system . phd d: because you know , compared to what Eric did a while ago , where he trained up , I think , a system based on Broadcast News and then tra retraining it on Switchboard or s and professor b: Yeah . phd d: But he I think he d he didn't he probably didn't use all the training data that was available . We we made some improvements to the dictionary 's to the dictionary about two years ago which resulted in a something like a four percent absolute error rate reduction on Switchboard , which professor b: Well the other thing is , dipping deep into history and into our resource management days , when we were collaborating with SRI before , phd d: professor b: it was I think , it is was a really key starting point for us that we actually got our alignment . professor b: When we were working together we got our initial alignments from Decipher , at the time . Later we got away from it because because once we had decent systems going then it was it was typically better to use our own systems phd f: Yeah . professor b: cuz they were self consistent but but certainly to start off when we were trying to recover from our initial hundred and forty percent error rate . professor b: And we 're not quite that bad with our our Switchboard systems but it was they certainly aren't as good as SRI 's , phd d: OK . phd f: W What is the performance on s the best Switchboard system that we 've done ? Roughly ? professor b: Well , the hybrid system we never got better than about fifty percent error . And it was I think there 's just a whole lot of things that no one ever had time for . we always had a list of a half dozen things that we were gonna do and and a lot of them were pretty simple and we never did . professor b: we never did an never did any adaptation phd d: But that w Even that that number professor b: we never did any phd d: Right . And And that number I think was on Switchboard - one data , right ? Where the error rate now is in the twenties . phd d: So it would be So it would be good t to sort of r re professor b: Yeah . And the other thing that that would help us to evaluate is to see how well the M L P is trained up . phd d: So it 's sort of a sanity check of the M L P outputs before we go ahead and train up the you know , use them as a basis for the tandem system . Not phd f: Should we Should we bother with using the net before doing embedded training ? professor b: But . phd d: But phd f: should should we even use that ? phd d: Oh oh that 's a good question . phd f: Or should I just go straight to phd d: Yeah , we we weren't sure whether it 's worth to just use the alignments from the S R I recognizer or whether to actually go through one or more iterations of embedded training where you realign . You run it ? Keep keep both versions ? See which one 's better ? professor b: yeah . professor b: And while it 's training you may as well test the one you have and see how it did . You know , it 's phd d: But But so I grad a: Sort of given up guessing . phd d: Well but i But in your experience have you seen big improvements in s on some tasks with embedded training ? Or was it sort of small - ish improvements that you got professor b: well . professor b: because we 're coming from , alignments that were achieved with an extremely different system . grad a: Although , we 've done it with When we were combining with the Cambridge recurrent neural net , embedded training made it worse . phd d: So you you started training with outputs from a with alignments that were generated by the Cambridge system ? grad a: Yep . professor b: Oh ! phd d: No it 's weird that it did I 'm sorry . Tha - u we we 've see and wi with the numbers OGI numbers task we 've seen a number of times people doing embedded trainings and things not getting better . phd d: Oh actually it 's not that weird because we have seen We have seen cases where acoustic retraining the acoustic models after some other change made matters worse rather than better . professor b: But I But I would I would suspect that something that that had a very different feature set , for instance they were using pretty diff similar feature sets to us . professor b: I I would expect that something that had a different feature set would would benefit from phd d: professor b: sorry , it was the other thing is that what was in common to the Cambridge system and our system is they both were training posteriors . professor b: So , that 's another pretty big difference grad a: That 's another big difference . professor b: and , one bac at least Back at phd d: You mean with soft targets ? Or ? Sorry , I 'm sor I missed What What 's the key issue here ? professor b: Oh , that both the Cambridge system and our system were were training posteriors . And if we 're we 're coming from alignments coming from the SRI system , it 's a likelihood - based system . You know , there 's diffe different front - end different different , training criterion , I would think that in a that an embedded embedded training would have at least a good shot of improving it some more . I was wondering you know what size net I should Anybody have any intuitions or suggestions ? professor b: how much training data ? phd f: Well , I was gonna start off with the small train set . professor b: And how How many hours is that ? phd f: That 's why I was I I 'm not sure how much that is . phd d: I think that has about Well i you 'd would be gender - dependent training , right ? So So I think it 's that 's about mmm , something like thirty hours . phd f: In the small training set ? grad a: Hello ? phd d: I I think so . I 'll grad a: Excuse me ? phd d: It 's definitely less than a hundred grad a: Alright . It 's it 's th the thing I 'll I 'll think about it a little more phd d: It 's m It 's more than phd f: And a thousand is too small ? professor b: Oh let me think about it , but I think that that th at some point there 's diminishing returns . professor b: but it but but there is diminishing returns and you 're doubling the amount of time . phd d: Remember you 'll have a smaller output layer so there 's gonna be fewer parameters there . phd d: And then professor b: Fifty s Fifty four to forty eight ? grad a: Vast majority is from the input unit . grad a: Right , because you used the context windows and so the input to hidden is much , much larger . professor b: Yeah , so it 's it 'd be way , way less than ten percent of the difference . What am I trying to think of ? phd f: The The net that that we did use already was eight thousand hidden units and that 's the one that Eric trained up . professor b: So , yeah definitely not the one thousand two thousand fr the four thousand will be better and the two thousand will be almost will be faster and almost as good . a four thousand is well within the range that you could benefit from but the two thousand 'd be faster so phd d: Right <doc-sep>But all all I know is that it seems like every time I am up here after a meeting , and I start it , it works fine . And if I 'm up here and I start it and we 're all sitting here waiting to have a meeting , it gives me that error message and I have not yet sat down with been able to get that error message in a point where I can sit down and find out where it 's occurring in the code . professor d: So so the , the new procedural change that just got suggested , which I think is a good idea is that , we do the digit recordings at the end . And that way , if we 're recording somebody else 's meeting , and a number of the participants have to run off to some other meeting and don't have the time , then they can run off . It 'll mean we 'll get somewhat fewer , sets of digits , but , I think that way we 'll cut into people 's time , if someone 's on strict time , less . , so , let 's see , we were having a discussion the other day , maybe we should bring that up , about , the nature of the data that we are collecting . @ @ that , we should have a fair amount of data that is , collected for the same meeting , so that we can , I don't know . Wh - what what were some of the points again about that ? Is it phd f: well , OK , I 'll back up . phd f: at the previous at last week 's meeting , this meeting I was griping about wanting to get more data and I I talked about this with Jane and Adam , and was thinking of this mostly just so that we could do research on this data , since we 'll have a new this new student di does wanna work with us , phd a: Well , great . phd f: And he 's already funded part - time , so we 'll only be paying him for sort of for half of the normal part - time , phd a: What a deal . grad b: And what 's he interested in , specifically ? phd f: So he 's comes from a signal - processing background , but I liked him a lot cuz he 's very interested in higher level things , like language , and disfluencies and all kinds of eb maybe prosody , grad b: Anyway , I thought OK , maybe we should have enough data so that if he starts he 'd be starting in January , next semester that we 'd have , you know , enough data to work with . phd f: But , Jane and Adam brought up a lot of good points that just posting a note to Berkeley people to have them come down here has some problems in that you m you need to make sure that the speakers are who you want and that the meeting type is what you want , and so forth . So , I thought about that and I think it 's still possible , but I 'd rather try to get more regular meetings of types that we know about , and hear , then sort of a mish - mosh of a bunch of one one - time grad b: One offs ? phd f: Yeah , just because it would be very hard to process the data in all senses , both to get the , to figure out what type of meeting it is and to do any kind of higher level work on it , like well , I was talking to Morgan about things like summarization , or what 's this meeting about . it 's very different if you have a group that 's just giving a report on what they did that week , versus coming to a decision and so forth . Then I was , talking to Morgan about some new proposed work in this area , sort of a separate issue from what the student would be working on where I was thinking of doing some kind of summarization of meetings or trying to find cues in both the utterances and in the utterance patterns , like in numbers of overlaps and amount of speech , sort of raw cues from the interaction that can be measured from the signals and from the diff different microphones that point to sort of hot spots in the meeting , or things where stuff is going on that might be important for someone who didn't attend to listen to . And in that , regard , I thought we definitely w will need it 'd b it 'd be nice for us to have a bunch of data from a few different domains , or a few different kinds of meetings . So this this meeting is one of them , although I 'm not sure I can participate if I You know , I would feel very strange being part of a meeting that you were then analysing later for things like summarization . phd f: and then there are some others that menti that Morgan mentioned , like the front - end meeting and maybe a networking group meeting . phd f: But basically , for anything where you 're trying to get a summarization of some kind of meeting meaning out of the meeting , it would be too hard to have fifty different kinds of meetings where we didn't really have a good grasp on what does it mean to summarize , grad b: Yeah . phd f: but rather we should have different meetings by the same group but hopefully that have different summaries . And then we need a couple that of We don't wanna just have one group because that might be specific to that particular group , but @ @ three or four different kinds . So , in general , I was thinking more data but also data where we hold some parameters constant or fairly similar , grad b: phd f: like a meeting about of people doing a certain kind of work where at least half the participants each time are the same . grad b: professor d: Now , let l l let me just give you the other side to that cuz I ca because I I don't disagree with that , but I think there is a complimentary piece to it too . professor d: As many people here a a and talking about the kind of thing that you were just talking about it would have too few people from my point of view . So , I think I would also very much like us to have a fair amount of really random scattered meetings , of somebody coming down from campus , and and , phd c: professor d: sure , if we can get more from them , fine , postdoc e: professor d: but if we only get one or two from each group , that still could be useful acoustically just because we 'd have close and distant microphones with different people . postdoc e: Can I can I say about that that the the issues that I think Adam and I raised were more a matter of advertising so that you get more native speakers . Because I think if you just say an And in particular , my suggestion was to advertise to linguistics grad students because there you 'd have so people who 'd have proficiency enough in English that that , it would be useful for for purposes You know . postdoc e: But you know , I think I 've been I 've I I 've gathered data from undergrads at on campus and if you just post randomly to undergrads I think you 'd get such a mixed bag that it would be hard to know how much conversation you 'd have at all . And and the English you 'd have The language models would be really hard to build professor d: Well , you want to i postdoc e: because it would not really be it would be an interlanguage rather than than a professor d: Well , OK , first place , I I I don't think we 'd just want to have random people come down and talk to one another , I think there should be a meeting that has some goal and point cuz I I think that 's what we 're investigating , postdoc e: OK . phd f: It has to be a a pre - existing meeting , like a meeting that would otherwise happen anyway . professor d: So I was I was thinking more in terms of talking to professors , and and and , senior , d and , doctoral students who are leading projects and offering to them that they have their hold their meeting down here . The second point is I think that for some time now , going back through BeRP I think that we have had speakers that we 've worked with who had non - native accents and I th I think that postdoc e: Oh , oh . postdoc e: No , it 's more a matter of , proficiency , e e just simply fluency . postdoc e: I deal with people on on campus who I think sometimes people , undergraduates in computer science , have language skills that make , you know that their their fluency and writing skills are not so strong . professor d: You 're just talking about postdoc e: Well , e I just think , grad b: We all had the same thought . postdoc e: but you know , it 's like when you get into the graduate level , no problem . professor d: But grad b: Well , I think that , I think that the only thing we should say in the advertisement is that the meeting should be held in English . And and I think if it 's a pre - existing meeting and it 's held in English , I I think it 's probably OK if a few of the people don't have , g particularly good English skills . postdoc e: OK , now can I can I say the other aspect of this from my perspective which is that , there 's there 's this this issue , you have a corpus out there , it should be used for for multiple things cuz it 's so expensive to put together . postdoc e: And if people want to approach , i so I know e e You know this The idea of computational linguistics and probabilistic grammars and all may not be the focus of this group , professor d: - huh . postdoc e: but the idea of language models , which are fund you know generally speaking , you know , t t terms of like the amount of benefit per dollar spent or an hour invested in preparing the data , professor d: postdoc e: if you have a choice between people who are pr more proficient in , i more fluent , more more close to being academic English , then it would seem to me to be a good thing . I postdoc e: Because otherwise y you don't have the ability to have , so if if you have a bunch of idiolects that 's the worst possible case . If you have people who are using English as a as an interlanguage because they they don't , they can't speak in their native languages and but their interlanguage isn't really a match to any existing , language model , professor d: - huh . professor d: Well , that 's pretty much what you 're going to have in the networking group . But the thing is , I think that these people are of high enough level in their in their language proficiency that professor d: I see . postdoc e: I I 'm I 'm just thinking that we have to think at a at a higher level view , could we have a language model , a a grammar a grammar , basically , that , wo would be a a possibility . postdoc e: So y so if you wanted to bring in a model like Dan Jurafsky 's model , an and do some top - down stuff , it to help th the bottom - up and merge the things or whatever , it seems like , I don't see that there 's an argument professor d: postdoc e: I 'm I what I think is that why not have the corpus , since it 's so expensive to put together , useful for the widest range of of central corp things that people generally use corpora for and which are , you know , used in computational linguistics . professor d: OK , well , i i let 's let 's see what we can get . , it it I think that if we 're aiming at at , groups of graduate students and professors and so forth who are talking about things together , and it 's from the Berkeley campus , probably most of it will be OK , postdoc e: Yes , that 's fine . And my point in m in my note to Liz was I think that undergrads are an iff iffy population . grad b: Well , not to mention the fact that I would be hesitant certainly to take anyone under eighteen , probably even an anyone under twenty - one . professor d: Oh , you age - ist ! grad b: What 's that ? Well , age - ist . Well , Morgan , you were mentioning that Mari may not use the k equipment from IBM if they found something else , cuz there 's a professor d: They 're they 're yeah , they 're d they 're assessing whether they should do that or y do something else , hopefully over the next few weeks . phd f: Cuz , one remote possibility is that if we st if we inherited that equipment , if she weren't using it , could we set up a room in the linguistics department ? And and , there there may be a lot more or or in psych , or in comp wherever , in another building where we could , record people there . I think we 'd have a better chance grad b: I think we 'd need a real motivated partner to do that . But if there were such a it 's a remote possibility , then , you know , one of us could you know , go up there and record the meeting or something rather than bring all of them down here . phd f: So it 's just a just a thought if they end up not using the the hardware . professor d: Well , the other thing Yeah , the other thing that I was hoping to do in the first place was to turn it into some kind of portable thing so you could wheel it around . , and grad b: Well , I know that space is really scarce on at least in CS . phd f: But you may not need a separate room , you know , grad b: That 's true . phd f: the idea is , if they have a meeting room and they can guarantee that the equipment will be safe and so forth , and if one of us is up there once a week to record the meeting or something grad b: True . professor d: Well , maybe John would let us put it into the phonology lab or something . grad b: Yeah , I think it would be interesting because then we could regularly get another meeting . phd c: But I I I think you need , another portable thing a another portable equipment to to do , eh , more e easier the recording process , eh , out from ICSI . phd c: Eh , if you you want to to record , eh , a seminar or a class , eh , in the university , you you need It - it would be eh eh very difficult to to put , eh , a lot of , eh , head phones eh in different people when you have to to record only with , eh , this kind of , eh , d device . grad b: Yeah , but I think if we if we wanna just record with the tabletop microphones , that 's easy . grad b: Right ? That 's very easy , phd c: Ye - Yeah , yeah . professor d: Actually , that 's a int that raises an interesting point that came up in our discussion that 's maybe worth repeating . We realized that , when we were talking about this that , OK , there 's these different things that we want to do with it . So , it 's true that we wanna be selective in some ways , the way that you were speaking about with , not having an interlingua and , these other issues . But on the other hand , it 's not necessarily true that we need all of the corpus to satisfy all of it . So , a a as per the example that we wanna have a fair amount that 's done with a small n recorded with a small , typ number of types of meetings But we can also have another part that 's , just one or two meetings of each of a of a range of them and that 's OK too . , i We realized in discussion that the other thing is , what about this business of distant and close microphones ? , we really wanna have a substantial amount recorded this way , that 's why we did it . But what about For th for these issues of summarization , a lot of these higher level things you don't really need the distant microphone . phd f: Right , I c I think there 's grad b: And you don't really need the close microphone , you mean . phd f: Yea - yeah yeah , you actually don't really even need any fancy microphone . postdoc e: Which one did you mean ? professor d: You d You don't ne it doesn't you just need some microphone , somewhere . professor d: but phd f: use , but I think that any data that we spend a lot of effort to collect , professor d: Yeah . phd f: you know , each person who 's interested in , we have a cou we have a bunch of different , slants and perspectives on what it 's useful for , they need to be taking charge of making sure they 're getting enough of the kind of data that they want . phd f: And So in my case , I think there w there is enough data for some kinds of projects and not enough for others . phd f: And so I 'm looking and thinking , " Well I 'd be glad to walk over and record people and so forth if it 's to help th in my interest . phd f: And other people need to do that for themselves , h or at least discuss it so that we can find some optimal professor d: Right . professor d: But I think that I 'm raising that cuz I think it 's relevant exactly for this idea up there that if you think about , " Well , gee , we have this really complicated setup to do , " well maybe you don't . professor d: Maybe if if If really all you want is to have a a a recording that 's good enough to get a , a transcription from later , you just need to grab a tape recorder and go up and make a recording . professor d: we we could have a fairly We could just get a DAT machine and phd f: Well , I agree with Jane , though , on the other hand that phd c: Yeah . phd f: So that might be true , you may say for instance , summarization , or something that sounds very language oriented . You may say well , " Oh yeah , you just do that from transcripts of a radio show . phd f: But what you what I was thinking is long term what would be neat is to be able to pick up on Suppose you just had a distant microphone there and you really wanted to be able to determine this . phd f: So I do think that long term you should always try to satisfy the greatest number of of interests and have this parallel information , which is really what makes this corpus powerful . phd f: Otherwise , you know , lots of other sites can propose individual studies , so professor d: but I I think that the i We can't really underestimate the difficulty shouldn't really u underestimate the difficulty of getting a setup like this up . professor d: And so , it took quite a while to get that together and to say , " Oh , we 'll just do it up there , " phd f: OK . professor d: If you 're talking about something simple , where you throw away a lot of these dimensions , then you can do that right away . Talking about something that has all of these different facets that we have here , it won't happen quickly , it won't be easy , and there 's all sorts of issues about th you know keeping the equipment safe , or else hauling it around , and all sorts of o phd f: So then maybe we should try to bring people here . professor d: I think the first priority should be to pry to get try to get people to come here . phd f: that 's that 's OK , so professor d: We 're set up for it . phd f: Yeah , I And I think we can get people to come here , that But the issue is you definitely wanna make sure that the kind of group you 're getting is the right group so that you don't waste a lot of your time and the overhead in bringing people down . professor d: Yeah , they have to do their digits or they don't get they don't get their food . professor d: Yeah grad b: Should I pursue that ? phd f: Oh , definitely , yeah . grad b: So I 'm not sure whether they 'll still be so willing to volunteer , but I 'll send an email and ask . phd f: I 'd love to get people that are not linguists or engineers , cuz these are both weird grad b: Right . professor d: The the The oth the other h phd f: well , I know , I shouldn't say that . The o the o the other The other thing is , that we we talked about is give to them , burn an extra CD - ROM . professor d: and give them So if they want a basically and audio record of their phd f: Well , I thought that was I thought he meant , " Give them a music CD , " like they g Then he said a CD of the of their speech professor d: Oh . phd f: and I guess it depends of what kind of audience you 're talking to , but You know , I personally would not want a CD of my meeting , grad b: Mmm . Of the meeting ? phd f: but maybe yeah , maybe you 're professor d: If you 're having some planning meeting of some sort and you 'd like phd f: right . professor d: We 're saying , " Look , you know , you 're gonna get this . It 's actually p It 's probably gonna be pretty useless to you , grad b: Yep . professor d: but you 'll ge appreciate , you know , where it 's useful and where it 's useless , phd f: Right . professor d: and then , we 're gonna move this technology , so it 'll become useful . phd a: What if you could tell them that you 'll give them the the transcripts when they come back ? postdoc e: Alth phd f: But we might need a little more to incentivize them , that 's all . postdoc e: I hav I have to raise a little eensy - weensy concern about doing th giving them the CD immediately , because of these issues of , you know , this kind of stuff , where maybe You know ? professor d: Good point . professor d: So we can so we can postdoc e: We could burn it after it 's been cleared with the transcript stage . phd f: If It should be the same CD - ROM that we distribute publically , grad b: That 's a good point . phd f: right ? professor d: Although it 's phd f: Otherwise they 're not allowed to play it for anyone . postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right , say " Yeah , well , I got this CD , and , Your Honor , I " grad b: Yeah . So that was that topic , and then , I guess another topic would be where are we in the whole disk resources question for grad b: We are slowly slowly getting to the point where we have enough sp room to record meetings . So I did a bunch of archiving , and still doing a bunch of archiving , I I 'm in the midst of doing the P - files from , Broadcast News . phd c: Eleven ? grad b: And it 'll take another eleven to do the clone . phd a: Where did you copy it to ? grad b: Well , it 's Abbott . professor d: Sk - It 's copying from one place on Abbott to another place on Abbott ? grad b: Tape . phd a: Ah ! grad b: So I 'm archiving it , and then I 'm gonna delete the files . postdoc e: One thing The good news about that that is that once once it 's archived , it 's pretty quick to get back . professor d: Is it ? postdoc e: it it it The other direction is fast , but this direction is really slow . phd a: Generating a clone ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's a good point . phd a: Oh ! Hunh ! professor d: S postdoc e: Now , what will Is the plan to g to So stuff will be saved , it 's just that you 're relocating it ? , so we 're gonna get more disk space ? Or did I ? grad b: No , the the these are the P - files from Broadcast News , which are regeneratable regeneratable postdoc e: OK . grad b: And so they they were two gigabytes per file and we had six of them or something . professor d: Or maybe six ? grad b: The SUN , ha , takes more disks than the Andatico one did . The SUN rack takes Th - One took four and one took six , or maybe it was eight and twelve . professor d: How many How much phd a: Is there a difference in price or something ? grad b: Well , what happened is that we we bought all our racks and disks from Andatico for years , according to Dave , and Andatico got bought by another company and doubled their prices . I 've been looking at the , Aurora data and , first first look at it , there were basically three directories on there that could be moved . One was called Aurora , one was Spanish , which was Carmen 's Spanish stuff , and the other one was , SPINE . phd a: And so , I wrote to Dan and he was very concerned that the SPINE stuff was moving to a non - backed - up disk . So , I realized that well , probably not all of that should be moved , just the CD - ROM type data , the the static data . So I moved that , and then , I asked him to check out and see if it was OK . I told him he could delete it if he wanted to , I haven't checked today to see if he 's deleted it or not . And then Carmen 's stuff , I realized that when I had copied all of her stuff to XA , I had copied stuff there that was dynamic data . professor d: So , but , y you 're figuring you can record another five meetings or something with the space that you 're clearing up from the Broadcast News , but , we have some other disks , some of which you 're using for Aurora , but are we g do we have some other other space now ? grad b: Yep . So , so , we have space on the current disk right now , where Meeting Recorder is , and that 's probably enough for about four meetings . phd a: OK , I but the stuff I 'm moving from Aurora is on the DC disk that we grad b: I don't remember . Yeah , we were at a hundred percent and then we dropped down to eighty - six for reasons I don't understand . And then with Broadcast News , that 's five or six more meetings , so , you know , we have a couple weeks . , so , yeah , I think I think we 're OK , until we get the new disk . phd a: So should , One question I had for you was , we need we sh probably should move the Aurora an and all that other stuff off of the Meeting Recorder disk . Is there another backed - up disk that you know of that would ? grad b: We should put it onto the Broadcast News one . grad b: But , so we could ' jus just do that at the end of today , once the archive is complete , and I 've verified it . professor d: OK , @ @ So , then I guess th the last thing I 'd had on my my agenda was just to hear hear an update on what what Jose has been doing , phd c: - huh . professor d: so phd c: I have , eh , The result of my work during the last days . Eh , and the the last , eh , days , eh , I work , eh , in my house , eh , in a lot of ways and thinking , reading eh , different things about the the Meeting Recording project . phd c: But for me , eh is interesting because , eh , eh , here 's i is the demonstration of the overlap , eh , problem . phd c: It 's a real problem , a frequently problem , because you have overlapping zones eh , eh , eh , all the time . phd c: Eh , by a moment I have , eh , nnn , the , eh , n I I did a mark of all the overlapped zones in the meeting recording , with eh , a exact mark . Oh , you did that by hand ? phd c: Heh ? That 's eh , yet b b Yeah , by b b by hand by hand because , eh , eh " Why . " grad b: Can I see that ? Can I get a copy ? professor d: Oh . phd c: My my idea is to work phd a: Wow ! phd c: I I I do I don I don't @ @ I don't know , eh , if , eh , it will be possible because I I I haven't a lot eh , enough time to to to work . , only just eh , six months , as you know , but , eh , my idea is , eh , is very interesting to to work in in the line of , eh , automatic segmenter . phd c: Eh but eh , eh , in my opinion , we need eh , eh , a reference eh session to t to to evaluate the the the tool . And so are you planning to do that or have you done that already ? phd c: And No , no , with i grad b: Have you done that or are you planning to do that ? phd c: Sorry ? No , I I plan to do that . Darn ! phd c: I plan I plan , but eh , eh , the idea is the is the following . I I will I will eh , talk about eh , in the in the blackboard about the my ideas . phd c: Eh , eh This information eh , with eh , exactly time marks eh , for the overlapping zones eh overlapping zone , and eh , a speaker a a pure speech eh , eh , speaker zone . , eh zones eh of eh speech of eh , one speaker without any any eh , noise eh , any any acoustic event eh that eh , eh , w eh , is not eh , speech , real speech . And , I need t true eh , silence for that , because my my idea is to to study the nnn the the set of parameters eh , what , eh , are more m more discriminant to eh , classify . The idea is to eh to use eh , I 'm not sure to eh yet , but eh my idea is to use a a cluster eh algorithm or , nnn , a person strong in neural net algorithm to eh to eh study what is the , eh , the property of the different feat eh feature , eh , to classify eh speech and overlapping eh speech . phd c: And my idea is eh , it would be interesting to to have eh , a control set . And my control set eh , will be the eh , silence , silence without eh , any any noise . postdoc e: Which means that we 'd still You 'd hear the grad b: Yeah , fans . phd c: Eh , I eh , noise eh , eh claps eh , tape clips , eh , the difference eh , professor d: phd c: eh , eh , event eh , which , eh , eh , has , eh eh , a hard effect of distorti spectral distortion in the in the eh speech . grad b: So so you intend to hand - mark those and exclude them ? professor d: phd c: Yeah , I have mark in in in in that Not in all in all the the file , grad b: phd c: only eh , eh , nnn , mmm , I have eh , ehm I don't remind what is the the the the quantity , but eh , I I have marked enough speech on over and all the overlapping zones . I have , eh , two hundred and thirty , more or less , overlapping zones , and is similar to to this information , grad b: Whew ! phd c: because with the program , I cross the information of , of Jane with eh , my my segmentation by hand . phd c: And the the idea is , eh , I I will use , eh , I want My idea is , eh , to eh to classify . phd c: I I need eh , the exact eh , mark of the different , eh , eh , zones because I I want to put , eh , for eh , each frame a label indicating . I I I put , eh , eh , for each frame a label indicating what is th the type , what is the class , eh , which it belong . phd c: Eh , the class you will overlapping speech " overlapping " is a class , eh , " speech " @ @ the class that 's grad b: Nonspeech . phd a: These will be assigned by hand ? phd c: a I I I ha I h I I put the mark by hand , phd a: Based on the - huh . phd c: because , eh , my idea is , eh , in in the first session , I need , eh , I I need , eh , to be sure that the information eh , that , eh , I I will cluster , is is right . Because , eh , eh , if not , eh , I will I will , eh , return to the speech file to analyze eh , what is the problems , grad b: Well , training , and validation . And I I 'd prefer I would prefer , the to to have , eh , this labeled automatically , but , eh , eh , fro th I need truth . So , the difference between the top two , i So so I start at the bottom , so " silence " is clear . By " speech " do you mean speech by one sp by one person only ? phd c: Speech Yeah . postdoc e: So this is un OK , and then and then the top includes people speaking at the same time , or or a speaker and a breath overlapping , someone else 's breath , or or clicking , overlapping with speech So , that that 's all those possibilities in the top one . phd c: Eh , in the first moment , because , eh , eh , I I have information , eh , of the overlapping zones , eh , information about if the , eh , overlapping zone is , eh , from a speech , clear speech , from a one to a two eh speaker , or three speaker , or is is the zone where the breath of a speaker eh , overlaps eh , onto eh , a speech , another , especially speech . postdoc e: So it 's basi it 's basically speech wi som with with something overlapping , which could be speech but doesn't need to be . phd c: No , no , es especially eh , overlapping speech from , eh , different eh , eh , speaker . Eh professor d: No , but there 's but , I think she 's saying " Where do you In these three categories , where do you put the instances in which there is one person speaking and other sounds which are not speech ? " phd c: Ah ! professor d: Which category do you put that in ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right . Yeah , he here I I put eh speech from eh , from , eh , one speaker without , eh , eh , any any any events more . postdoc e: Oh ! professor d: Right , so where do you put speech from one speaker that does have a nonspeech event at the same time ? phd c: Where ? Where What is the class ? professor d: Which catege which category ? postdoc e: Like a c phd c: No . phd c: For for the by the @ @ no , @ @ because I I I I want to limit the the nnn , the the study . grad b: Yeah , so that 's what he was saying before , is that he excluded those . phd c: " Why ? Why ? What 's the reason ? " because i it 's the first study . In the in the future , the the idea is to to extend the class , phd a: Is is phd c: to consider all the all the information , you you mentioned before professor d: Yeah . phd c: but eh , the the first idea Because eh , I don't know what hap what will happen with the study . i it 's pure phd a: What if there was a door - slam or something ? phd c: No , no , it 's pure silence . professor d: What you Well w I I think what you m I think what you mean is that it 's nonspeech segments that don't have impulsive noises . professor d: Right ? Cuz you 're calling what you 're calling " event " is somebody coughing or clicking , or rustling paper , or hitting something , which are impulsive noises . Right ? phd c: h here yet , yet I I I I I think I I think , eh , there are that some kind of noises that , eh , don't don't wanted to to be in that , eh , in that control set . phd c: But I prefer , I prefer at at the first , eh , the the silence with eh , this eh this kind of the of eh of noise . professor d: Right , it 's , it 's " Background " might be might be a better word than " silence " . phd c: And , with this information The idea is eh , eh , nnn , I have a label for for each , eh , frame and , eh with a cluster eh algorithm I and postdoc e: Well , we needed to get the categories , yeah . And eh I am going to prepare a test bed , eh , well , eh , a a set of feature structure eh , eh , models . phd c: I have to to test , but eh I phd a: You have your own ? phd c: Yeah , yeah , yeah . Is a modified version of of of a pitch tracker , eh , from , eh , Standar - eh Stanford University in Stanford ? No . phd a: Oh ! What 's it written in ? phd c: Eh , em , I I I don't remember what is the the name of the of the author , because I I have several I have eh , eh , em , eh , library tools , from eh , Festival and of from Edinburgh eh , from Cambridge , eh , and from our department . phd c: And And I have to because , in general the pitch tracker , doesn't work very well and grad b: Bad . This this is And th the idea is to to , eh , to obtain , eh , for example , eh , eh diff eh , eh , different well , no , a great number of eh FEC for example , eh , eh , twenty - five , eh , thirty thirty parameters , eh , for for each one . And in a first eh , nnn , step in the investi in the research in eh , my idea is try to , eh , to prove , what is the performance of the difference parameter , eh to classify the different , eh , what is the the the the front - end approach to classify eh , the different , eh , frames of each class eh and what is the the , nnn , nnn , nnn , eh , what is the , the error eh , of the data grad b: Supervised clustering . phd c: and the second is try to eh , to use some ideas eh , similar to the linear discriminant analysis . phd c: Eh ? Eh , similar , because the the idea is to to study what is the contribution of eh , each parameter to the process of classify correctly the different the different parameters . What sort of classifier ar ? phd c: Eh , the the the classifier is nnn by the moment is eh is eh , similar , nnn , that the classifier used eh , in a quantifier vectorial quantifier is eh , used to to eh , some distance to to put eh , a vector eh , in in a class different . grad b: Unimodal ? phd c: Is Yeah ? W with a model , is is only to cluster using a eh , @ @ or a similarity . grad b: So is it just one cluster per phd c: A another possibility it to use eh a netw netw a neural network . phd c: But eh what 's the p What is my idea ? What 's the problem I I I I see in in in if you you use the the neural network ? If w when this kind of eh , mmm , cluster , clustering algorithm to can test , to can eh observe what happened you you can't you can't eh , eh put up with your hand in the different parameter , grad b: Right , you can't analyse it . phd c: but eh If you use a neural net is is a good idea , but eh you don't know what happened in the interior of the neural net . professor d: Well , actually , you can do sensitivity analyses which show you what the importance of the different parce pieces of the input are . professor d: It 's hard to w w what you It 's hard to tell on a neural net is what 's going on internally . professor d: But it 's actually not that hard to analyse it and figure out the effects of different inputs , especially if they 're all normalized . professor d: Well , this isn't tru if if if you really wonder what different if if phd c: Yeah . phd c: But professor d: Yeah , then a decision tree is really good , but the thing is here he 's he 's not he 's not like he has one you know , a bunch of very distinct variables , like pitch and this he 's talking about , like , a all these cepstral coefficients , and so forth , grad b: Right . professor d: in which case a a any reasonable classifier is gonna be a mess , and it 's gonna be hard to figure out what what phd c: And grad b: Right . professor d: I , I think the other thing that one , this is , I think a good thing to do , to sort of look at these things at least See what I 'd I 'd Let me tell you what I would do . Instead of taking all the MFCC 's , or all the PLP 's or whatever , I would just take a couple . professor d: OK ? Like like C - one , C - two , something like that , so that you can visualize it . professor d: OK , so before you do build up any kind of fancy classifiers , just take a look in two dimensions , at how these things are split apart . professor d: That I think will give you a lot of insight of what is likely to be a useful feature when you put it into a more complicated classifier . professor d: And the second thing is , once you actually get to the point of building these classifiers , @ @ what this lacks so far is the temporal properties . So if you 're just looking at a frame and a time , you don't know anything about , you know , the structure of it over time , and so you may wanna build @ @ build a Markov model of some sort , or or else have features that really are based on on on some bigger chunk of time . But don't anyway , this is my suggestion , is don't just , you know , throw in twenty features at it , the deltas , and the delta del and all that into some classifier , even even if it 's K - nearest - neighbors , you still won't know phd c: Yeah . professor d: what it 's doing , even You know it 's , I think to know what it 's to have a better feeling for what it 's grad b: Yep . professor d: look at at som some picture that shows you , " Here 's These things , are offer some separation . " And , in LPC , the thing to particularly look at is , I think is something like , the residual phd c: Yeah . S postdoc e: Can I ask ? It strikes me that there 's another piece of information , that might be useful and that 's simply the transition . So , w if you go from a transition of silence to overlap versus a transition from silence to speech , there 's gonna be a b a big informative area there , it seems to me . phd c: I eh the the Meeting Recorder project , for me , has eh , two eh , w has eh several parts , several p objective professor d: But eh , at the first , in the acoustic , eh , eh , parts of the project , eh I think you eh we have eh two main eh objective . And for that , if you don't use , eh , eh , a speech recognizer , eh broad class , or not broad class to to try to to to label the different frames , I think the Ike criterion or BIC criterion eh will be enough to detect the change . When you you have , eh , eh s eh the transition of speech or or silence eh to overlap zone , this criterion is enough with probably with , eh , this kind of , eh , eh the the the more eh use eh use eh used eh em normal , regular eh parameter MF - MFCC . But eh eh I I understand that you your objective is to eh classify , to know that eh that zone not is only a new zone in the in the file , that eh you have eh , but you have to to to know that this is overlap zone . because in the future you will eh try to to process that zone with a non - regular eh eh speech recognizer model , I suppose . phd c: you you will pretend to to to process the overlapping z eh zone with another kind of algorithm professor d: phd c: because it 's very difficult to to to obtain the transcription from eh using eh eh a regular , normal speech recognizer . phd c: A model to detect more acc the mor most accurately possible that is p , will be possible the , eh the mark , the change and another another model will @ @ or several models , to try s but eh several model eh robust models , sample models to try to classify the difference class . grad b: I 'm I 'm I 'm sorry , I didn't understand you what you said . What what model ? postdoc e: phd c: Eh , the the classifiers of the of the n to detect the different class to the different zones before try to to recognize , eh with eh to transcribe , with eh a speech recognizer . phd c: And my idea is to use eh , for example , a neural net postdoc e: So p phd c: with the information we obtain from this eh this eh study of the parameter with the selected parameter to try to eh to put the class of each frame . phd c: you you eh , eh have obtained in the first eh , step with the for example , BIC eh , eh criterion compare model postdoc e: phd c: And You I don't - u professor d: OK , but , I I think in any event we 're agreed that the first step is phd c: i postdoc e: Yeah . professor d: Because what we had before for for , speaker change detection did not include these overlaps . professor d: So the first thing is for you to to build up something that will detect the overlaps . professor d: Right ? So again , I think the first thing to do to detect the overlaps is to look at these , in in in in grad b: Features ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , I again , the things you 've written up there I think are way too way too big . professor d: OK ? If you 're talking about , say , twelfth twelfth - order MFCC 's or something like that it 's just way too much . All you 'll be able to do is put it into a classifier and see how well it does . professor d: Whereas I think if you have things if you pick one or two dimensional things , or three of you have some very fancy display , and look at how the the different classes separate themselves out , you 'll have much more insight about what 's going on . professor d: Well , you 'll you 'll get a feeling for what 's happening , you know , phd c: Yeah . professor d: so if you look at Suppose you look at first and second - order cepstral coefficients for some one of these kinds of things and you find that the first - order is much more effective than the second , and then you look at the third and there 's not and not too much there , you may just take first and second - order cepstral coefficients , phd c: Yeah . professor d: right ? And with LPC , I think LPC per se isn't gonna tell you much more than than than the other , maybe . , and on the other hand , the LPC residual , the energy in the LPC residual , will say how well , the low - order LPC model 's fitting it , which should be pretty poorly for two two or more people speaking at the same time , and it should be pretty well , for w for for one . professor d: And so I i again , if you take a few of these things that are are prob promising features and look at them in pairs , I think you 'll have much more of a sense of " OK , I now have , doing a bunch of these analyses , I now have ten likely candidates . phd c: but eh , eh eh eh eh I don't know it is the first eh way to to do that and I would eh like to to know what eh , your opinion . Eh all this study in the f in the first moment , I I w I I will pretend to do with eh eh equalizes speech . grad b: With postdoc e: With what ? With what ? grad b: Right . phd c: Eh , why ? Because eh the spectral distortion is more eh a lot eh clearer , very much clearer if we compare with the PDA . phd c: fff ! Because the n the noise eh to sp the signal - to - noise relation is eh is is low . phd c: I don't know eh i i that eh the the result of the of the study eh with eh with eh this eh this speech , the mix speech eh will work exactly with the eh PDA files . phd c: eh What , I , what what is the effect of the low ' signal to to to noise relation , you know , eh with professor d: N u We Well , I think I think I think it 's not a it 's not at all unreasonable . It makes sense to start with the simpler signal because if you have features which don't aren't even helpful in the high signal - to - noise ratio , then there 's no point in putting them into the low signal ratio , one would think , anyway . professor d: And so , if you can get @ @ again , my prescription would be that you would , with a mixed signal , you would take a collection of possible , features look at them , look at how these different classes that you 've marked , separate themselves , and then collect , in pairs , and then collect ten of them or something , and then proceed with a bigger classifier . professor d: And then if you can get that to work well , then you go to the other signal . And then , and you and you know , they won't work as well , but how m you know , how much grad b: Right . Because it I think it would be interesting to see if some features work well with close mixed , and And don't professor d: . professor d: That 's well , the It it 's it 's true that it also , it could be useful to do this exploratory analysis where you 're looking at scatter plots and so on in both cases . phd c: I I I I think that the the eh parameter we found , eh , eh worked with both eh , speech file , postdoc e: That 's good . phd c: but eh what is the the the relation of eh of the performance when eh you use eh the , eh eh speech file the PDA speech files . Is eh is not easy eh to to solve , because if you I I I have seen the the the speech file from eh PDA , and s some parts is very difficult because you you don't see the spectrum the spectrogram . phd c: Is very difficult to apply eh , eh a parameter to detect change when you don't see . Well , that that that 's another reason why very simple features , things like energy , and things things like harmonicity , and residual energy are , yeah are are better to use than very complex ones because they 'll be more reliable . phd a: Yeah , I maybe this is a dumb question , but w I thought it would be I thought it would be easier if you used a PDA professor d: Nah . phd a: because can't you , couldn't you like use beam - forming or something to detect speaker overlaps ? grad b: Well , if you used the array , rather than the signal from just one . professor d: Yeah , no , you you 're you 're right grad b: But that 's professor d: that In fact , if we made use of the fact that there are two microphones , you do have some location information . which we don't have with the one and and so that 's phd a: Is that not allowed with this project ? professor d: well , no , we we don't have any rules , r really . professor d: I think I I think I think it 's it 's it 's a it 's an additional interesting question . professor d: I think you wanna know whether you can do it with one , because you know it 's not necessarily true that every device that you 're trying to do this with will have two . professor d: if , on the other hand , we show that there 's a huge advantage with two , well then that could be a real point . professor d: But , we don't n even know yet what the effect of detecting having the ability to detect overlaps is . postdoc e: There there is a complication though , and that is if a person turns their back to the to the PDA , then some of the positional information goes away ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , it it it does , i it d it does , but the the the issue is that that phd a: No , it 's not it 's not that so much as postdoc e: And then , And if they 're on the access on the axis of it , that was the other thing I was thinking . postdoc e: He You mentioned this last time , that that if if you 're straight down the midline , then then the r the left - right 's gonna be different , grad b: Yeah , we hav need to put it on a little turntable , phd c: I I I I I th grad b: and phd a: Well , it 's phd c: Yeah . postdoc e: It seems to me that that it 's not a p , you know , it 's this the topograph the topology of it is is a little bit complicated . phd a: I don't I don't know ho phd c: I I I think Sorry . I I I think because the the the distance between the two microph eh , microphone , eh , in the PDA is very near . But it 's from my opinion , it 's an interesting idea to to try to study the binaural eh problem eh , with information , because I I found difference between the the speech from from each micro eh , in the PDA . It - it 's not amplitude , postdoc e: Oh yeah ! Oh I agree ! And we use it ourselves . postdoc e: But I 'm just I 'm just saying that the way we 're seated around a table , is not the same with respect to each to each person with respect to the PDA , phd c: No . postdoc e: so we 're gonna have a lot of differences with ref respect to the speaker . phd c: But professor d: That 's So so i @ @ I think the issue is , " Is there a clean signal coming from only one direction ? " phd a: Right . professor d: If it 's not coming from just one direction , if it if th if there 's a broader pattern , it means that it 's more likely there 's multiple people speaking , phd c: Yeah . phd a: So it 's sort of like how how confused is it about where the beam is . professor d: Yeah , is there a narrow Is there a narrow beam pattern or is it a a distributed beam pattern ? So if there 's a distributed beam pattern , then it looks more like it 's it 's , multiple people . OK , it just it just seemed to me that , that this isn't the ideal type of separation . , I I think it 's I can see the value o professor d: Oh , ideal would be to have the wall filled with them , but But the thing is just having two mikes If you looked at that thing on on Dan 's page , it was When when there were two people speaking , and it looked really really different . phd a: Did - Sorry , b I 'm not sure what Dan 's page is that you mean . professor d: You take the signal from the two microphones and you cros and you cross - correlate them with different lags . So when one person is speaking , then wherever they happen to be at the point when they 're speaking , then there 's a pretty big maximum right around that point in the l in in the lag . professor d: So if at whatever angle you are , at some lag corresponding to the time difference between the two there , you get this boost in the in in the cross - correlation value function . phd a: So so if there 's two grad b: And if there are multiple people talking , you 'll see two peaks . postdoc e: Well , let me ask you , if if both people were over there , it would be less effective than if one was there and one was across , catty - corner ? phd c: Yeah . The - the Oh , I 'm sorry , postdoc e: No ? professor d: if they 're right next to one another ? phd a: If I was if I was here and Morgan was there and we were both talking , it wouldn't work . professor d: i i postdoc e: Next next one over n over on this side of the P PDA . postdoc e: Versus you versus you know , and we 're catty - corner across the table , and I 'm farther away from this one and you 're farther away from that one . grad b: Or or even if , like , if people were sitting right across from each other , you couldn't tell the difference either . Yeah , so it 's postdoc e: And so my point was just that it 's it 's gonna be differentially differentially varia valuable . postdoc e: it 's not to say , I certainly think it 's extremely val And we we humans n n depend on you know , these these binaural cues . professor d: But it 's almost but it 's almost a I think what you 're talking about i there 's two things . professor d: There 's a sensitivity issue , and then there 's a pathological error issue . professor d: If someone just happens to be sitting right there then we won't get good information from it . and i and if there So it And if it 's the two of you guys on the same side professor d: if they 're if they 're close , it 's just a question of the sensitivity . professor d: So if the sensitivity is good enough and we just we just don't have enough , experience with it to know how postdoc e: Yeah . postdoc e: Oh I 'm not I 'm not trying to argue against using it , by any means . I just wanted to point out that that weakness , that it 's topo topologically impossible to get it perfect for everybody . professor d: the other thing you can do , if , i We 're assuming that it would be a big deal just to get somebody convince somebody to put two microphones in the PDA . And then you know then you 're sort of Yeah , then then you pretty much could cover phd a: Once you got two postdoc e: Interesting . phd a: Well what about just doing it from these mikes ? postdoc e: Interesting . phd c: It will be more interesting to study the PZM because the the the separation I I think professor d: @ @ But - but that 's , we can we 'll be all of this is there for us to study . professor d: But but but the thing is , one of the at least one of the things I was hoping to get at with this is what can we do with what we think would be the normal situation if some people get together and one of them has a PDA . phd a: That 's what I was asking about , what are the constraints ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , that 's that 's the constraint of one question that I think both Adam and I were were were interested in . professor d: but you know if you can instrument a room , this is really minor league compared with what some people are doing , right ? Some people at at , yeah , at Brown and and and and at and at Cape , grad b: Big micro @ @ arrays . phd a: Didn't they have something at Cape ? professor d: they both have these , you know , big arrays on the wall . And you know , if you could do that , you 've got microphones all over the place grad b: Very finely . professor d: you know p tens of microphones , and and phd a: Oh ! I saw a demo . professor d: And if you do that then you can really get very nice kind of selectivity phd a: Yeah . grad b: Oh , I saw one that was like a hundred microphones , a ten by ten array . phd a: And you could In a noisy room , they could have all kinds of noises and you can zoom right in on somebody . grad b: It was all in software and they and you could pick out an individual beam and listen to it . professor d: But , the reason why I haven't focused on that as the fir my first concern is because , I 'm interested in what happens for people , random people out in some random place where they 're p having an impromptu discussion . And you can't just always go , " well , let 's go to this heavily instrumented room that we spent tens of thousands of dollars to se to set up " . phd a: No , what you need to do is you 'd have a little fabric thing that you unroll and hang on a wall . phd a: It has all these mikes and it has a plug - in jack to the PDA . grad b: But I think professor d: The other thing actually , that gets at this a little bit of something else I 'd like to do , is what happens if you have two P D grad b: Yep . professor d: and they communicate with each other ? And then You know , they 're in random positions , the likelihood that , basically there wouldn't be any l likely to be any kind of nulls , if you even had two . grad b: Though All sorts of interesting things you can do with that , postdoc e: Interesting . grad b: not only can you do microphone arrays , but you can do all sorts of multi - band as well . postdoc e: Ah ! phd a: I still like my rug on the wall idea , so if anybody patents that , then grad b: But I think postdoc e: Well , you could have strips that you stick to your clothing . phd a: Hats ? grad b: In terms of the research th research , it 's really it 's whatever the person who is doing the research wants to do . , I i I i I would actually kind of like us to wind it down , see if we can still get to the end of the , birthdays thing there . professor d: So grad b: Well , I had a couple things that I did wanna bring out . grad b: One is , do we need to sign new these again ? postdoc e: Well , it 's slightly different . phd a: Are they new ? postdoc e: Cuz it it 's slightly different . professor d: Oh , this morning we didn't sign anything cuz we said that if anybody had signed it already , we didn't have to . grad b: Yeah , I I should 've checked with Jane first , but the ch the form has changed . grad b: I had some things I wanted to talk about with the thresholding stuff I 'm doing . postdoc e: I had to make one grad b: But , if we 're in a hurry , we can put that off . postdoc e: Well , should I I have some results to present , but I guess we won't have time to do that this time . But it seems like the anonymization is , is also something that we might wanna discuss in greater length . , wha what postdoc e: If if we 're about to wind down , I think what I would prefer is that we , delay the anonymization thing till next week , and I would like to present the results that I have on the overlaps . @ @ It sounds like u , there were there were a couple technical things people would like to talk about . Why don't we just take a couple minutes to to briefly do them , and then and then and then and then and then we grad b: OK , go ahead , Jane . postdoc e: I 'd Oh , I 'd prefer to have more time for my results . postdoc e: And I think the anonymization , if y if you want to proceed with that now , I just think that that 's that 's a discussion which also n really deserves a lo a you know , more that just a minute . postdoc e: I really do think that , because you raised a couple of possibilities yourself , you and I have discussed it previously , and there are different ways that people approach it , e and I think we should grad b: Alright . We 're we 're just We 're getting enough data now that I 'd sort of like to do it now , before I get overwhelmed with once we decide how to do it postdoc e: Well , OK . I I 'll give you the short version , but I do think it 's an issue that we can't resolve in five minutes . postdoc e: OK , so the the short thing is , we have , tape recording , sorry , digitized recor recordings . postdoc e: Now , in terms of like the transcript , the question becomes what symbol are you gonna put in there for everybody 's name , and whether you 're gonna put it in the text where he says " Hey Roger " or are we gonna put that person 's anonymized name in instead ? grad b: No , because then that would give you a mapping , and you don't wanna have a mapping . postdoc e: OK , so first decision is , we 're gonna anonymize the same name for the speaker identifier and also in the text whenever the speaker 's name is mentioned . Because that would give you a mapping between the speaker 's real name and the tag we 're using , and we don't want postdoc e: I I don't think you understood what I what I said . postdoc e: So , so in within the context of an utterance , someone says " So , Roger , what do you think ? " OK . Then , it seems to me that Well , maybe I it seems to me that if you change the name , the transcript 's gonna disagree with the audio , and you won't be able to use that . grad b: We don't we wanna we ha we want the transcript to be " Roger " . grad b: Because if we made the the transcript be the tag that we 're using for Roger , someone who had the transcript and the audio would then have a mapping between the anonymized name and the real name , and we wanna avoid that . postdoc e: OK , well , but then there 's this issue of if we 're gonna use this for a discourse type of thing , then and , you know , Liz was mentioning stuff in a previous meeting about gaze direction and who 's who 's the addressee and all , then to have " Roger " be the thing in the utterance and then actually have the speaker identifier who was " Roger " be " Frank " , that 's going to be really confusing and make it pretty much useless for discourse analysis . postdoc e: Now , if you want to , you know , in some cases , I I I know that Susan Ervin - Tripp in some of hers , actually did do , a filter of the s signal where the person 's name was mentioned , except professor d: Yeah Yeah , once you get to the publication you can certainly do that . postdoc e: And and I cer and I So , the question then becomes one level back . , how important is it for a person to be identified by first name versus full name ? Well , on the one hand , it 's not a full identity , we 're taking all these precautions , and they 'll be taking precautions , which are probably even the more important ones , to they 'll be reviewing the transcripts , to see if there 's something they don't like OK . On the other hand , this is a small this is a small pool , and people who say things about topic X e who are researchers and well - known in the field , they 'll be identifiable and simply from the from the first name . However , taking one step further back , they 'd be identifiable anyway , even if we changed all the names . postdoc e: So , is it really , You know ? grad b: Ugh ! postdoc e: Now , in terms of like so I I did some results , which I 'll report on n next time , which do mention individual speakers by name . Now , it would be very possible for me to take those data put them in a in a study , and just change everybody 's name for the purpose of the publication . And someone who looked professor d: You can go , you know , " Z " , for instance . , yeah , t it doesn't , I 'm not knowledgeable about this , but it certainly doesn't bother me to have someone 's first name in in the in the transcript . postdoc e: Yeah , and and in the form that they sign , it does say " your first name may arise in the course of the meetings " . So again , th the issue is if you 're tracking discourse things , you know , if someone says , " Frank said this " and then you wanna connect it to something later , you 've gotta have this part where that 's " Frank colon " . grad b: Yeah , shoot ! professor d: Right ? postdoc e: Yeah , and and you know , even more i i , immediate than that just being able to , Well , it just seems like to track track from one utterance to the next utterance who 's speaking and who 's speaking to whom , cuz that can be important . postdoc e: S i You know , " You raised the point , So - and - so " , it 's be kind of nice to be able to know who " you " was . postdoc e: And ac and actually you remember furthermore , you remember last time we had this discussion of how you know , I was sort of avoiding mentioning people 's names , professor d: Yeah , I was too . Well , if we 're going to step in after the fact and change people 's names in the transcript , we 've basically done something one step worse . Well , I would sug I I don't wanna change the names in the transcript , phd c: Yeah . grad b: but that 's because I 'm focused so much on the acoustics instead of on the discourse , and so I think that 's a really good point . L let me just back up this to make a a brief comment about the , what we 're covering in the meeting . I realize when you 're doing this that , I didn't realize that you had a bunch of things that you wanted to talk about . So I think what would be helpful would be , i and I 'll I 'll mention this to to Liz and Andreas too , that , before the meeting if anybody could send me , any any , agenda items that they were interested in and I 'll I 'll take the role of organizing them , into into the agenda , postdoc e: OK . I 've no desire to to make it up , but if if no one 's told me things , then I 'm just proceeding from my my guesses , and and , and i ye yeah , I I 'm sorry it ended up with your out your time to , I 'm just always asking Jose what he 's doing , you know , and and so it 's There 's , there 's obviously other things going on . grad b: How will we how would the person who 's doing the transcript even know who they 're talking about ? Do you know what I 'm saying ? phd a: " The person who 's doing the transcript " The IBM people ? grad b: Yeah . , so so how is that information gonna get labeled anyway ? postdoc e: How do you mean , who what they 're who they 're talking about ? grad b: so if I 'm saying in a meeting , " oh and Bob , by the way , wanted wanted to do so - and - so " , postdoc e: How do you mean ? phd a: They 're just gonna write " Bob " on it or do @ @ grad b: if you 're doing Yeah , @ @ they 're just gonna write " Bob " . If you 're if you 're doing discourse analysis , postdoc e: They won't be able to change it themselves . professor d: What ar how are they gonna do any of this ? grad b: Yeah , really . postdoc e: Well , I I 'm betting we 're gonna have huge chunks that are just totally un untranscribable by them . professor d: they 're gonna say speaker - one , or speaker - two or speaker I I phd a: They can't do that . phd c: Yeah , I think grad b: Well , the current one they don't do speaker identity . phd c: grad b: because in NaturallySpeaking , or , excuse me , in ViaVoice , it 's only one person . I think that My understanding from Yen Is it Yen - Ching ? Is that how you pronounce her name ? professor d: Yu - Ching , Yu - Ching . postdoc e: Oh , Yu - Ching ? Yu - Ching ? grad b: y Yu - Ching . postdoc e: was that , they will that they will adopt the part of the conventions that that we discussed , where they put speaker identifier down . But , you know , h they won't know these people , so I think it 's Well , they 'll they 'll adopt some convention but we haven't specified to them So they 'll do something like speaker - one , speaker - two , is what I bet , but I 'm betting there 'll be huge variations in the accuracy of of their labeling the speakers . professor d: And it and it may very well be , since they 're not going to sit there and and and worry ab about , it being the same speaker , they may very well go the eh the the first se the first time it changes to another speaker , that 'll be speaker - two . professor d: And the next time it 'll be speaker - three even if it 's actually speaker - one . grad b: Yeah we we can probably regenerate it pretty easily from the close - talking mikes . phd c: postdoc e: Yes , I was thinking , the temp the time values of when it changes . grad b: The p It 's a good point , " which what do you do for discourse tracking ? " phd c: Because y y you don't know to know , eh you don't need to know what i what is the iden identification of the of the speakers . If if if if someone says , " what what is Jose doing ? " and then Jose says something , you need to know that that was Jose responding . postdoc e: Unless we adopt a different set of norms which is to not id to make a point of not identifying people by name , which then leads you to be more contextually ex explicit . You know ? , so when we did this las last week , I felt that you know , now , Andreas may , @ @ , he he i sometimes people think of something else at the same time and they miss a sentence or something , and and because he missed something , then he missed the r the initial introduction of who we were talking about , and was was unable to do the tracking . postdoc e: But I felt like most of us were doing the tracking and knew who we were talking about and we just weren't mentioning the name . phd a: But , you know , like , at the beginning of this meeting Or , you I think said , you know , or s Liz , said something about , " is Mari gonna use the equipment ? " , how would you say that ? postdoc e: Yeah ? phd a: you have to really think , you know , about what you 're saying bef grad b: if you wanted to anonymize . Yeah , is professor d: " Is you know who up in you know where ? " phd a: Yeah . professor d: Right ? Use the phd a: I think it would be really hard if we made a policy where we didn't say names , plus we 'd have to tell everybody else . grad b: Yeah , darn ! , what I was gonna say is that the other option is that we could bleep out the names . phd a: I I think the I think I don't know , my own two cents worth is that you don't do anything about what 's in the recordings , you only anonymize to the extent you can , the speakers have signed the forms and all . grad b: Well , but that but that as I said , that that that works great for the acoustics , but it it hurts you a lot for trying to do discourse . grad b: Because you don't have a map of who 's talking versus their name that they 're being referred to . phd a: I thought we were gonna get it labelled speaker - one , speaker - two grad b: Sure but , h then you have to know that Jose is speaker - one and phd a: Why do you have to know his name ? professor d: OK , so suppose someone says , " well I don't know if I really heard what , what Jose said . professor d: So u phd a: Oh , I see , you wanna associated the word " Jose " in the dialogue with the fact that then he responded . professor d: And so , if we pass out the data to someone else , and it says " speaker - five " there , we also have to pass them this little guide that says that speaker - five is Jose , grad b: And that violates our privacy . professor d: and if were gonna do that we might as well give them " Jose " say it was " Jose " . postdoc e: Now , I I think that we have these two phases in the in the data , which is the one which is o our use , University of Washington 's use , IBM , SRI . postdoc e: And within that , it may be that it 's sufficient to not change the to not incorporate anonymization yet , but always , always in the publications we have to . postdoc e: And I think also , when we take it that next step and distribute it to the world , we have to . But I but I don that 's that 's a long way from now and and it 's a matter of between now and then of d of deciding how grad b: Making some decisions ? postdoc e: i i it You know , it may be s that we we 'll need to do something like actually X out that part of the the audio , and just put in brackets " speaker - one " . phd c: the ? ? grad b: You know , what we could do also is have more than one version of release . professor d: I I think that we we have a need to have a consistent licensing policy of some sort , and postdoc e: But I also think a consistent licensing policy is important . phd a: Well , one thing to to take into consideration is w are there any For example , the people who are funding this work , they want this work to get out and be useful for discourse . phd a: If we all of a sudden do this and then release it to the public and it 's not longer useful for discourse , you know grad b: Well , depending on how much editing we do , you might be able to still have it useful . grad b: But , n excuse me , but you could bleep out just the names . professor d: She No , but she 's saying , from the argument before , she wants to be able to say if someone said " Jose " in their in their thing , and then connect to so to what he said later , then you need it . But in the transcript , you could say , everywhere they said " Jose " that you could replace it with " speaker - seven " . But I I also wanna say that people grad b: And then it wouldn't meet match the audio anymore . professor d: And th and the other thing is if if if Liz were here , what she might say is that she wants to look if things that cut across between the audio and the dialogue , postdoc e: Well , you see ? So , it 's complicated . postdoc e: But it 's g but I think it was good to introduce the thing and we can do it next time . grad b: I didn't think when I wrote you that email I wasn't thinking it was a big can of worms , but I guess it is . postdoc e: Well it Discourse , you know Also I wanted to make the point that that discourse is gonna be more than just looking at a transcript . postdoc e: It 's gonna be looking at a t You know , and prosod prosodic stuff is involved , and that means you 're going to be listening to the audio , and then you come directly into this confronting this problem . phd a: Maybe we should just not allow anybody to do research on discourse , postdoc e: So . professor d: maybe we should only have meetings between people who don't know one another and who are also amnesiacs who don't know their own name . grad b: Did you read the paper on Eurospeech ? postdoc e: We could have little labels . I I I wanna introduce my Reservoir Dogs solution again , which is everyone has like " Mister White " , " Mister Pink " , " Mister Blue " . Did you read the paper a few years ago where they were reversing the syllables ? They were di they they had the utterances . phd a: But so , the syllables were in the same order , with respect to each other , but the acous grad b: Everything was in the same order , but they were the individual syll syllables were played backwards . phd a: What did it sound like ? grad b: People had no difficulty in interpreting it . So what we need is something that 's the reverse , that a speech recognizer works exactly the same on it but people can't understand it . professor d: What , what does the speech recognizer care ? grad b: Ah , anyway . professor d: postdoc e: Oh , do we do digits ? Or ? What do we do ? grad b: OK , we 'll quickly do digits . like as if you were talking like , " nine eight six eight seven ? " postdoc e: Well , you know , in the in the one I transcribed , I did find a couple instances I found one instance of contrastive stress , where it was like the string had a li So it was like " nine eight two four , nine nine two four " . So they were like looking ahead , postdoc e: And phd a: huh ? postdoc e: Well , they differed . , I 've I am sort of interested in in And sometimes , you know , I s And I I never know . phd a: Well , I was thinking that it must get kind of boring for the people who are gonna have to transcribe this postdoc e: and I phd a: They may as well throw in some interesting intonations <doc-sep>grad d: I tried to go for the EE Cummings sort of feeling , but grad a: Three three six zero zero . grad a: You ever seen " So I married an axe murderer " ? grad c: parts of it . grad a: There 's a part wh there 's parts when he 's doing beat poetry . is when he 's he works in a coffee shop , in San Francisco , and he 's sitting there on this couch and they bring him this massive cup of espresso , and he 's like " excuse me I ordered the large espresso ? " grad d: . grad a: Wait do are y So you 're trying to decide who 's the best taster of tiramisu ? grad d: No ? . There was a a a fierce argument that broke out over whose tiramisu might be the best and so we decided to have a contest where those people who claim to make good tiramisu make them , grad a: Ah . grad d: and then we got a panel of impartial judges that will taste do a blind taste and then vote . grad a: Seems like Seems like you could put a s magic special ingredient in , so that everyone know which one was yours . Well , I was thinking if y you guys have plans for Sunday ? We 're we 're not it 's probably going to be this Sunday , but we 're sort of working with the weather here because we also want to combine it with some barbecue activity where we just fire it up and what whoever brings whatever you know , can throw it on there . grad a: Well , I 'm going back to visit my parents this weekend , so , I 'll be out of town . grad d: So you 're going to the west Bay then ? No , grad a: No , the South Bay , grad d: south Bay ? grad a: yeah . Wonder if these things ever emit a very , like , piercing screech right in your ear ? grad d: They are gonna get more comfortable headsets . I actually , even though Liz was kind enough to offer to be the first subject , I sort of felt that she knew too much , so I asked Litonya . grad d: So , this is what she saw as part of as for instr introduction , this is what she had to read aloud . , that was really difficult for her and grad c: Because of l all the names , you mean ? grad d: The names and this was the first three tasks she had to to master after she called the system , and then of course the system broke down , and those were the l I should say the system was supposed to break down and then these were the remaining three tasks that she was going to solve , with a human . And now comes the This is the phone - in phase of grad c: Wait , can I I have a question . So there 's no system , right ? Like , there was a wizard for both both parts , is this right ? grad d: Yeah . grad d: One time , pretending to be a system , one time , to pretending to be a human , which is actually not pretending . Isn't this kind of obvious when it says " OK now you 're talking to a human " and then the human has the same voice ? grad d: No no no . And the wizard sometimes will not be audible , Because she was actually they there was some lapse in the wireless , we have to move her closer . grad a: Is she mispronouncing " Anlage " ? Is it " Anlaga " or " Anlunga " grad d: They 're mispronouncing everything , grad a: OK . Well , if we we professor b: So , are are you trying to record this meeting ? grad d: There was a strange reflex . , that was already anticipated by some people suggested that if we just have bullets here , they 're gonna not they 're subjects are probably not gonna going to follow the order . professor b: S so if you just number them " one " , " two " , " three " it 's grad d: Yeah , and make it sort of clear in the professor b: OK . That is something that Fey actually thought of a in the last second that sh the system should introduce itself , when it 's called . grad d: And , another suggestion , by Liz , was that we , through subjects , switch the tasks . So when when they have task - one with the computer , the next person should have task - one with a human , and so forth . , we have to refine the tasks more and more , which of course we haven't done at all , so far , in order to avoid this rephrasing , so where , even though w we don't tell the person " ask blah - blah - blah - blah - blah " they still try , or at least Litonya tried to repeat as much of that text as possible . grad d: And my suggestion is of course we we keep the wizard , because I think she did a wonderful job , professor b: Great . grad d: in the sense that she responded quite nicely to things that were not asked for , " How much is a t a bus ticket and a transfer " so this is gonna happen all the time , we d you can never be sure . grad a: I wasn't wasn't sure whether wizard was the correct term for " not a man " . grad c: There 's no female equivalent of grad d: But grad a: Are you sure ? grad c: No , I don't know . grad d: Well , there is witch and warlock , grad a: Yeah , that 's so @ @ . grad c: Yeah , that 's what I was thinking , but grad d: and professor b: Right . And So , some some work needs to be done , but I think we can And this , and in case no you hadn't seen it , this is what Litonya looked at during the while taking the while partaking in the data collection . , do you know exactly how to do that , or is Lila , you know what exactly do we do to to put her on the payroll in some way ? grad d: I 'm completely clueless , but I 'm willing to learn . So anyway , grad d: N professor b: So why don't you ask Lila and see what she says about you know exactly what we do for someone in th grad d: Student - type worker , professor b: Well , yeah she 's un she 's not a a student , grad d: or ? professor b: she just graduated but anyway . professor b: So i if Yeah , I agree , she sounded fine , she a actually was , more , present and stuff than than she was in conversation , so she did a better job than I would have guessed from just talking to her . grad d: This is sort of what I gave her , so this is for example h how to get to the student prison , professor b: Yeah . grad d: and I didn't even spell it out here and in some cases I I spelled it out a little bit more thoroughly , professor b: Right . grad d: this is the information on on the low sunken castle , and the amphitheater that never came up , and , so i if we give her even more , instruments to work with I think the results are gonna be even better . professor b: Oh , yeah , and then of course as she does it she 'll she 'll learn @ @ . And also if she 's willing to take on the job of organizing all those subjects and stuff that would be wonderful . professor b: And , she 's actually she 's going to graduate school in a kind of an experimental paradigm , so I think this is all just fine in terms of h her learning things she 's gonna need to know , to do her career . professor b: So , I my guess is she 'll be r r quite happy to take on that job . grad d: And I told her that we gonna figure out a meeting time in the near future to refine the tasks and s look for the potential sources to find people . She also agrees that you know if it 's all just gonna be students the data is gonna be less valuable because of that so . professor b: Well , as I say there is this s set of people next door , it 's not hard to grad d: We 're already Yeah . professor b: grad d: However , we may run into a problem with a reading task there . We could talk to the people who run it and see if they have a way that they could easily tell people that there 's a task , pays ten bucks or something , grad d: Now , I signed us up for the Wednesday slot , and part of what we should do is this . professor b: So , my idea on that was , partly we 'll talk about system stuff for the computer scientists , but partly I did want it to get the linguists involved in some of this issue about what the task is and all you know , what the dialogue is , and what 's going on linguistically , because to the extent that we can get them contributing , that will be good . professor b: maybe we can get some of the linguists sufficiently interested that they 'll help us with it , other linguists , if you 're a linguist , but in any case , grad d: Yep . So my idea on on Wednesday is partly to you , what you did today would i is just fine . You just do " this is what we did , and here 's the thing , and here 's s some of the dialogue and and so forth . " But then , the other thing of course is we should give the computer scientists some idea of of what 's going on with the system design , and where we think the belief - nets fit in and where the pieces are and stuff like that . So , I don't I don't think it 's worth a lot of work , particularly on your part , to to to make a big presentation . I don't think you should you don't have to make any new PowerPoint or anything . The other two things is we 've can have Johno tell us a little about this professor b: Great . grad d: and we also have a l little bit on the interface , M - three - L enhancement , and then that was it , I think . grad a: So , what I did for this this is , a pedagogical belief - net because I was I I took I tried to conceptually do what you were talking about with the nodes that you could expand out so what I did was I took I made these dummy nodes called Trajector - In and Trajector - Out that would isolate the things related to the trajector . And then I did similar things for our our net to with the context and the discourse and whatnot , so we could sort of isolate them or whatever in terms of the the top layer . Let 's go Slide all the way up so we see what the p the p very bottom looks like , or is that it ? grad a: Yeah , there 's just one more node and it says " Mode " which is the decision between the grad d: Yeah . grad a: So basically all I did was I took the last belief - net professor b: So grad a: and I grouped things according to what how I thought they would fit in to image schemas that would be related . And the two that I came up with were Trajector - landmark and then Source - path - goal as initial ones . grad a: And then I said well , the trajector would be the person in this case probably . grad a: you know , we have we have the concept of what their intention was , whether they were trying to tour or do business or whatever , professor b: Right . And then in terms of the source , the things the only things that we had on there I believe were whether Oh actually , I kind of , I might have added these cuz I don't think we talked too much about the source in the old one but whether the where I 'm currently at is a landmark might have a bearing on whether grad d: And " usefulness " is basi basically means is that an institutional facility like a town hall or something like that that 's not something that you 'd visit for tourist 's tourism 's sake or whatever . " Travel constraints " would be something like you know , maybe they said they can they only wanna take a bus or something like that , right ? And then those are somewhat related to the path , professor b: grad a: so that would determine whether we 'd could take we would be telling them to go to the bus stop or versus walking there directly . Similar things as the source except they also added whether the entity was closed and whether they have somehow marked that is was the final destination . , and then if you go up , Robert , Yeah , so , in terms of Context , what we had currently said was whether they were a businessman or a tourist of some other person . , Discourse was related to whether they had asked about open hours or whether they asked about where the entrance was or the admission fee , or something along those lines . grad a: Prosody I don't really I 'm not really sure what prosody means , in this context , so I just made up you know whether whether what they say is or h how they say it is is that . grad a: the Parse would be what verb they chose , and then maybe how they modified it , in the sense of whether they said " I need to get there quickly " or whatever . grad a: And , in terms of World Knowledge , this would just basically be like opening and closing times of things , the time of day it is , and whatnot . grad d: What 's " tourbook " ? grad a: Tourbook ? That would be , I don't know , the " landmark - iness " of things , grad d: So let me see if I can ask grad a: Well , this is not a working Bayes - net . No , I understand that , but but So , what Let 's slide back up again and see start at the at the bottom and Oop - bo - doop - boop - boop . So , you could imagine w , go ahead , you were about to go up there and point to something . grad a: I I 'd No , I was gonna wait until professor b: Oh , OK . So , so if you if we made if we wanted to make it into a a real Bayes - net , that is , you know , with fill you know , actually f , fill it @ @ in , then grad a: So we 'd have to get rid of this and connect these things directly to the Mode . And and Bhaskara and I was talking about this a little earlier today is , if we just do this , we could wind up with a huge , combinatoric input to the Mode thing . And grad a: Well I oh yeah , I unders I understand that , I just it 's hard for me to imagine how he could get around that . Let me just mention something that I don't want to pursue today which is there are technical ways of doing it , I I slipped a paper to Bhaskara and about Noisy - OR 's and Noisy - MAXes and there 're ways to sort of back off on the purity of your Bayes - net - edness . If you co you could ima and I now I don't know that any of those actually apply in this case , but there is some technology you could try to apply . grad a: So it 's possible that we could do something like a summary node of some sort that OK . grad a: So in that case , the sum we 'd have we , these wouldn't be the summary nodes . We 'd have the summary nodes like where the things were I guess maybe if thi if things were related to business or some other professor b: Yeah . professor b: So what I was gonna say is is maybe a good at this point is to try to informally , not necessarily in th in this meeting , but to try to informally think about what the decision variables are . So , if you have some bottom line decision about which mode , you know , what are the most relevant things . professor b: And the other trick , which is not a technical trick , it 's kind of a knowledge engineering trick , is to make the n each node sufficiently narrow that you don't get this combinatorics . So that if you decided that you could characterize the decision as a trade - off between three factors , whatever they may be , OK ? then you could say " Aha , let 's have these three factors " , OK ? and maybe a binary version f for each , or some relatively compact decision node just above the final one . professor b: And then the question would be if if those are the things that you care about , can you make a relatively compact way of getting from the various inputs to the things you care about . So that y so that , you know , you can sort of try to do a knowledge engineering thing grad a: OK . professor b: given that we 're not gonna screw with the technology and just always use sort of orthodox Bayes - nets , then we have a knowledge engineering little problem of how do we do that . and grad a: So what I kind of need to do is to take this one and the old one and merge them together ? professor b: " Eh - eh - eh . , so , Robert has thought about this problem f for a long time , cuz he 's had these examples kicking around , so he may have some good intuition about you know , what are the crucial things . professor b: and , I understand where this the this is a way of playing with this abs Source - path - goal trajector exp abstraction and and sort of sh displaying it in a particular way . professor b: I don't think our friends on Wednesday are going to be able to Well , maybe they will . This is sort of th the second version and I I I look at this maybe just as a , you know , a a whatever , UML diagram or , you know , as just a screen shot , not really as a Bayes - net as John Johno said . grad a: We could actually , y yeah draw it in a different way , in the sense that it would make it more abstract . But the the the nice thing is that you know , it just is a is a visual aid for thinking about these things which has comple clearly have to be specified m more carefully professor b: Alright , well , le let me think about this some more , grad d: and professor b: and see if we can find a way to present this to this linguists group that that is helpful to them . grad d: ultimately we we may w w we regard this as sort of an exercise in in thinking about the problem and maybe a first version of a module , if you wanna call it that , that you can ask , that you can give input and it it 'll throw the dice for you , throw the die for you , because I integrated this into the existing SmartKom system in in the same way as much the same way we can sort of have this this thing . So if this is what M - three - L will look like and what it 'll give us , And a very simple thing . We have an action that he wants to go from somewhere , which is some type of object , to someplace . grad d: And this these this changed now only , It 's doing it twice now because it already did it once . , we 'll add some action type , which in this case is " Approach " and could be , you know , more refined in many ways . grad d: Or we can have something where the goal is a public place and it will give us then of course an action type of the type " Enter " . So this is just based on this one , on this one feature , and that 's that 's about all you can do . And so in the f if this pla if the object type here is is a m is a landmark , of course it 'll be " Vista " . And this is about as much as we can do if we don't w if we want to avoid a huge combinatorial explosion where we specify " OK , if it 's this and this but that is not the case " , and so forth , it just gets really really messy . You 're you 're grad d: ? professor b: It was much too quick for me . So , I I do understand that you can take the M - three - L and add not and it w and you need to do this , for sure , we have to add , you know , not too much about object types and stuff , and what I think you did is add some rules of the style that are already there that say " If it 's of type " Landmark " , then you take you 're gonna take a picture of it . Ev - every landmark you take a picture of , grad d: Every public place you enter , and statue you want to go as near as possible . grad d: W professor b: that 's a that 's another kind of baseline case , that 's another sort of thing " OK , here 's a another kind of minimal way of tackling this " . Add extra properties , a deterministic rule for every property you have an action , " pppt ! " You do that . , then the question would be Now , if that 's all you 're doing , then you can get the types from the ontology , OK ? because that 's all you 're all you 're using is this type the types in the ontology and you 're done . grad d: ? professor b: Right ? So we don't we don't use the discourse , we don't use the context , we don't do any of those things . professor b: Alright , but that 's but that 's OK , and it it 's again a kind of one minimal extension of the existing things . And that 's something the SmartKom people themselves would they 'd say " Sure , that 's no problem you know , no problem to add types to the ont " Right ? grad d: Yeah . And this is just in order to exemplify what what we can do very , very easily is , we have this this silly interface and we have the rules that are as banal as of we just saw , and we have our content . grad d: Now , the content I whi which is sort of what what we see here , which is sort of the Vista , Schema , Source , Path , Goal , whatever . grad d: This will be a job to find ways of writing down Image schema , X - schema , constructions , in some some form , and have this be in a in a in the content , loosely called " Constructicon " . And and here is exactly where what 's gonna be replaced with our Bayes - net , which is exactly getting the input feeding into here . This decides whether it 's an whether action the the Enter , the Vista , or the whatever professor b: " approach " , you called it , I think this time . This is so what we 'd be generating would be a reference to a semantic like parameters for the for the X - schema ? professor b: For for for Yes . So that that i if you had the generalized " Go " X - schema and you wanted to specialize it to these three ones , then you would have to supply the parameters . professor b: And then , although we haven't worried about this yet , you might wanna worry about something that would go to the GIS and use that to actually get you know , detailed route planning . professor b: But , presumably that that that functionality 's there when when we grad a: So the immediate problem is just deciding w which grad d: Aspects of the X - schema to add . professor b: Yeah , so the pro The immediate problem is is back t t to what you were what you are doing with the belief - net . professor b: You know , what are we going to use to make this decision grad a: Right and then , once we 've made the decision , how do we put that into the content ? professor b: Yeah . professor b: The harder problem is we decide what we want to use , how are we gonna get it ? And that the the that 's the hardest problem . So , the hardest problem is how are you going to get this information from some combination of the what the person says and the context and the ontology . The h So , I think that 's the hardest problem at the moment is is grad a: OK . , and that 's so , getting back to here , we have a d a technical problem with the belief - nets that we we don't want all the com grad a: There 's just too many factors right now . professor b: So we wanna think about which ones we really care about and what they really most depend on , and can we c you know , clean this this up to the point where it grad a: So what we really wanna do i cuz this is really just the three layer net , we wanna b make it expand it out into more layers basically ? professor b: Right . , it 's true that the way you have this , a lot of the times you have what you 're having is the values rather than the variable . So instead of in instead it should really be just be " intention " as a node instead of " intention business " or " intention tour " . professor b: OK ? So you Yeah , right , and then it would have values , " Tour " , " Business " , or " Hurried " . professor b: But then but i it still some knowledge design to do , about i how do you wanna break this up , what really matters . grad a: I think what was going through my mind when I did it was someone could both have a business intention and a touring intention and the probabilities of both of them happening at the same time professor b: Well , you you could do that . And it 's perfectly OK to insist that that , you know , th , they add up to one , but that there 's that that it doesn't have to be one zero zero . So you could have the conditional p So the each of these things is gonna be a a a probability . So whenever there 's a choice , so like landmark - ness and usefulness , grad a: Well , see I don't think those would be mutually professor b: OK grad a: it seems like something could both be professor b: Absolutely right . professor b: And so that you might want to then have those b Th - Then they may have to be separate . professor b: So that 's but again , this is this is the sort of knowledge design you have to go through . It 's you know , it 's great is is , you know , as one step toward toward where we wanna go . grad d: Also it strikes me that we we m may want to approach the point where we can sort of try to find a , a specification for some interface , here that takes the normal M - three - L , looks at it . Then we discussed in our pre - edu EDU meeting how to ask the ontology , what to ask the ontology the fact that we can pretend we have one , make a dummy until we get the real one , and so we we may wanna decide we can do this from here , but we also could do it you know if we have a a a belief - net interface . But this information is just M - three - L , and then we want to look up some more stuff in the ontology and we want to look up some more stuff in the maybe we want to ask the real world , maybe you want to look something up in the GRS , but also we definitely want to look up in the dialogue history some s some stuff . Based on we we have I was just made some examples from the ontology and so we have for example some information there that the town hall is both a a a building and it has doors and stuff like this , but it is also an institution , so it has a mayor and so forth and so forth and we get relations out of it and once we have them , we can use that information to look in the dialogue history , " were any of these things that that are part of the town hall as an institution mentioned ? " , professor b: grad d: " were any of these that make the town hall a building mentioned ? " , grad c: Right . So this may be a a sort of a process of two to three steps before we get our vector , that we feed into the belief - net , professor b: Yeah . grad d: and then professor b: There will be rules , but they aren't rules that come to final decisions , they 're rules that gather information for a decision process . So they 'll they presumably there 'll be a thread or process or something that " Agent " , yeah , " Agent " , whatever you wan wanna say , yeah , that is rule - driven , and can can can do things like that . And there 's an issue about whether there will be that 'll be the same agent and the one that then goes off and carries out the decision , so it probably will . My guess is it 'll be the same basic agent that can go off and get information , run it through a a c this belief - net that turn a crank in the belief - net , that 'll come out with s more another vector , OK , which can then be applied at what we would call the simulation or action end . So on once you pull that out , it could be that that says " Ah ! Now that we know that we gonna go ask the ontology something else . " OK ? Now that we know that it 's a bus trip , OK ? we didn't We didn't need to know beforehand , how long the bus trip takes or whatever , but but now that we know that 's the way it 's coming out then we gotta go find out more . So this is actually , s if if we were to build something that is , and , I had one more thing , the it needs to do Yeah . I think we I I can come up with a a code for a module that we call the " cognitive dispatcher " , which does nothing , professor b: OK . grad d: but it looks of complect object trees and decides how are there parts missing that need to be filled out , there 's this is maybe something that this module can do , something that this module can do and then collect sub - objects and then recombine them and put them together . So maybe this is actually some some useful tool that we can use to rewrite it , and get this part , professor b: Oh , OK . In particular see what we 'd like to do , and and this has been implicit in the discussion , is to do this in such a way that you get a lot of re - use . What you 're trying to get out of this deep co cognitive linguistics is the fact that w if you know about source source , paths and goals , and nnn all this sort of stuff , that a lot of this is the same , for different tasks . And that there 's there 's some some important generalities that you 're getting , so that you don't take each and every one of these tasks and hafta re - do it . grad d: There 're no primitives upon which professor b: u u What are the primitives , and how do you break this grad d: yeah . professor b: So I y I 'm just just there saying eee well you I know how to do any individual case , right ? but I don't yet see what 's the really interesting question is can you use deep cognitive linguistics to get powerful generalizations . professor b: grad d: Maybe we sho should we a add then the " what 's this ? " domain ? N , we have to " how do I get to X " . Then we also have the " what 's this ? " domain , where we get some slightly different professor b: Could . grad d: Johno , actually , does not allow us to call them " intentions " anymore . professor b: Well , I I don't like the term either , so I have n i i i y w i i It grad d: But , I 'm sure the " what 's this ? " questions also create some interesting X - schema aspects . I 'm not a I 'm not op particularly opposed to adding that or any other task , grad d: So . professor b: I 'm just saying that I 'm gonna hafta do some sort of first principles thinking about this . Well , no the Bayes the Bayes - nets The Bayes - nets will be dec specific for each decision . But what I 'd like to be able to do is to have the way that you extract properties , that will go into different Bayes - nets , be the general . So that if you have sources , you have trajectors and stuff like that , and there 's a language for talking about trajectors , you shouldn't have to do that differently for going to something , than for circling it , for telling someone else how to go there , grad d: Getting out of professor b: whatever it is . So that that , the the decision processes are gonna be different What you 'd really like of course is the same thing you 'd always like which is that you have a kind of intermediate representation which looks the same o over a bunch of inputs and a bunch of outputs . So all sorts of different tasks and all sorts of different ways of expressing them use a lot of the same mechanism for pulling out what are the fundamental things going on . And pushing it one step further , when you get to construction grammar and stuff , what you 'd like to be able to do is say you have this parser which is much fancier than the parser that comes with SmartKom , i that that actually uses constructions and is able to tell from this construction that there 's something about the intent you know , the actual what people wanna do or what they 're referring to and stuff , in independent of whether it about what is this or where is it or something , that you could tell from the construction , you could pull out deep semantic information which you 're gonna use in a general way . You might be able to to say that this i this is the kind of construction in which the there 's Let 's say there 's a cont there the the land the construction implies the there 's a con this thing is being viewed as a container . So just from this local construction you know that you 're gonna hafta treat it as a container you might as well go off and get that information . So if you say " how do I get into the castle " OK , then Or , you know , " what is there in the castle " or so there 's all sorts of things you might ask that involve the castle as a container and you 'd like to have this orthogonal so that anytime the castle 's referred to as a container , you crank up the appropriate stuff . professor b: Alright , so that 's that 's the that 's the thesis level grad d: professor b: grad d: It 's unfortunate also that English has sort of got rid of most of its spatial adverbs because they 're really fancy then , in in for these kinds of analysis . professor b: Well , you have prepositional phrases that grad d: Yeah , but they 're they 're easier for parsers . grad d: Parsers can pick those up but but the with the spatial adverbs , they have a tough time . Oh yeah , b But an architecture like this would also enable us maybe to to throw this away and and replace it with something else , or whatever , so that we have so that this is sort of the representational formats we 're we 're we 're talking about that are independent of the problem , that generalize over those problems , and are oh , t of a higher quality than an any actual whatever belief - net , or " X " that we may use for the decision making , ultimately . So , are we gonna be meeting here from now on ? I 'm I 'm happy to do that . We we had talked about it , cuz you have th th the display and everything , that seems fine . grad d: so far I think it was nice as a visual aid for some things and and professor b: Oh yeah . No I I think it 's worth it to ass to meet here to bring this , and assume that something may come up that we wanna look at . grad d: Yeah ? The , she w she was definitely good in the sense that she she showed us some of the weaknesses professor b: Right . grad d: and also the the fact that she was a real subject you know , is is professor b: Right . Yeah , and and and yeah and and she took it seriously and stuff l No , it was great . grad d: So I think that , w Looking just looking at this data , listening to it , what can we get out of it in terms of our problem , for example , is , you know , she actually m said you know , she never s just spoke about entering , she just wanted to get someplace , and she said for buying stuff . grad d: and in the other case , where she wanted to look at the stuff at the graffiti , also , of course , not in the sentence " How do you get there ? " was pretty standard . Nuh ? except that there was a nice anaphora , you know , for pointing at what she talked about before , and there she was talking about looking at pictures that are painted inside a wall on walls , so grad c: Right . , because graffiti is usually found on the outside and not on the inside , grad c: Yeah

The concern was raised by Grad C regarding having the same person act as both the wizard and computer system. However, Grad D assured Grad C that there was a way to differentiate between the two through the use of recordings. Grad E generously offered his 18 Gigabyte drive, which had 12 gigabytes of unused memory. Grad B mentioned that the data had been archived by creating a clone, which took eleven hours but would result in faster data access. This archiving process also freed up ten gigabytes of space. Furthermore, two copies of the data would be made, with one stored offsite and another onsite.

Question: What was the conclusion of the discussion on transportation for EOTAS learners in rural areas and why did Darren Millar AM disagree with WJEC's approaches to textbooks? Additionally, how did the WJEC address the concerns raised by Darren Millar AM? Article: I've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies and Hefin David, and we've got no substitutions. Can I ask if Members have any declarations of interest? Can I just, then, declare for the record that I chair the cross-party group on suicide prevention and that Samaritans Cymru, who are appearing before us later, provide the secretariat for that group, just for that to be on the record? Item 2, then, is an evidence session for our inquiry on education otherwise than at school, and I'm very pleased to welcome our panel of witnesses this morning: Sharon Davies, head of learning, Torfaen County Borough Council and representing the Association of Directors of Education in Wales; Nick Williams, director of education, Swansea city and county council, and representing the Association of Directors of Education in Wales; and David Hopkins, interim head of education at the Welsh Local Government Association. We've got a lot of ground we'd like to cover, so we'll go straight into questions, if that's okay. And if I can just start by asking you what you believe the main reasons are for the increase in the number of exclusions from school. I think one of the things we're experiencing across the system in Wales is more examples of very challenging behaviour. I think the prevalence of ASD—autism spectrum disorder—and trying to get the learners the right provision is sometimes a challenge. Obviously, I can speak more about my own local authority in Swansea: the numbers have increased about fourfold over the last five, six years, so what's presenting as difficult behaviour can also sometimes be additional learning needs as well, and the system's struggling a little bit to catch up to have enough capacity to do that, so that is placing pressure on schools and then, in turn, pressure on the EOTAS, including our pupil referral units, because, obviously, we just probably haven't got enough capacity at the moment in the system. Anybody got anything to add to that, or—? sharon davies: No, I think that's what we're seeing in Torfaen as well. So, to what extent, then, do local authorities have clear strategies for support and reintegration, and a continuum of provision to meet the needs of learners who are either at risk of exclusion, or disengagement? nick williams: Well, we've just developed a behaviour and well-being strategy, which, with our schools—and I'm aware, because I work in the south-west and mid Wales region, and I know some of the other local authorities have something similar, and, similarly, I chair the EOTAS network across Wales, and I know many local authorities are going in that direction, so that has a tiered approach, or staged approach, or whichever, so that there's universal provision. I think it's something that—you know, we need to make sure that our staff and our schools are well-equipped to meet these needs, but there will always, unfortunately, be some learners who need more specialist provision. But there's a little bit of lag in the system, trying to bring everybody up to the same, consistent level. But I think work is afoot in nearly all local authorities, as far as I'm aware. In terms of school accountability measures, do you think that they have had an impact on the rise in exclusions? sharon davies: When we're looking at the accountabilities, there's a huge amount of pressures on schools to perform, and I think the whole culture that the schools are within does play an element of it to some—. We are seeing a change with the interim measures coming on board, but I think there's going to be a lag in the system before we see that having a knock-on effect on our learners, because, undoubtedly, there are pressures on schools. lynne neagle am: So, you've seen an improvement since the capped 9 has been brought in? sharon davies: I think it's early to say, but certainly we're working towards that improvement. I can only speak for Torfaen—we've been working really hard on our exclusions and working with our schools to ensure that the curriculum is broad and balanced, and accounts for every learner within the system. nick williams: May I answer this in Welsh? lynne neagle am: Of course, yes. nick williams: The messages that the Government is conveying to us and the messages we convey as directors and councils are important as well. So, we always tell them that it's the progression of the children in the future that's important, not just reaching up to the level. So, messages such as those are being conveyed now, and I think that the schools do understand now the expectation and what's expected of them. In terms of parents, what are local authorities doing to actually engage parents of children and young people who are either EOTAS or at risk of becoming EOTAS? nick williams: I'll answer this in English. Again, I know perhaps Swansea and Neath Port Talbot—we have a team-around-the-family approach. So, as you say, it's more complicated than just the child behaving in a certain way, or being school-anxious, whatever the issue is. So, it's sort of bringing all of the agencies together to try and look at how we can proactively solve problems and support the families. Because nearly always, the behaviours that are demonstrated, or come out in schools, or whatever provision, is obviously probably greater in the home environment, so there's a whole—. lynne neagle am: And do you think that all local authorities have got that understanding across Wales? sharon davies: I would say the majority have. As Nick mentioned, it is about that multi-agency approach—it is working with social care, working with health colleagues, to look at the whole package that goes into these families and to our learners. nick williams: Certainly with schools, I know across Wales we've done a lot of training on adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed practice, so at least people can perhaps better understand some of the reasons why this behaviour is coming through, whereas in the past—I'm thinking myself, now, as a teacher—they were just difficult behaviours. sian gwenllian am: May I begin, maybe, with a question, generally speaking—? We're all aware of the funding issues and the challenges of funding that face schools in general. So, can this lead to more exclusions, because additional learning needs have been hit in light of these challenges, and then that the side-effects of that creates more exclusions? sharon davies: In particular now with the new Act coming into force, that's going to place more pressure on the system. In Torfaen, we know that we have schools that are looking at their funding—they are behind, and they have to make these hard choices. And sometimes, they have to look at every aspect within the school in terms of their learners, then, and that does place additional pressure on the schools. sian gwenllian am: Is the additional learning needs sector being adversely affected, worse than—? sharon davies: I'm not sure whether it's being worse affected, but certainly there's pressure, in particular with the new Act coming in, and that's going to place more pressure on the system. sian gwenllian am: But maybe we need to spend more in light of the new Act? sharon davies: Yes. But just sometimes, the Government doesn't think about the staff in the pupil referral units, because we've gone back to the Government to tell them, 'Right, you've provided money to school staff, but what about staff that need training—perhaps more than staff in the school sector?' And in fairness, they have addressed that, but perhaps it's not at the forefront of their minds when they're thinking of providing funding to the schools. sian gwenllian am: And maybe I can ask the WLGA: are the difficulties that can arise between the money that is kept back by local authorities and the funding that goes directly to schools—can that therefore affect the kind of provision that's happening from authority to authority? david hopkins: Yes, sure. The delegation levels are already very high in most authority areas, and we've got agreements in place with the Government to make sure that more money, or as much money as possible, is devolved to schools. I think the factors that really affect exclusions, which is where I think the question came from: you've got the very narrow measure at the end of key stage 4 attainment, which I think has put pressure on some schools, certainly, and headteachers have felt that—sometimes excluded, or otherwise put into another school as a consequence, which is regrettable, but that's what's happened. And on the additional learning needs side, whilst the Minister has currently made some more money available, if we look at experiences that have happened in England, in particular, because there are direct parallels there with legislation, we know from those experiences that ALN funding has become increasingly under pressure—there have been big issues around tribunals, to the point where local authorities at one point almost gave up going to tribunals, because they were losing them time and time again. So, there are financial pressures there, but I don't think the levels of delegation have any impact on that. If they're under pressure financially or in terms of performance measures, they will react in a particular way. Culturally, we've got to get to the point, I think, particularly with the new curriculum coming in, where we say, 'Look, forget the narrow measures that you're being judged by. We're trying to agree with partners, including Estyn and the Welsh Government, a broader range of measures.' That, in a sense, may provide opportunities for schools, and local authorities, to look more constructively at this whole area. So, that's one area, but you're right, I think the ALN legislation will put pressures on, not just local authorities and schools, but also on the post-16 sector, because we're talking now about a wider age range—doing up to 25 as well. So, we've got a host of issues, I think, there to consider and work our way through. sian gwenllian am: And is the fact that there's variation from term to term, from week to week sometimes, in the level of provision that a school is going to have to provide for trying to retain those pupils in mainstream schools—is the fact that there is so much variation creating a specific challenge, and maybe that that leads to more exclusions? sharon davies: As you say, because it changes, it's difficult then to plan ahead, and from year to year and also, as you've said, within the term. Perhaps you have provision for more learners coming in or moving, and then that causes the pressure within the system, then, because you haven't planned for them, and therefore there's no spare funding there to draw on. nick williams: Also, in fairness to PRUs, we've been trying to work on the fact that, if children move out of school, the funding follows them. We don't want a lag in the system, because they have to meet the challenge of the pupils, but the money is still in the schools, because it's once a year that they have that funding. What more can be done, and by whom, to support collaborative working between schools, PRUs and local authorities to ensure that there is a continuum of provision and support for learners? nick williams: Well, one of the things I think that has improved a lot is the networking within the PRU sector. And we're talking about professional learning for any teacher or provider, or it's sometimes the more informal training they receive by making visits, joint visits, to provision and also using the expertise that we do have within the sector to work more closely with our schools, and vice versa, particularly around the curriculum. And I think this is the opportunity the new curriculum provides, providing our staff have the funding to do that and the opportunities we need to be creating around that as well. But in the past, there might well have been some staff who perhaps hadn't had those school experiences and vice versa. janet finch-saunders am: Can I just ask you about transition arrangements, because I know some of the issues that have arisen in my own constituency is when a pupil is in a PRU and then trying to get back into mainstream education? It isn't a clear, sort of, going from one to the other—sometimes a child can find themselves at home because they're not able to get back into the school setting, the main school setting. We've had a big investment of time, and there will be money and through band B, we're building a brand-new PRU provision in Swansea, which will be open in January 2021. So, we've recognised that, so that we have our staff working very closely with the schools. There's an integration through a part-time timetable back into school, and we continue to support them during that process. But then, when they're back in school, that support doesn't stop—that support continues, and then there's a managed reduction in that support. nick williams: But I'll be honest with you, the more challenging your learners are the ones who are coming to the end of their statutory education, your key stage 4. It is far, far more difficult when they're 15, 16 to get them back into mainstream. So, then you're looking more at how you transit, then, into further education and colleges and so on. In your view— lynne neagle am: Just before we move on, have you got anything to add, Sharon, in terms of—? Because, obviously, we've had the Swansea perspective. , how effective are Torfaen at reintegrating young people into mainstream education? sharon davies: As Nick said, it does get more difficult at key stage 4, and it's working, then, with—. It comes back to that team-around-the-family approach, to ensure what is needed for that learner to go back into school, what can the school provide. It's looking at the whole package of support, then, that surrounds not just the learner but the family, whether it's transport—it's looking at the whole agenda, then, to ensure that everything is in place for that learner to go back to school, where it's possible. david hopkins: I think, Chair, at least one authority is looking at how they can best retain all pupils in the school setting, but it's early days yet for looking at that. , that's an ideal, obviously, but it does mean looking at your funding constructively and carefully, and it brings—. The principle is fine, but it does bring a host of other issues with it, if you see what . It's been tried elsewhere, and we keep an eye on that, but we don't really know what the outcomes have been long term with that. lynne neagle am: And which authority is that? david hopkins: I don't think I'm allowed to say at this point. sharon davies: A few years ago, I used to be a primary headteacher in England, so we were looking at different models, then, at various conferences, and I believe Oxford, as a local authority—they had a PRU, and they had discussions with their secondary schools, then, whether to get rid of the PRU, as such, and give the money back into schools. But they looked at a partnership within the schools, then, to say, 'Okay, you can have the money, but there's got to be terms of reference'—not quite a service level agreement, but the schools worked together as a partnership, then, so that they couldn't keep moving the children around, the learners around. It started off really well, but that was a few years ago, so I don't know whether it's continued now. But that was a model that, at the time, that local authority looked at to get more money into schools and to get schools, then, to have that responsibility—that they didn't offload the learners elsewhere. We've operated this now for almost three years, where we devolve—the word is 'devolve', as opposed to 'delegate'—the money to secondary schools to try and give them some extra resource to manage the process, and they have to produce an action plan, which we monitor, about how they're using that funding. But, obviously, we recognise that—and it's back to your original question, the first question—we still have learners, unfortunately, despite pretty effective support and provision in nearly all our schools, because of the very, very challenging behaviour we're experiencing, who do need additional and bespoke support, which in fairness the school can't provide. So, in your view, though, what are the reasons for the delays that some children experience in accessing EOTAS provision? nick williams: Capacity— janet finch-saunders am: What? Sorry, I missed that. Capacity: we just haven't got enough spaces in some cases, some year groups and so on. Obviously, given what I've said as well, and I'm sure it'd be the same for all local authorities, we've got to have robust systems and panels and so on to make sure that everything possible has been done to meet the needs of the learner in their home provision, if you like, the home school. So, there might be a time period when the learners are on a part-time timetable, which isn't ideal, I accept, but again, it's working with the families and the youngsters. We have somebody who oversees that and works very closely with our secondary schools so that we give almost a second chance to learners. Sometimes, it works really well; sometimes, the learner turns around and says, 'Actually, I preferred it in my old school.' So, there's a cooling-off period as well. What would be the advantages or disadvantages, then, of local authorities having commissioning frameworks for providers, and for EOTAS providers to have approved status? nick williams: Obviously, we do do that, but we're struggling sometimes for additional provision—very important around safeguarding. However, we don't want to make it too difficult, so that we haven't got any providers coming forward either. But I think, then, we need to perhaps think about how the staff in that sort of additional provision—what sort of training and support they have. At the moment, that is a struggle for us, because we're managing those pressures in our own provision whilst we go out and observe through a provision framework to make sure that the provision is—. To what extent do local authorities know about the level of EOTAS provision that is organised by individual schools, whether in an FE college or otherwise off the school site? nick williams: I can only speak for Swansea. We know, as part of that plan that we ask our schools to send in, they have to put down where that provision is. And obviously, as part of the visits, as well, to the schools by the challenge advisers, the school should be monitoring that provision and quality assuring that provision. janet finch-saunders am: And how is safeguarding monitored in terms of privately run EOTAS? Independent. nick williams: The schools would have to make sure that— janet finch-saunders am: But is that happening, do you know? nick williams: Yes, because schools do take safeguarding very, very seriously. And is there a role for local authorities in quality assuring, monitoring or evaluating the EOTAS provision organised by individual schools? nick williams: Yes, but a lot of the additional provision is provision we also use, in our experience. So, if it's MTP or something through the college, like a mechanics course or something like that, we're probably using it ourselves. sharon davies: In Torfaen, our secondary schools have set out their own TCP—Torfaen curriculum panel—which looks at alternative provision. The meetings are facilitated and they're currently undergoing a review of the alternate provisions each school is doing because, sometimes, it's worked in the past, but what they're seeing now is that it's not quite working now, and it's understanding why. Is it due to the complexity of the learners coming through? Or is it that the providers are not offering what the learners are seeking any more? So, it's looking as well at, coming back to that curriculum offer, is it the right curriculum offer for those learners? And the training of the staff, do we have the right staff? It's capacity, then. And should local authorities take a greater role in quality assuring individual tuition? sharon davies: Can I just ask what you mean by individual tuition? janet finch-saunders am: I suppose individual tuition in terms of each individual, I would assume that means. janet finch-saunders am: I wouldn't like to think anyone was falling through— lynne neagle am: I think the purpose of the question is around home tuition, yes. Individual tuition in terms of we wouldn't want any child, if they're away from a main-school setting, to slip through the net in terms of tuition, or safeguarding even. sharon davies: I suppose the difficulty with home tuition is, as a local authority, we're restricted on how much access we get into the home. janet finch-saunders am: Well, I appreciate that, and that's the—[Inaudible.] sharon davies: Therefore, it's really difficult then to quality assure, because unless the families invite us in there's very little—. janet finch-saunders am: What about if they're in a private setting? nick williams: If they're following a restricted timetable or whatever, because maybe they're school anxious and so on, and we're trying to get them into our provision like that, the home-tuition staff work for us. We don't use agency staff, for instance, to go in and provide a few hours of provision, or to go to the local library. So, for whatever reason their needs at the moment can't be met in a school or in approved provision, then the staff who do provide some education, or if it's for medical reasons, they work for us in the local authority. So, we're not using— janet finch-saunders am: Is that widespread around Wales? nick williams: I don't really know the answer to that, I'm sorry. david hopkins: Historically, there has been a general pattern, and if you're making a provision you will quality assure it, clearly. lynne neagle am: What we were driving at was home tuition that is commissioned by the local authority, but I think Nick has answered that now, really, if that's a consistent answer for local authorities. Can I just ask, before we move on, in the WLGA paper, you say you're concerned about the 'potential impact of changes to the registration of pupils who are EOTAS and the implications for the management of data/funding/joint working'. Can you expand on those concerns for the committee? nick williams: I think it's, you know— lynne neagle am: It was the WLGA paper, actually. nick williams: It's about getting that money following the learner and so on, and that shared ownership of the learner that the schools need to keep, because we want them reintegrated back into schools—that's the aim of any provision that we put in. It's not permanent—except, for certain learners, that might be the case—so they're still, if you like, part and parcel of the school. I think one of your other colleagues asked about the off-rolling, if you like—another term that's used—of students when they get to GCSEs so they don't count in schools' data. We're trying to very much move away from that, through the messages that we all give our schools. They're the most vulnerable learners we've got.' And for the individuals, for the families, and for society, if we can't support these learners—we know the links then to crime, and the cost to us as a society as well. I just want to discuss a little about the curriculum as it stands, and thinking about transferring to a new curriculum, of course. What are the challenges? I'll begin with the WLGA, in general, and ask you, in both your areas, what are the challenges to ensure that EOTAS learners have access to a broad and balanced curriculum, and that there are learning opportunities that are appropriate for them? What are the challenges associated with that? david hopkins: In general terms—. PRUs: clearly, we know that they are following a set curriculum; they are inspected; they are under the control of the local authorities. Where home tuition is provided through the local authority, as has been discussed, again, there should be safeguards there to make sure that that quality assurance takes into account what the pupil is receiving. It's more difficult where, I suspect, it's being provided by a third party that's been commissioned. The commissioning arrangements should ask for those things to be put into place; it's all about the monitoring then. But in general: PRUs, yes, we'd be satisfied; home tuition that is commissioned and managed through the local authority, yes, we would be satisfied; other areas, we would not be able to give a definitive answer on, is my guess. sian gwenllian am: And does that worry you? david hopkins: Me? sian gwenllian am: The WLGA. If you can't guarantee quality in any shape or form for a young person, it is a concern. sian gwenllian am: In terms of the how curriculum is at present, are you happy that it's being delivered? nick williams: To be honest, we are— sian gwenllian am: In the PRUs? nick williams: To be honest, they are broad and balanced. But there's working together now in terms of the new curriculum, and using the opportunity that exists now to collaborate with school staff as well. I can see how collaborative working with the units can work—because they're under your control—the problem is the other parts of the system, in a way. nick williams: They're not with other people all the time; they just go for something So, they would still have literacy and numeracy and Welsh—that would still be provided in the PRU. sian gwenllian am: No, it's beyond the PRUs I'm talking about. But for those who are in homes, or in private provision, perhaps who are not in your experience—. Maybe, this morning, we're getting a picture of the best practice, and we're not going under the surface to where things aren't as good in some areas. Do you agree that there is that inconsistency? What we're hearing about now are the best elements. sian gwenllian am: With the curriculum? nick williams: Yes, and in terms of collaboration. Can I also just refer back to the point that David was making earlier on about ALN and the extent to which ALN support is available to learners in EOTAS? The information that we've had is that it's difficult enough in mainstream schools, but in an EOTAS setting, it's particularly challenging. So, how can that be improved? What can we do to address that? The reason I'm saying that is there are particular needs of learners in an EOTAS setting—that's why they're there, quite often. david hopkins: If a child has additional needs, of course they should be met, whatever the setting. Again, going back to the previous question, we would know within, say a PRU or any local authority commissioned or delivered tuition—whatever form that took—then those needs definitely should be being met. I can't tell you hand on heart whether they all are or not—I don’t know—but they should be. Once you get out of that very tightly regulated part of the system, then, again, if a child has a particular need, of course that need should be met, but it becomes increasingly difficult. So, I think there possibly is an issue there, but I don't know whether my colleagues have a greater understanding of that. dawn bowden am: There is a disconnect between what should be happening and what actually is happening, isn't there? Even in some local authority PRUs where we expect all of this to be happening, we know that it’s not; we know that the full curriculum is not being provided either. The basic numeracy, literacy and well-being stuff is taking place, but there is discrepancy of provision, even in local authority commissioned EOTAS provision. david hopkins: I think there will be variations in provision, but I would say that, within the local authority maintained sector, that provision should be being made. If it's not, the local authority concerned should be aware of that and should be dealing with that. nick williams: We've probably—[Inaudible.]—in Swansea if you look at the inspections of the provision. However, the most recent inspection is very positive, and not that we recognise that there's no work to be done; we're not being complacent. So, I suppose that comes down to additional funding, because I'd like a dedicated educational psychologist spending their time possibly only with our PRU youngsters and EOTAS provision, but we haven't got the capacity because of the demands on us from the wider system. sharon davies: It's kind of what Nick said about capacity, but it's also ensuring the right staff as well, because sometimes, you may have them, but if they move on, or retire, or whatever, there's not a bus load, if you like, of people with that expertise. Because sometimes it takes years to build up on that expertise, and therefore, it's quite niche, and once that person has moved on, it's really difficult to start all over again. It's more than just one person—it's the whole training package that goes around that capacity as well. Because that's not just down to money, it's making sure that we perhaps offer, through our teacher training colleges, the opportunity for them to spend some time. At the moment, a newly qualified teacher can't work in this type of provision, which you can argue, that's fine, they need to perhaps get mainstream first. So, that should be built in to their teacher training, and even through their ongoing professional development, both ways—staff actually coming out to schools, going into our provision and vise versa—because you can also get very isolated if you've worked in PRUs for—. So, we could be doing more there, and I think that's probably, the group I chair, a discussion we need to have. dawn bowden am: And on that point, actually, we did hear from Estyn the point you were making about the staff leaving and there are very small numbers of staff working in that provision. Is that your experience? And if so, what can we do about that? sharon davies: I think it's limited. So, is there any way that local authorities can encourage specialist teachers and educational psychologists to actually share expertise with independent providers of EOTAS? nick williams: Yes, but again, it's a capacity issue, because if we take them out of the provision, it's difficult for perhaps a supply teacher to come in and manage that class because of the demands. But you're saying, really, take it back to teacher training and start at that point so that every teacher has at least some basic awareness of dealing with education in that setting. sharon davies: Or whether there's an opportunity, if somebody wants to lead into that more, that there's an opportunity to do it; that there's an offer there, if they want to specialise more into that area. What about access to mental health services? What's your experience of EOTAS learners' access to mental health support? nick williams: Again, even in the region there's variation there because we've got three health boards over the footprint of the south-west and mid Wales region. And that's one of the positive steps, that health boards have to have a DECLO now—don't ask me, I can't remember what the exact abbreviation is—but we've met with the designated education clinical lead officer, and I think those partnerships will be strong in the future. So, there's counselling and so on to make sure that the learners are going through, if you like—. Not that we're trying to stop them going through, but we're trying to deal with them appropriately at the different stages so that they're not inundated either. But is your experience also that a lack of mental health support in mainstream schools could potentially be leading to more learners ending up in an EOTAS provision. david hopkins: I was going to say, about the question, I think there's a general deficit in child and adolescent mental health services, for example. I'm not criticising the services, I'm just saying the capacity isn't there, as we would like. So, I think there's probably a more general issue there that would, in turn, translate into pupils who've got additional needs, whether they're in EOTAS, PRU or wherever. I suspect—I've not got an evidence base to offer you, but there's a very long-standing problem there. Just to return to teacher training, and you say that new teachers can't go straight into a unit, and maybe more emphasis is needed on that aspect. But generally speaking, if there's an increase in challenging behaviour, are new teachers able—? They don't have the experience, but are they equipped well enough to deal with that? Because we hear of so many people leaving the profession because of this challenging behaviour, and again, I wonder if the system has adequately caught up with that. And we need—not just in this aspect—but we need to look at the system holistically to be more prepared to deal with challenging behaviour. If people decide not to go into teaching after having training, it's not just because of challenging behaviour. You need the theory, but also the practice—that's important to have somebody who can mentor you in the school and that shows good practice. sian gwenllian am: But if we're facing a situation where there are fewer wanting to go into the profession and we are losing those most experienced people, then it creates a great big challenge, doesn't it? We're looking at something very limited here, but we need to look at it in the bigger picture of what's happening. lynne neagle am: Sharon, the CAMHS in-reach project is operational in Gwent, but my understanding is that they don't include PRUs. I just wanted to ask, then, the Gwent attachment team has been working with PRUs in Gwent, and the committee is familiar with the work of the Gwent attachment team, can you just tell us what you think the impact of that has been in terms of support for staff and embedding that awareness of attachment and early trauma in the PRUs? sharon davies: I think any form of professional learning, it's positive, and, therefore, as we alluded to earlier, it's that expertise training for the PRU then and for the staff there. Is there anything you want to pick up from the—? janet finch-saunders am: Yes, I think the rural aspect—are you aware that there are any issues relating to transport for EOTAS learners, particularly in more rural parts or areas of Wales? nick williams: Certainly, in our region, in Powys, from north Powys, when you're almost in Oswestry, down to Ystradgynlais, which is not far from me. I think they've got provision in the north and south of the county, but you're still talking— janet finch-saunders am: What provision in the north? nick williams: I think there's a PRU provision in the north of Powys and one in the south— janet finch-saunders am: Oh, sorry, north of Powys. nick williams: For myself, and I'd hazard a guess, Torfaen, we're relatively compact, aren't we, so it's not such an issue. lynne neagle am: Has the WLGA got any comment on the transport issue? david hopkins: I'm not aware of issues, if I'm honest, but then again, it may be something we've not investigated. We have probably got a few areas that we'll write to you about, if that's okay. Can I thank you for your attendance this morning? We will send you a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again for attending. The committee will break until 10:20, but can Members not shoot off for a sec, please? Okay, can I welcome everybody back to our next evidence session, which is our sixth evidence session for our inquiry on education otherwise than at school? I'm very pleased to welcome Sarah Stone, executive director for Wales of Samaritans; Liz Williams, policy and communications officer at Samaritans; and Dr Ian Johnson, who is the manager of children and young people's mental health at Mind Cymru. If I can just start by asking you what you think the main reasons are why we are seeing this increase in the numbers of children and young people being excluded from school. dr ian johnson: I think it's a very difficult subject, because, in many cases, we're not really sure what the data looks like. We get these things from quite a broad perspective, and we don't actually see the extent of the reasons why. If you look at, for example, the statistical release, then you get a sense of why people are being excluded, but they tend to be—. It's a very reductionist discussion, so you see reasons like persistent disruptive behaviour, verbal abuse or physical assaults, but you don't actually get the underlying factors that are influencing that. Now, we know that that information exists, because, obviously, schools don't exclude anybody lightly, and I speak as someone who's been until this academic year a governor on secondary and primary schools. So, there's a great deal of paper trail, but that doesn't seem to really find its way up to a higher level. And how concerned are you about the trend that we're seeing of an increase in younger children being excluded, and what do you think the reasons might be for that? dr ian johnson: I think it's very concerning that we're seeing increases amongst younger children in particular. Those have gone up quite substantially in the past few years, and a lot of the evidence that we're hearing is quite anecdotal, so it tends to be around the behavioural issues or underlying issues, and there's a lot of discussion about the adverse childhood experiences agenda and how that's—. So, there's a better understanding of that, but I'm not in a position at the moment, really, to be able to explain why primary schools maybe are actually taking that position and excluding more than they used to. sarah stone: What I would say is that the reason that Samaritans did our report on exclusions from school rested with—. They began with anecdotal information coming through to us around individual distress and from projects working with young people who'd been excluded. So, this is enough to ask us some serious questions, to which we don't know the answer, unless we actually do some serious work on this. So, I would reiterate what we say in our report: that we need to examine this. It's a really important issue, and the life trajectory of those young people is being impacted by their exclusion. You may not be able to answer this, but to what extent do you think school accountability measures are having an impact on the numbers of exclusions? dr ian johnson: Well, I think it's very interesting, looking at Estyn's pupil registration practices report from October last year, which looks at off-rolling, and I think that you see, specifically at year 10 to 11, a strong impact: around 4 per cent of pupils are off-rolled between year 10 and 11, but you're also seeing a number between 1.5 and 2 per cent that are off-rolled in any given year between year 8/year 9, year 9/year 10. So, I think it's clear that there's been a substantial increase in the numbers off-rolled in that year 10 to 11, but what I think is concerning for me is the normalisation, throughout the system, at secondary school level, where there's off-rolling between year 7/8, year 8/9. Based around there being around 30,000 to 32,000 in each cohort, then you're looking at 500 to 600 children in any given year, and I think we need to understand why that is the norm, what could be done around that, as well as looking into the obvious impact of that at year 10 to 11. I think we need to dig a bit deeper and understand the story behind that and whether there's a specific reason why schools are doing that, related to the accountability measures. It'll be interesting to see the impact of changes towards capped 9 et cetera, but I think we need a bit more qualitative work on that rather than just the quantitative work that's currently available. liz williams: I think there's also a problem with schools only being measured on academic outcomes rather than the journey travelled by the child and the efforts put in by the school to nurture the well-being of children who are particularly vulnerable. So, I suppose, if you consider that, this is something that definitely needs to be looked at further so that there's incentive for schools to keep children who are perhaps demonstrating challenging behaviour or perhaps aren't attaining brilliant grades. sarah stone: And, just finally, if that's okay, just to cross-refer the committee to the loneliness and isolation strategy, to which we made extensive representations on this issue. A part of the strategy talks about using our approach to accountability to recognise inclusive schools and reduce incentives to remove pupils from schools. It's a really important commitment to make a reality of that, because, actually, what is happening, I think, is that there are incentives that are perverse around this issue. dr ian johnson: Could I just come in on that? I think there's an interesting, again, qualitative, quantitative, element to what happens to those children who move into PRU, EOTAS provision in their earlier years in school and those as they reach a later point in their school career. So, I think there's a question, then, about—I was talking earlier about those children who move in in years 7/8, 8/9, et cetera, and how they loop back into the mainstream education system, what happens to them, but then what happens to those who may be reaching the end of their formal education career and move into EOTAS, PRU provision, and what happens to those young people afterwards? I'm sure we'll pick up some of that as we go through. We've got some questions now from Janet Finch-Saunders around the support for learners who are at risk of becoming EOTAS. To what extent is adequate support provided to pupils who are at risk of becoming EOTAS? sarah stone: Okay. So, this was a major focus around the piece of work that we did, and we came up with a range of suggestions. I think the quick answer is that what we've seen is a strong indication that it isn't, and that it's—. But also that it's not simply a question of the young person, that it's a question of the whole school environment and how that interacts with the challenges that a young person might be facing. One is that we want to promote a compassionate response and an informed response by everybody in the school to distressed young people—and that distress may show in a number of ways, not necessarily just as obvious distress. So, I think it's understanding that, having a confident response and, obviously, this links with expressing suicidal thoughts and distress as well, which may not come out in exactly that way—but being able to respond where young people are expressing suicidal thoughts. And I think if we connect this with the agenda around adverse childhood experiences, and if you see the young person—. I think what we as Samaritans really wanted to do was to focus on the distressed individual—that's what we do, it's what we're majorly about. So, a young person who is experiencing a whole range of adversity in their own life may be presenting at school in a very challenging way, perhaps. That school may also be their only safe place, and I think that's just a really simple thing just to keep remembering. Hearing headteachers and teachers talk about this, a lot of them are very aware of that, and there are some great examples of schools working to reduce exclusions and understanding the fork in the road that exclusion or not exclusion represents in the life of that young person. There are restorative justice-type approaches being used by schools in Cardiff that seem extraordinarily inspiring. There's been so much interest in this piece of work that we've done, and I've spoken to many educators since, and so it's doing what we needed to do, which is to get people talking about it. Because I think it's not about providing a simplistic answer to this question of support, it is understanding that it's a whole-school question. It's building on the excellent work that is being done by schools in different parts of Wales, joining that up and making that much more general. So, I think that's the opportunity: is to really recognise that this is a big issue, and that, if you don't hold young people within an educational setting, the lifetime consequences for them, including their elevated risk of suicide—it's very hard to reverse that. So, I think we want to focus on a distressed young person and how we respond to that, and it's amazing to move someone on from where they started, and loads of teachers will tell you examples of how they've done that and how they've felt that's not sufficiently recognised by the measures that they're subjected to. dr ian johnson: I think it's an issue where it's very important both to focus on the individual, but also on the macro situation, and, as Sarah mentioned, I think the whole-school approach, which is something that's been discussed within this committee, as part of the 'Mind over matter' work, is something that is hugely important. And that's why that should be—there should be statutory provision regarding a whole-school approach. That prevention operating all the way through the whole-school community will, hopefully, be very effective in providing support levels, ensuring that that support is in place from the very beginning, all the way through primary school, all the way through secondary school, to ensure that learners are being supported and that that is something that's at the forefront of people's considerations whenever they're considering what a pupil is doing, and why they might be doing it. But, generally, just that thinking about the behaviour and the emotional response first, I think, is hugely important in this context. And what do you think could be done more, and by whom, to help schools to support pupils to remain in mainstream education? sarah stone: So, this is where we set out nine recommendations in our report and I think the major message is, as I said before, that we don't have a simple answer to this one. However, there are a number of things that we need to do: we need to recognise the impact of adverse childhood experiences; we need to train teachers so that they have an understanding response and are much more confident in that; we need to learn from what works; we need to listen to the voices of young people themselves. I know this committee is very well aware of that, because you've done very good work listening to the direct voices of young people, but they are very often able to articulate quite a lot about what is needed. I would also add to that that we would want young people themselves to be skilled up in understanding and recognising their own emotions, because this is about putting in place that awareness, that consciousness, if you like, about being able to name and recognise feelings. There's great international evidence on the importance of that and the benefit of it, which was carried out when the new curriculum was being developed, and the health aspect of that. What we would like to see is that new curriculum around health and well-being and mental health and awareness being in the curriculum, so that young people, on a statutory basis—. Otherwise, you're entrenching the differences and the inequalities between teaching across Wales, because the good will do it, and perhaps others will find it much harder. So, I think there's a menu, if you like, and some of it is very much about respecting the experience of teachers and of schools and working with them, because this is about working with their will to do things well. dr ian johnson: I think what's important, and maybe it's implicit within the question about helping to support pupils remain in mainstream schools, is working out what is the best support at this point in time for the young person. Obviously, the schools provide whatever support they can, but what is the best for the young person at this time? And that answer will differ from individual to individual. I think it is important to have the learner voice playing a role within this, and it's important to get more of a child-centred voice around this. One of the projects that Mind will be working on in Wales in the next year is regarding an inclusive education inquiry, where we'll be forefronting the voices of young people within the evidence, because at the moment a lot of the evidence that we have is data-driven or anecdotal, and I think we want to get to the bottom of how young people feel, and how they find this. I think there's a lot to be done, still, with regard to PRU and EOTAS with the new curriculum, and, hopefully, we'll be able to outline some of that in terms of questions later on. And what are your views on the balance between funding being used for diagnosis and support, because I know that the Samaritans report suggested that funding tends to go into diagnosis rather than support? How can the balance be addressed? liz williams: I think it's a really difficult balance, but it was something that was brought up in the research stages of our report. So, we held a round table during the research period, and participants said that they were particularly concerned about the lack of awareness and knowledge of children who had additional learning needs. And, obviously, this is quite serious because these children are at risk of being excluded and are over-represented in excluded groups. And they were particularly concerned about children who were sort of on the cusp, or not properly diagnosed, and a lot of these children would have things like attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and, again, these made up the cohort of pupils who were excluded. So, when you consider that, you tend to think, actually, diagnosis could be really useful, so that staff are aware of the pupil's needs, and maybe aware of why the child might be demonstrating challenging behaviour. However, what participants did say was that unless there was a proper understanding of the child's condition or additional learning needs, and that the proper support was there, then diagnosis alone wasn't of value. So, I think one of the participants said that up to 50 per cent of learners in a classroom could have an additional learning need, so, again, if the support isn't there, that child isn't going to benefit from diagnosis. And what was really highlighted is the importance of the school being inclusive, and for that child, regardless of whether they had an additional learning need or not, to have proper opportunity to progress. And, then, to what extent are schools aware of the impact of early trauma ACEs, and how are schools adapting their practices to take account of them? dr ian johnson: I don't think we're really capable of saying that on an individual level. We're aware, as you've heard from previous evidence from heads of education, et cetera, directors of education, that work is going on on an all-Wales basis, and there's obviously an awful lot of work that's going on on the ACEs agenda. I referred to being a previous school governor, and that's somewhere that's become a trauma-informed school, and they have established that and are widening that base. I think that what the school does though is something that has to loop back, as I said, with the curriculum changes as we're going forward. There's a concern that I have at the moment regarding the progress on EOTAS and PRU within the new curriculum, and there's work that I think will still need to be done, and something that I'm sure will be considered by this committee when it deals with the curriculum assessment Bill when it comes forward later on in the year, because there were comments made by the education Minister, I think, in response to Suzy Davies, in the statement in January, that we're talking about disallowing areas of the curriculum on the basis of the individual learner, to which I have no concern in itself. However, the emotional and mental health well-being needs of this particularly vulnerable group of people needs to be centre stage. So, the role of the health and well-being area of learning and experience, and the role of mental health and emotional well-being within the curriculum, is hugely important. sarah stone: And I think, just to add to that around the impact of early trauma, I think one of the things that we at Samaritans are particularly aware of is the impact of loneliness and isolation on individuals and how that can help to drive distress and suicidal ideation. That sense of belongingness is recognised by the research as being critical to functioning well as a human being. And one of the ways in which early trauma and adversity, if that leads to exclusion from a range of groups, is to lead to lifelong isolation. You look at a trajectory that goes back towards their early years, very often, and Samaritans is about to release some research on that very point. There's also, if we look at the numbers of exclusions around boys, and we're looking at much higher suicide rates and numbers of other issues around men—. Again, I think it's important to see this whole picture— janet finch-saunders am: It's very bad in north Wales. I would say that we want to do something to mitigate the impact of adverse childhood experiences, and we have this great opportunity to release the potential of those young people whose, often, strength and resilience is quite extraordinary in circumstances that many of us would find hard to imagine. So, we need to look at the assets that young people have as well, which you can work with. So, I think if there's a real opportunity to create a change, this is one of them. liz williams: Just to reiterate what Sarah said, looking at our research, which, obviously, isn't yet published but will be soon, it really is quite shocking how these men fell through the net so many times when they were young, and, actually, how many missed opportunities there were to intervene in the cycles of inequality. It is quite clear from that research that these stages where children are demonstrating challenging behaviour are the first signs of distress. So, I think like Sarah said, it is really important to see this as a preventative agenda. You've set out very clearly what you think needs to happen in your report, your nine points and so on, but what's your view on the support currently provided, both in a school setting and EOTAS settings for mental health support? Have you been able to get that sort of information? Have you got a sense of—? dr ian johnson: I don't think we're really in a position to answer fully as to what's going on. I think that part of the problem is there's not really a national picture that we can pick up in terms of data or information regarding this, and I think that's really why there's been such a push towards seeing this in the curriculum. So much of your evidence is anecdotal, is it? It's people that have been referred to you, come to you for help, and you just—or your own research. What—? dr ian johnson: The research that we're going to do is really where we're at, and that's because we feel that there is a gap there regarding how young people are experiencing this within the school environment and in general. I think, in particular, we're aware of increases—quite substantial increases in some cases—regarding self-harm, and concern that manifests itself slightly differently between girls and boys. Specifically, I think there's now an increasing focus on self-harm behaviour amongst girls in the 15 to 19 age range, but we're not entirely sure of how good the support is at schools. My experience of projects that I've been involved in—I was previously in front of this committee as part of the Time to Change Wales project—was that, overall, it depends quite strongly on the senior management team and their commitment. Where the SMT are, perhaps, a bit more laissez-faire regarding this, then it feels that maybe schools are not making such a step forward. And to come back to the point, that's why we feel that whole-school approach guidance needs to be statutory, because we'll otherwise reach some quite uneven outcomes, because those who are doing it well will really push ahead and those that are not so engaged will not be helping their pupils in the way that they should be. dawn bowden am: I guess the EOTAS or PRU provision is going to be much more challenging then, isn't it, then main school provision. I suppose that was what I was trying to get at as well, whether you get a sense that there may be some progress being made in mainstream schools, is that following through in PRUs and EOTAS provision? dr ian johnson: I'll just be honest: right now, I couldn't give you an answer on that. I think that is something that, perhaps, slightly concerns me about the whole field is not being able to get a national feel for these issues. I've heard discussions about things being done regionally and nationally, but I think it would be good to be able to see what that best practice looks like and how well it's done. dawn bowden am: I appreciate you're not educationalists and you wouldn't necessarily have all of that information, but have you got any sense of—again, whether this is anecdotal or from cases that are referred to you—evidence of schools off-rolling pupils with mental health problems? If you've got any evidence of that, what might the impact of that be on the individuals? liz williams: Yes, I think that certainly does happen. I suppose we know this anecdotally from Samaritans research, but also I have experience of working in pupil referral units and working with some really vulnerable children, and I think there is a sense sometimes that these children are labelled as naughty and disruptive. So, children who have additional learning needs or a communication problem that potentially is undiagnosed or not really properly understood. I think when children have mental health problems and additional learning needs, often they can find the school environment really difficult. I've worked with children who have told me that they just don't enjoy being in the classroom because they feel incredibly anxious. They don't feel they can contribute to the school environment, they don't feel like they're keeping up with their classmates and, as a result, they demonstrate challenging behaviour so that they can leave the classroom. But, like Sarah said earlier, there are certainly examples of really good practice, and I suppose this links in to what approaches schools, pupil referral units and EOTAS should take to vulnerable children with mental health problems. One example I can give you is that, at one pupil referral unit, the children would get really distressed and really disruptive towards the end of the day on a Friday. I suppose that, in some schools, the teachers would have thought, 'This is ridiculous, they're disrupting the lessons', but what the teachers knew is that these children would go home, they would face such adversity, wouldn't always get a meal, would be exposed to things they shouldn't be exposed to, and the teachers were able to respond to that with compassion and empathy. But, obviously, seeing behind behaviour is really, really difficult, and I don't think teachers should have to do this alone, they should be properly trained and properly equipped. Ideally, as Samaritans, we would want suicide prevention plans to be embedded in schools and to be part of the culture of schools, but obviously this can't happen if teachers aren't properly equipped and don't have the confidence to go up to a student and ask them if they're struggling. In our compassion in education toolkit, we highlight the importance of asking a child, 'Are you self-harming?', if there are signs; 'Have you tried to take your own life?', if there are signs. So, yes, there are certainly examples of best practice, but I do believe that, if school staff aren't properly equipped and trained, off-rolling pupils, especially at key stage 4, where obviously you will hold those grades, is definitely something that they don't necessarily have the incentive to prevent. dawn bowden am: You touched, in the beginning of that response, on children being labelled as naughty. To what extent have you come across that? Is that quite prevalent? Is that quite common? liz williams: Absolutely, yes. Lots of children with communication difficulties especially, if they haven't been formally diagnosed, they are certainly the ones that are deemed naughty, because I suppose people think, 'Well, you should be doing well, you're bright. Children can be incredibly anxious, have mental health problems, obviously, are exposed to ACEs and things that go on at home that not necessarily every teacher would know about. So, I think there are definitely children who are labelled 'naughty', and I think children also play up to that as well. Like I said, if children are very anxious in the school environment and in the classroom, if they know they can get out of the classroom and get into a safe space, they will do that. dawn bowden am: And then that labelling of a 'naughty' child is actually the impediment to getting that child the support that they need. So, yes, I think it is down to how the school approach it, and it goes back to the whole-school approach and having emotional and mental health on a statutory basis in the curriculum. It embeds emotional well-being into the culture of the school, and it means that students might know when they need help, how to be more resilient and helping themselves, and when and how to ask for help from the teachers. dr ian johnson: If I can just pick up on one of those points, Mind Cymru conducted a series of focus groups around Wales to inform our response to the new curriculum. One of the comments that I think struck home most strongly with me was a young boy saying that, because the same teacher was responsible for pastoral and behaviour, because he had been labelled as naughty or a troublemaker, he felt uncomfortable in terms of going to that same person within the school in order to disclose the problems he was having, because there was a fear of not being believed or accepted, or it being considered as an excuse for poor behaviour, rather than them being taken seriously. I wouldn't want to over-egg that point, but I think it is an important consideration from a learners' perspective. 'If I disclose a problem, if I want to talk to somebody, are there appropriate considerations within the school setting where I can turn to somebody who maybe I might not have the greatest relationship with in other contexts?' I'd also just like to come back to the off-rolling question if I may, just quite briefly. As I said at the outset of the evidence here, Estyn conducted a piece of work on pupil registration practices that showed a substantially higher amount of off-rolling between year 10 and 11, but also a consistent level—1.5 per cent to 2 per cent—in other secondary school years. But we don't have the qualitative material to understand how much of that is related to mental health factors, and how much—because we're in discussion about school accountability—might drive some of that at year 10/11. But we don't know why that baseline of 500/600 young people every year is there within our schools. Can I just ask you a couple of other questions about the impact of particular circumstances, and whether you've come across any issues relating to Welsh-medium provision to support the mental health and well-being of learners as an issue—that it's not been available, Welsh-medium support, for those learners? Have you come across that at all? dr ian johnson: We haven't necessarily come across it, but we haven't been looking for it either. The Estyn report notes that there are generally fewer off-rollings from Welsh-medium education to EOTAS. It could be the socio-economic profile, because exclusions, et cetera, are substantially higher amongst those who are eligible for free school meals, and in many parts of Wales the socio-economic profile of a Welsh-medium education school is slightly different. We are not aware of any particular work that's been done to examine the needs and the provision of Welsh-medium EOTAS. Therefore, my suspicion, without any particular evidence, would be that it happens on a local authority basis, possibly on an incidental basis, depending on the quality and the ability of staff, and possibly more prevalent therefore in west and north-west Wales. Do you know whether there's any impact on learners where there are actually delays in accessing EOTAS, again in terms of mental health conditions, if there's a delay in getting them to the appropriate provision? Have you got any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, of the impact on that? sarah stone: Not specifically researched on that situation. I think, again, there is so much that we don't actually know and that we should know a lot more about, but I think there are some things that we can say about delays for young people who are not either in education or in anything else, and they're connected with the issues anyway. So, if you understand that there's a strong link between inequality and exclusion, and that the most likely young people to be excluded have other disadvantages as well, that's a really important issue to understand. So, being out of school or out of education for any time is going to exacerbate those pre-existing inequalities, and I can't emphasis that enough. It makes you vulnerable, and I guess the longer that continues I would expect the worse that impact and that uncertainty would be. So, there's the impact on loneliness and young people seeking an alternative community to the school one. Since the publication of our report, we have had an extraordinary level of interest from people concerned about crime. So, we've talked to the youth justice board, we've met with the police, there's a huge level of concern about county lines and about home-growing drug gangs, and the fodder that those young people are for people who will engage them in all sorts of activities, which are hugely damaging both to themselves and also to the wider society. So, I think we need to understand there's a lot at stake here for wider society in holding young people, and not allowing gaps to grow where they are not held. I would just refer you to the child death review on suicide and suspected suicide by young people, which came out very recently from Public Health Wales and Swansea University, and that looked at 33 young people who died by suicide over the past few years. One thing that came through that and was reflected in one of their suggestions for action was that those young people had not been held in education or training or employment, had slipped through all sorts of systems, and were extremely vulnerable. So, I think that's a really big message: that we need to try to hold people and not allow those gaps—where they're not held within their society—to lengthen and become really, really difficult. dawn bowden am: Can I just ask, as a follow on from that, whether you've got any views on the potential impact of individual tuition on learners' well-being? So, home tuition, for instance: are pupils going to be on their own doing that? That might be in their best interest, or do you have any concerns that it might not be? liz williams: I suppose we don't have actual evidence to show the impact home schooling has on pupils, but what we do know and something that is of huge concern, I suppose, to most people is that there's no central data on how many young people are home schooled. So, it's quite likely that these children are hidden or invisible and could be at a huge risk of the adverse problems that are related to exclusion more generally. Also, it is a concern, if children aren't registered with any school, how they get back into school, how they reintroduce back into the schooling environment, if that's what people think is best for them. And just to reiterate Sarah's point, I suppose, home schooling could tackle the more academic side of things, so it would mean that that child is still receiving an education, but it might not necessarily help with the adverse effects of exclusion, like loneliness and isolation. These men, who are now middle aged and are at the highest risk of dying by suicide, weren't always interacting with children their own age, and that did cause problems in later life. So, I think it's definitely something we don't know enough about, but I think we need to know more about. dr ian johnson: There are two questions within there, regarding the delay in entering provision and the effect of long term individual teaching. I think there are occasions on which individual tuition will be beneficial, because there may be a reason why somebody is uncomfortable and unable to operate within an educational setting. What concerns me, I think, is the idea of there being a gap between mainstream education and entering any form of EOTAS provision due to capacity or otherwise, because that is a period in time—. We don't know whether there's the causation of or exacerbation of mental health issues amongst those in EOTAS, but it's clear that—well, it seems intuitive that a gap between being in mainstream education and EOTAS is unhelpful, not least their rights to an education, but also the feelings that young people who are probably in quite a confused and troubled state may have during that gap and how long that gap can endure. I will refer back: there was a recommendation by Estyn in their 2016 report on EOTAS regarding CAMHS support for children within those settings, I don't know whether there's been any particular progress within that—and especially the mixture of issues that may be related to both mental health and also neurodevelopmental issues and whether those are more or less likely amongst this vulnerable part of the population. sarah stone: Just to draw your attention to it, I think there's an acknowledgment that there's a lot we don't know about this. Again, in the loneliness and isolation strategy, there's a commitment to analyse existing education and health data to explore correlations between exclusions or being educated other than at school and mental well-being, including loneliness and isolation. So, I think that's a very welcome commitment to try to expand our understanding in this area, because there may be some pluses as well as minuses, but actually there is so much that we don't know about this. I think some of them have been covered, but— sian gwenllian am: Just in general, once a young person or a child has been excluded, is there enough support for them, not just on the educational side, but in general? Are we supporting these young people, these most vulnerable young people, once they're in the position of having been excluded? dr ian johnson: I'd say that that's something that's possibly happening locally, but we don't have a national picture. One of the things we have already noted is the time between being excluded and entering some kind of EOTAS provision. So, that in itself—and I've heard people talking about the capacity issues—shows what's happening to these children, at a time when they are most vulnerable because they are outside of the system. sian gwenllian am: And who should be supporting them? Are we being clear enough with regard to who should be giving them the support? They've been excluded, so obviously the education system has a responsibility, but are we clear enough in terms of who else's responsibility this is, and who should be co-ordinating that support? dr ian johnson: The truth is, the responsibility lies on the local education authority in that context, I would say. So, it's incredibly important that any service is interweaved into that setting around the child or the children who are in this situation. When I was talking earlier about inclusive education, or some kind of investigation into this, that's the kind of thing I'd look at: how to bridge that gap and what kind of support will be available. I'm concerned, of course, in terms of education, whether there is enough funding available to ensure this. But because this is a very vulnerable group, we need to take responsibility in exactly the same way, perhaps, as corporate parenting plays a role there. I know there are figures available on local authorities, but I can't remember them off the top of my head, but maybe that's something to look at. liz williams: And as Ian just said, although there's a lot of responsibility by the school and the local authority, I suppose some responsibility also sits with the parent as well. But for the parents to support their child, either if they're at risk of being excluded or if the child is already in EOTAS, and that parent wants to make sure that the child is having the best education possible, the parent has to have the right amount of information. They must know where to go for support themselves, and I think that a parent can't necessarily know the rights of their child to education and what their child is supposed to be having if they're not provided with all of the information. And I'm sure this is dependent on the school or dependent on the local authority, but that's something worth thinking about as well. Any other questions? sian gwenllian am: Well, unless you want to sum up—? dr ian johnson: Just a comment, really, on the new curriculum and ensuring that EOTAS provision includes this, and how the whole-school approach will work within EOTAS, and how we ensure that the provision is available through the medium of Welsh, as we were referring to earlier, on a national level. Is it possible that it can be worked out within the local consortia, for example? How do we ensure that the teachers—? If it's initial teacher training, or if they're newly qualified teachers, or if they're more experienced, how will this be implemented through the system? Because I think that children in EOTAS situations are usually more vulnerable than others, and therefore there is a need to prioritise their well-being and their mental health. We talk a lot about certificates and so forth, and qualifications, but ensuring everybody's well-being is important, and an important outcome of the work. So, we're thinking of this whole-school approach and how it works within the new curriculum, and this is a vital point for the years to come. lynne neagle am: Just before we finish, then, is there anything you wanted to add in terms of what the committee could recommend about professional development for staff that would enhance this provision in this area? liz williams: Yes, absolutely. I think it's so important for teachers to be equipped with the training and to understand the link between inequality and all the things that come under that term, and challenging behaviour, and I think if teachers are aware of that, and trained properly to deal with that, the risk of exclusion will ultimately lessen. And I think with regard to how that can happen, I think, in some cases, mental health training and mental health awareness training is supplementary at times, with just teacher's training, but I think it should be embedded in the initial teacher's training, so that, more than anything, as well as being equipped with the skills, teachers have the confidence to deal with those really challenging situations. Ian? dr ian johnson: I think that's the importance of a whole-school approach, and that being statutory, because that will ensure that everybody within the school community has that knowledge and awareness and knows what to do and where to signpost people. It means foregrounding and having that in the heart of the school ethos, and I think that turning the school into somewhere that considers mental health and emotional well-being first, rather than waiting for a problem—I think that's the key to improving the well-being of our future generations. sarah stone: I just think it would be great if the community would recognise the link between inequality, adverse childhood experiences, and the opportunity that there is in avoiding a young person falling out of school, and out of anything, and out of sight. So, I think, the other side of this is that this is a real moment of opportunity to intervene positively. As usual, we will send you a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you very much. Just one paper today, which is the Welsh Government's response to the committee's report on the scrutiny of the Welsh Government's draft budget 2020-1. Item 5, then: can I propose in accordance with Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Okay, thank you.<doc-sep>lynne neagle am: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's meeting of the Children, Young People and Education Committee. Can I ask Members whether there are any declarations of interest, please? darren millar am: Yes, I have a declaration of interest, Chair. I understand that my daughter features in one of the videos that is going to be used to contribute evidence to this inquiry. And, in addition, I'm a governor of one of the schools that features in the video. So, item 2, then, today is our first session on the provision of textbooks and learning resources for pupils, which is a video of interviews with young people and teachers. The committee team has been out to take video evidence around Wales, and we're now going to watch the results of that on the screen. Well, I'm sure that the committee would want me to place on record our thanks to the young people and the teachers who took part in that very helpful and informative video. We'll move on now then to our evidence session, and I'm very pleased to welcome Gareth Pierce, chief executive of the WJEC, Mike Ebbsworth, assistant director educational support, WJEC, Philip Blaker, chief executive of Qualifications Wales, and Emyr George, associate director general qualifications at Qualifications Wales. So, thank you all of you for attending and thank you for the papers that you provided in advance as well. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions now, and if I can just start by asking you to outline what you see as your role in ensuring that students and teachers in Wales have the resources that they need to pass general qualifications and what you think the role of commercial publishers and Welsh Government is. philip blaker: Shall I start? So, Qualifications Wales is the regulator of the awarding bodies, so we regulate awarding bodies. In regulating the awarding body, our primary focus is also on the design of the qualifications and then the delivery of the assessment. That said, when we are going through the design of the qualifications, we go through an approval process, so we develop approval criteria and we ask WJEC to submit their specifications against those approval criteria and sample assessment materials as well. So, our focus is very much on making sure that teachers are able, through the sample assessment materials and the specifications, to have a good understanding of what is going to be expected of them in the examinations and of their pupils in the examinations. So, that's setting out the knowledge, skills and understandings that will be assessed by WJEC when those exams are sat. So, during the last round of approvals, we pulled together interested parties in Welsh Government, regional consortia and WJEC to look at resources that would be available with a view to facilitating the discussion about who would be best placed to fill the gaps where there may be perceived to be gaps in resources. Our other primary role is in maintaining standards. So, as the regulator of qualifications, what we want to do is we want to make that the awards of qualifications—so, the grades that people get—are fair. One of the things we do is set out the way in which the awarding bodies will set grades—so, the awarding process, the methods that will be used—and then we monitor WJEC's award of grades against those processes. During a period of change, we prescribe the use of comparable outcomes as the primary approach, largely because comparable outcomes are designed for circumstances like this, where there's a change in a specification particularly, because there are any number of reasons, including resources, why performance may be different from one year to the next, but comparable outcomes is there to ensure that, all things being equal, if the cohorts have the same ability, the same grade should be awarded from one year to the next. Much of that has been related to the timelines that we've all had to deliver new specifications against, which have been far from ideal for everybody involved. We think that particularly our role moving forward will be looking at the timelines for reforms that will be necessary for the new curriculum to make sure that this situation isn't repeated and that there is sufficient time in future reforms to allow for greater system readiness. In terms of the roles of others, Welsh Government have a role at the moment in terms of grant funding of translation of materials into Welsh medium. And there is, through the common model at the moment—and this is a model that is common between England and Wales—a reliance on commercial publishers to provide textbooks. Now, that's something that probably needs to be looked at in the future in terms of potential different models for how that might be achieved and also, potentially, around a paradigm shift in what's expected of those materials. The WJEC does provide what's required in a regulatory sense, and there are two things there—the specification, which tends to be very comprehensive in providing guidance in terms of drawing up a programme of teaching, and also exemplar assessments, which include marking, and those go to the regulator before they are published. The WJEC also do invest a great deal in resources that we produce digitally in both languages simultaneously. Each new course has substantial teaching guidance, which includes a great deal of useful information for teachers and pupils. And we run a professional development programme for teachers that is free of charge when courses are new, and then annually there is some charge for those events. Indeed, the regulations as they stand in Wales, Northern Ireland and England preclude examination bodies from having commercial links with providers of textbooks, but that is something that emerges from the three-nation regime that existed in terms of qualifications. So, that is one point that we noted as something that needs to be considered for Wales as we move forward, whether it would be possible—. As we are not talking about examination boards competing with each other in Wales for GCSE and A-levels, in passing, that is something that I would want to suggest may deserve review. At the moment, these tend to be England-based—Hodder Education and Illuminate Education, for example—and then the Welsh Government does provide funding to the WJEC to support the process of providing Welsh-language versions for those textbooks. So, we use that funding to provide editorial support to the process, and also to pay for translation costs, and we give significant guidance in terms of terminology. We have a language services team including excellent editors and translators within the WJEC, and we work closely with external translators too, and we use translation technology increasingly, which facilitates a great many things. Beyond that, I think the WJEC does see the need for flexibility, particularly when difficulties arise, and you heard there of some of the methods used by Mike and others to get digital resources available earlier than the print versions. And I should also note perhaps that, as the WJEC is very much involved with stakeholders, we feel that we do have a contribution to make in terms of ideas for the future. What is your view on that as a good use of teachers' time in Wales? gareth pierce: I think the question of translation is an interesting one. I think perhaps we need to understand what causes the need for that because, as I mentioned earlier, there are so many resources available digitally in both languages at the same time. Perhaps an interesting question is: is that source useful for teachers, being able to draw resources from two sources? Another interesting question, I think, is—. The Welsh language, of course, is a language that is used in an educational context, but we are in a big world that's an English language world. I'm very aware that many of the websites we refer to in our resources and many of the case studies, as was mentioned in that video—they are available in English only. Therefore, I think another interesting question is: can we discover what those additional resources are that are worth translating? And, certainly, it would be very unfortunate if there were a dozen Welsh-medium schools, for example, translating material from the same website independently of each other. If there are a few websites, or a few case studies, in this big external digital world that are worth translating, shouldn't we able to source those early? Because I don't think it's a good use of teachers' time. What is the vision in terms of teaching in a Welsh-medium class, in particular, perhaps, in the A-level classes? I'm sure that some teachers feel that there is a way of enriching the teaching by referring to terms in both languages, as well as explaining those terms in their own language. But the impression I got from the video was that there was quite a lot of mechanical translating happening, and perhaps there is a need to understand more of the context. llyr gruffydd am: Just to pick up on your point on the additional materials, whose role would it be to asses this or to take that overview, and then to respond to the demand? gareth pierce: Mike, in the WJEC, has conversations about resources in the team he's part of. That is extremely important—to identify, as Gareth has just said, those materials that need to be translated, and not everything needs to. We've made a lot of use recently of speaking with teachers and the consortia, and ensuring then that we are focusing on those things that need that attention. llyr gruffydd am: But would you—? The question I'm asking is: would you still see that as a core part of your work, although it's not necessarily essential in terms of the provision that you're required to provide? gareth pierce: Yes, we invest substantially from the WJEC budget into digital resources. So, through the types of conversations that Mike mentioned, in terms of identifying needs, deciding on priorities with teachers in individual subject areas, that can provide very useful information for us in terms of prioritisation. llyr gruffydd am: And do we need further resources for that? gareth pierce: Well, it's an interesting question. The WJEC is doing as much as we can— llyr gruffydd am: Why isn't it happening to the extent that it needs to happen, then? gareth pierce: One can always do more, of course. The WJEC is trying to use its budget prudently, and most of our funding comes from payments made by schools and colleges in terms of taking assessments. So, we do need to make choices within the substantial budget we have in terms of the work that Mike is undertaking. mike ebbsworth: There is a need to be careful as well in identifying resources and needs, and that those are suited towards the requirements. Quite often a teacher—and I've been a teacher myself—has this idea that there is a need to have everything. There has been a move towards different means of assessment over recent years, and we've moved our resources towards that to meet the needs of teachers on how to undertake that sort of assessment. lynne neagle am: Did you want to come in on any of this? philip blaker: I'm just going to say one thing. Teachers will want to be creative in the use of resources, and, in doing that, they'll potentially want to adapt resources from either language. I think one of the things that we would be quite keen to try and establish moving forward is what is the common core that should by default be available bilingually, and then what sits around that that would be for schools to use creatively and adapt. And what I wouldn't want to see is a default position where all materials were bilingual—a wide range of resources that might be created from all sorts of diverse, different channels—because that may inhibit the creation of some of those materials that may be more creative, which could then be used by teachers as they see appropriate. But I think it is reasonable to expect for that core, common body of knowledge to be available bilingually by default, and for teachers not to have to spend time translating that. The £500,000 funding for Welsh-medium educational resource that's in the budget for 2018-19—are you able to share any information with the committee as to how that's going to be spent? gareth pierce: Tthe WJEC has some information in terms of that budget. It is a Welsh Government budget, and they have annual discussions with us as to what resources we are likely to be working on along with publishers, and where we would like to make a claim against that grant to pay for the editorial and translation costs that we will have incurred. Now, there have been conversations recently about possible support from that grant for some research work into the use of various materials and resources, and also, although this would be a very small part, a contribution towards seminars for publishers. But that isn't a full picture of the £500,000; I think you would have to ask the Welsh Government about the exact allocation of that total fund. We've just started this financial year; I'm sure there is some flexibility in their thinking in terms of the use of some of this resource. We have contributed a list of publications, for example, that are ongoing, and they're aware of that, and a percentage of that funding then will go towards ensuring that those are there through the medium of Welsh. darren millar am: This is a huge mess, isn't it? It's a huge mess, which is causing lots of pressure and extra work for teachers, lots of pressure and extra work for learners, and is affecting the well-being of students, at a time when they need to be mentally fit, in order to go through the general stress that learners face when they have exams coming up. We know that the problems are not confined to Welsh-medium resources; they're also being experienced in English language resources as well, particularly in terms of the availability of textbooks. You've both mentioned—both of your organisations have mentioned that there needs to be some sort of common core of resources available for learners and teachers, and I would agree with you on that front. But isn't a textbook a pretty basic element of anybody's toolkit for supporting a child getting through the information that they need to learn, and swot up on, in advance of exams? gareth pierce: I think that the evidence is that different learners see their requirements differently. But I think the evidence also shows that not every young person will use them; perhaps the teacher uses them. There is an emphasis, for example, from one pupil there, on that traditional model of revision, namely class notes and his own revision notes, but that he personally also wanted a textbook. So, certainly, the content of a textbook is going to be important, and that that's available in some form or other. It was very interesting to know, for example, that when he was describing the traditional model of revision, he felt that he'd had quite a lot of the content of the textbook through the classroom notes. Much of that digital content, of course, corresponds to the content areas of a textbook, but it's just in a different form. And some of our frustration as well is that the timetables of some individual publishers don't always get us to the point where there is a textbook available in time. That doesn't happen so often in English medium, but we know about that gap in time in the Welsh provision. darren millar am: Well, it's happened fairly regularly in the English-medium textbook world, hasn't it? My daughter—she featured in that video—has got her RS qualifications coming up, and she only had a textbook over the Easter period. You mentioned digital resources; not everybody's got access to digital resources in their own homes, even, in Wales. So, aren't we giving a significant disadvantage to those learners who might need the traditional 'swotting up from a textbook' method of revision and benefit from that? mike ebbsworth: We do ensure that those digital resources include things that the teachers can also print. Most of these are resources for teachers so that the teachers can adapt them for their own use, to suit the learners who are in front of them at any given time. If there are activities, then those activities can be printed off and handed to pupils so that they can take them home. gareth pierce: I think you're right that the availability of technology is an important part of this big picture. The young people talk about websites and blogs, and we're talking about digital resources, so being able to reach those resources, I think, is vital in Wales. It's interesting to note two contradictory remarks from the teaching associations in the letters. One teaching organisation says that it just creates more work, while another organisation says that the digital resource is something that's very valuable. Of course, the headteacher at the end was praising the fact that, in a situation of crisis or unacceptable timetables, we have succeeded in creating some resources that will be in the textbook later, but available digitally at an early stage. But I agree with your core comment that technology is vital, and access to that, and also the content of a textbook in some form is vital as well. darren millar am: Mr Blaker, you would agree that a textbook should be an essential core piece of the resource pack available for each qualification. philip blaker: I think we wouldn't want to underplay the desirability of textbooks, recognising that different learners have different learning styles and may look to different resources. I think what I'd like to raise is a wider concern about textbooks in their current model, which is very much around the fact that every time there's a change in a specification, there's a new textbook, which is designed around that specification and is endorsed by an awarding body, which is a nice model for a publisher, because every time there's a change, there's an opportunity for a new textbook. Ofsted and also Estyn have raised concerns about the focus in teaching on teaching to the test as a common concern in both nations. I have a concern that having a textbook that is endorsed by the awarding body and is designed specifically around that specification may lead to some of that tendency. I think I'd much rather see that textbooks are seen as a curriculum resource that are broader than, perhaps, the model of endorsement and the current model of publication suggest. darren millar am: So, you don't think that a textbook for each subject should be a core resource for pupils who are learning in advance of examinations. I think a textbook for each subject is absolutely an essential part of the broad range of resources that you'd want to see available for people to choose what they prefer, but on a subject, perhaps, rather than a specific specification, because I think there's a tendency to conflate the two, and much of the underlying content that is assessed in one specification, or a new updated specification, will remain unchanged. It is true that there may be a different focus or emphasis, or a different style of questioning, but that can be picked up more nimbly through supplementary digital resources, for example, which can highlight that change, particularly to a teacher, so that they can shape their lesson planning around that. What we are looking at here are reformed GCSEs and reformed A-levels in subjects that are well-established, traditional subjects, and so whilst it is not necessarily the ideal, I think it's important to remember that there is already a good deal of pre-existing resources, including textbooks, out there in schools already. We're not for a moment saying that that is the situation that we would want everybody to be in. I think it might be preferable if the textbook was perfectly bespoke to the course and didn't contain any extraneous material, but that perhaps is an ideal picture and I think we do need to remember that there are already many resources out there that are available to teachers and to students. darren millar am: But of course, unlike their peers in perhaps other parts of the UK, we have teachers who are having to go meticulously through some of these other resources that might be available to determine whether they're appropriate for use in the classroom, given that the specification is different in terms of the new qualifications. Can I just ask you about the disadvantage that some learners might face as a result of the lack of textbooks? Mr Blaker, I note that you sought to reassure the committee in some of your opening remarks about the fact that equivalent outcomes are what you aim to achieve in discussion with the WJEC in terms of the outcome of assessments, and I think that that's a very positive thing. But, how do you differentiate between the different learning styles of individual students who are in that cohort to ensure that the disadvantage that one faces because they're somebody who relies particularly heavily on textbook-type learning, traditional sort of swotting up for examinations, versus someone who is much more digitally aware and able to use digital resources—? How do you make sure that it's fair to the cohort as a whole, while still enabling some of these individuals for whom textbooks are important not to face disadvantage within that cohort? philip blaker: The systems that are in place are very much around making sure that awarding is fair across the whole cohort. It's very difficult—in fact, it would be impossible—to unpick all of the different factors that might affect performance, because you could well have a textbook that's been available for some time, it may be somebody's preferred leaning style to use a textbook, but did they use that textbook effectively? You know, did they open it in revision or did they not open it in revision? So, there are so many different factors that can affect individual performance. They particularly wanted to stress this point I think; that the quality of teaching is probably the most dominant and the most important factor in relation to a learner's ultimate performance in the examination. darren millar am: I understand that, but you also understand that someone who doesn't have the resources that they feel are best suited to them face some element of a greater disadvantage than others for whom, perhaps, textbooks are less important. gareth pierce: I think also, perhaps, related to that, it is important to mention digital literacy here. Every young person in Wales, I would hope, taking GCSE or A-level, should have that digital literacy in order to source the valuable materials available—that they should have those skills. Then, they have the choice whether they go down the digital route, or do they do as Mike suggested—much of the digital material can be printed—or do they then turn to textbooks, in the hope that those would be available? That would then allow for a pupil's personal learning choice to be reflected. It's also important for teachers to confirm that their ways of teaching do support these alternative approaches taken by pupils. darren millar am: I understand that, but I've got people in my constituency who haven't even got a broadband link at home, so there's a digital disadvantage as well. Can I just ask you about the reason why this has taking so long to sort out? It was back in 2015 that concerns were first raised about the availability of textbooks in both English and Welsh for the new qualifications. We're three years on, what on earth has been happening in the interim and why is it taking so long? If you've got these resources digitally, why can't they just be compounded into textbooks pretty straightforwardly? gareth pierce: I think the main reason for that is that there are three series of reforms of qualifications that have happened. Those three cycles of reform have all suffered from the short timetable that was between approving a qualification and publishers being able to start the work. Perhaps an interesting comparison would be a subject being taught for the first time in 2015—where that subject has reached now in terms of resources. I would hope that each one of those subjects have more available now in terms of resources, and therefore we are adding each year—not textbooks but digital resources. So, every subject is moving on over a period of time of five to six years while that specification is being studied. But those same difficulties have, unfortunately, affected 2015 subjects and 2017 subjects, and that's why we're discussing the same thing in 2018. darren millar am: So, it's the scale of the challenge and the volume of the work? gareth pierce: Yes. philip blaker: I think Gareth, in the evidence that he has provided to the committee previously, has said about the timeline, the schedule, for reforms. Now, that's a schedule that we inherited and was largely dominated by the schedule for reforms in England. Now that we've reached a point of divergence in GCSEs and A-levels, between England and Wales, it gives us much more agency in the future to establish a timeline that doesn't place the pressures on the system. So, Gareth has quite rightly pointed out that there are three waves of reforms, but the pressures that build up in the first wave are consequential onto the next wave and the wave after that. So, the whole system has been pressured both from a regulatory perspective of the approval process, the awarding body preparing its submissions to use, and then system readiness thereafter. I assume that advice was given by WJEC and Qualifications Wales and your predecessor organisation to the Welsh Government at that time protesting about the timescale that you were being expected to abide by. gareth pierce: Yes, and similarly in England, the examination boards working in England would have provided the same advice to the Government there. And, of course, the Welsh Government programme was associated with the reform programme in England, in particularly for those A-level subjects, where there was a strong influence from the universities across the UK in terms of what they wanted to see differently in the A-level subjects. So, England and Wales have run on a very short timetable common to both countries, and I would say that every exam board and every publisher has seen this very challenging in Wales and England. But our advice is that there is a real need for between 18 months and two years from completing a specification that has been approved, then being able to work with teachers on what their needs and requirements will be, thinking about what the teaching programme will be, and then starting to work with publishers and get resources available—ideally, with a year of preparation then for the teacher before they start teaching. So, as they will know what resources will be available, we'll be able to discuss the use of those resources in our professional development programmes, and then that timeline is convenient for everybody. llyr gruffydd am: Estyn, NAHT, UCAC, NASUWT, WJEC and Qualifications Wales have pointed to the way in which the Government has managed the reforms that have been happening over the past few years as one of the things that has led to some of these difficulties. Well, what about the tsunami of curriculum reform that we're currently facing? That is, how confident can we be that the situation won't deteriorate as the new curriculum is introduced—rather than improve? gareth pierce: That is a very key question, isn't it? We have started to discuss this, specifically in particular in a forum that includes publishers in Wales, with the Welsh Government around the table and Qualifications Wales around the table. I think one of the very interesting questions and important questions is: what will the nature of the information available in April 2019 be in terms of the new curriculum? At what level of detail will it be? To what extent will it be adapted again after April 2019? Is it detailed enough, really, for teachers to start discussing their programmes of teaching, and that we then still have a role with publishers, even though this is for this curriculum and not for qualifications? WJEC has a tradition of publishing resources over the key stages and other key stages as well. I think there is a need to discuss the implications of the timetable as it starts to appear, because there is a need to start teaching the new curriculum in September 2022. If we're talking about working on resources available for that preparation year, we're talking about September 2020. So, the timetable does appear already tight, particularly if there's something that's not quite certain about that curriculum statement in 2019, and that there is a lot of work to turn that into teaching programmes. So, I think it is a key question, and I can't be confident at the moment that this is going to work. lynne neagle am: Did you want to come in, Philip? philip blaker: I think one of the big differences is it's a tsunami we can see coming. So, young people will be assessed for the first time, assuming linear exams, in the summer 2027, which is some way away, and, actually, given the reform process historically, this is probably the most foresight we've seen of a big change like this. There is a big dependency on the curriculum and the curriculum being described in such a way that we can relate qualifications to that curriculum, because qualifications should relate to the curriculum rather than drive the curriculum, so we do need to see something coming out of that. I think, for us, once we've seen the curriculum, and we've got better sight of it, we'll be able to plan things out. We've already started engagement with awarding bodies over the possible supply chain for these new qualifications, and, ultimately, there'll be a go/no-go decision that would need to be made, probably in 2023, which would be that if the conditions don't appear right for safe implementation, then we would make a recommendation to Welsh Government that these reforms are delayed in terms of the qualification, not in terms of the curriculum, for a year to allow the system to be able to catch up. So, we're starting to plan out not only the whole of the process, but also thinking about where we might have to make key decisions. gareth pierce: Just one very brief comment in that context: I think that the comment of the consortia jointly is important there. They emphasise, in the context of the curriculum, the importance of the autonomy of teachers in interpreting and providing, therefore I think we truly need to discuss that. Does that suggest that there won't be so much need for national resources, or are those resources required to support that autonomy in any case? We need to discuss that at an early stage and in detail, I think. llyr gruffydd am: Yes, certainly, and one is concerned that that conversation isn't already happening, but, yes, okay, you've made that point clearly. If I could return, therefore, to the commercial issue—clearly, there is a shortage of providers in Wales, and we are reliant on others. You suggested that the WJEC may be interested in stepping up and taking some sort of role if regulations were changed. I assume that that would be something that you would be eager to see happening in terms of the change to regulation in that context. I think that I haven't described correctly the purpose of a seminar to encourage interest: the interest is there, but there needs to be an understanding of what the implications are of working towards that kind of timetable, what the implications are of working in two languages, what kind of business model, perhaps, would be suitable for the publishers in Wales, how much certainty could be given to them that there is a period of work, because they would want to build their teams, and develop skills within those teams, and to have enough certainty that this is worth doing. And therefore, those are the sort of issues that we're starting a discussion on, in the hope of having a discussion in June to move that forward. Of course, Welsh Government, Qualifications Wales and other stakeholders are part of this discussion, not only WJEC, but we've been part of initiating that discussion. llyr gruffydd am: Is this developing at the pace that you would like to see it developing? gareth pierce: Yes, I think, and there is some enthusiasm. For example, a number of publishers in Wales are within an association describing itself as Cwlwm Cyhoeddwyr Cymru. Myrddin ap Dafydd is chair of Cwlwm at the moment, and there is enthusiasm and vision, certainly. So, there's a wonderful opportunity, I think, for Wales to interpret these possibilities swiftly and then hopefully take action on them. llyr gruffydd am: And we're talking here not just about translating but developing resources, and the point, I think, is an important one around some of the evidence that we've received about the importance of developing resources naturally bilingually from the very beginning, rather than having to translate something. Because there have been comments that translations are clunky, difficult to follow and not—I'm not saying that they're not fit for purpose, but certainly don't facilitate teaching, perhaps, as easily as one would wish. gareth pierce: Yes, I would agee, and that begins with the authors, doesn't it? We must have the authors— llyr gruffydd am: So, the expertise, and the same capacty with the publishers as well. gareth pierce: Yes, and we do want to nurture authors within Wales, particularly given that the new curriculum has to do justice to a Welsh dimension within the curriculum in so many different subjects. So, we need authors who can be developed, and authors who would be willing to work with the publishers. llyr gruffydd am: Would that market be viable without any sort of subsidy, if it were to develop bilingually? Or do we have to accept that they have to have an element of public subsidy? gareth pierce: Our view in the WJEC is that subsidy will be necessary. Why not rethink that and think of a subsidy for producing resources in two languages for the Welsh curriculum? And perhaps we would need a little more funding for that. But there will be organisations such as the WJEC who will still be interested in contributing, because we are a charity, and within our mission is investment in various things that supports education in Wales. llyr gruffydd am: But in terms of where we are now, resources have to be translated. But also, how long is acceptable to wait for a translation, in your view? mike ebbsworth: We've done a great deal of work recently, over recent years, to ensure that that delay between having an English version and a Welsh version is reduced. We are highly aware of the fact that the best-case scenario is that the Welsh and the English are available simultaneously. In those terms, we've taken huge steps forward with the publishers that we've named this morning, so that we have discussed translation as the textbook is being produced. The nature of books is that the author may change his or her mind, or edit as he or she is writing. Well, with that model, we would have to ensure that we approved as we moved forward, chapter by chapter perhaps, so that there would be no changes to be made from then on. At the end of the process, then, the publishers in England have agreed to hold the English version back for a period of time until the Welsh version is available, and then to publish both simultaneously. Unless that timetable is followed throughout the process, there are inherent risks in that process, of course, as I've mentioned in terms of translation as we author materials, and in ensuring that that timetable is stuck to. gareth pierce: And perhaps there is a need to emphasise that the process is translation and editing as a package, and that sometimes the same amount of time goes on the editing, how the Welsh works in terms of diagrams and things that aren't text necessarily—pictures and so forth. So, eight weeks, I think, is the time that we've succeeded in agreeing with the publishers so that we can turn around the Welsh version in that period of time. So, you’re telling us, Mr Ebbsworth, that the WJEC has agreed with Hodder and Illuminate that, in future, even if an English textbook is available for publication, and it’s already late, you will further delay the availability of that textbook so that it can be published on the same day as the Welsh-medium textbook? mike ebbsworth: We can only work on those books that are in the process of being developed. Naturally, if something is late in English, then that timetable would be affected in terms of a decision that will ultimately have to be taken. But that's the hope: that when new textbooks are produced in English and authored in English, we would look at that eight-week period as a turnaround. darren millar am: I understand the point that you made earlier about the chapter-by-chapter approach, which seems much more equitable. But to suggest that you will delay books that could be available for students and could be available for teachers to be able to access by two months because you haven't got the systems in place to be able to produce them on the same day, seems to be wholly inappropriate. Can I ask, also, why on earth it isn't possible to produce Welsh-medium textbooks first and then translate them to English on occasions? mike ebbsworth: We're entirely open to that and to that sort of model. darren millar am: So, why has that never ever been done? gareth pierce: Well, of course, it would happen with subjects that stem from Wales, but I think the problem is that we work with publishers and those publishers and their authors, therefore, tend to work through the medium of English. But, just to be clear, this idea of delaying an English version is something that the Welsh Government is eager for us to experiment with, but not with textbooks that are already late. They are within the new programme of textbooks that are contained within the grant that you mentioned of £500,000. So, in a way, this is an experiment and the Welsh Government wants to look at this as one way of responding to the complaint that there are different timetables available. darren millar am: So, you're being forced to do this by the Welsh Government, rather than— gareth pierce: Well, we've agreed to do it in discussion with them. darren millar am: So, are you happy with that approach? gareth pierce: Well, as long as the textbook isn't late in the first place, then yes; it's worth trying. There is a challenge on the eight weeks, there is a challenge in the publisher sticking to the timetable in terms of the English version first of all, but we are willing to use this as a test bed, and we're working on two specific textbooks on this. lynne neagle am: I think the committee is struggling with this idea, so what do you understand to be the rationale behind that, then? Is it that both sets of pupils should be equally disadvantaged? gareth pierce: Well, no, in a way, it uses the same principle as we have regarding our use of digital resources. With the digital materials, the intention is that things are available in time and that they're available in both languages at the same time. So, trying to imitate that with printed text is what we're trying to do, but not with texts that are already late. So, if these books keep to the timetable, then they will be available in time in both languages, but that the English version has stayed before going out on the shelves. llyr gruffydd am: So, that's to say that the English version will be completed eight weeks beforehand so that you have eight weeks for translation. mike ebbsworth: Well, ultimately, I may have used the wrong words in saying that we're holding the English back. The English version would still be in the process, just as the Welsh version would be, and then they would catch up as they approach the date for publication and printing. There is an element of editing the English as well as the Welsh and that would happen in that eight-week period. So, a draft form might be available, and we do ensure that our draft versions are available on our secure website as soon as possible, but then that has to be held up before publication. john griffiths am: Just on that, Chair, it's nonetheless the case, as we've heard, I think, and as the letter to the committee from Kirsty Williams has made clear, that there might be a situation where the English-language version of a textbook could be made available, but it isn't made available because there isn't a Welsh-language version. And, as the Chair said, is that about putting those students in Wales on the same footing, and if so, how does that relate to the fact that these students, including those who could have had earlier access to the English-language version, are competing with students over the border, as we heard on the video earlier, for those precious university places? Doesn't it place the English-language student using the English-language version at a potential disadvantage, compared to students over the border? gareth pierce: I think this is a point for Qualifications Wales to a certain extent, but applicants for qualifications in Wales are assessed as a national cohort, if truth be told, so, each piece of information we have on the standards is evaluated for that national cohort. So, in discussion with Qualifications Wales, we ensure that there is no disadvantage to any cohort in Wales in any subject, be that because of a textbook being unavailable or for any other reason. philip blaker: Certainly, from a comparable outcomes perspective, the fewer differences that there are that are differential—. So, the idea of textbooks being available in English and Welsh at different times could potentially create another dimension in terms of disparity. So, if we're looking at it strictly speaking from a comparable outcomes perspective, it makes the awarding easier if everybody's on a common playing field. It's worth remembering—we provided some evidence in our original letter particularly looking at religious studies on the basis that religious studies was a subject that had been mentioned. This subject has already been awarded at AS-level last year, so it has gone through an award and will go through the full A-level award this year. The comparable outcomes approach did protect those learners last year, in the absence of a textbook, and we saw stability in the results that came out of the cohort level. Similarly, with other subjects that have gone through reforms, we've seen it with the GCSEs that were awarded last year, ASs that were awarded last year and A-levels that were awarded last year: we saw good comparability year on year. Is that okay, John? darren millar am: Just a very brief follow-up on that, at the cohort level, yes, you suggest that there is some evidence that students were protected, but what you don't know and can't tell, because you're not able to drill down to the individual student level, is whether children, young people, were disadvantaged as a result of their learning style being more textbook orientated than that of their peers. philip blaker: I guess we're in a situation where there's no evidence either way that that— darren millar am: The absence of evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. darren millar am: Well, I think you've seen plenty of evidence about the stress that it's causing, and the concern that learners have about their outcomes. I think it would be very interesting, actually, to take some teacher assessments and expected grades and compare those to the actual grade outcomes. Is that something that Qualifications Wales could do on a sample basis? philip blaker: Historically, that sort of evidence has been very unreliable. Certainly, back in my day at an awarding body they were provided, and there tended to be a very low correlation between the predicted grade and the actual achieved grade. gareth pierce: No, we agree with you that the comparisons are not that reliable, because there are so many factors. But I think, at the end of the day, what we see is, yes, I agree there is evidence of stress, but I think there's also evidence of young people and their teachers really using the available resources and the available skills in approaching revision and preparation, and tending to do that very well. That's the evidence that we've got, for example, in the AS religious studies last year, that the cohort did extremely well in fact. We can't disagree that there's evidence of stress, but I think we can also point towards resilience and excellent approaches to drawing together the various sources that they've got: classroom notes, revision notes, as they mentioned, and the various other materials that they referred to. john griffiths am: Coming back to the effect of the lack of resources, we heard on the video, as you've just mentioned, Gareth, that pupils were experiencing a lot of stress and anxiety, and it affected their well-being in terms of their perception that they might be disadvantaged by the lack of resources, as we discussed. We know exam time is very, very stressful—I'm sure all of us would agree with that—in general, without any additional problems or perceptions of problems. So, with that sort of background, would you accept then that some students have been negatively affected by the lack of suitable support materials for general qualifications? I know we've discussed this in terms of it being difficult, perhaps, to show cause and effect, but I think most people watching that video would clearly come to the view that some students have been negatively impacted. There is evidence of their concern, isn't there? But as Philip said, what we don't have is evidence that that anxiety then has an impact on their attainment, because there are so many factors, there are so many different kinds of resources that they've referred to—even those who want to see textbooks, they're also talking about so many other materials that are available to them. Of course, it's also clear that they are conscientious young people who have worked hard, so you have a picture there of young people who are concerned, yes, and as you've said, examinations are a stressful time in general, but they are also young people who are doing their level best, and usually do get the results that they have worked for. Coming back again to matters that we've already discussed, but just to put to you in a fairly focused way, would you accept that it isn't fair that some pupils are not having the support material that others are having, depending on whether their particular subject is involved and the language that they're studying through? Would you accept that that is a basic unfairness in the system as it currently exists? gareth pierce: Ideally, resources, digital accessibility and digital literacy should be available for every pupil on an equal basis. But I think perhaps if we analysed this in much detail, different individuals would be able to say, 'There are different types of unfairness.' You referred earlier to the digital inequalities. Is there an economic inequality? There is some evidence from the teaching unions that suggests that not every school is in the same situation as each other in terms of buying the resources that are available. So, I think your question drives at a very important point: what sort of inequality could be having an impact on young people in terms of their achievement during their school time? Ideally, each one of those elements of potential inequality should be levelled. So, I don't think I can go any further than acknowledging that any inequality is unfair, but there are so many different kinds and the textbook is not the only one, and therefore we're not going to be able to analyse the impact of that on its own. john griffiths am: Could I put to you, finally then, what Estyn have said about reported delays in the production and distribution of educational resources such as textbooks, marking criteria and specimen papers, that that delay has impeded the ability of teachers to plan adequately, and that this effect on their ability to plan adequately is very likely to have had an impact on pupils' achievement? Would you accept that? gareth pierce: It's interesting—they link three quite different things there, don't they? We've discussed the textbooks in some detail. When they refer to sample assessments, we have to provide those within the regulatory time frame, and they have to be approved. So, in every subject there are sample assessments and marking schemes, and they are statutorily available, in a way. One request that we receive often from schools is for exemplars in terms of the work of pupils that has been assessed and marked by us. Of course, they're not available until the young people have taken those exams for the very first time. But in some subjects the demand has been so strong that we have worked with schools in order to ensure that work is produced by pupils before that first examination, is marked by us, and is then made available. I would like to have a conversation with Estyn, indeed, to interpret on a more detailed level some of the things that they refer to. emyr george: May I offer a comment on that quote from Estyn? They talk about a reduction in attainment and that, to some extent, brings us back to the point in terms of the comparable outcomes method that we're talking about. That method is based on research and evidence that says that in a period of change to an exam or qualification, we know that performance in an exam can fall, and that is due to a number of different factors. Certainly, knowing that you're the first to sit that exam perhaps raises your concerns about that examination, and examinations are a matter of concern already. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate between those factors, but what we know on the whole is that they come together to have an impact on pupils' performance in an exam, and that's why, when it comes to awarding qualifications for the first time and looking at the grades, we look very carefully at what that the mark means in terms of the grade in order to try as best as we can, on the level of the whole national cohort, to eliminate as much unfairness as possible because they are the first cohort to sit the exam. gareth pierce: Could I just make a brief comment on the sample assessments? Now, interestingly, when the English, Welsh, maths, and maths and numeracy GCSEs were new, the Welsh Government were very eager that we invest in more sample assessment materials. We had to produce one for the regulator, but they wanted to see us produce far more, and we did that. If we create more and more sample assessments, then does that create more risk of teaching to the test? And every time we produce one of these, of course, we are using robust assessment ideas, and they're out there to be used for test purposes. So, we need to be careful that we don't weaken the real assessment by providing too many of the examiners' good ideas in the sample material. So, it's an interesting theme, but it would be interesting to have a further conversation with Estyn on that. I think what we need to do is we need to think about the future reforms, particularly knowing that we've got some on the radar already, and to think about what this paradigm is and how we can isolate some of these factors in the future. So, if we look at resources and if we look particularly at textbooks as being a curriculum resource, rather than a qualification resource, I think we can change the timeline to which some of those materials are produced. So, going back to when I studied my A-levels in the 1980s, there was this common body of knowledge that was an A-level textbook in biology that wasn't focused around an individual awarding body. When we talked to unions about this on Monday, they said, 'Yes, when we used to teach many years ago, there were curriculum resources like that, and then when a particular topic or a particular area of content dropped out of the qualification, we either did or didn't teach it according to whether it was in the curriculum'. That's a little bit worrying by virtue of the fact there might have been a component of that subject that didn't get taught because it was no longer in the text, despite the fact that it was in the common body of knowledge. But I think if we can shift this paradigm—and I would really like to a shift in the paradigm for resources particularly, away from the focus on the qualification and into more of a focus on the curriculum—then that provides an opportunity for, I would suggest, a much healthier model in the future. In the United States, for example, there are some states within the United States that produce a state textbook. Now, that can have issues, particularly if it's politically orientated—so, if politicians are seen to have a strong influence in the content that's taught. Equally, if you look at somewhere like Hong Kong, they've actually tried to de-emphasise textbooks. So, Hong Kong, which is a very high-performing jurisdiction, is trying to move away from that model in the future. gareth pierce: Could I just add very, very briefly— lynne neagle am: Very briefly, because I want to bring Hefin in. gareth pierce: I know that, in our letter to you, we emphasised that this is not just to do with the body of knowledge. The assessment objectives have shifted in many subjects towards analysis and evaluation. So, therefore, we really do need resources that support that way of working, and I'm sure that lots of the young people we've heard from—what they're really doing in their revision is actually not just studying the content, but thinking about how they respond analytically and evaluatively. In fact, an interesting question for us as an awarding body to debate with the qualifications regulator, maybe, is whether some of the content should actually be able to be taken into the assessment hall. Do young people need to remember all these terms and their precise definitions, sometimes in both languages if they've learnt it in that way? Shouldn't some of the reference material be more and more available in the assessment arena? And then you are really getting towards analysis and interpretation and evaluation. hefin david am: I want to welcome these particular comments, because having come from a higher education background, what I've tried to deliver in my courses are textbook-free modules, where you're relying on academic journal articles and you're piecing together the story yourself, based on the curriculum you develop yourself. I fear that students who are nurtured on a textbook diet, when they go to university, they are not expected to repeat what's in the textbook; they're expected to do exactly as Gareth says and analyse and combine information into a discursive argument. So, therefore, I'm interested to know how you've worked with higher education to develop that approach. lynne neagle am: Can I ask for brief answers, please? gareth pierce: Yes, well some of the people who provide ideas into our digital resources certainly are either teachers who are very well aware of that progression to HE and therefore what their learners want or, in some cases, they are HE people themselves. We do draw on a body of expertise, and we are more than willing to emphasise the importance of that approach to the support resources we provide. hefin david am: I think the difficulty and the difference is that, at HE level, the kind of journal articles that are available are probably not consumable at GCSE level. And I think, interestingly—I know we've pointed towards some of our religious studies resources as examples—I think some of the websites we point to are quite ambitious. They would be described as scholarly, and I think some of the young people on the video made that point, didn't they—that they need to engage with that material to understand some themes? But we need to assist them in doing so. We need to almost make those scholarly items that are worth including in their curriculum accessible and user friendly for them at their point of learning. We recently published a report on the Welsh baccalaureate and skills challenge certificate, and I think it's relevant to pull in at this point that the independent study that pupils would be expected to do through the skills challenge certificate in doing their project work is really designed to try and draw out some of those skills that would be relevant in higher education. Through the reforms that we are starting to think about for the skills challenge certificate, there's a real opportunity to start honing some of those skills, particularly at the advanced level bacc, to make people really HE-ready so that they're better able to engage with that different style of learning. So, I think there's a huge opportunity that shouldn't be diminished within the advanced Welsh bacc. mark reckless am: Gareth, can I just put to you—? On the Estyn criticism, I think you've answered one aspect of their criticism that WJEC did not make as many sample assessment materials available as schools would have liked early on in the reform process, and I understand your position there, but they went on and said, 'At times the sample assessment materials were provided with incorrect mark schemes' and also, 'It would be helpful if the WJEC ensure that all necessary resources were made available before the start date of each qualification.' Do you have a response to those points? gareth pierce: Again, probably, I'd like a conversation with them about any problems with the specimen assessments and their mark schemes, because if they are the statutory regulatory ones they would have gone through Philip's team as well or his Welsh Government predecessors as regulators, depending on which qualifications they were. Very occasionally, somebody will identify an error, and obviously we then correct them, because these are available digitally online. So, if there is a problem, we want to hear about it and then we can correct it. But, yes, I agree with their fundamental premise, that ideally the whole package of resources should be available before teaching starts, including, as we mentioned earlier, so we can draw on that set of resources in the events we run as WJEC free of charge for teachers leading up to the first teaching. We need that information ourselves as well so we can talk about the use of these valuable resources in an appropriate pedagogical context in that preparatory year. mark reckless am: So, what mechanism do you have for picking up on this type of criticisms from Estyn and having that conversation with them? Has that not happened? gareth pierce: We have met with Estyn a couple of times recently, actually—once when they were beginning their review of the key stage 4 qualifications that had been in place for two years and a bit, and also when they were planning a review of some of the A-level work. Because we do have regular meetings with them, we will have an opportunity to explore their comments here I'm sure. mark reckless am: Looking at the structure and the relationship between Qualifications Wales and the WJEC—. I understand in the model in England—you've got Ofqual, the regulator, and you have various competing exam boards, some I think with for-profit motivation. We don't have that in Wales; there is a sole regulator and a single, dominant examination board. Does that mean that there's significant overlap and potentially cost duplication between the work of the two bodies, particularly given WJEC is a charity and seems to have many of the same objectives as you in Qualifications Wales have? philip blaker: The roles are very distinct, so I'd tell you there's no overlap. What we try and do is try and make sure that there's a good connection between the work that we do. I would say a strength of the Welsh model is that there is an independent regulator and a single awarding body largely, because much of the work that Ofqual would need to do in terms of its maintenance of standards is about ensuring that the competition between awarding bodies doesn't lead to what's been termed in the past as a race to the bottom in terms of standards. Now, the opportunity that we have in Wales is, where we have a single awarding body, we can have a close and good working relationship with WJEC, but guarding very strongly to make sure that we keep that regulatory distance to make sure that we preserve our role as the regulator and look at WJEC as one of our regulated bodies. gareth pierce: Can I make a general point? Perhaps the important opportunity in Wales is to look anew at how national and regional organisations, such as the consortia, can collaborate to make a success of the broad range of resources and CPD that will be required to support the new curriculum, and also the next set of qualifications that will be reformed. The Learned Society of Wales is a player that wants to introduce ideas into the Welsh dimension of the curriculum. There will be a need for some financial resource from the Welsh Government—yes, certainly—and the WJEC can provide some resources, but I think we all want to collaborate in order to ensure the success of the next round of resources. mark reckless am: But doesn't that national approach and collaboration preclude the model that Philip was talking about earlier, where we had textbooks based on the curriculum, and there's that core, but that was separate from what the exam body decided to do and the textbook wasn't there for the particular exam approach? If you have a single, dominant exam board, and you have a Welsh curriculum that's developed with that board, how do you then have this separation between textbook and exam? philip blaker: So, if we look at qualification, a qualification should be based on the curriculum that's being offered, because learning should be based around the curriculum, and the role of the qualification is to measure attainment against knowledge of that curriculum—knowledge, skills and understanding, the dispositions that that curriculum is trying to develop. Now, of course, what will inevitably happen is once the curriculum is known and developed, there will be a level of detail that comes across from what the qualification is looking for. I think what we're trying to say is, from an educational perspective, what we'd like to see is a broader focus on the curriculum and less of a narrow focus on the qualification and some of the problems that that can drive, so that, if a learner is well-versed in the curriculum and has been taught well and has acquired the knowledge, skills and dispositions that the curriculum is trying to create, they should succeed in the qualification. mark reckless am: And you suggested earlier that, if need be, the qualification could be pushed back a year, but not the curriculum. Does that mean that it would be possible to teach the new curriculum while keeping the old qualification? philip blaker: It would be possible. mark reckless am: But satisfactory? philip blaker: Because, if we're looking at qualifications predominantly being 14 to 16, what Professor Donaldson said at the very beginning, with 'Successful Futures', was, actually, if the curriculum is preparing people better for that qualification stage, so that they're better versed as learners and better able to perform in those qualifications and we see a rise of attainment—. Ideally, you'd be in a position where you've got GCSEs that have been reformed to marry up to any change, but I don't see there being a huge problem in itself of a delay if we think that is the right thing to do. We would much rather be in a position of having reforms, but, equally, I'd want to see any reforms delivered safely, and I wouldn't want to compromise fairness and safety of delivery of those qualifications on the basis of a timeline. But I think all too often the case is that a timeline dominates over doing what is the right thing and I think as we get further into this we'll have to really assess and keep a grip of what's the right thing to do. darren millar am: Just on this issue of shaping the curriculum and making sure that we've got textbooks that can be used to support the delivery of the curriculum—. So, who should be responsible for developing these curriculum resources? philip blaker: I think, for a new model, that needs to be determined. They have responsibility for curriclum and they've already started work with the seminar last year, and then drawing people together now to look at a new model for the future. I think we need to evolve that approach, and I think Welsh Government taking a lead on some of this thinking about how things might be prepared for the future is probably a good position to be in at the moment. darren millar am: Are there any other models that you can point us to in terms of how these things are done elsewhere? philip blaker: Yes, there are models where you can have—. For example, in Northern Ireland, you have the regulator, the awarding body and the curriculum body all under one roof. So, you can have a position where everything is tied together as it is in Northern Ireland with the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment. Equally, if you look at somewhere like Hong Kong, you have very distinct bodies that are looking after each individual component. But, of course, in Wales, and also previously in England, the qualifications regulator has also had a responsibility for curriculum. I mentioned earlier that, in the past, the WJEC has produced a fair few resources in collaboration with publishers in key stage 3 and even at primary stages. Certainly, key stage 3 is closely linked to GCSE, and, therefore, if the WJEC continues to be a player—as I hope it will—in the area of resources for GCSE and A-level, then the WJEC is also well positioned in terms of our investment in editing, translating and the use of technology to contribute to key stage 3 most certainly and perhaps even the primary stages. So, I'm sure that the WJEC would want to offer itself as a national organisation that wants to contribute as best we can in this area. Well, we're out of time, so can I thank you very much for attending this morning and for answering all our questions? I think it's been a very useful and informative session. In view of the time, can I ask whether Members are happy to note all those papers in a block? Can I just flag that I would like to return to paper to note 3, which is the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education on minority ethnic, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller learners, when we go into private, if that's okay with Members? Item 5, then, is for me to propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting. Are Members content? Thank you.

The issue of transportation for EOTAS learners in rural areas of Wales was raised, as they had to cover a significant distance to access provisions in Powys. The Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) acknowledged that this issue had not yet been investigated but would be soon. Darren Millar expressed concerns about replacing textbooks, stating that it would create additional pressure and work for teachers and students. He believed that textbooks were essential for learning, revision, and qualification, and that not everyone in Wales had access to digital resources. He also worried that some learners would be disadvantaged by the transition to digital content. Mike Ebbsworth suggested that teachers could print materials to accommodate learners, while Gareth Pierce emphasized the importance of technology and textbook content. They both agreed that digitalization would add flexibility to teaching materials. The WJEC highlighted the importance of digital literacy for exams like A-levels and GCSEs. It was challenging to determine whether the lack of textbooks directly affected students' performance, as there were multiple factors to consider.

Question: What are the ways to identify schools that are causing significant concern, as discussed by Irranca-Davies? Article: We've received apologies for absence from Janet Finch-Saunders, and also from Dawn Bowden, and I'd like to welcome Huw Irranca-Davies, who is substituting for Dawn Bowden. We'll move on, then, to our evidence session for our inquiry on school improvement and raising standards. I'd like to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, and Steve Davies, director of education. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so we'll go straight into questions, if that's okay. If I can just start by asking you: to what extent is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development still involved in the Welsh Government's school improvement journey? kirsty williams am: First of all, can I thank the committee for their invitation this morning, and their interest in this particular area? As you will be aware, on coming into office, the director and I agreed to ask the OECD to do a rapid review of the state of Welsh education at the beginning of this Assembly term. I was very clear in the national mission that I would invite the OECD back to review our progress against that mission, and that has happened in the tail end of last year, and the OECD will publish their latest report on Welsh education next month now, in March. So, the expectation is that the report will be published on 23 March, and my intention is to make a statement to the Chamber on 24 March. Actually, the continuing relationship with OECD is about self-evaluation of the entirety of the system and Welsh Government. We don't want to accept our own orthodoxy and just be in a bubble where we are constantly listening to ourselves and those people who might want to agree with us or tell us what we want to hear. That's a risk for Ministers and for Government, because we want them to give an honest evaluation of where we are, but that's a really important tool for me, to ensure that we're constantly testing ourselves. The nature of that review is that the OECD were able to talk to whoever they felt it was important to talk to, so that included practitioners on the ground, elements of the middle tier, as well as Welsh Government. And I know, Chair—I hope you'll be pleased to hear this—that the reports of this committee have formed parts of their review, looking at how the Senedd itself has contributed to and has held the Government to account. Can I ask about the powers under the School Standards and Organisation (Wales) Act 2013, to ask you to tell us about the use of those powers either by Welsh Government or by local authorities, and how effective you feel that legislation has been? kirsty williams am: Okay. Well, as you'll be aware, local authorities have quite extensive powers of intervention in schools if they feel that is necessary. If I'm honest, I think there's a mixed picture, with some local authorities using those powers not on a regular basis, but obviously demonstrating a willingness to use those powers. Since that legislation came into being, there have been a number of reasons, because of course a local authority has to give a reason for using those powers of intervention. They usually focus on standards, but sometimes they focus on a breakdown in governance arrangements, perhaps, or a failure or a breakdown in financial management. And the types of interventions that have been used have included, in some cases, appointing additional governors to governing bodies, or suspending a school's delegated budget so the local authority takes on, then, financial control of that particular school, or sometimes applying to the Welsh Government to entirely replace a governing body and establish an intervention board. So, if I can give you an example of where that's been used and has been successful, in Flintshire. They applied to Welsh Government for two interim executive boards, in Sir Richard Gwyn Catholic High School and in Ysgol Trefonnen. The IEBs were put in place and both of those schools, which had been in special measures, moved quite rapidly, actually, out of special measures. Perhaps the most recent example of this is one that the Chair will know very well in her own constituency of Torfaen, in Cwmbran High School, where Torfaen has intervened in that case. My expectation always is that local authorities should be the first port of call, and I would encourage—and we always encourage—local authorities to take a proactive approach to intervention and to use those powers. Can I ask, then, about the national evaluation and improvement resource and how significant a role that will play in the raising of school standards, and how you feel it's evolved since it was first conceived? kirsty williams am: So, this brings us back to the principle of self-evaluation and something, if we're honest, we've not been very good at. If you look at a number of chief inspectors' reports into the Welsh education system, self-evaluation has always been identified as something that is missing or underdeveloped in our system to date, hence, then, the work to establish not a new approach, but a more robust approach to self-evaluation. We've done that in conjunction, again, with the OECD, middle tier and practitioners. It's really important, throughout the entirety of our reform journey that that's done in co-construction, because we want this resource to be usable in schools. So, it's all very well having a conceptual idea and people outside the classroom working on it, but if it's of no practical use to a school leadership team, then we won't see the impact. We're in the testing phase at the moment and having it evaluated itself, with a view to introducing that resource across the system at the start of the new academic year, in September 2020. I truly believe that, if we're to make progress in Welsh education, we have to develop the skills within our system to have robust self-evaluation. So, it's not left to an individual school to come up with a system; it's right the way across the system. My hope would be that those principles could then be applied to local education authorities, to regional school improvement services and Welsh Government as part of a whole-system approach to self-evaluation. steve davies: So, they have played a critical role and, as we know, as the Minister has said in the past, she may introduce policy and practice, but if Estyn are part of it then schools, usually, because they recognise that it will be part of the inspection process—it gives it greater push and support around it. kirsty williams am: And I think, if I just say as well, that the external perception of what that's about is really important. It's not a test of school readiness for reform, it is a genuine attempt for a school to evaluate their strengths, their weaknesses and where they need to go next. And because of the word 'toolkit'—the feedback was that it gave the impression of a checklist, 'Just do this and check list'. So, it'll be called the national evaluation and improvement resource, rather than the toolkit, because, as I said, the feedback was that 'toolkit' gave the impression of a checklist exercise, and it's got to be about more than that if it's going to be meaningful. lynne neagle am: Okay. Before I bring Suzy in, can I just welcome Siân Gwenllian, who is joining us via video-conference in north Wales? Morning, Siân. suzy davies am: Yes, the resource, thank you—about whether there were any conflicting ideas in the process of development that made it quite difficult to zone in on something that school leadership teams, in particular, could rely on. Were there differences of opinion on what this should look like? kirsty williams am: Not that I'm aware of from the practitioners that I've spoken to who have been part of that. The head of Gladestry has been involved in this process, and she said that she'd really enjoyed the process of working alongside Estyn and the OECD as a school leader to be able to shape it. suzy davies am: I'm not suggesting that there has been; I'm just interested as to how it had worked, that's all. steve davies: Chair, I think, inevitably, when you bring stakeholders together, they're not going to be in total agreement as to how it's going to work, and I think initially one of the challenges was having Estyn there as part of the facilitation group. There are always some concerns that, actually, it's coming from a to inspect, oral, judgmental tick box. So, we had some early day challenges where we had to convince—and, ultimately, Estyn convinced them—that they were there to help and support as opposed to to inspect, and that the model that was developed, as the Minister said, was not going to be a tick box, 'You are good at this part of self-evaluation', it was to build the skillsets up. You know, four years into the job, what I've reflected on as well is there is this sometimes a feeling out there that the Minister says all the right stuff, but you're not actually going to do it, so, when you talk about a new approach to doing things, you're not actually serious about it. So, trying to build that confidence that we are serious about developing a new system around self-improvement, which is different from accountability—sometimes, the practitioners are like, 'Oh, yes, we've heard it all before but it never actually happens.' And I think that's been a part of the constant—not pressure, but the responsibility on Welsh Government is in following through. So, we said that we were going to do this in the national mission, and we are going to do it. I'm really proud that there or thereabouts, a few months either way, we've actually kept to the timetable as outlined in the national mission, and that helps build confidence within the sector that we are committed to that programme and we're going to do what we say we're going to do. lynne neagle am: And a final question from me: how effective do you think the investment in school standards has been in this Assembly term, as opposed to the approach taken in the last Assembly term, where there was the protection put in place for core school budgets? kirsty williams am: Well, I think, first of all, it's important that, whilst this additional resource is specifically targeted at school standards, that is only a part of a much wider education budget, a budget that—you know—is incredibly complex. And so it is really challenging to be able to draw straight lines—you know, 'We did this and it's resulted in that'—given that we're looking at the entirety of school funding here. What's been really important is that, if you drill down into what that money has been spent on, 50 per cent of it has been directed towards professional learning in one form or another to support our teaching professionals. I've said it time and time again: an education system cannot exceed the quality of the people who stand in front of our children day in, day out to work with them and teach them. Therefore, that investment in staff and investment in the professional learning of our staff and support for them I think is making a difference already but, importantly, will continue to make a difference. But I think it is really challenging to be able to say, 'Well, we spent this bit of money and it definitely led to that', because it's such a complex picture. And, again, what we do know from international best practice, what do we know that works in driving up standards, and then how can we align the money that we've got to supporting that? And, as I said, 50 per cent of that money has gone directly to simply supporting the professional learning of those who work with our children. We're going to talk now a bit about schools causing concern with questions from Huw Irranca-Davies. If I can, just first of all, zoom in on the way in which we actually decide which schools need what support. So, we've got the school categorisation system, which we're familiar with. We've also got Estyn inspection reports, then we've got other intelligence, including local intelligence on the ground. How do you decide from that? How is it decided what schools need support, need challenge? How do we do that? kirsty williams am: Well, you're right: what we have is a variety of ways in which we can identify schools that need support, or need to be challenged on their practice. So, our school improvement service—it's a risk-based approach, so they can evaluate where they need to put their time, effort and resource. Sometimes, it's used by other people for other things, but that is not its primary purpose; its primary purpose there is not one of accountability, it is one of identifying risk and aligning that then to the support that is available. That is our method of holding schools and their governing bodies to account for their practice and for the work that they do. The elements that go into making that judgment around the levels of support have changed, and, of course, the Estyn inspection regime is also changing. huw irranca-davies am: And you've made, with feedback over the last few years, adjustments to the way that the categorisation system works. Are you content with where it is now, or do you see more adjustments being made? Have you got things in front of you that you're getting feedback on saying 'Well, we need to tweak this again a little bit'? kirsty williams am: So, that system has evolved over time. Initially, on coming into office, when I first came in, it was purely driven by data, and it was also done in quartiles. So, there was a certain number of schools that had to be in the bottom, which drove practitioners mad. They were like 'Ah, every year, there's going to be some of us that have to be in the bottom quartile', because of the way in which it was arranged, which seemed very unfair to them. It's not just purely driven on data now; there are other judgments—the professional judgments of our challenge advisers are taken into account. And I would expect that situation to continue to evolve to align itself to our curriculum reform, and our changes in self-evaluation. I expect that that system will continue to evolve and change, so that it complements and assists in the reform journey as other parts of the system change. I think, for any impartial reader of the way that the trends have been going on this, there is some good news within that, in that, certainly, those schools that might have been identified as have been okay but coasting along, seem to be moving up the categories, although we still do have that—. Well, it's what the system is there to do, it's to identify those schools that do need that additional support. And I like your analogy of a triage system—'You're fit; keep on doing what you're doing and do it well; you need more support, we'll put the support in.' But, can I turn to those schools that are causing significant concern, and how we identify them? The Estyn chief inspector's conclusions at the end of the 2017-18 report that these schools are not being identified early enough—there's a need to do something urgently about these concerns, particularly in secondary schools. Have we addressed that? Are you content that we've addressed that concern? Was he right? kirsty williams am: No, the chief inspector is absolutely right—absolutely right. In some ways, when a school goes into special measures, in a way, that's a failure of the system, because that should have been identified sooner. huw irranca-davies am: So just to ask, bearing in mind the earlier discussion we were having, how is it that we don't identify those schools? kirsty williams am: That's it—you're quite right. Undoubtedly, what categorisation has done is led to a greater understanding, I think, on behalf of local education authorities' and school improvement services' knowledge about their schools. But we are not there yet in terms of necessarily, then, moving those schools more quickly, once they've been identified as needing the highest level of support to see improvement. So you will have seen from the last publication of categorisation data that our primary sector continues to improve—more and more and more of our primary schools are in a green rating, which is very satisfying to me. But we have got more of an issue with secondary schools, and we have a particular issue with the same schools being identified in that level of categorisation. So even though we've identified them as needing that extra help, they are not moving at pace away from that system. The first is, we are, again, looking at different sets of data that can give us even earlier warning systems that things are going wrong in a school—and perhaps Steve will explain later. For instance, staff sickness, and carefully monitoring staff sickness, because there is a direct correlation between high levels of staff sickness in a school and what is going on in the school. And we have a new multi-agency approach, working with those schools to try and move them more forward. And that multi-agency panel includes the school itself, the local authority, the regional consortia school improvement staff, Estyn and Welsh Government—as a multi-agency panel to support improvement in that school. So, for instance, what would normally happen, Estyn would come in, Estyn would make a judgment on the school—requiring special measures or urgent improvement—and Estyn would go away. They'd go away for six months, and then they'd come back in six months, and they'd make another judgment, 'No, still not good enough', and disappear for six months. We're saying—Estyn and the Welsh Government have agreed that's not the best approach; Estyn need to be part of the solution, rather than just coming and making a judgment. Actually, we've had local authorities coming to us and saying, 'Can we put more schools in? Rather than just having two of our high schools, can we engage more in this project and this pilot?' It's being evaluated by Cardiff Metropolitan University and Swansea University, so we're having some academic overview to see, actually, does this approach work, can we evidence it—that it actually makes a difference? And it's actually—I'd like to claim all the credit for it, but it's actually not dissimilar to something that's happening in Scotland as well. But we knew that carrying on doing the same old thing clearly wasn't moving these schools, we needed a new approach, and this is what we're doing at the moment. Steve, I don't know— steve davies: I think your important point is about, 'What about the schools that are sliding in that direction?' And it's bringing together what we know from Estyn, but also, critically, local authorities have knowledge of their schools, and so do consortia. So, the Minister gave the example of staff sickness—not always a trigger, but it's one of those. If you look at movement of pupils out of a school, you can look at complaints, you can look at, actually, emerging increased use of HR resources that a school pulls on a local authority. The point the Minister made about Estyn as well is, historically, when they go into special measures, Estyn, at the end of that week, call in, historically, either the region or the local authority, they will feed back to one of them, and then they go away. But, as the Minister said, we want to keep a very clear distinction between the accountability and the transparency to the public, to parents, with the very detailed collective work of that multi-agency group to actually make that difference over time. Does that deal with the issue of the schools that have been identified in those categories of requiring significant improvement and requiring special measures? Are those the ones that will be identified now, or is that above and beyond that again? kirsty williams am: Well, those are the ones that are primarily at the forefront of our minds, but this way of sharing data better, to step in earlier, is part of our attempt to address what the chief inspector says about stepping in early—not waiting until a school gets into special measures and a formal judgment from Estyn of that, but actually using that intelligence to get support in there earlier. The three elements that that multi-agency approach look at are: what are the fundamentals that need addressing in this school? What is the capacity of the school itself to be able to address those fundamentals? And, what extra support needs to go into that senior management team and the governing body to get those fundamentals addressed? And actually, what does sustainable improvement look like? Because, again, one of the issues, sometimes, that happens is, a school goes into a category with Estyn, there's a big push and a big, 'We must do something' and the school comes out, but actually, that improvement is not sustainable. It's the low-hanging fruit; it's the easy wins that have been achieved, but actually, perhaps some of the fundamental challenges underlying in that school haven't been addressed in that process. So, this is about what will sustainable improvement look like in six months, what's it going to look like in 12 months and what's it going to look like in 18 months. So, actually, a more strategic, longer term approach to real change in a school rather than, perhaps, some of the easy-to-fix items that make a school as if it's doing better, but we really haven't tackled some of the underlying problems that make that school vulnerable to slipping back. Does that make sense? lynne neagle am: I've got a couple of supplementaries on—. Sorry? kirsty williams am: Does that make sense? lynne neagle am: Yes. We've got a couple of supplementaries on this, first from Suzy and then from Siân. Obviously, I'm pleased to hear that this work is being done, but I'm wondering—. What strikes me, in the recent past, at least, particularly as we've got the usual suspects in this category—. I've got to ask myself why it is that councils have been reluctant, perhaps, to step in with these schools earlier, particularly as they've got consortia or middle-tier support as well. Has there been a deficit in that space that has meant that councils don't feel equipped to step in? I just don't really get it why they've been reluctant to step in so far. If they've been nervous about doing it, because they don't feel that they've got the tools to do it, then I think that's pretty important, because as you were saying, we were talking about fundamentals; surely, councils have been able to deal with fundamentals, and more importantly, consortia up until now. Because, obviously, we're asking these players to give us evidence at some point, so perhaps I'd like to challenge them on how come we're here now. I see our job as corralling the collective effort, and I think, for too long in the system, there has been a lack of co-ordination. So, this is about bringing and corralling a collective effort to address this, going forward, in more sustainable way. And I think it does come back to this issue around self-evaluation and a willingness to be open, honest and upfront about some of the challenges that we've got. It's not easy, is it? It's not easy to accept or to acknowledge sometimes when things are— suzy davies am: That they don't know how to do this. kirsty williams am: Well, that they're going badly, or perhaps they don't know exactly how to make the difference. So this approach, as I said, is a new way of trying to coral that collective effort across the board. But, I don't know if Steve—because you've done other roles in the system, so perhaps you've got a different insight. There are others that we're working with, and yes, at its best, it's done as a joint exercise where they use their regional school improvement service to help in the identification that there is a need for this. They take advice as to what the action is, whether it is, as the Minister said, in the more significant areas, a board, or whether a warning notice comes in terms of standards or finance. So, we're working with them and we're working with the Welsh Local Government Association to share that practice. An example of that work is: we have done a development training session for cabinet members for education, and scrutiny leads for education across Wales, and all 22 local authorities came to that and engaged with that. That was partly about self-improvement, but it was also about where significant issues arise, you have to constructively confront them. And that comes with what the region knows, and increasingly, we're looking to have it consistently across 22 local authorities, so they are collecting all the additional data that we referred to earlier, so they can legitimately hold a mirror up and say, 'This is a real concern that we have. We're not punishing you, but we're registering the seriousness, and we want you to address it.' And we're making progress. I believe it's genuinely more consistent now, but I'd be lying if I said that there was consistency across all 22 local authorities. sian gwenllian am: Because you are moving to a more sophisticated approach in terms of identifying problems sooner, and so can offer the support earlier, is it time to think about moving away from the system of categorisation entirely? That is, has the categorisation system reached the end of its usefulness, and is the multi-agency approach, this more sophisticated approach, a better way, ultimately, of being able to assist schools in moving forward? kirsty williams am: I think, Siân, as I said earlier, the categorisation system has evolved over time, and my expectation is that it will continue to evolve, because it has to be consistent with our overall approach to school improvement and raising standards. I expect OECD will have feedback for us on this important part of our system, and we'll wait to see exactly what they say about it, but as I said in answer to Huw Irranca-Davies earlier, I haven't got a closed mind; we've demonstrated over the last four years our willingness to change the system to make it a smarter system, and we will continue to keep that under review, as we move forward. If I could just go back briefly, it doesn't sound like a very exciting thing, does it, when we say we've been doing work with the WLGA, with cabinet members, but also scrutiny, because that's a really important part of the jigsaw as well, is actually local government scrutiny of the performance of your education portfolio holder and the leadership of your council. So this is about trying to up the ante on all sides, so that those issues around 'What are you doing in your local authority to use the powers that you have?' You know, sometimes, making sure that everybody in that authority—those in power and those who are there to hold those in power to account—have the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding to do that appropriately. We've talked a lot about early identification; getting in there and then managing the improvement, this triage approach there, and then getting some grip of it, as well, in doing all of that. I won't touch on the primary schools, but let's just look at secondary schools—11 per cent of secondary schools inspected in the last two academic years judged as unsatisfactory, needing urgent improvement. There will always be secondary schools and primary schools that hit moments of crisis for one reason or another, but 11 per cent to me, and to any layperson, would seem unreasonably high. What is a level that you would be content with of having schools in red category in Wales? kirsty williams am: You're right. Schools will need different levels of support at different points, and sometimes, it's not because of a crisis. So, for instance, in my region, we do have an increase in the number of schools in the amber category. That's because we've seen in that particular region a number of headteachers retire because they've reached retirement age, and there are new headteachers. Nothing else has changed in that school, but the simple fact that you have a new leader, sometimes in those cases it might be their first headship. That means that that school is going to need a little bit of extra support, so it isn't always just a crisis that needs extra support, there are just general things that happen in the life of a school that could lead to it. But you're absolutely right—we have a particular challenge in the secondary sector where we have not been able to move individual schools forward at pace. And 11 per cent is not acceptable to me, Huw, which is why we have introduced this new pilot to address those schools where, persistently, we have concerns about their ability to move forward. If we'd have carried on doing the same thing, I suspect we would have just carried on getting the same result—hence the need for a new approach to those schools that are causing concern. steve davies: Very briefly, the things we talked about earlier was how we measure the performance of schools, particularly at GCSEs, with a narrow focus. As was said earlier, some of these are the same groups—they trip in and then they don't come out. Our belief is, from research, that they concentrate on squeezing the pips to get the grades up in some small areas for a period of time, and you can do that by targeting and immersing them. Estyn can tick the box to say your grades have got better, but we haven't handled the serious underpinning issues—leadership, teaching and learning, and bringing those together. As the Minister said, what does sustainable improvement look like in six, 12, 18 months? It isn't just, as important as they are, getting those exam grades up a bit. And if they're all agreed as the indicators at the outset, we're more likely—. So it's multi-agency; it's not a little activity, it's a major strategy. In 2016, your election manifesto very clearly said that you wanted to abolish regional consortia—three words in it. Why haven't you done it? kirsty williams am: Because, given that you're such a keen student of my manifesto, you'll also know that— hefin david am: It was only three words. kirsty williams am: The Liberal Democrat manifesto also said that we supported major local government reform and a major reduction in the number of local government units. I have to say genuinely, my experience over the last four years has proven to me the value of regional working, and in the absence of significant local government reform, I think it's absolutely vital that we have scale in school improvement services—scale that I don't think can be delivered across 22 individual local authorities. kirsty williams am: I think if there was significant local government reform and we could demonstrate that those units had such a scale that they could perform the functions of regional consortia, then I think it would be inevitable that any education Minister would look to see whether there was an opportunity to change structures. But in the absence of that, Hefin, I have been absolutely convinced whilst doing this job that you need larger units to be able to carry out successful school improvement work, and I think it would be reckless to advocate the system going back to school improvement being organised in 22 different ways. Do you think that the work of the four consortia has been consistent and effective? kirsty williams am: The school improvement services? hefin david am: The four consortia. kirsty williams am: I think, as with individual local education authorities, there are some regional consortia services that have performed really highly—and that's not me saying that, that's Estyn, but gives us assurance around that—and there are others that need to improve. I think the consortia themselves would admit that they, since their establishment, have found new ways of working. Increasingly, over recent years, we have seen those consortia working together on a national approach, but delivered on a regional basis. But we are constantly looking for optimum delivery from those particular organisations, but as I said, I think it would be absolutely reckless to go back to a situation where school improvement services were being delivered individually on 22 different bases. I'm happy to accept that you've changed your opinion there; that's no problem at all. But with regard to the four consortia, and we'll take Education through Regional Working as an example, it does things differently to the other three. Is that a cause for concern, or do you think that's entirely appropriate? kirsty williams am: Well, ERW does things differently, but then so does the Education Achievement Service. What I'm interested in is not necessarily how they are constituted and organised, I'm interested in the effectiveness of that organisation to deliver for children and for teachers. ERW has got particular challenges, and we continue to work with those in ERW to address those, but increasingly, as I said, what we are seeing the regional consortia do is develop a national approach to school improvement services but deliver that on a regional basis so that there is greater consistency in terms of delivery. hefin david am: Are you happy that, within the ERW area, local authorities employ their own improvement advisers, rather than doing it in the way that the others do? kirsty williams am: We have discussed this at length with them. My preference would be for school improvement officers to be employed in the centre, and we continue to have those discussions, but what's really important to understand is that the regional consortia are not a beast of the Government; they are a beast of the local authorities that have worked together to create a school improvement service that meets their needs. So we can't impose that solution, and we continue to discuss with ERW what is the optimal way, and they continue to discuss with their constituent local authorities about how that should be organised. hefin david am: Are you concerned that Neath Port Talbot have given notice that they want to withdraw from regional working? kirsty williams am: I think it's really disappointing that Neath Port Talbot have published that notice. What's important for me is to understand—not for me, it will be important for Estyn. It will be really important for us to understand how Neath Port Talbot intend to support their schools and their teachers if they were to withdraw from ERW, especially at what is a very, very critical time. I would want to know from Neath Port Talbot how they are going to do that without being part of that organisation. And, of course, there's the added complexity that so much of our money is channelled through to schools via the regional consortia. So, I would want to understand from Neath Port Talbot how they're going to safeguard their schools and make sure that the children who are receiving their education in Neath Port Talbot are not disadvantaged if they were to follow through on that decision. hefin david am: Do you feel that it's your role to intervene in that area and instruct Neath Port Talbot and ERW as to how they should resolve this issue? kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, I would be seeking assurances— hefin david am: What does that mean, though, 'seeking assurances'? kirsty williams am: Well, Neath Port Talbot would need to demonstrate to me how they're going to address these issues. If they're not part of ERW and their schools and their children are not going to be in receipt of the support from ERW, as I said, especially at this critical time, how are they intending to do that? I haven't seen those plans, but if they were to push forward and follow through on the notice, I would want to see them and I suspect Estyn would want to see them also. hefin david am: Okay, just last issue on that: you're just waiting to see what Neath Port Talbot do next, then. kirsty williams am: Well, we have written to Neath Port Talbot to ask them to demonstrate to us, if they were to pull out of ERW, how they're going to meet their functions. hefin david am: Steve, did you want to say something? steve davies: Obviously—[Inaudible.]—that point. Is that the current document? Are there plans to change or update it, or is that exactly where we stand? kirsty williams am: So, that is the current model. Some specific recommendations were put forward about additional services that could be organised on a regional basis; primarily, that is a specialist human resources resource. We know that, because of austerity in some local authorities, HR departments have been really stretched. So, a proposal was put forward to include specialist HR and governor support as part of the regional model. However, I must say, having presented that evidence, some of our local authorities, even though there wasn't a national agreement to put that into the national model, have pooled their resources, and those services are being delivered and supported on a regional basis. So, for instance, the Education Achievement Service now provide specialist HR resource, and EAS and Central South provide governor support. So, although we weren't successful in persuading local government to adopt a new national model, local authorities in those areas saw the value of moving that way. hefin david am: So, with that in mind, and perhaps I'll put this to Steve Davies, everything the Minister just said, and also the line in the document— 'The implementation of this model will change over time'— is it time to go back to that document and review it from a procedural point of view? steve davies: I don't think it's necessarily timely to go back and have a complete review of it. But, certainly, we are in ongoing discussions with the Welsh Local Government Association, both in terms of work with local authorities, and the type of intervention in schools. As the Minister touched on earlier, there is some work to get consistency across the current area, particularly, as we just mentioned, in relation to ERW work. I think what is emerging, as the Minister said, is that there are two regions who have already made this shift to pool services. I think the two other regions are seeing and will see the benefits of that, and instead of forcing it through, we'd expect that to evolve. hefin david am: And Professor Dylan Jones's strategic delivery group seems to have had quite a warm welcome in the sector. I'm very grateful to Dylan for his hard work and his skill in chairing that group, and I think it's been welcomed by all, so that we can get that clarity and consistency about the roles and responsibilities of the individual partners and players in the middle tier. hefin david am: And when will the work be completed, and what will the outcomes be? kirsty williams am: Well, the group is currently engaging with Steve and other officials on agreeing a plan, but also, crucially, that plan is there to support the successful implementation of the curriculum, so that we're very clear about the roles and responsibilities in the middle tier in this crucial phase following the publication. The history of devolution is full of fantastic documents, and, shall I say, patchy implementation. The work that has gone into that curriculum is too important for implementation to be left to chance. hefin david am: Yes, but I'm thinking that the strategic delivery is reviewing the role of the middle tier. So, you know, what do we expect to see from it, notwithstanding the kind of softly, softly approach that you've already talked about? steve davies: It was set up, actually, about 18 months ago—just under. It was set up to build collective efficacy, because what people out there are seeing is that there's a confusion of roles, in what the regions are doing, and it was building that collective efficacy so everyone was behind the wheel. So, they've been looking at who is doing what for the last 18 months, and exploring and making some changes themselves. It's not just what they do with Government or what they do with each other; it's just happened that it's timely, because one of the key bits of feedback we believe we will get from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is we have had co-construction, we'd had collective effort, but we need to do more, particularly within the middle tier. This is not controlled by Government, it is arm's length from Government, and it's not their job to get it ready for the new curriculum—that's a key part of it. It does feed back in to the Minister but there's no formal mechanism by which they have to report. What I'm about to say, I say it even though I'm a big localist: it all seems to be heading in one direction of a national service. Is the strategic group even thinking in these terms, obviously building in local accountability? But it'll just make it so much easier in terms of accountability and consistency to monitor what the middle tier does, if it's a national service, like the National Adoption Service. Local delivery, national service—is it heading in that direction? kirsty williams am: That's not the intention of setting the group up. As Steve just said, I receive feedback from Dylan, because I meet Dylan in this particular capacity on a planned basis. He is there to give me advice on the middle tier, and to give me advice on what he thinks Welsh Government needs to do. sian gwenllian am: What I was going to raise has been answered already, that is that, from what I can see, the work that Professor Dylan Jones is doing has evolved somewhat. I felt that, originally, the idea was to look at the middle tier in terms of any kind of duplication that was happening, and where it was possible to tighten up the people going into schools from different directions. But it appears that it has evolved to be something that's much more than that, and that it is placing a focus on the curriculum and other aspects of the educational system. Is there a risk for them to lose focus in that sense? kirsty williams am: No, not at all. I think they are very, very clear around establishing roles and responsibilities for each of the players and to be very clear about the expectations that each part of the middle tier can have of each other, as to what they can expect from their partners in the middle tier. And absolutely, it is about making sure that there isn't duplication, that people aren't second-guessing each other's work, and there are clear demarcations about who does what in the system, and, as I said, knowing that you can rely on your colleague in the middle tier to do the bit that they are responsible for. We've got a lot of areas to cover so we are going to have to pick up our pace a bit. sian gwenllian am: Thinking about you as a Minister trying to see what the long-term trends are with regard to raising standards and improving educational attainment, is that difficult, because the performance measures have changed, haven't they? We can't compare like-for-like now, because of the changes that have been made in the way that performance is measured. So, to begin with, is that a challenge, to see whether progress has been made? And secondly, what evidence do you as Minister use to look at the long-term trends? kirsty williams am: The first thing to say, with regard to changes to performance measures—you're right that change to those does make it, in some cases, more difficult to look at trends over a period of time. If we change a performance measure, it is done to ensure that it is in the best interests of learners. I understand that, for researchers and for opposition Members, even for Ministers, it would be simpler to have the same set of measures over a period of time. But if we know that those things are driving behaviours that are unhelpful to children, and not in the best interests of children, then we have to change them, even thought that then does create challenges in different areas. With regard to what do we look at, there are a number of ways that we gain data and look at data in the system: everything from the categorisation system we spoke of earlier, and trends in categorisation; we look at Estyn reports; we continue to look at examination results. But we're trying to develop a broader range of data and statistics that give us a whole picture of the education performance, rather than narrowing down on one simple indicator that tells you one thing but doesn't tell you everything. But I don't know, Steve, if there's anything further that you'd like to add. steve davies: It's going back to what the Member raised earlier, in terms of the range of things that you look at—things that can make a difference. So, when Estyn review schools, or we're looking to develop national frameworks for things like mental health and well-being, which look to the practice that enables raising standards, it's collecting that information, both at a national level, through the annual review of Estyn, as well as our engagement with regions and local authorities. And, inevitably, we will use the Programme for International Student Assessment, and any other external assessments that come through organisations like the OECD. And even where we've changed the performance measures, we still have, at national level, the ongoing data. So, if you looked at level 2 plus, we believe it is important that children get five good GCSEs—for higher education and for employment. So, we've not lost sight of those at a national level—we're not using them as a narrow set of performance measures for individual schools. kirsty williams am: So, if we look at—level 2 plus is a good example. We know that a relentless focus on that single measure, as a way of judging the system, leads to a set of behaviours in schools. It narrows the focus onto a certain part of the cohort, it narrows the curriculum, when we know that children— sian gwenllian am: I'm not challenging the fact that you've changed the performance measures—I understand that, and having a broader way of looking is better in the long run. I'm just saying, because there's been this change, it makes it more of a challenge—whilst accepting why you've made the changes, but it does present more of a challenge, presumably, because you have to look at more indicators, and take evidence from different places. But those changes are being made for the right reasons, as I said, whether that be at level 2 plus. I understand why perhaps a performance measure around English was introduced, but the effect of that was that significant numbers of children—and, it must be said, usually children who are entitled to free school meals—were suddenly not sitting English literature GCSE. We've changed that performance measure, and guess what? Last year, we saw a significant increase in the number of children that were sitting English literature GCSE. For standards of literacy and oracy, I think studying literature is really, really important, before we even get into the joy of introducing children to the written word and the love of reading. Yes, it causes challenges, but we're making those changes because we believe that they are in the best interest of children, and that has to trump ease of comparison. sian gwenllian am: Why have you decided to ask the consortia, Estyn and so on not to report on local data or regional level data? How do we then come to conclusions about what is working if it isn't presented on a local authority and regional basis? kirsty williams am: Well, I think the thing to say about the communications from Welsh Government, Estyn, and the WLGA is it's not about not communicating the data, it's about challenging people on how that data should be used. So, the data is still available, but it's a challenge to them about how to use that data. So, for instance, when we're presenting data that compares local authority to local authority, you could have a local authority that says, 'There we go, I'm above the national average. I don't need to worry about the education in my local authority, because I'm above the average, or I'm better than my neighbour.' That doesn't necessarily mean that everything is right in your local education authority. So, actually, it's not about hiding data; it's about how you use the data appropriately. And sometimes, how we were presenting data in the past was lulling some people into a false sense of security about the performance of their system. So, it's about how you use data, and that's what the communication from Welsh Government and the WLGA and Estyn was about: think very carefully about this data and what it's telling you about your system, and don't be lulled into a false sense of security that you may be doing brilliantly. Or, perhaps, looking at your data, you may think, 'Oh, my goodness me, we're not doing very well at all', but, actually, more careful consideration of that might show that your school's impact on those children is really, really a positive one. If anything, it's about more data and, crucially for me, it's about more intelligent use and interrogation of that data, about truly what it's telling you about your system. So, doesn't that contradict what you've been telling the consortia and everyone else? kirsty williams am: No, not at all. As I said, we're not in the business of trying to hide data—I believe absolutely in full transparency. And in terms of level 2 data, I think I'm not moving away from the point that I think it's really important that more and more children get five really good GCSEs. steve davies: Can I, very briefly—? We didn't just send a letter out collectively. We've now carried out training jointly with WLGA and Estyn on how to use that data. So, it's not just looking where your LA is; it's also not looking at whether your school's better than average for the authority. And it is well received, and it should broaden the approach of scrutiny committees to beyond what historically was, if I'm honest, looking at the league table for their authority or looking at the league table of local authorities. It's not that they shouldn't be looking at that, but they need to dig much, much deeper underneath it. I'm going to appeal for brief questions and brief answers so that we can cover the rest of the questions. What are they telling you about the success you've had in trying to avoid the bad behaviour? Short answers. [Laughter.] I think it's inevitable: whatever kind of measures we put in place, people will look to maximise their success in those measures, and I don't think we'll ever come up with a system where those measures are absolutely perfect. What's really important to me is that we're really, really, really challenging schools to look at the performance of all of their children, rather than just at a very, very narrow cohort around those C/D boundaries, which we knew was detrimental, potentially, to more able and talented children and really pushing those Bs to As and those As to A*s, and children for whom actually just getting in to school on a daily basis is an achievement, and the school has done well to provide that. So, our new capped 9 makes sure that there is breadth across a range of subjects, rather than just focusing on a narrower and narrower bunch of subject opportunities for children, and our new third-third-third system enables schools to really look at their performance. So if their capped 9 score is high, what's driving that? Is it because the bottom third of the cohort is doing really well, and the impact on those children is above and beyond what could be expected, but actually, you're not doing very well for your more able and talented; you're not pushing them on? Alternatively, maybe your capped 9 score is because your MAT children are doing incredibly well, but actually, you're not really making the progress for the middle tier of those children. It allows us to have a greater focus on the performance of our FSM children—where they really are within that system. And crucially for me, it looks at the impact for every child, because every child has to matter in the system, and what we had before was a narrowing of curriculum choice and a narrowing on a certain cohort of children. suzy davies am: So are the permanent measures likely to be pretty similar to what you've got now? Because the research—I don't know if the research is complete yet. When will you be publishing the new permanent evaluation? kirsty williams am: Sue, you're right: they're interim measures at the moment, and we will need to make sure that the performance measures are aligned to the new curriculum. Because Wales's review of qualifications potentially has an impact on what those finally will look like, so that work is ongoing at the moment, and unless Steve can tell me off the top of his head when we expect that to be completed by, I will send you a note. It's what's wrapped around those interim measures that I touched on earlier: the other evidence that we bring to bear about the effectiveness of a school, but we do want to say to schools that on the whole, broadly speaking, the interim measures will carry on for two, three years. suzy davies am: Okay, and the reason I asked that is right at the beginning of this session, the Minister said to the Chair that this £100 million that's going into school improvements will be going into things that work. We need some evidence that the interim measures are going to work as well, so when are they going to be evaluated? steve davies: Well, we've only just used them for one year. steve davies: We've signalled that they're only going to be in place for three years. We are carrying out our own review of the impact of those and that's been built in, but I expect the OECD report—because it is an extensive report—to give us feedback on how those things are working now, and some steer, as they did with the last report, as to the direction we would want to go into. kirsty williams am: And what I'm also interested in is those performance management measures around schools. Yes, they're about outcomes for children, but actually are about a broader suite of behaviours within that school, so, yes, qualifications and grades are an important part of a performance measure, but actually, I have other expectations of schools, above and beyond simply qualifications. And so, we would want our permanent set of performance measures to look at a wider set of behaviours within a school, and I think because—. Exams are important—of course they are, qualifications are important—but the way in which those schools achieve those results are also important. lynne neagle am: Would you anticipate that including well-being, then? suzy davies am: In a whole-school approach. kirsty williams am: I absolutely—and we need to find a way of how we can truly measure that. Sometimes, children's well-being is influenced by lots of things outside the control of a school. So, I don't want schools to be held accountable for things that they have no control over, because of the circumstances in which a child may be living. But, absolutely: well-being and how the culture of the school addresses well-being is really important to me. suzy davies am: How useful is PISA for you in helping school improvement? I know that it's not always the thing that you enjoy watching or looking out for. But, genuinely, how useful is it? kirsty williams am: It is one of a range of tools that we need to look at. PISA is one thing where there is a level of consistency, so it will continue to be, I think, an important part of how we test how our system is doing. suzy davies am: We know that you are a little bit encouraged, but we are not out of the woods yet. How confident are you that we are on track for meeting these targets that were set before your time, or do you think that having those targets is helpful? Is it setting up aspirations that are incapable of being met within a period of time? kirsty williams am: Well, those long-term targets of a score around 500 are part of 'Our National Mission', and we have to keep the pressure on to strive. If we look at reading scores for girls, we are almost there, but that just demonstrates what a journey we've got with our boys to address. For me, one of the ways in which we will reach those targets and achieve them is further progress on our more able and talented children. Although we are now performing at an OECD average, I will be the first person to admit that, although we have seen an improvement in the higher level skills of our more able and talented children, we do not perform at an OECD average with regard to those level 6 and level 5 scores. That's one of the reasons why we have introduced a more able and talented budget to support that, and our Seren programme, which is delivering fantastic results post-16. That's why we're introducing the principles of Seren earlier into children's careers, bringing it down from year 9 upwards, to be able to drive improvements. So, I think that that's the area that we are particularly keen to work on: making sure that more of our children perform at the OECD average at level 5 and level 6. We are working with southern Ireland, who have consistently done well with reading scores, to look to see what lessons we can learn to press on with there with reading. Does that mean that the focus will then drift slightly from maths, where there has been some success; and drift from science, where the encouragement of more people to take GCSE science has reduced the number of high-level passes? kirsty williams am: First, we have to have a system that is capable of doing all of those of things at the same time. We can't accept a system that says, 'Well, we can do a bit over here, but that means we have to—.' We have to have a system, Suzy, that can drive improvements at all levels. As I've said, it's far from perfect, and we've got more work to do, but we have to deliver across all three domains, as we did last time. It was a travesty that there were children who never had the opportunity to sit a science GCSE. We don't have to make assumptions about the nature of many, many, many of those children. We have seen a significant increase in the number of children who are having the opportunity to sit GCSE science and who are passing GCSE science. One of the reasons that I suspect we have ended up with poor science scores is because of the previous policy around science entries and science qualifications. Again, one of the reasons that we have changed it isn't just solely because we need to do better in PISA, but I think that by changing it, we will see an impact on PISA. sian gwenllian am: I just want to discuss an issue that I know is important to you, namely closing the attainment gap between pupils who are eligible for free school meals and those who are not eligible for free school meals. We are not where we need to be in terms of the performance, not only of our children on free school meals, but the performance of our looked-after children, and the performance of some children from some ethnic minority groups. So, we will continue to look to support those learners in a variety of ways, again looking to amend our practice on the basis of evidence that is given to us from our experts who are there to advise us. There has been some progress in some areas, but it is not where I would want it to be. sian gwenllian am: But, this is despite the fact that there is £475 million that has been invested in the pupil development grant, for this exact purpose of closing the attainment gap. kirsty williams am: Well, I think that, as I said, I am not shying away from any assumption or declaration that we need to do better. If we go back to look at what PISA has said about our performance, the PISA results show that pupils in Wales are relatively more able to overcome the disadvantage of their background than is the average in OECD countries. If we look at pupils who are eligible for free school meals, they do score below their better-off counterparts in PISA by some 34 points. It's difficult to make comparisons because of all the reasons we have talked about, but if we look back to 2006 and we look at the very basic level of qualifications, which is a level 1 qualification, we have seen a jump from 9.4 per cent of children in 2006 achieving a level 1 qualification to over 18 per cent. We need to get this right for those children, the moment that they come into a nursery and the moment that they start their formal education at the age of 5. Providing catch-up, of course, we need to do for those kids; we can't throw those year 10s and year 11s to the wind. sian gwenllian am: But I'm sure that that is a disappointment to you, because it has been a personal priority for you as well. In terms of minority ethnic learners, while there are some groups within that category who are achieving, there is underachievement happening here as well, isn't there? It's not consistent across the minority ethnic group. Is that something that you will be focusing upon? kirsty williams am: Yes, and that's why we have committed to maintaining a ring-fenced grant to local authorities of some £10 million, to support education of our minority ethnic children. We need a much more sophisticated conversation about what is really going on in attainment across minority ethnic groups so that we can best target that resource and have a conversation about what the differences are. If we look at black Welsh girls entitled to free school meals, they perform almost at the national average for all children—not FSM children; the national average for all children. So, there is a really complex picture here, and I really welcome a debate about acknowledging the various levels of performance of BAME children, and where the gaps in performance lie. I'm committed to continuing to support educational opportunities, and that's why have ring-fenced the minority ethnic achievement grant. lynne neagle am: Siân, this will need to be the last question, I'm afraid. sian gwenllian am: Sorry? lynne neagle am: This is going to have to be the last question. In terms of looked-after children, which is one of the groups where attainment isn't where we would like it to be, there was some improvement in 2016 at key stage 4, but it has been disappointing. Do we know what's been happening in 2019? kirsty williams am: The 2019 data will be published next month, and there has been significant activity. You are right: in recent years, the data have been poor and not where we would want it to be. That's why we have had a reformed approach to PDG LAC; the employment of PDG LAC co-ordinators across the regions. We've identified new resource in the new financial year to test new approaches, so, for instance, virtual school approaches, where we know, in other systems, that has worked. But, we expect the next set of data around the performance of this particular group of learners in March. We have come to the end of our time, so can I thank you, Minister, and your official for attending this morning? We have had a wide-ranging and very detailed discussion that will be very useful for the committee. As usual, you will be sent a transcript following the meeting to check for accuracy, but thank you again, both of you, for your attendance this morning. Paper to note 1 is a letter from ERW providing additional information following the evidence session on 16 January. Paper to note 2 is a letter from Central South Consortium, similarly providing additional information following the evidence session. Paper to note 3 is a letter from the Noah's Ark Children's Hospital for Wales regarding children's rights in Wales, following up on some additional information there. Paper to note 4 is a letter from Qualifications Wales, providing additional information following the annual report scrutiny session in January. Can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Thank you.

The school improvement service relies on the school categorization system to identify schools in need of support or challenge. Kirsty emphasizes the need for a more strategic and longer-term approach to bring about changes in schools, rather than focusing on easy-to-fix items. The categorization system will continue to evolve to align with curriculum reform and self-evaluation. However, Kirsty and Huw raise concerns about the identification of schools that are not being addressed early enough, particularly in secondary schools. Steve highlights the importance of addressing schools that are sliding in the wrong direction. It is crucial to bring together the knowledge and expertise of Estyn, local authorities, and consortia to improve the identification and support of these schools.

Question: Summarize the discussion and opinions on the marketing positioning of the product, including the input from User Interface and Marketing. Article: Now hopefully we've all got a better idea from than we did f leaving the last meeting as to what it is we are up to now . you should know that I'll be taking minutes during all the meetings , as I was struggling to our last time and that'll be easier for me now because I'm not actually giving the whole presentation . the additional points are just the stuff that we sent and that I forwarded on from upper management having a few bright ideas to make our lives painful . Here's the additional points I just wanted to put those in there to see if you guys had any comments on them . project manager: So does anyone have any overall marketing: Well what comes up for me is that if we're gonna if we're gonna be marketing a product that is going to be having no teletext , people are very comfortable with the idea of having teletext and using teletext , and so we're not we're gonna be a new product without something that people are very comfortable having right now . What are we gonna have that makes this thing better than project manager: Well tha that first point could also be an op opportunity because in seeing that teletext is becoming outdated , some sort remote control that can work with the Internet there is the opportunity that's presented , I guess . marketing: So what I'm talking about is I see that one side we're eliminating something so we have to come up with another side which is , what are we gonna be targeting our market that identifies our product as better than because it doesn't have teletext it has ta-ta-ta-ta-ta . So we're really probably , in terms of marketing , are looking for that's that's a cost winner rather than a fantastic new feature product . industrial designer: So we're gonna be removing the teletext out of any T_V_ that we people use our remote with . project manager: But there's also the potential for mark there's a market here for our lost teletext . project manager: For example someone that just goes to the shop that wants a replacement wants it as cheap as possible . marketing: That's what I'm that's what I'm talking about is is that we have to find something that is gonna be very attractive about this product 'cause somebody , some people are gonna be hap unhappy 'cause it took they can't ac access their teletext . 'Cause we're talking about eighty percent or ninety percent or ninety-five percent of the televisions out there are are teletext . marketing: So so it's it's not that I'm criticizing the product at all . It's just when we eliminate that then what do we bring ? What are we bringing in to take the place of this , project manager: 'kay . industrial designer: So then the double R_ will be our our project manager: On the product yeah . Can you handle that black and yellow ? user interface: I think one of industrial designer: I tho I tho I thou I think Rol Ro Rolls-Royce might mind , but don't worry . user interface: I think w , yeah , one of the things that we should also keep in mind when we're doing this our company's slogan is we put the fashion in electronics , right . So I think our kind of our target here is to have some kind of very like sleek nice look remote and we want it to be functional as well , but I think one of the main selling points is that we don't want it to be clunky like like this thing here . We want something that looks nice and it's fashionable and so marketing: So you have this ? project manager: Nah . But click it on off ? user interface: so you all know me , I'm the Industrial Designer . And we've some basic components that our remote is gonna need , just basically every remote'll need 'em . we have to decide on our our user interface , which is his department , but the in user interface is also a major component . we need a programmable digital signal processor to to take the input from the user and translate that into into electronic signal , which we pass to the infra-red L_E_D_ , which you aim at the television which and it receives that signal . And we also need to have the if we want a universal remote we need to have encryption codes for the different makes of T_V_s . So we need to know all the different you know all the different signals and so that'll require some memory as well . You ha the v the power source is in the upper right-hand corner there , and you can see that we have the user interface here which is connected to the chip which does all our signal processing , and then passes that signal on to the infra-red L_E_D_ and that signal is then emitted and received by the television at the photo-transistor . So those are the basic components that need to go into this and everything else is pretty much open to move around . marketing: Now is would this be considered just a standard user interface: I think any des marketing: This is not this is not cutting edge technology we're talking here . user interface: Yeah this is just this is just a basic layout of ev of all the components that w w are gonna be absolutely necessary f to have a working remote . We can add things in like if we wanted some voice recognition , that that you can kinda say would would fall under the user interface and the digital signal processing chip . project manager: Do we have an idea of costs of different components ? user interface: well the most the most costly components are gonna be the chip and the th it could als basically the user interface and the casing are gonna be expensive as well . user interface: the L_E_D_ and the the transistors and everything else are you know they're they're pretty cheap . So depending on what we want our functionality to be , the chip could be expensive or it could be cheap . user interface: depending on the n amount of memory we need in there and stuff like that and h and h you know how much power . user interface: but and I think a significant part of the cost could be the actual the actual casing itself and and you know the the b the buttons and things like that , I think . project manager: And you wanna get industrial designer: When we're fighting over it's also more lot more fun . project manager: View a slide show , that's what you wanna do , yeah ? Just go up to view . you guys know me , Pedro , and what I found is we want to do fashion and I think , honestly , we should keep technology low and just simple basically and try to aim for design . If basically a case will will cost the same if it looks good or bad so we ma we have to make it look good . project manager: industrial designer: And although mo most people will buy s televisions and everything for that have loads of loads of little functions and everything and they mostly end up using simple functions and little things and most the people won't won't get too mad of actually having to go the to the s to the television to , for instance , tune in their the stations . So as for what I would recommend for the the interface design , and I will change the colours on the on the logo , but we should go for the user-oriented device , so simple controls and good ergonomics . and although I th I th I'm still here recommending the teletext so I'll remove that , I guess , but we should go for the project manager: But I t I think what the the management recommendation was less that there's a worry that teletext will become outdated rather than we shouldn't have it . So I I still think if it's cheap enough functionality-wise to include , it really should be in there . project manager: Because otherwise we're just going to even if it's necessary or not , if you if you're given the choice between a t a remote with teletext or without when it really if it i if it isn't more expensive for us to k make because as far as I understand it , it can be operated with the same set of buttons , yeah ? So it should be in there . I in the very beginning it said with the with the advent of computers there's gonna be the it's gonna be out-moded teletext . How does how does computers and teletext h how why is one eliminating the need of the other ? I don't understand that . project manager: Well maybe what we're getting into here is the the idea of Internet through the T_V_ for example . industrial designer: Yeah the they're basically aiming at saying that you would use you know a couple of years ago teletext to be the easiest way to check like for the scheduling and the next programme and stuff like that user interface: Scheduling . marketing: Yeah 'cause , yeah , I just I don't see the cross-over between computers and television . I do see the cross-over in some sense , industrial designer: Yeah , but it's not happen yet . marketing: So so if we make the cross-over and we're gonna view television on computers then we're then we're losing the the necessity of the remote . S user interface: Unless you have a project manager: Well there there is a for example on digital T_V_ systems you have you can press a button and you can buy things in adverts , user interface: Yeah . project manager: A a family member of mine has got a system where you just you can Yeah , and there's other features for example on other systems where you can pause live T_V_ and things like that . They're just features from the Internet from computers are are coming into the T_V_ sort of under the covers , but you still use it through a teletext . project manager: So now the things to think here are that that there's gonna be more functionality , potentially that we can handle . And all of those require the other commands with more complexity and more software and user interface: I think a lot of that's proprietary anyways . If if it's , for example , a trainable one then we're just simply having like an up , down , left , right , an okay button or something like that might might do as well in future proofing it . industrial designer: Yeah but we would increase the price to try to make it a trainable one , so project manager: . One way the other teletext was there but I guess we can remove it or , you know , make two separate interface designs . user interface: I think if it's possible you should try to you know have a talk with management about that . marketing: I I don't see the logic in elimination of teletext , I just I I project manager: Yeah , and neither do I in fact . industrial designer: project manager: I'll communicate that back to those guys there a a and th the message really we wanna be sending to them is that , although teletext may become outdated w there's no l logic in not having it in there anyway i if it doesn't affect the price . project manager: but I I think what they're pushing us towards here is in terms of thinking of ways to future-proof our system for future systems that have something else other than teletext maybe . project manager: I dunno I'm industrial designer: Yeah but we're not putting some there's no no putting anything in in the place of teletext . marketing: So so w we can't go and pump a whole bunch of technology into this thing project manager: Yeah . So if we drop if we are gonna choose to drop teletext , again what are we adding to the product that makes it marketable ? project manager: . So if we're keeping it basic we're loo loo what we're looking to sell it basically is it's just being very easy to use , looking exceptionally good , that sort of thing . marketing: I don't I don't see it , and to me if I'm gonna market a product for b for beauty for for design I'm gonna I'm gonna try to market it at a much higher price . So I would market this product it at eighty-nine Euros and come up with some really beautiful exterior design or something th but but I don't think we have that flexibility . project manager: But i if design if design is cheap and functionality is basic , then twenty-five Euros is probably a high price for a commoner garden stan standard T_V_ so the place remote the then the place we're going to justify that cost is through through design through making it a a sleek elegant high-priced basic remote . Does that make sense , huh ? marketing: No I no I I understand what you say , project manager: . marketing: but what I'm what I'm , okay we probably need to move along , project manager: Yeah we probably should . marketing: but my my concern is trying to find a marketing niche for this product , project manager: We we're doing alright for time . marketing: and if I'm coming in with a with with twenty-five Euros , which is mid-market price , then what am I going to give these people for this ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: No just I I would I would advocate for continuing teletext and those would be the basic commands . as for , you know , the the case design maybe I'll come up with more concrete ideas . Right now it's just the idea of simplicity and slickness , cute and small user interface: Right . I'm just thinking you know with all these universal remotes that are out there , how many people how many people actually use every feature that ar you know i like these trainable remotes and things like that , where , you know , it's just so confusing to do to use all these functions . Where I think the largest portion of the market is just gonna you know they lost their T_V_ remote , they need another one that'll work with their T_V_ . They want something that looks nice , that that that isn't gonna break when they drop it , that you know that maybe it's it's ergonomic , it feels good in your hand , something like that . user interface: I think that's gonna be where you're gonna find the biggest , you know , market share . project manager: So we are looking for something that looks good and just works , rather than looking for any special features . Is that user interface: I think the more bells and whistles we add , it's just gonna cut into our into our profits . user interface: Because I think as we as we add costs for things like for like if we add the voice recognition and things like that , I think you know what percentage of the of the of the market is actually gonna use that ? project manager: . marketing: Oh P Pedro , I just want to say quickly I I would really like it when you can come up with some more bells and whistles , eh . industrial designer: marketing: You know sell things come to my mind is something that's voice-activated . I know we're getting into some , I hope , some big money on this thing , but project manager: I think that's probably a question more for for this guy here , yeah . marketing: 'Cause and I think of voice-activated I think of of how many times I've I've lost my my remote and I can't find it . So some way that I can I can find my remote by clapping my hands or something user interface: I'm trying to find some bells and whistles 'cause when they talk about tel taking out teletext , it's like , what are we gonna put in ? What makes this thing attractive ? And it's only for televisions . So we everyth our our competition out there has got these these multiple adaptors where they can use 'em for their V_C_R_s , their D_V_D_s , their their televisions and we're coming out with one remote for television only . marketing: I I I don't s I really have to say I don't see the market niche for this product . I'm I I go along with this , because this is what we're given to try to market , but I I don't see the market niche for this product without without some really sort of something really special to identify it as as unique in the market . industrial designer: I think technology we'd we we're not in the price range to do it . We don't have the money to do it towards t f technology so we should we should aim at design . marketing: Okay well , so so that's up to you then to to make this box in something that's absolutely extraordinary . Does any of the the features that Pedro's spoken about here have any implications we might not have thought about on in terms of just pure functionality ? In terms of making it work or the cost of that or user interface: I don't I think all these things are pretty standard . marketing: Well you know for marketing f marketing for me is and how do I go here ? Okay . user interface: No no no marketing: Is that right ? user interface: you just get off that . Yeah , what for me is it I d I don't know what I'm marketing right now , okay , 'til you spoke and when I wrote this , I don't know what I'm marketing . I just know that I I was identified as a a we identified ourselves as a as a developer , as a manufacturer , and as a as a distributor t to other wholesalers . And so the th the twenty-five Euros that we've identified as the sale price is a wholesale price rather than a retail price . so what I did is I I decided that that this this needs to be a product in a in a sense can market itself . So I say inspiration , so having something beauty , something attractive , something that in a sense will sell itself . cutting edge technology , I don't think we're gonna have that , these were ideas I was putting together , unless we come up with some New Age product a as far as the casing is concerned . I I wanna make this thing something that I can identify as special in some way , so maybe we can have some I I talked about environmentally sensitive , maybe we have a product that can be identified in some way as advantageous in a home . I wanted to talk about who we are as a as a corporation , that we're new , we're aggressive , we're competitive , we're we're trying to provide a product from a new perspective rather than from an old corporate line . marketing: we're kind of in the middle of the market , but what I'm seeing is that the market is ready for I I identified new technology , but again , because what I see is budget restrictions and limitations , I don't know that we can bring any new technology into this thing . user interface: And it's kind of along the s lines of environmentally sensitive , and it may even fit into ergonomics , and even kind of address the issue of losing losing the remote , what we were saying it's a common issue . user interface: what we can do is , well you know that batteries throwing a aw remotes run through batteries like crazy . Well maybe not a solar remote but instead what about if we had like a power cradle ? marketing: But solar user interface: Like a a cradle that is is there to hold the remote when you're not using it , so you'll always know where the remote is 'cause you have to put it back there to charge the remote , and we can , instead of having instead of having , you know , replaceable batteries we'll just have a power cell that stays there for the life of the remote . And also you can I I think it's a good opportunity for the user design or for not just for the user design , but also for the just for the look and feel of the remote as as a whole . You know you could have some kind of neat little , you know , a sexy design for d a cradle and the remote itself . marketing: But boy , we can sell this thing , because there's no batteries , it's environmentally sensitive , i we can identify it as a safer product in some form . I really see project manager: Now the the question is can we make this for less than twelve-fifty per ? marketing: But the cost i No no . project manager: We we well do we necessarily have to change the end cost because Can we dl can we do that without changing it twelve-fifty per product , if we basically can sell more based on this ? marketing: There's I don't see it anyway . user interface: Well marketing: I my reaction is no , but user interface: what I can do is I can d look into ho well Pedro and I can look into how much this might increase our our costs project manager: user interface: and you can look into what kind of effect an increased cost is gonna have on our on our final numbers . project manager: Yeah we we can certainly push for a more expensive product if that's gonna be marketing: Well , see I I see I I'm an advocate to make this an exclusive product . Let's make this thing really exclusive , environmentally sensitive , high-tech design , ergonomics , all of this . If you don't have one , hey what kind of remote do you have ? Oh you've got one of those , oh fantastic , I want one of those too . user interface: I just don't know about that , because in order to do that in order to price it at that kind of level I think we'd need to have every functionality that all the other competitors are offering like being able to operate , you know , the D_V_D_ player and , you know , the stereo system and all that . And additionally we're m maybe not supporting teletext project manager: Nah , I think we can say with certainty now that we are supporting teletext . marketing: user interface: But I do think there are some basic features that we don't have that a lot of other remotes are going to have . marketing: Yep , one one thing I don't understand is h they've they've given us this package , okay . I don't think it's our place to create their product for them , maybe it is . I don't know what kind of role we have in this in the corporate ladder , but to me it's like , okay , you have got your here's our ideas , okay . marketing: And then let them look at those ideas and they say , yeah well , we can we can raise the price twenty percent , you know we like this idea , this idea no , but to me it's it's about a choice , do we follow their directives or do we make presentations back and and then and then discuss ? beca I I do not I do not see the market niche for the product that they're handing f handing us right now . I think our market niche is basically people who need who have lost their remote or who've broken their remote and don't wanna send back to the manufacturer , they just wanna run out to the store and get a remote , and then they're gonna look on the shelf and they're gonna see ours is the nicest looking remote . These aren't I I think that it project manager: And and th to get to back to another point , sorry for cutting in but , I th I think it's important to remember that that this remote has to work with multiple T_V_s , yeah , 'cause it's selling on its own . project manager: It's not going to be specifically for Hitachi T_V_s or or whatever . project manager: So technologically , if I understand it , T_V_s T_V_ remote's working exactly the same way as video remotes and D_V_D_ remotes . All you need to do is train them to the individual one , all you need to do is is know the the f like some four-digit code . marketing: project manager: So saying that it works with all T_V_s is equivalent to saying that it'll work with D_V_D_s and other things . industrial designer: Yeah y y you you wouldn't marketing: They've identified this product limita project manager: We have done this . marketing: That's why I say I don't I don't see the market niche for this . marketing: If we if w if we were going to have a product that worked for D_V_D_s , V_C_R_s and everything , then I can see the market niche , project manager: marketing: And it's like whoa we ha in my opinion we have to go with something that's extremely exclusive to make this thing marketable , user interface: Well here's project manager: And I I'd marketing: because who wants just a television remote ? project manager: sorry . user interface: If you're in the market for this ultimate remote , you're not gonna go for just a television remote . If it can't control if it can't control your your D_V_D_ player and a al if y if you can't get that all-in-one ultimate remote , that just you can throw all your other remotes away . marketing: That's why I say I quest I q I question the marketability of the product . user interface: So that's what I'm saying project manager: The the one thing that that that you said really struck a chord with me here in that we're we're carrying the corporate identity with the product , but we're actually looking for a large profit at the same time where I'd be inclined to go back to upper-level management and say like let's just cut down our profit expected on this product because we are actually branding our company here . We're trying to get mind-share about Real Reaction to to the people who are gonna buy consumer electronics . We want people to eventually say , oh that's that's Real Reaction that's a good m make . And and we're gonna make it we're gonna win mind-share by either being a fantastic product industrial designer: project manager: or for it working , it just being good , reasonable-priced , and solid . So if we can make if we can put an emphasis here on it not breaking I think that's in itself an extremely big thing . marketing: W okay if you if you drop the cost , now if you make if you make go to the other side of the cost scale , and you make it less expensive , then all of a sudden now we're going into an a a new market area . So we can say low-cost good design , beautiful , wa-da-da-da-da-da . project manager: Is twenty-five Euros a mid-market price for a remote ? marketing: project manager: Okay . marketing: for for multi for a multi-function remote , that's a mid-market price . In a discount right now you can buy 'em on sale sometimes for about about eighteen , nineteen Euro , project manager: Okay . marketing: and that's for the multi-functions , D_V_D_ , V_C_R_ , catch-alls . And and they have 'em in a little box in the middle , and and this is the consciousness that most people have about replacement remote controls . We have to have something that will change people's thinking to identify this as advantageous , and I don't know what that is . project manager: Well I'd be inclined to say , if we can make the design better than any comparable remote while reducing the cost , then that's the way we really should play it . If we can take it down to you know fifteen rather than twenty-five and make a low profit-margin on it , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Or my d project manager: And I can communicate this to to the more senior people within the company here to to get a reaction . user interface: What about the idea that I had with the cradle ? How do you feel about that ? project manager: Well how does everybody feel ? user interface: Or how does everybody feel ? marketing: I I well we g we're talking about the other end now . user interface: No , but I that's the thing I I don't think it's necessarily the other end . marketing: I like the idea , but we have t we have to find out project manager: The other the o the problem with that in my mind I just think off-hand as a as a consumer , would I wanna buy that ? And I think maybe not because I've got a remote and I'll take it to different chairs , I'll take it to different user interface: It i if it is gonna be somewhere that you put it down then it needs to be at the side of your armchair , user interface: Right . So it's very good for some people but it's not a like user interface: Well it lasts it would last for several hours on its own power , but when you're done with it you put it back in the cradle . project manager: You have to d shift down the side of the couch to find it and put it back and user interface: project manager: I d I d I d I think it it in my mind it doesn't seem like something that oh I'd really want because of that fact . You know if we're gonna go in this direction , to me we're going to the other side of the cost range . marketing: Are we gonna make this selling selling the cost as a high high-tech environmentally sensitive whatever , or are we gonna go to the lower side of the range ? Again I don't see our market niche in the middle for our product yet . project manager: So what do we think maybe we should Pedro , do you have any opinion on it ? industrial designer: we should keep it simple , medium-low cost mar cost area and make it look good . marketing: W a question I have in in a 'cause I I I think I agree with you on , we gotta make it a box . marketing: Can can can we have multiple designs ? Have a modern , have a traditional , have a you know , and so so instead of them all looking the same , people can have maybe four or five different designs they can choose from . I don't know what that creates cost , or user interface: Well the the problem with that is we may end up with a whole bunch of inventory of a of a poor design you know . industrial designer: Yeah , complicated but user interface: but what we could do is some kind of well Yeah we we need to , have a few designs to look at and then come up with something that I think we all agree is , you know , the best fit . I think w what's really important is it has to look good , it has to feel it has to feel good in your hand , project manager: Yeah . user interface: it has to be durable , it has to a and I think it's really important that it doesn't look cheap . I think I think we have to make sure people look at it an and feel like it its like a quality remote . marketing: What ab what ab what about a a remote that's that doesn't maybe look like a remote ? Just an idea . Maybe that could be part of our design exclusivity , is we make a remote that doesn't even look like a remote it it opens like a telephone . user interface: Or what if it looks like a pen ? marketing: Doesn't matter , yeah . user interface: A pointer ? marketing: It That's the thing , I'm gonna keep thumping on . I really un unless you guys are die-hard against the fact that it's possible like it reduces the usability of the remote b and the fact that you can't lose it on your own , I think it still might be a good idea to investigate having like a power cradle . user interface: Because I really think i in a certain sense it almost like for me I would want to have that just , because I know at the end of when I'm done watching T_V_ that when I'm done , oh I better go find the remote and put it back where it belongs . project manager: there's al there's also remote controls I remember that that worked , this hasn't been done in a while I think , but th as a as a watch . user interface: As a watch ? project manager: Yeah , there is remote control watches , user interface: 'kay . project manager: but I think they're a sorta eighties thing , so it might not be easy to market in it but the the technologies came along and it might be cheaper to make now . marketing: One thing I just thought about when you were saying that , is that the p our target market is gonna be someone who has lost or broken project manager: user interface: That's what I was saying . So how many remotes do they wanna buy ? Can we p can we sell them a remote that can maybe guarantee they will not need to buy another one ? user interface: Exactly . marketing: And so with with with this kind of system or locator or something , to to think about , how have people been been losing or breaking their remote ? user interface: user interface: And also presumably they've marketing: And and then and then design the product , maybe some component of the product that can identify this as the last one you'll ever need to buy . project manager: Well if if we're going down that then we can we don't need to go the user interface: Exactly . project manager: it it strikes me that the locator feature might actually be quite expensive to make . project manager: Whereas actually just putting it in a power cradle might not be too expensive at all because that's just done with mobile phones user interface: True . project manager: you can just n we we have said we have actually similar products that we can take from and potentially cut costs there . project manager: need to look into whether we can do that but I think we we have some m mobile phone-based products checking quickly our Internet . marketing: It's just it's that I think it's telling us to stop our meeting . marketing: So we have the c we probably have have on-line in our in our system , we have the ability to create this , we're talking about . project manager: without it being too In fact we can cut costs through using the manufacturing that's already gonna be in place here . marketing: If if we can create this we have probably five or six or seven really strong marketing characteristics . user interface: I think one of the things that we can put right on the box is , never buy another battery

The group aimed to create a new product that was visually appealing, long-lasting, and environmentally friendly. However, there was a slight difference in opinion between the User Interface and Marketing teams. User Interface believed that the product should have basic functions, focusing on ergonomics, durability, and aesthetics. They argued that most people only buy a new remote control when they lose their old one and need a replacement that works with their TV. Therefore, simplicity was key, and advanced features would only add unnecessary costs. On the other hand, Marketing wanted the product to be exclusive, beautiful, attractive, and environmentally sensitive. They wanted to incorporate their corporate identity into the product and make it stand out in the market. However, due to budget constraints, they couldn't use cutting-edge technology and had to prioritize the exterior design.

Question: Why did the Industrial Designer prefer rubber casing as the best material option? What were the team's discussions about the use of advanced chips and LCD display? What recommendations did the user interface designer make regarding the casing material of the product and why? Article: , on the agenda for this , for this particular meeting , we'll have your three presentations on what you've done since our last meeting , after we came up with some general ideas of our design . And , then we have to make some key decisions on , on our remote control concept , and how we're gonna make it , what materials we're gonna use , and that sort of thing . I've been doing some research into the different components that we could use , what's available to us f to actually make the remote control . , first of all we have to look at how the remote control is actually made , and what is it happens inside the casing , which is more your field . , thes main internal feature is a circuit board , which contains all the elec electronics and also the contacts with the power source . , there are several components of , the circuit board that we need to consider , where we'll be getting them from , what they'll be made of . , diodes , transistors , resonators , resistors , and capacit capacitors all need to be considered as well . project manager: Are they all included , like mandatorily , or r are these different options ? industrial designer: these , they're all different options , they're all separate , apart from the chip , which we will probable decide whether we buy a simple , a regular , advanced . , all the other things are individual components that we'd have to get in separately , and work out the most , like , effective circuit , including all the wires and everything like that . And the L_E_D_ of course , that's a light emitting diode . So , we could , so we've got flex flexibility with colours and things , with that as well . We could use a basic battery , but that brings with it , like they need to be recharged and the bulk , the size of it as well . There's a hand-powered dynamo which is a sort of thing that was used for torches fifty years ago . project manager: What is a hand-powered dynamo ? industrial designer: where you manually charge up the power . project manager: Just every , every once in a while ? industrial designer: Like you wind up something . marketing: industrial designer: Whereas kinetic energy is a new idea that's being used by some watches and other devices , where you just shake the device and it gives it power . , or there's solar power , which we've been considering inside a building , which is where it's gonna be used , might not be quite so useful . , lots of considerations for the case , like what sort of shape it would be , curved or flat . I know I've had a remote control before which you couldn't tell which was the front and the back , user interface: industrial designer: 'cause it had so many buttons on , and the shape was so symmetrical that I'd be pressing like a volume button instead of the on button . industrial designer: we also can choose what materials , the we could use metal , we could use rubber which might be more ideal for the anti-R_S_I_ . It's like the same sort of rubber that's used in stress balls and things like that , so it's very like soft , not so stressful on your hands . user interface: industrial designer: I don't think that's quite up to date with what we're looking for here . We've developed some we've got some good advances in technology , with our research team have found some new multiple option scroll buttons . I think that was brought up for , they're basically quite a flexible design , modern , you don't have to use individual buttons . It , it industrial designer: project manager: we would have to have an L_C_D_ industrial designer: Yeah . We're going on to that later with the advanc with the L_C_D_ that means we'd need a really advanced chip . industrial designer: also we've got the integrated pushbutton , which is what we're most familiar with . It's not been seen before , so it could be quite a , a novelty factor , attractive as well . And also energy saving 'cause you're producing the energy , you don't need an external sort of battery supply or solar panels . industrial designer: Rubber casing I thing would probably the best , if we're going for the anti-R_S_I_ and like more choice with aesthetics . And probably the regular chip as opposed to the simple , marketing: industrial designer: then we could possibly have the scroll and the push , but no L_C_D_ , 'cause we probably can't afford that one . , one concern with the rubber casing is that it would be rubber encapsulating all of these chips and diodes and delicate technology as industrial designer: Another thing is it might be more difficult if it's a rubber exterior talking about putting on interchangeable plates . project manager: I don't see how a like a rubber plate going on top it would stay there . industrial designer: Maybe if the , if it was just kind of a , more of a rubber coating which was on to a case . user interface: W industrial designer: So , it was kind of , the whole thing would be removable . user interface: Well , there's , there is a certain phone that has like a rubber casing , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: you can get sort of outer casing for iPods and something , that's just it's protective as well . industrial designer: it would reduce the impact if it was dropped or something , as well , 'cause it wouldn't damage itself so easily . I , is it possible to put designs onto this type of rubber ? industrial designer: As far as I know . industrial designer: I thought that was project manager: But I think that it's worth it , kinetety , kinetic user interface: Yeah , tha marketing: user interface: marketing: I guess it's a bit scary 'cause it hasn't been done before . marketing: Yeah so there's there is a one battery , because most remotes use two batteries I believe . marketing: So , if it was running off of one battery as a user interface: That would be good yeah . user interface: Maybe we could you were saying about solar power ma maybe not working indoors , but a lot of calculators , yeah , have solar power . user interface: So maybe that could be incorporated as industrial designer: May maybe that could be the backup . user interface: Do , do those calculators industrial designer: s but some marketing: So , if we're doing user interface: yeah . If we're industrial designer: But thing is , it's not you don't need the solar all the time . It can be like you can have the solar energy and then it can store that energy and use it . industrial designer: I suppose it would be really annoying if you get to think , oh no , I forgot to charge my remote today . industrial designer: Like if the kinetic thing , I think what's best about that is that it's instant energy . industrial designer: You don't have to , you know , you can shake it a few times , or whatever . Instead of you don't have to like make sure it's in the right place to charge and . It's the aspects of a computer system which can be seen or otherwise perceived , for example , heard or felt maybe , or by the human user . There's the graphical user interface , which emphasises the use of pictures for output and a pointing device , for example a mouse for input control . I'm not really sure about the pictures that maybe that's on an L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Do you think it's project manager: Yeah , 'cause industrial designer: So I suppose sometime project manager: I'm sorry ? industrial designer: after you . user interface: project manager: because command interface requires you to type textual commands and input at a keyboard , so the numbers are sort of like a keyboard . user interface: So you must , for the graphical user you must need some kind of presentation for the graphics . industrial designer: I s I suppose where on some buttons you would have like the power would be s some kind of symbol . industrial designer: I know we're not having that , but a similar thing , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: you , they have there's a like little picture with a screen with lines across it , which I suppose it's that sort of thing like the , the symbol on the button . industrial designer: But if we're having a simplified display anyway , w that , we probably won't have to focus so much on that . project manager: Yeah , we'll be doing industrial designer: It'll be more the on the numbers and the volume . It'd be more a command interface , and then industrial designer: I suppose we need to think of symbols for like the volume , display , and stuff like that . marketing: So it's just draf graphical for the pointing aspect ? industrial designer: I marketing: The infrared is like , that's considered a project manager: ? user interface: No I think it's to do with the actual symbols that are on the , that's on the buttons of the remote control , and per marketing: Okay . So when it says pointing device that doesn't include industrial designer: For inp user interface: Well it could be a wee scroller thing , and something could come up on the screen . user interface: But I think we're gonna go with the command interface anyway , project manager: Yeah . project manager: What do you mean ? user interface: Like I can't think of an example , but Sort of like little pictures rather than project manager: Oh yeah , like how the buttons user interface: Like a little sound . project manager: So , it's a keyboard in the shape of it , right ? user interface: Yeah m perha yeah . user interface: the co we've decided that the command interface would be the most useful for a remote control . , the remote control would be cheaper to design , so that we'd have more money in the budget to , target the design area of the interface . We , we also have to keep in mind when we're designing our , more user-friendly remote control , that a lot of interfaces consist of a clutter of buttons , that , that their functions , colours and forms aren't always helpful . So , that doesn't improve the use of the produ product , so we need to come up with something that's easy to understand . user interface: Does anyone have any questions ? project manager: Do you think that we should keep all the buttons to one same colour , just to keep it , give it a simplistic look . marketing: so and , and we might , depending on what comes out of the design , we might have to stick to just black buttons . user interface: But project manager: But what about the lighting up effect ? marketing: You mean different colours for the lighting or project manager: well , I thought we had decided that we would if you touched one of the buttons they'd all light up . industrial designer: So there would have to , have to be some parts maybe transparent around the buttons , or something . user interface: In the phone that I was thinking of as well , when you change the covers of it , the , the little buttons that actually , you know , that contro control stuff , are behind the rubber . project manager: If it's flat then , like o like on a cellphone or a mobile phone , it's like all very flat , and you just have to sort of press down on these tiny little buttons , but user interface: Yeah . 'Cause if it's just like constructed in the same way as like the front cover of a mobile phone . I don't think it would matter that the buttons were bigger through the , the top casing . I'm sure you could f work it out to fit in the casing , without causing too much difficulty . , the first one is that there should be a fancy look-and-feel , instead of the current functional look-and-feel . So , I think we've done a lot of talking about that , just with lighting and the buttons and the face-plates . And the recent fashion update , according to fashion-watchers in Paris and Milan , is that fruit and vegetables will be the most important theme for clothes , shoes and furniture . , also , in contra in contrast to last year , the feel of the material is expected to be spongy . So , my personal preferences here , of course , as we , we've already talked about the personal face-plates in this meeting , and I'd like to stick to that . The fruits and vegetable themes , I don't know if that's going to work for us . marketing: So maybe we I've seen a lot of purses with olives on them , you know . marketing: But I I think , I think if we stick to T_V_ based , you know , maybe T_V_ shows , or project manager: But they still need to fit into people's decor though . we don't have to make something in the shape of a strawberry , but it could have the curves of a strawberry , or something . industrial designer: Or just like you know really make it a quite abstract , if that's fits in more with what we're doing . It doesn't s quite fit in with the trendy well , obviously it does , if that's the current theme . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: But may maybe we could go more directly , I don't know . marketing: One thing I was thinking though is project manager: marketing: I dunno if you all remember from our kickoff meeting , we talked about our favourite animals . marketing: that might be getting , you know , too specific , and we should see what the success of the first face-plates are . marketing: And , did you have any questions ? Pretty straightforward ? project manager: Yeah industrial designer: Yeah . Have you guys been saving your PowerPoint presentations to the industrial designer: I didn't for the first one . project manager: Does anyone know how to take it out of , user interface: Just escape I think . industrial designer: Or do we just project manager: But would a backup really be necessary ? will people just use the battery if there's no , if there's , industrial designer: I think maybe we could just go for the kinetic energy , project manager: if there is backup . industrial designer: I think project manager: There's like no reason why it wouldn't work , right ? industrial designer: yeah . industrial designer: Is everyone happy with that ? marketing: So if it's not working they just have to shake it a bit and that revitalises it ? project manager: Yeah . And that linked in with what buttons we would gonna have , so project manager: Right , and we were going for more simplistic style , right ? industrial designer: Yeah , it was user interface: Yeah . project manager: I think we decided on the pushbuttons , right ? industrial designer: so that's the simple . project manager: Would we need a more advanced one for the lighting , the interior lighting system ? industrial designer: Yeah possibly . project manager: Yeah ? industrial designer: So , it's probably gonna be the regular chip that we're going to need . , does this , is this dependent on shape , or what it's made of , or what ? industrial designer: So th I think this is just like gonna be the a very outer case , which we will decide on rubber . I , I I'm sorry , I've lost my PowerPoint thing , so I can't remember what it's ca it's the component industrial designer: Your screen ? marketing: Think it was called command interface . What's that all about ? user interface: I think that is marketing: project manager: user interface: well we haven't really made any decisions about what we're gonna do about the cluster of button functions , colours and forms , in the in consistent use . Like what what are ideas to combat these problems ? project manager: user interface: You know how different interfaces are very different , and can be confusing because because of their difference , and because of the different clusters of buttons that they have . project manager: what are our choices here ? user interface: Well it's just w where where shall we locate the buttons . What kind of functions wi shall we have ? project manager: You mean like we'll have the numbers of the channels , and we'll have the channel-changer , and volume , and power ? industrial designer: The power . Like I don't know if we should go into like adjusting light levels , things like that , because different televisions will have industrial designer: May yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , it was minima marketing: Do you remember that ? industrial designer: well , it wasn't the l project manager: Yeah , it was hardly ever used really . Yeah , and surely that would be like quite specific to the individual television , user interface: Yeah , each television . I think most of that comes like on the i individual television set itself , user interface: You don't change that often , yeah . industrial designer: doesn't it ? I'm sure it has its own buttons , so you don't necessarily need to have it on remote . project manager: Like we , I don't know if we can make a remote that would be universal to all the different kinds of industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: So we're just going for power , channels , volume , project manager: Volume . Some T_V_s will have the option of like living room style , movie style , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and that , they say that's used zero point eight times an hour , which is actually somewhat high . user interface: It w it would seem silly if we'd having anything else , just have an audio button though . project manager: Yeah , user interface: Do you know ? project manager: I don't , I it's , it's a problem with the international appeal , I think . user interface: But we industrial designer: I've marketing: Yeah I guess that it affects the marketing , 'cause it , it is a good sales ploy to say , aren't you annoyed with remote controls that have all these buttons . project manager: Yep , and the user interface design , so this is where the trendy stuff comes in . user interface: project manager: And , your personal coach will give you the rest of the information of what needs to happen . So , anyone else have something to say ? industrial designer: I just have one question about the whole fruit and vegetable aspect . industrial designer: Are we seeing as that was the most popular thing that came up out of your market research , I thi I think we should keep to that rather than moving to animals or something , because even if that may not seem obvious to us , if that's what the surveys brought out , I think that we should probably go along with that . But you're happy to go ahead with the fruit and veg ? marketing: Now do you guys need want an idea of how many are you gonna come up with casing ideas ? industrial designer: Y Yeah . user interface: What I What I was thinking what do yous think of this ? , having the numbers kind of like , not a bunch of grapes , but you know like purple and kind of in a triangle . user interface: That's just industrial designer: We can have a look at those ideas , yeah . marketing: So it's a something that will , you know , appeal to the fifteen to twenty five year olds <doc-sep>marketing: So do we need to re-train Mike on how to put his mic on ? project manager: We may do . industrial designer: Think s marketing: Okay , can he get it all by himself this time ? project manager: I dunno , I'm feeling like a big boy . Pro marketing: industrial designer: Probably not , 'cause he's 'S been listening to too much . We're gonna all do a presentation , and then hopefully we're gonna make some decisions now . you've got a printed a printed circuit board here , and you've got all these buttons which kinda press down little rubber nubbies into these little holes that activate marketing: project manager: We've all broke a remote control ri s yeah . industrial designer: marketing: I've user interface: So you've also got you've got your chip here , your batteries here , and some sorta electronics . industrial designer: Yeah there's a thingy and a dingy and project manager: You press this and it does th user interface: Well marketing: Yeah y do jabber user interface: so you've got here's here's a transistor , and this amplifies your signal , industrial designer: user interface: you've got the L_E_D_ here on the end of the on the end of the printed circuit board . user interface: So we've got a i in this in this drawing he in this example here , this is a eighteen pin chip I dunno . You can use a basic battery , which we've already discussed , th our tech department also said we have the option of doing some kind of hand dynamo where maybe you crank it or something like that . user interface: I don't know if that's really marketing: I I gotta I gotta flashlight , and user interface: I don't know we got some qu crazy guys down there in that department so industrial designer: project manager: Okay . user interface: So that's the next bullet is the the kinetic provision of energy , marketing: And that's on the camera . user interface: we've got solar cells , which I don't think is a very good idea because you could not use your remote at night which doesn't make a lot of sense . project manager: Okay so we basically have battery versus cradle here ? user interface: M battery versus cradle I think is yeah . project manager: It's actually a novel thing because you could sell it a as a novelty , just to be actually serious for a minute here , user interface: Yeah . project manager: you could user interface: Well it is it is more it is more eco-friendly than the than the cradle 'cause you're still using power off the grid with the cradle . Our material choices are a plastic latex ty or plastic , a rubber latex type thing , wood , or titanium . If we go with titanium we're gonna be limited in the amount of shapes we can do because it's tough to shape the titanium , and Yeah pers project manager: Wood wood would ge would give us a little bit of a marketing niche , wouldn't it . user interface: I I can't see anybody wanting to use a wooden remote , it's just anti-technology really , you know . We can we can o we can accentuate whatever whatever product you put in there we can find a way to accentuate it . user interface: And what we may be able to do , and I think this might be the best option is to combine some a couple of these . my recommendation personally would be to do some kind of a plastic inner shell with a like a rubber outer shell , to make it to mak like a thick plastic inner shell and a t kind of a to have that rubber outer shell to make it more durable , and also maybe i I think it feels a little better than the plastic . user interface: Yeah marketing: And if you make it from that super rubber , when you drop it on the floor it can bounce right back up in your hand . user interface: The advantages of working with plastic and rubber is w we we'll have a lot more options just in terms of shape industrial designer: marketing: user interface: because you can extrude plastic in basically any shape you want . So and then we can cover you know the breakable bits with rubber yeah so project manager: Okay . user interface: But basically these are curved and double-curved I I believe that the tech department , in their in their message to me , that they were referring to the number of th curves in the bottom . user interface: but that's what they told me , uncurved , flat , curved , or double-curved . industrial designer: user interface: I would guess this like this pen would be kinda like a double-curved , where it's curved on m m multiple axes , right ? I think curved means just curved in one axis and double-curved is curved in two axes project manager: Okay . project manager: I think it might mean something like that sorta shape because a double curve rather than a marketing: - yeah that's yeah that's what I see . okay , with the interface we have the following options , we can u we can use push buttons , we can use a scroll wheel with an integrated push button , and L_C_D_ display , marketing: Ooh . so these are all options that the user interface guy can has at his disposal to put together a user interface . A simple chip , which is the least expensive , but I have no numbers to give you , project manager: user interface: a regular chip , which is like the medium porridge the medium expense project manager: D do we have actually any concept of what the difference is between a simple chip and an advanced chip ? user interface: Yes the difference is , with a simple chip a simple chip will operate oh why doesn't this scroll up ? Previous previous , okay . user interface: an advanced chip is required to to operate the L_C_D_ display , and it didn't say specifically , but I I have a hunch that a regular chip is gonna be the scroll wheel and the multiple scroll wheels . project manager: Technical functions or interface concept ? user interface: I think industrial designer: Oh interface concept . user interface: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Well that doesn't bo bode well for it for it tats as well . It it it you'll be you know be affected by the by the other speech and user interface: If the T_V_ is working , yeah . project manager: user interface: That's just it'll if somebody says up in the middle of a television show , it's gonna change the channel . industrial designer: Yeah and and fighting for the remote would not be fun anymore , user interface: So industrial designer: and I think that's one of the things we wanna keep . project manager: But what if you actually had to press a button to make it recognize ? So if you pressed it and went , up ? industrial designer: That kinda would r d user interface: Well then why don't you just press the up button ? project manager: Man yeah . project manager: But if it's just one thing with a button that you can just go Up . user interface: Even still there's gonna be interf th there's there still will be interference from the T_V_ . user interface: It might not be it might not be completely confusing , but I think you'll still y it's still marketing: user interface: I don't think it's practical at all . industrial designer: Yeah so taking that away , our the the the rubber but rubber buttons are the more reliable project manager: You guys know your stuff . industrial designer: it's the the ones that would al would allow us to to market our product as being you know less prone to damage and more resistant to things like spillage of liquids over it or you know mistreat misuses as it happens to remote controls . Well , we wanna small r remote control one side because we want it to be cool and designed , but apparently market shows that bigger s bigger remotes get less lost , user interface: That I would believe . user interface: industrial designer: But yeah I think we we need to compromise between those two and somehow we'll do that . so the the what I would propose is something more or less in the direction of what is to yo the right of that slide but without with a l a less complicated design , so the numbers , the volume control , and channel control , and teletext access . the volume and channel control can just become those the the four button array as in if it was a round dial . industrial designer: And if you just think about it as the one to the right but with the numbers and the four buttons plus maybe a centre one with teletext . project manager: So we're suggesting doing a sorta scroll wheel thing for the volume ? industrial designer: Ye no it's not user interface: That's not a scroll wheel . industrial designer: i i it's just four buttons that are on a cross , project manager: Nah . user interface: Instead of play , stop , rewind , and fast forward there , that's up , down , louder , and quieter . industrial designer: Yeah yeah so I think we w we go for something mid-sized , so something looks good marketing: industrial designer: and is not too prone to get lost . When I s when I see the when I see the product I I I I don't wanna buy it . There's nothing about that product that makes me wanna choose that product over other products that are out there . user interface: Are you talking about the picture ? That's not our that's not our b design , marketing: Yeah yeah . user interface: that's just a that's just something he a a graphic he used to show you the layout of what the layout of the buttons might be like . Okay 'cause 'cause right now I don't have too much to say about how to market this product because we don't have a product to market yet . marketing: And from from talking to Mike is that we have we have we can market a more expensive product now . marketing: And and so yeah I'm a I'm a little bit stuck right now in that what w what is it that I'm gonna market ? without special or increased marketable features I don't believe the product has a consumer demand . I like the idea of of the scroll makin there are so many people making these products at this price right now . What are we gonna do to make this one special and unique ? user interface: What's special and unique about a scroll ? marketing: well I don't project manager: It's cool . I say that it's different I what I'm looking for as marketing is m give me something different . I give me a lower price , give me a higher price , give me some new technology , don't give me the same thing that everybody else is putting out there on the shelf it's f at the same price . project manager: I'd I'd say though that we if we did make the decision to go with the cradle though , the then we have that as well , marketing: What i if when when we have project manager: but wi with a similar marketing: yeah when we when we have something like the cradle or or something give that's as as a marketing standard I need something to market , to make this product unique . user interface: Well right I think the two big th points that we have so far are the having the cradle and also having the the actual design of the case itself having like this like rubber shell maybe with a plastic interior , marketing: Yep . Just remember when I made up this report I didn't have the information that we're discussing here . marketing: And and so so yeah when we have a cradle , when we have some kind of design , so what I'm saying is , from my perspective , I don't have a product to market right now . my personal preference is that we make some adjustment in the cost , either lower or develop an integrated new technol technology . That's that is the next step , there's technology and then there is technology , which we're moving into the next phase . industrial designer: marketing: And so we're gonna have some new technology to enhance the marketability . Yeah again I'm not sold on the product because we don't have a product in my opinion yet . project manager: So now marketing: If you if you give me if you give me a cut-out of what everybody else has then I need to I need to find a lower cost . project manager: So our big questions here really are cradle or not cradle ? Do we go basic or do we go for features ? d does anyone really wanna do anything with the scroll wheel or should we ditch that off-hand first ? user interface: Well my question is what would the scroll wheel do ? Function-wise , what does that do that project manager: Oh but that was in your presentation so wh what would you imagine it doing ? marketing: Yeah wh wh what's the wh user interface: Yeah . Well it's it's just another way to do the exact same thing that the buttons do . project manager: 'kay industrial designer: But would we marketing: Okay now what I see with the scroll wheel is everybody has buttons . So from a marketing standpoint I have I have another door to walk through when we have something that's unique . marketing: If it creates something more complex or more expensive , then I don't know if that makes it a marketing necessity . But again , from a marketing perspective I want as much new and different about this thing as possible because we're we're co it's a very competitive market . project manager: What I understand about scroll wheels is they're they're quite expensive to to make . project manager: So I d user interface: Th they are gonna be more expensive , but on the other hand , it it is an alternative if if you think that's gonna sell some some you know if if we're gonna make up the extra cost by extra sales I think maybe it's worth it to do it , but I would just use if I was gonna do this I would just use the scroll wheel for s channels up and channels down . user interface: No we can we can do multiple scroll wheels but project manager: Well I d I like the idea of basically focusing the my personal preference is focusing the p the product on the idea of the the case the the dock to put it in to to charge it . project manager: And if we we keep the rest in a format that is durable because th th the whole product's gonna need to be more durable th thus because you're not going to be ditching it as often . I think we got some exclusivity in that , you know , we got something that nobody else has right now , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and and that means we can we can make some adjustments in the retail or wholesale price if we need to and it also can create it's own demand from it's uniqueness . project manager: So our big decision then is like how do we do like we have to decide on the details and we have to decide on well n not exactly the details , but d do we have What type of casing ? I personally like what you were saying about the plastic with the rubber . project manager: user interface: I'm thinking yeah something like kinda almost like these pens , you know , where there's you have plastic bits and then it's not really rubber but just kinda like a fused the plastic with rubber on the outside . Just a very thin sorta sheet for a a grip , sorta thing or for user interface: Well no ma yeah maybe a bit more then th is on here but ju just as a kind of an inspiration , these pens I think are are kind of project manager: Okay . So then if we d d do we want to do anything more basic with the more advanced with the user interface in terms of do we want to go for buttons , or do we want if we're ditching the scroll wheels do we want to go L_C_D_ ? Do we want to give do we want to have anything else on it ? industrial designer: It's only a T_V_ . user interface: Or from from my perspective I think L_C_D_ is a mistake because this is a universal remote and all you're doing it's you're not gonna get any information back from the television , so the only information you can display on this remote is what channel you just sent it at last and there's just not a lot of information , you know , there . user interface: So I I don't see any reason for having an L_C_D_ 'cause it's an increased cost . Yeah right now there's right now there's nothing coming out of the T_V_ to receive , so you know unless technology changes and information starts coming out of the a cable box or something there's no s I don't see the , user interface: Right . project manager: Okay so the question is now I guess we need t to decide on well y you guys basically have to now go and figure out the details of this thing . marketing: project manager: So , what we need to know in terms of marketing and project management are are there any other questions that we need to answer now before you guys can go and build this ? marketing: project manager: What what overall things have we not decided on ? user interface: Well we have to I think for me it's still not exactly clear exactly what the inter user interface is gonna be . There's the scroll wheel , in or out ? What do you guys like in the user interface ? project manager: I think maybe in terms of marketing , is that gonna make enough of a difference to justify the cost ? marketing: Again . Well I think it's it's the more uniqueness you can bring to the product , the easier it is , I believe , for me to market . And so we can go with the same thing , but we're gonna be com competing in a in a broader market than if we go with something unique . You know the other thing I thought about was you know , do we go to something like this ? Make a remote that doesn't look like a remote . It's just another it's just a an idea , and I don't know user interface: Well I dunno about like the flip-phone idea , because I think , as far as durability th it's not a big well maybe when it's closed . marketing: what I see one of the things one of the things you brought up in an earlier presentation is , when you got children , their their stuff gets inside the circuitry , they get dirty , they get messy with drinks and stuff . marketing: And what I keep throwing out there I just keep throwing out ideas to try to make this thing look or act or in some way identify itself as unique or different . project manager: Yeah and I guess th th the question th th that you're being asked right now is whether is the dock enough of a unique feature to be able to go out and sell that a a as a a very different product , or do we really need the scroll wheel as well ? marketing: Oh okay project manager: Because the scroll wheel comes at quite a cost . I think if you can have the base station with a with a locator , I think those are two very strong features , user interface: Well marketing: if that's something that can be integrated without a bunch of extra cost . user interface: The The locator's gonna require a radio transmitter , which will marketing: project manager: That's gonna n is that gonna need a better chip as well ? user interface: we're probably gonna have to go with a like a medium chip , s I would imagine . marketing: So it's just I I think that's user interface: It should be a really simple signal though so marketing: I know personally that would be a very attractive feature , is to have a have a button I can push to find my remote control . project manager: And it's presumably gonna need a little speaker in it or something like that as well to beep . project manager: But I guess a little tiny speaker is gonna be quite cheap , it's not gonna need q quality , is it ? It's user interface: Oh yeah yeah . marketing: Or maybe you can like have a a smell-o-rama , you know you push a button and it s puts out a stink . project manager: marketing: You can industrial designer: Maybe not marketing: project manager: Makes your living room more fresh as you watch . I think that user interface: So the scroll wheel , in or out ? project manager: pr my personal preference is out . I don't think the cost is justified for a little bit more uniqueness when we already have that , and I don't s think it's obvious and natural how it would be used . Yeah I think we have like and it's not very usable and it will bring down the robustness of the whole thing , project manager: . marketing: user interface: I don't know exactly what the increased cost is gonna be , but I think he does have a point , i it might push somebody over the edge when they're looking at our at our remote versus something else , when they see this one has a scroll wheel to go up and down on the channels . project manager: But then that that surely d depends a little on the T_V_ marketing: W project manager: because some T_V_s are quite slow at changing channels from like so user interface: Sure . project manager: if you've got a scroll wheel and you s you have to scroll scroll it really really slowly just so that you're actually keeping in pace with the T_V_'s ability to to change channels . project manager: You scroll it a bunch of times and you wait for it to user interface: Well I think wh what it would be is like like the m like this , where it's maybe you know a digital wheel , right , where it's where it's quantized into you know certain project manager: . That's where you user interface: That was that was my my intuition of what the scroll wheel would be . marketing: user interface: It's just it's basically it it's just a f look and feel thing . marketing: I I think there's you know that there are so many people today that are that are surfing are television surfers , and I see the scroll as a as a great mechanism for surfing . project manager: Yeah if you're just sitting there going marketing: Instead of going button-to-bu you just j you'd j j j j j j . user interface: Now just just so you know though you did bring up a point which is very valid , is a lot of T_V_s won't re the T_V_s won't respond exactly the same . Some of them are gonna be kinda slow switching , so you may like queue up like fifteen channel changes , and it'll be like flip , flip , flip . user interface: But project manager: You could basically make it so that it'll it's just gonna be sending a signal to the T_V_ yeah the T_V_'s ge so if you send about five flip channels , if you did that it's gonna flip once . user interface: Yeah it just might be frustrating where you can't make it go as fast as you want , project manager: Other than click click click . user interface: but I think once people get used to it I I do like the idea of the scroll wheel though . project manager: And if we're marketing it as a high niche product , then we're gonna be selling it to people who are buying good T_V_s as well , yeah , presumably . marketing: Now the the only thing I I on the interface side of it , is that I I I see the dilemma . But if we have the option of of scrolling at any particular speed , or the option of jumping direct , okay . marketing: So I can go presuming I have , on my television , something that tells me what channel I'm on , I can scroll direct from channel five to channel thirty two . So I don't know that really that's that's gonna be a a d problem , 'cause the television can go automatically from channel five to channel thirty two with the push of a button . marketing: So ca can we can we create that kind of interface within a scroll system ? You understand what I'm saying ? user interface: I think I know what you might be getting at , or or project manager: Oh I see so if maybe if we had an L_C_D_ up the top that just did a number on it , right ? And then it that basically marketing: Oh no we could read it from the television . user interface: Well , what about this what about if you can programme in your favourite channels into this scroll wheel and you can just like roll through your favourite channels , project manager: . user interface: and it c it project manager: You'd need a display on the th the thing . user interface: Why ? It'll tell you when you flip the channel on the T_V_ . You say programme start , and then type in marketing: Put user interface: 'cause you still have the typing you know you'll still have the keypad where you can type 'em in manually . user interface: So programme start , zero , one , enter , zero , five , enter , thirty eight , enter , programme end . project manager: and that just basically flips between it and it'll go it sends out zero , five , and then thirty six , and then zero , one again . project manager: That's not gonna be too expensive because that's gonna be you're gonna be able to nab that off of computer mouse manufacturers really . user interface: Oh well we also have to determine in some manner how to switch between modes , between going through your favourites list and just hitting up one , up two . marketing: Or we go directional up we go we go this we go this we go this way for one , we go this way for the other . project manager: Yeah people are gonna have their favourite sorta , whether they do that or whether they marketing: Ah-ha okay . user interface: I think we'll need a we'll need a mode switch , but then if we have a mode switch we're gonna need some kinda indicator project manager: Just the lights behind the buttons . user interface: to which , an L_E_ an L_E_D_ project manager: You could have back-lit buttons maybe . And if we're making back-lit buttons period , do we want that just for the mode indicator or maybe to indicate what button you're pressing at the time , so that you know if it's actually pressed or not . Just so you know I think it was my understanding that before we were gonna stay in the mid-market range . project manager: Yeah well we don't have it's not that we have more money , marketing: Didn't you say so ? project manager: we can push up the the price . marketing: So I don't know I don't know whether having user interface: I just wanna make sure everybody's on board with it . So we really need to be sure as to what we can push the cost up to , though we haven't got to a stage where we're ready to pin down the price of components . But I'd say what sorta price are we looking to be able to sell something like that , and what sorta price can we make it for ? marketing: Well I think th I think the design and technology has to come back and say , okay to create this product we see it's gonna cost us this much for this volume , because we do have a volume target of of fifty million profit . project manager: Yeah no I I think that's where we really should be more flexible than anything else because as we said in the last meeting , our management is really looking for us to push our brand . project manager: so I think the the profit expectation for this one product is maybe not as important as being able to marketing: Okay I'm I'm okay with that . I guess what I just want to me the next step is for these guys to come come in with the design proposal w with the cost estimate attached , and then we have to take this to the next level . project manager: But th what's our ballpark as to what we'd be able to sell something like this for ? user interface: Well y yeah . Let's let's try and think now , how much would you pay for marketing: We have to find cost . user interface: with all these features how much would you pay if you went to the store , and you were in the market f to replace your T_V_ remote , how much would you pay for that ? project manager: But you've gotta think who our target market is because I I'm not our target market . project manager: I'm a student , but on the other hand I would think , with my Project Manager salary , I would think yeah I could probably afford this user interface: If industrial designer: user interface: Then you could probably afford this . If I had a cool new T_V_ and this was r looking really slick and it had the dock and it had the scroll wheel , which I think's a really cool idea , that would sell me on it a little . I do I don't think I'd go over a hundred Euro certainly , that would be way too much , user interface: Oh no no . project manager: but the I would be happy paying over forty for it , I guess , but not much user interface: I would say thirty five to forty . marketing: Because one of th one of the things we're marketing about this product is that this is the last one you will ever need to buy for your television . industrial designer: Okay so we'll come up with something between thirty five and fifty that is rug rubber , robust , with scroll wheel , with the new facilities of the scroll wheel like favourite stuff , favourite channels , and and with a cradle , and yeah and the locator . The next meeting starts in thirty minutes , although does it ? It starts at three twenty one , the next meeting . marketing: Well I have Is my three twenty one is the next meeting ? project manager: The the ne next meeting is three twenty one yeah . project manager: Okay are there any other questions with regards to what this thing's gonna do , look like , how it's gonna work that need to be addressed before we really look at this in a lot of detail ? user interface: I don't think so <doc-sep> , first I'll I'll discuss the buttons we just chose , show you some samples , discuss some colours and design maybe , already . The channels buttons , one to nine , and off zero to nine , and the button to choose higher channels than nine . the volume and channel quadrants , left and right , up and down arrows , to do the volume and channel . industrial designer: user interface: well what's pretty standard is that it's that they're all pretty high marketing: Large . project manager: user interface: So it's it's not really very clear what's the function of that . So , that's project manager: Can you go back one page ? For the menu , what do we use for that ? We don't have buttons for the menu . But user interface: So , how project manager: You have to put it on the user interface: Like this . user interface: well I don't I don't know if we have to discuss this already , or in the next meeting . industrial designer: user interface: But , as we have to to to design the the case and the whole remote control in our our our corporate company colours and the logo , I would recommend a yellow case . user interface: yeah so good good icons on the buttons , and and big buttons is my personal opinion . marketing: project manager: industrial designer: at first we will I will f say something about what younger people want , marketing: Okay . And then , I'll discuss what my opinion is about the costs , about what battery is in it , what kind of buttons also . Maybe it's nice to get a remote control not like all the other ones , straight and flat and long . But to give him the shape of your hand , so you it's easier to use or something like that . And then , I'll have to discuss about the costs of all the things for the remote control . When you want to go m move up , you just scroll up and click on the button , if you wanna see the next , if you wanna see that channel . And that's also easy just w when you have a thing like this , and you get it here . , but then we have just a basic remote control , and I think there are a lot of those things , and people won't buy it any more . And I think our budget is too low to use and an L_C_D_ , and the chip who is more expensive . And maybe it's also then thoughtful if we u use as different kind of shapes for the for remote control , that we then use the primary colours . But , thi i This is with an L_C_D_ ? No , industrial designer: Not with an L_C_D_ . industrial designer: but l when you see a menu on the television , it's like you see one to twenty , you go s scroll up , and push number tw twenty . marketing: can you give an indication in b in the cost difference between the chip with L_C_D_ or without ? industrial designer: I got it on my screen and it was higher . marketing: I think if we have an L_C_D_ , it will also sell a lot better . marketing: And that might bring back the costs industrial designer: But then we'll I think we must discuss who what will be better . Or , a more hand-shaped remote control , with scroll , without L_C_D_ . So , well how we did do that ? , well we made an investigation of the market , by Trendwatchers . And well , what did you find ? , we have two groups , young and trendy , and the old and rich . Well th and the young and trendy , they they starting to like fruit and vegetables as a theme for n clothes , shoes , and also products . So , we m must not just only look at what the trend is now , as it might be totally different next year . How w how we how we make it ? project manager: Yes , a concept on industrial designer: marketing: project manager: Just industrial designer: Shouldn't we first discuss about like what w we all marketing: Yeah . , what do we want ? industrial designer: Yeah , but if I paint with project manager: I'll paint . marketing: We have this , and we had the idea of an a more like sh in the shape of your hand . user interface: industrial designer: M like Yeah I can't dr I can't draw it . user interface: marketing: A g project manager: So , it has to be soft ? marketing: . And , the buttons ? industrial designer: So , you can squeeze in it and Sorry ? project manager: Buttons . industrial designer: user interface: But but i that's the only scroll button on it then ? industrial designer: But now we use one scroll button and the other one is here . marketing: And i if we go to industrial designer: If 'Kay c If we do If we use one , then we'll have just a switch on it , and you'll just switch it , and now it's the sound to switch back user interface: . project manager: It's better in marketing: If we have a menu , how do we choose other options ? industrial designer: with the menu button . Just not like all the other ones , with this thing , and here an arrow , here an arrow , here an arrow , here an arrow . project manager: But if we don't have a L_C_D_ we don't have a menu . project manager: Yeah , but again maybe th How do we know the T_V_ can handle it ? industrial designer: user interface: project manager: You don't know . It's like some sort of teletext option , but we don't have teletext . industrial designer: And if we put an L_C_D_ thing on it , then the costs will be much higher . industrial designer: And this has to be harder , because when it falls , it mu mu must not burst . user interface: industrial designer: Paint it ? marketing: user interface: industrial designer: With the scroll thing on , like this ? project manager: One with two scroll buttons and one with without . industrial designer: So ? project manager: And the one with with a menu has an L_C_D_ . user interface: But if you put push the the menu button project manager: that's the menu . user interface: Yeah , wh what Yes , but you don't know which of the scroll buttons you have to choose . marketing: industrial designer: But is it easy to use ? When you have it on your left side , and project manager: When it's not too big . marketing: M yeah , maybe it's better if the scroll-wheels are industrial designer: Separate , more separate , h yeah . But would it be easy to use then ? If it's like you have a big project manager: industrial designer: project manager: Very good . marketing: But , industrial designer: Personally , I think two scroll buttons aren't easy to handle . industrial designer: No project manager: Then you go down , you switch , you go into the right , you switch , you go down . But is it Does that break , a joystick ? Or a small one just like in a laptop . industrial designer: A small one like this , like a Nintendo k project manager: No just like in a industrial designer: Playstation thing . project manager: Oh the sh Yeah , but then you can industrial designer: Just like a Playstation thing . project manager: So Maybe , if it's possible , it's not too expensive , I think a joystick is better . industrial designer: No , that's okay , I got marketing: And on the L_C_D_ , how much it costs ? , it costs extra ? industrial designer: they're not in details . project manager: industrial designer: It's more expensive or less expensive , huh ? project manager: Yeah we I think you get it . industrial designer: And that's project manager: And , we If you use the L_C_D_ , we have to industrial designer: the most expensive . So , the shapes of the design depends on the L_C_D_ and But , it has to be small . industrial designer: Or shall we just put it on the pistol thing ? And then just put also on L_C_D_ on it ? project manager: If you have pistol , it L_C_D_'s not easy . industrial designer: If you have a joystick on No , if you have like an a ni a Playstation game controller . But , the easy of user interface: But that's marketing: th the ease of use wasn't the most important aspect of it . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: So marketing: project manager: I think it's clear

The Industrial Designer suggested using rubber as it is softer and cheaper than titanium, which would exceed the budget. Rubber also offers more flexibility in terms of color options. While rubber couldn't be used as the interior to protect the innards, a rubber coating would help reduce the impact if the remote control was dropped. The Industrial Designer also presented the option of using both simple chips and advanced chips for the mouse. However, using LCD display with the advanced chips would significantly increase the cost. The Project Manager agreed that the LCD display would be convenient for using the scroll buttons and viewing numbers, but decided against choosing the advanced chips as young people may not have their own room to afford an LCD TV. The user interface designer pointed out the limitations of using titanium, as it is difficult to shape. Wood was also deemed unsuitable as it appeared anti-technology. Instead, the user interface designer recommended using a thick plastic inner shell and a rubber outer shell, which would be more durable and provide a better feel.

Question: What were User Interface's thoughts on the voice recognition system, user interface design, button features, and prioritization of features for the remote control? Article: Then I'm going to talk about the project management , what I'm going to do , and , of course , I'm doing the project management and secretary both , okay , to take the minutes of the meeting . And I have come up with the management come with the new proposal , okay , and I have to discuss a few points on this . the one is the teletext becomes outmoded , okay because if because of the computer systems and the new technology . So we don't need to consider really about the teletext all in our new project design . And the third point , it's very very important to establish our marketing or corporate image , okay , with this new project or new product . So I will invite Agnes , can you go to the third slide ? user interface: No , this is the third slide . user interface: Do you want the mouse , or do you want me to industrial designer: I'll do the notes . project manager: industrial designer: So well I I figured we should identify some user requirements , and from my experience , I wanna , and from research I did , the the device has to turn the television on and off the first time you press on the big button , you can't can't have like waffling on this point , you know . project manager: industrial designer: Really have It needs to be able y y have to be able to find it . So , I also , since we have to establish our corporate image on the basis of this new product , thought we better look at things that are popular and ex go beyond those , and , as I said in the first meeting , and then we might wanna talk eventually about the materials that are appropriate to use in in the construction , especially in the the the outside of the product project manager: industrial designer: so that it gives the appearance , and it is reliable , and so forth . I did a little history on the the remote controls and when they were invented and so forth , so , I guess this guy Zenith created the Flashmatic , which I kinda like the idea , 'cause it made me think of maybe the remote control made a big flash when you turn the T_V_ on and off , that might be interesting . And so it was highly directional flash light that you could turn the picture on and off , and the sound on and off , and change channels c so I think those are still requirements we have today , fifty years later . industrial designer: And it was really a pioneering innovation , but it was sensitive to the sun , so that it would get would start off by the you'd get it would easily cause problems . So , I in addition to looking at the the functional requir so all these devices are examples of where they represent examples that are available today which I think the one in the middle is r really something to keep in mind . And it would y you'd you could throw it at things if if the T_V_ didn't turn on and off , you could use it for something else . And since I'm not really Industrial Designer , I didn't really know what to do with this slide . But I just took some different schematics and I put them into this , and I guess this is what a slide might look like if you were drawing a circuit board . So , personal preferences , user interface: industrial designer: I think we could I I'm really thinking outside the box here , and I think that we should consider perhaps having an an an a a size a remote control that changes in size depending on the user preference . user interface: industrial designer: So something that's very very flexible and inflatable and then you could shrink it . I think it could either be you could go either one extreme , be very colourful , or you could make it clear , and kind of blend in with things , so you didn't have to have a problem with the th the decoration of the of the user's home . I think it needs to be waterproof , because sometimes they fall into cups project manager: industrial designer: and , you know , it might be out by the swimming pool or something like that . if you mi one of one of my requirements was about needs t to tell you when it's done its job or not , because half the time , I keep pushing on the remote control , and I don't know if it's actually understood my message , so I think it should give you some sort of an oral cue . So , marketing: industrial designer: that's those are my f preferences , and that's my presentation . project manager: Yeah , let me interrupt you if you can add other facility , other feature , like unbreakable . project manager: Okay , because especially today , you know , you have the family and the kids , user interface: project manager: okay , and the kids throw it and they they play with their remotes and . Okay , so if you can add the feature , okay , for your fabric whatever in your outline design okay , with unbreakable , okay , I think that will give a lot of advantage for our product , if I'm not wrong . project manager: Okay , thank you Christine , and any questions or clarifications , or any discussion on the functional design ? user interface: Do you have any preconceived ideas in terms of materials ? 'Cause , for example , in the unbreakable thing , doing something plastic would be harder , industrial designer: . user interface: whereas having something like , I dunno , steel or titanium isn't really economically viable . industrial designer: No , I haven't really I wanted feedback , I think we need to rate rank these , but we'll see what your personal preferences are and your thoughts . industrial designer: you know , nobody told me how mu what our financial objective is , so project manager: Yeah so industrial designer: It'd be hard to inflate something ou made out of titanium though . project manager: Yeah the the I'm sorry because the last meeting we supposed to discuss about the financial thing . marketing: I don't know , project manager: Okay , marketing: I think verbally we can we can pretty much sell . project manager: I will I will send you a mail , okay ? The project may be the the project aim , okay . Okay , that maybe Eddie will talk to you about how much the price and what's how much its cost for the manufacturing and how much it's going to be we sell in the market . This remote control , okay , it can be for like universal , to use for any T_V_ . Okay , and it will be slim , okay , and industrial designer: Not fat ? project manager: Not fat . But let's try it , okay , with the different the designs , okay , the functional designs . project manager: Okay ? So any other questions ? marketing: from her side , I don't think there's too many more questions . Thank you Christine for time being , marketing: If you can come to the project manager: so then Ed , so can you tell about marketing: Okay , from the marketing yeah , from the marketing side , just to to give an idea what the management is looking for , I was looking for a a remote control to have a s user interface: S 'scuse me for one sec . marketing: I have a sales price of twenty-five Euro , with a production price of twelve and a half Euro . For what I think from what we're trying to find , we're tr we're looking for , I don't think that price is exactly in the market . marketing: I'll explain myself here now in the sense that in a in the recent surveys , from the ages fr from fifteen to thirty-five , eighty percent are willing to spend more money for something as fancy as trendy . project manager: marketing: Twenty-five Euros , that's that's a preson reasonable price . Now if we're gonna take a risk , and push this up a bit , make it more expensive , project manager: Yep . But , I think there's one other thing interesting two things that are interesting is that from the fifteen to thirty-five year-old group , which always spends more money on trendy new things , speech recognition is requested . marketing: And we're talking between seventy-five to ninety percent of this group is willing to pay for speech recognition on a remote . That might be a possibility , even though it costs more , to be the first on the market to produce this . industrial designer: marketing: So maybe one word speech recognition commands , say remote , and there's a beep beep beep , and they can find it through , you know , ten tons of newspapers , magazines , whatever you have at home . project manager: marketing: But , in the cost that the management is looking for , that's not gonna be possible . But if it's trendy , if it's fancy , it's got some colour to it , if it's very easy easy to use , if it's got simple remote speech remote control , like I said , louder , softer , change channel , on , off , remote , it goes beep beep , I can find my my remote without spending half a day looking for it and getting all upset 'cause I can't turn the T_V_ on . So we're gonna have to look at it in a in this global idea , with the ideas of the industrial design . So what do you think about the design ? Do you think you can make it or industrial designer: D I'm sorry ? project manager: What do you think about the design , what he was talking about of the speech recognition ? marketing: Speech recognition . industrial designer: So might we can perhaps do it if the user is willing to spend some time in the training process , it could reduce th th the overall cost . And so , maybe what we'll have to do is add something where you can recharge it wirelessly so that y you know sen send power to it . So or maybe set it out in the sun and it , you know , gets , from the light , a a solar cell inside there user interface: . user interface: It seems also like with the speech recognition , yeah , it's a great feature , but if you're watching T_V_ , there's a lot of ambient sound , and it's words . It's actual speech , so then you have to make sure that the speech recognizer is good enough to filter out the T_V_ speech , and the the user's speech . user interface: But if someone on the screen is saying the same thing , all of a sudden , you have someone in a movie saying off and your screen dies , because they've triggered the remote control and it's turned off your T_V_ . So , I think if we can find a speech recognizer that can handle those types of problems , then yeah , it'd be a really good marketing gimmick . marketing: Because tha w with speech recognition th I'm not that good at that idea user interface: marketing: but th if it's a one-word recognition , 'cause I know with telephones and cars and things I've seen in the States , user interface: Yeah . marketing: Because I think s with speech recognition , if the the remote or like the telephone it has a exact word that it has to hear . If somebody's speaking on the se the television , they're not gonna stop and say remote , user interface: No , I think it's a great idea if we can design it to to suit those requirements . No because I this is this is years ago in the United States where we're driving down and he said call home , and the telephone called immediately user interface: Yeah . project manager: Well , what I can suggest to you , Christine , okay , if you need some the technical feedback , or some training , okay , about this facility , especially for the speech recognition , I can recommend you some companies like Intel or I_B_M_ , okay , because they're already in this speech recognition part , okay . Okay , and if you want , I can coordinate , okay , to get some information , okay , and you can let me know , okay , so what kind of the details you require okay , to add this feature in this project . And we need to know how much is the timeframe you need to develop , apart from what today . marketing: From from your side , you're gonna have to go back the management and s be more s precise . marketing: a risk , take a risk on the market ? Something that's gonna cost more , but could very easily s make a boom in the market ? project manager: Yes . project manager: but end of the day , you're the sales guy , so I will come back and sit on your head because you are going to give your sales projection , marketing: user interface: project manager: okay . It's of course it's good to tell the management how much it's cost us marketing: And , so I don't mind to convince , okay , the management to spend some more money on the project , okay , if you can make out of marketing: Obviously . project manager: Yes , okay I don't mind to convince the the management , user interface: project manager: okay . project manager: The management says , okay , so they they don't want certain facilities , which it's already worked , okay , they want something new , okay . I think like speech recognit definitely they will agree , I don't think they'll say no for that , okay . So if you have any new ideas , okay , for your you can always come up and you can tell me if you need any s special , okay , coordination , okay , between any technical companies , which you can hide their technology backup , okay , for your functional design or technical design , okay , then I am ready to do that . And what's your comments about user interface: well , maybe if I go through my presentation , you can sort of see what the user perspective is , and how it ties into the other two comments . So , basically , the method that we usually use in the user interface design is that we need to look at what people like and what people don't like about existing products . And then , what the good ideas are , and what the bad ideas are , and why they're bad and good , which isn't always as obvious . We seem to have intuitions about why things are good or things are bad , but when you look , technically , at how it works , sometimes that's not the case . Then we need to decide what functionalities we really want to keep , 'cause that'll feed into both Ed's work and Christine's work . and then what the remote control should look like , obviously , once we've got a good idea of what the functionalities are . So , in terms of the functionalities that we need , you obviously need to be able to turn the T_V_ on and off . You need to be able to control the volume and then control any menus on the T_V_ to regulate contrast or whatever . So , the problems that people have expressed is that there's too many buttons on remote controls , in general . often , you need to know specific button sequences to get certain functionalities done , which you don't necessarily always remember , especially if it's a functionality that you don't use very often . So , here we've got two examples where here on the left-hand side , you can see a remote control that has lots and lots of buttons . they're hard to see , and okay , they're labelled , but the labels don't necessarily tell you too much . Whereas , on the other side , you have a much simpler remote control that I think basically has the minimum functionalities that are needed . So , I would be inclined to go sort of towards this , in terms of design , rather than this . And if there's specific functionalities that require more buttons , then we can figure out how to do it with existing buttons . So my personal preferences are to keep the number of buttons to a limit , or to a minimum , sorry , make frequently used buttons bigger and more strategically placed , so like the on button being really obvious one , the channel changing and the volume , and to keep the design basically sleek and simple . so , that's pretty much it , an I don't know if you guys have any questions or industrial designer: Oh , it's , seems very understandable . industrial designer: and the only thing that I saw missing from your your research that we found was this ability to find the doggone thing when you need it . That's why we're all here at the table , so that if we think of it and our research indicates certain things and w we it's complementary . industrial designer: I also think that th f the the feel of it is , when you hold it , is something that was expressed more in in in in my design user interface: industrial designer: and that's logical and normal 'cause those are the parameters that an Industrial Designer's more thinking about , th th the look and the feel , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and , you're user interface: Oh , that's definitely a very important factor , especially to users who are gonna be buying the thing and then using it almost on an daily basis in a lot of cases , I think . project manager: So for anybody need any help , for time being , on this subjects , okay , so please come back to me , user interface: Oh project manager: and Christine , maybe I can try to help you to get some the technical the companies to help you for make a design slim , okay , and to add some features , like we are talking about , the speech recognition and all . user interface: Should we maybe make a decision about what features we actually want to include , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause we've thrown a lot of features onto the table , but do we actually want to incorporate all of them , or have we missed anything ? marketing: . industrial designer: Do you wanna go back and look at the closing slide , maybe that would provide some guidance ? user interface: Sure . industrial designer: it says user interf so I'm supposed to do the components concept , supposed to work on the user interface concept , user interface: I think we should do as many features as start with all of them right now user interface: I thought industrial designer: and eliminate them later in the process , that's my suggestion . And I'll send you the the minutes of meet industrial designer: You can object if you want to user interface: No , I I'm just thinking in terms of time , marketing: She's objecting . No , I was just thinking is it really practical to start designing something with features that we're just gonna end up throwing away ? , it takes a lot of time and effort for everyone to consider different features , and s if we spend that time and effort on features that we're not gonna use , maybe it's better to spend it on the f thinking more about features that we actually do want , but industrial designer: I think we should take that as an action item for after the meeting , marketing: Oh th we s we still have user interface: guess industrial designer: 'cause w our meeting time has run out . project manager: Okay , what we'll do is now we'll take for lunch break , okay , then we can discuss furthermore , okay , with our areas , and then we will come back again in the in the next meeting . So thanks for coming and I'll send you minutes of meeting , and please put your all information in the sharing folder so everybody can share the information <doc-sep>user interface: No I don't think so it has to be like that yeah and you have to adjust the length . I thin industrial designer: Yeah but the the mic should not user interface: It's not a directional mic , anyway . project manager: So w we will try to structure this meeting with an a with an agenda as presented here . So , We have been provided with some w technical tools to to communicate and to well , learn from each other's plans as I can say so w we will also try to to get acquainted to this tools so they are also new to me I don't know whether you worked with them before . You all know I hope how it's about the new r remote control we are going going to design . project manager: then we will discuss , well , how it should be and wh what what our new product should look lite like . Be we want to be distinguished , ? People want to when they look at the shelf want to think , well that's the product I I need . But then , it also should work user friendly and otherwise people well it will not be be rated very well in consumer articles and like that . industrial designer: project manager: So , the general outline of new project will be we first go through a functional design phase . You all get certain task in this in this phase and then we will meet again and discuss this functional design . And the same holds for the ph two phases after this , the conceptual design and after that a a more detailed design in which the the final project should get its definite shape . In all in front of you you see the notebooks and w n note blocks and we have here a a a a white-board . project manager: And well it should work I've read it from my from some colleague that it should work with some kind of toolbar . I didn't find out yet how it work , but maybe one of you did , so industrial designer: Under documents in the shared folder . Do Do we have to say something about that ? I I I'm not fully updated about this shared folder . industrial designer: Yeah , I guess we'll have a shared folder with documents that we can share . Well , this seems to me , yes , some computer program but I didn't find it yet . project manager: Well , yes , we we should try to t to draw on it and then well it should be smart some way . I I'm not really sure how this works , but industrial designer: Okay , shall I start ? marketing: . marketing: I think for us it's just like a normal whiteboard , but they'll be recording what we write down . user interface: industrial designer: But it's marketing: industrial designer: Actually , I think I cannot go with project manager: You you D doesn't it work ? Maybe someo Maybe maybe Anna , maybe you can start . project manager: So L Why don't you draw your favourite animal on on th on the white-board . industrial designer: user interface: You know ? Pro specially we should next project we should take l like that . project manager: So , marketing: It's not a cat , project manager: that's the cat . project manager: So but that's also kind of cat , user interface: Oh project manager: isn't it ? user interface: the dog doesn't have a tail ? marketing: It's got a tail then . d did you work out cord ? industrial designer: user interface: marketing: And you guessed cats without a tail . industrial designer: right ? user interface: It'll still not extend , right ? It's not up to that . So marketing: Ah project manager: I suppose it user interface: Ah I think you can put that . user interface: I'll tell to get it off my project manager: Ma Matthew ? user interface: ? project manager: industrial designer: And we should sum up its favourite charas characteristics , right ? marketing: So you've all drawn land animals , marketing: project manager: so why not draw an animal from the water . user interface: The cat is going to eat the fish or the rat ? industrial designer: With different pen widths . marketing: project manager: Oh , yes , why not ? industrial designer: project manager: Good idea . user interface: you know it's going to eat the cat rather than the cat eating the fish , no ? industrial designer: Oh . So I dunno if we need to spend time on that , actually But user interface: You should go for the next one it seems to me . when we are and when w you are going to design w we must keep in mind that the selling price of the product will be about twenty five Euros , so when designing a project I also look at you Mael , keep in mind People user interface: Twenty four . industrial designer: project manager: more interesting for our company of course , p profit aim , about fifty million Euro . we will try to to get at a international market so it will be I think mainly Europe and Northern America , user interface: Ah yeah , the sale man , four million . also important for you all is the the product production cost must be maximal twelve twelve Euro and fifty cents . we still have to to make a profit , huh ? user interface: They have to sell at least four million to make a profit industrial designer: Of course . project manager: Excuse me ? user interface: Ah we have to make we have to sell at least four million to make our own profit . project manager: So well I think w when we are working on the international market , in principle it has enough customers industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: so when we have a good product we we could meet this this aim , I think . And now just let have some discussion about what is a good remote control and well keep in mind this this first point , it has to be original , it has to be trendy , it has to be user friendly . project manager: Yes , well i it should have the the the the expected functionality of a remote control . user interface: You need to browse the browse the channels in upward downward way , marketing: . Th th that's very handy I I always miss it and on some remote controls that you can go channel up or down ins instead of retyping the number , especially when you have a lot of channels . user interface: and industrial designer: And just before starting the detailed discussion , maybe we are the marketing guy ? Or marketing: I'm marketing . project manager: So user interface: I thi think you know me , industrial designer: so yeah Just on your web page but yeah not not face to face . project manager: Are there some other very important things to to do well , user interface: So industrial designer: So I project manager: to specify in this first phase of of the project . user interface: And , you'd need the usual ones , like the changing the volume , changing the the channel and then you project manager: Yes . project manager: well I I think w y you two should should , I think , think this over w espec what , what functionality . industrial designer: Actually , yeah user interface: Let's Let's take industrial designer: w Of course , and first before designing the func well thinking about the functionalities , we need to know what are the user requirements . industrial designer: then if they need internet , then we would be able to to p to propose something with T_V_ over I_P_ . But Ninety percent of the time , ninety nine percent of the time , people will be using the main functions , the volume , the different channels , so we can have all the fancy things as well but the main controls need to be very obvious and very easy to use . Keep k keep in mind i it's a it's a twenty five Euro unit , so the the very fancy stuff w we can leave that out , I think . project manager: So twenty five Euro you expect a quite , well normal but good functioning user friendly remote control . user interface: Oh in that case you can you always hook up with someone who is providing that and you know , you you sell their product as well as your product with them , you know . project manager: Yes , but but but ab about the spec the buttons , the buttons that will be on it . project manager: well just just for the next meeting , user interface: L project manager: well , you wor yes , work on a design , keep it general , so w we will be still fle flexible with maybe adding some functions . project manager: you will be working on on technical function design , so user interface: Yeah , sure . project manager: eh ? Does it need internet , or or do do we stay at basic basic television interface <doc-sep>industrial designer: Is there any time for a cup of coffee ? user interface: We have a slight problem . project manager: Sorry ? industrial designer: Can I get a cup of coffee ? project manager: no . project manager: then the three of you prepared a presentation , I think ? Sebastian ? industrial designer: I think so too . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: Then we'll do your one as la the last . the top goal of this m user interface: But you can't upload your presentation from here , I believe . project manager: the top goal of this meeting is to reach a decision on the product , on the target group and and the functions of the remote control , so keep that in mind . the new project requirements , first of all , we didn't speak about it , but we should not support teletext in the remote , because our b board feels that teletext is out of date and internet is replacing teletext . the remote control should only be used for television , because it's not f feasible , it's not w user interface: Yeah . project manager: we we cannot make it because of the time to market that we have to deal with . project manager: the third requirement is that we should focus on customers that are younger than forty , which is important for you , Ruud , and as well for Roo . then for Roo , as well important , the corporate image should be recognisable in our product . the individual presentations , I th Roo or Sebastian , who of you would like to start ? user interface: Yeah , I'll start . the method of the remote control is just the function of remote control is basically to send messages to the television set . user interface: Then I found two different kind of remote controls , the multi-function remote control with many possibilities , but the lack of the feeling I already mentioned in the previous discussion . user interface: And the ease-of-use remote control with the less p possibilities but a great feeling in in touching the buttons . My personal preferences were ease of the easy to use remote control , because the user-friendliness and it can be more trendy in in user design . But it should b I think it should be a combination , but teletext buttons are not in our design . But my in my opinion , the the easy to use R_C_ is the best possi possibility for us . project manager: Okay , so marketing: project manager: the important thing here is user interface: And it's also i indeed Ruud's insight in the in the topic . project manager: Yeah , okay , w we will s we all user interface: Just for for user desi user friendliness I should choose for the the ease of use remote control . well , there are some changes in the design requirements , so there are some changes in the method also . user interface: industrial designer: basically all this device has to do is send messages to a T_V_ set . And the m most easy way to do this is by sending pulses of infrared light to a T_V_ set . Well , I th I tried to implement a picture here , user interface: Energies and industrial designer: but it's hardly readable . The user interface connected to a chip , which is connected to the sender , which generates messages using infrared light , which are sent to the receiver . And there's a little picture , just for your imagination , how a device like this should look or can look . Usually these kind of things consist of a battery , infrared diode , buttons , chips , and circuit board . It's almost every piece of equipment every piece of every T_V_ set is controlled infrared . And I think that's what we w user interface: The glow in the dark concept we discussed . And the whole thing is transmitted by a infrared li diode , and there is not a power source here . industrial designer: and I think we should we should c s succeed in in our plan to do this . industrial designer: personally I think we should infra use infrared , because otherwise our device cannot communicate with almost every T_V_ set . And if we want to use a rechargeable design or a energy-save design , we should really implement them . for cost-effectiveness , we should really use a very low-cost circuit board , because most of the production cost are are in this part of the equipment . industrial designer: And the money we save on using this we can use for elaborate fancy lighting techniques , blinking LEDs and all that kind of fancy stuff . user interface: And what's the industrial designer: I think our users will really will really like that . user interface: if we use the LEDs , i does it use much more energy or industrial designer: No , they're p f power friendly LEDs also . user interface: For the same costs , it's can be in our industrial designer: no , they're they're a little bit more expensive , but by making user interface: Combined with the low-cost circuit board so it's industrial designer: We can we can make its I think . project manager: Yeah , but but the question is whether two or four buttons makes m makes such a difference in the costs if you already plan to include fancy lightning techniques , I guess . user interface: Yeah , I think it's the same as in the cell phone , just light in in the device that that shines on all the buttons , marketing: true . Well , it's not one light , it there are more lights in a in a in a mobile device . project manager: Okay well , industrial designer: project manager: we ar we are very curio curious to what the market will feel about such a product . marketing: But since the other part is forty percent of the market , I thought earlier we might want to constrain that portion of the market . The buttons to zap are used the about fifteen hundred times , when the power button is only used one time . So user interface: Yeah , well it should just have a design The perfect design for those only those buttons . Just one thing I'm just wondering , the sound signal , from where do you execute th the s sound ? industrial designer: Well marketing: Yeah , that's a problem . project manager: Well industrial designer: Usually project manager: maybe maybe like clapping in your hands , user interface: It should be project manager: like turning on and off the the the lights . You press it and your T_V_ set starts to make a kind of weird sound , and your remote controls then start to beep . project manager: But th user interface: But but T_V_s don't have all buttons . marketing: And you project manager: Yeah , because we do not have a a a a a home user interface: But I believe you will have an marketing: Yeah , and usually industrial designer: We do not control the T_V_ set so well . marketing: And even if the T_V_ set would have such a button , you would have to walk to your T_V_ , industrial designer: Yes , m yes . S and we b we want to make so it's is easy as possible for our customers , marketing: and it's project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so we should think about project manager: So what about the clapping technique ? because you se user interface: I'm convinced Sebastian will find one solution for us . marketing: And b project manager: Well , you see it a lot in in light lightning industrial designer: Yes , yes . Well , basically the characteristics the characteristics of clapping is just an increase in the volume , the amplitude of the sound , project manager: Yeah , a peak . industrial designer: But there are many other sounds which are exactly the same from the point of view from a remote control . industrial designer: Yes , user interface: But we can have just a home stat f a base station next to the T_V_ . user interface: Well if you lost th industrial designer: Well , project manager: Well industrial designer: is there not something f something more easily user interface: I don't think people would bother walking to the T_V_ and press that button because they lost the their remote . user interface: that's just industrial designer: No , and y the the most important thing for people is that there's a central point to which they can go and b perform a a some kind of . You do not want another device , which can be everywhere in the house , which you have to find first before you can find your remote control . project manager: Yeah , m maybe w we we do agree on on the thing that the remote should have such a function , if it's possible within the costs and all that kind of things . project manager: maybe Sebastian should have a detailed look later on and come up with a solution , industrial designer: But before I do that I w I want to warn you that by implementing this kind of a function the technical design will become more complicated project manager: And there are some implepe imp user interface: And do we even prefer the sound above the the LEDs , the lightning function ? industrial designer: Well , I I think so , because when you have a p newspaper over your remote control , you cannot see it . user interface: It's a unique item project manager: Yeah , it's a distinction in the market . project manager: and I think it's worth looking and and probably more i interesting than than the lights . user interface: And just about the user interface , I came up with an easy remote control and an advanced remote control . marketing: Well , t we won't support teletext which which was the third-most the second-most used function . project manager: Well , we we do have a wise board , so I'm not questioning that . And we don't have to use it for D_V_D_ players and all kind of stuff . user interface: So industrial designer: we should save costs by not implementing a lot of functions and the money that we can save from that we should use for having a nice design and thinking about the user interface project manager: Yeah . Okay , industrial designer: and project manager: Ruud , how do you feel about that ? do you agree , do you think the market would would respond to a simple marketing: well if we include other innovative functions then they might , project manager: user interface: just a few buttons , trendy design , nice lightning effects wh and the sound . You can make it look like an easy s piece of equipment , but it's quite elaborated , because it has many functions . industrial designer: Maybe it's more important to make the make it look like a very friendly , easy to catch piece of equipment , but nevertheless project manager: But but are we not in in the in the manual if you have few buttons , no display , I guess it's l it's working with with a shift functions and one button can industrial designer: Well , I was more thinking about a more elaborate way of controlling , by by these kinds of sticks or something like that . project manager: But but how does how does the remote report r give back to the user w in what state it is ? user interface: Yeah , I don't know yet . There's no , but there's no way to do that , because we cannot implement that kind of the system . project manager: I know , but but if we use like a stick , for example , industrial designer: W When you move the stick to a to a position , maybe a light next to it can lit up . So you know I've just pushed the button , or I changed the channel or t turned up the volume . marketing: And if you use that stick for volume control and channel selection , you have the m two most important functions in one button . user interface: But does it I then should n just use i instead of the stick , like many cell phones , just a round m well , project manager: Yeah , draw draw it on the board . Oh user interface: It's just an easy way of of a round button what which can be pushed in four directions . user interface: A stick is v vulnerab vulnerable when it's falling down project manager: Yeah , it can break down . marketing: And it's also quite easy to use , so it'll it attract younger people because well new , and it might attract older people because it's easy to use . project manager: Okay , but w we still we're still in the question of putting in advanced options . we can't discuss it right now , because n no one of us have has the information to discuss about that , I think . user interface: Yes ? project manager: We need to have the the user function the functions decided and our target audience . Do do you want a list of functions ? Do you want an explicit list ? which incorporates all function available on the device ? project manager: well , I do not want a full it's not necessary to to have a full list , but I want the kind of functions , for example th the most important are volume and programme selecting . l how is the remote going to look ? Not not in the user interface , but user interface: Oh , and just one function . The the the the programme to programme button , the switch to two channels , when you have something on channel four and something on channel six , just one button which which can change industrial designer: project manager: Mielsen , because I I was writing it down in the last Mielsen . industrial designer: but make a s make a sub-folder for it , because it's starting to fill up already . project manager: And and do we want the ten digits ? user interface: The ten digits ? Yeah , I believe so . industrial designer: Well , are are you sure ? marketing: Well , if you want to go to channel ninety and you have th that button . industrial designer: but is that so relevant ? Because I don't think but you should shou you should know that . industrial designer: Okay , user interface: and I think the most industrial designer: I can imagine when project manager: I agree actually . user interface: Just elder elder people would would buy it , industrial designer: I can imagine when you're when you have a satellite decoder and and you have , well , about six hundred channels , I can imagine you want this . marketing: Well user interface: but industrial designer: But if you're a regular T_V_ user , and you just want to watch the the Dutch television networks , well , you can you can use about ten buttons . industrial designer: Well , marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: but how how often do you watch all these channels ? marketing: and if if we And if we are targeting at the younger audience , they will probably watch more channels than the older people . Don't you think ? project manager: Well , it depends on the on the on the looks , on the on the industrial designer: The design . marketing: Well project manager: You c you can d make them very fancy marketing: And project manager: by Nokia , they have ten digits on their phones and it still looks very fancy . industrial designer: Okay , so you can experiment by with with shape or with size or with colour , that kind of thing . it might be expensive and hard to implement , but it would be a solution for project manager: Okay , speech . industrial designer: So when you add speech recognition to your remote control , it's very easy to change the channel . industrial designer: So maybe that's a possibility , but I'm afraid it will be a bit costly . project manager: If if we would drop the ten digits industrial designer: But maybe when we project manager: but keep the programme and the volume , industrial designer: It's mas it makes it very easy for us to implement the find find the remote control button remote control function . industrial designer: There are some hybrid hybrid devices which incorporate a solar panel and rechargeable batteries . industrial designer: So when you just leave the device in a in a light room , it charges itself . project manager: But But but can we manage it bu for the costs ? industrial designer: You have to do nothing for it . marketing: And if we if we could inc include a c a cradle in which it could recharge , then there wouldn't be a big problem . marketing: 'Cause when project manager: Is a cradle very cheap ? industrial designer: It's Oh , it's very cheap . I would like to hear maybe maybe you all have th things not spoken about , yeah , but that are important . are there other things about the market we should know ? marketing: I think we dealt with the most important information . project manager: Sebastian ? industrial designer: I just want to make a summary of all all things spoken and the different possibilities . So on the outside it looks easy , but we can make it easy on the inside or elaborate on the inside . But I think there's a big advantage in making it more elaborate by implementing speech techniques , voice recognition , that these kinds of things . there are some advantages and some disadvantages , and the main advantage is that we can implement fancy techniques , which I think our customers will like . The disadvantage is that there are some concerns about the the costs and the things like battery lifetime , energy saving . industrial designer: another advantage is that the circuit board will become much more easier if we do not do not implement these buttons . If we just add a chip which does the voice recognition , our circuit board will become even more cheap . So that's another project manager: Yeah , and that was the main issue , right ? The the board industrial designer: well , it wa it w it was an issue , but we also thought that we already thought we should do it as cheaply as possible . user interface: But the cheaper the ch the the chip or th what was it ? industrial designer: project manager: No , it's th industrial designer: The fewer buttons you have , the ch ch the cheaper the circuit board , yes . user interface: Well it then we should just take a look at the costs and especially for the voice recognition . project manager: I'm not sure how how we'll f determine the costs , I will have a look at it . project manager: I'm not sure how how that industrial designer: Yes , I al I I hope my personal coach will have a lo look at it . project manager: I'm don't know how long the break will be , but we'll find out . project manager: then we will have thirty minutes of time to perform our individual work , and I'm sure your personal coaches will assist you with it . project manager: User Interface Designer , Roo , I would like to see the user interface c concept . project manager: And user interface: the only problem is it that it depends on the divisions the decis decisions Sebastian makes . industrial designer: Well project manager: Well , i it should be easy , user interface: Well project manager: that's w w what we concluded . industrial designer: So we drop the voice recognition ? project manager: No no no , we didn't industrial designer: Or project manager: but it shouldn't be integrated industrial designer: Oh . project manager: yeah , it's of course it's user interface , but i I was talking about really the design of the industrial designer: Okay <doc-sep>Okay , so Right well from the last meeting I was trying to send you the minutes , but it didn't work out too well , so maybe in sort of quick summary of the last meeting , I can quickly give you what we what we had . user interface: project manager: right , so Wishing I hadn't closed the damn Right so we had the fact that we're gonna have the the logo the company logo in its colour scheme incorporated onto the the device the remote device . We had made our decisions about made our decisions about the device itself , that it was gonna be simple to make it enable us to complete the project in time . We're gonna have effectively two pages , a front page which had the features that the the customers most wanted , and then the the backup features on the second page so that it could meet the technical requirements . So basically what decisions have we made ? have there been any changes ? industrial designer: I think we all have a presentation again , project manager: Right . For the components design , next step is basically the the way the remote's gonna work is still the same idea as before . There's a kinetic option , which if any of you've seen those new watches which you kind of you power up by waving around , it just requires a small amount of movement which would mean the batteries wouldn't have to be replaced . For the buttons , we have an integrated push button , which is Oh just to say all all these are supplied by Real Reaction . So I guess for the ease of for quickness and ease we should take them from at least like one of these options . industrial designer: so for the buttons there's an integrated push button , which I guess is just the same as the standard ones . This says it's similar to the button on the mouse for a normal for like like modern computer . there's a scroll wheel which is you know the new mouse has just got like the centre section which you can scroll up and down , which may be for the volume . industrial designer: one issue for the buttons is , depending on which material we use , if we use rubber buttons then it requires a rubber case , so we have to take that into consideration . moving on to the printed s project manager: What would be the cost do do we know ? industrial designer: that's on the next project manager: industrial designer: I th I think the there wasn't too much difference in the cost , that that related to the actual buttons , but it does affect the printed circuit board . Basically for the circuit board which is the middle , it's just see it down there the chips like the like the workings of the actual of the remote . So if we've got the scroll wheel for one of the buttons , that would require a slightly more advanced circuit board than if we just had a standard push button . There's a small unit available through the company which obviously would be an extra cost , but it wouldn't affect the size of the remote too much . and I guess that would require a more advanced circuit board , so there is an extra price in that sense . going to my personal preferences , I thought possibly for power we could use kinetic which is the idea of the watches that you move you move the remote around to power it up . for the buttons , I thought we'd probably get away with just having the standard push buttons rather than the scroll wheel . So if we wanted the scroll wheel and wanted the voice recognition , then we'd have to get a a more costly circuit board . industrial designer: i it kind of depends if we're gonna have the speech recognition , we'd have to probably get an advanced one . industrial designer: but I don't know , so that is something I'll have to look into . project manager: So are we able to make that decision now in a sense that this is the point at which we're discussing that issue , industrial designer: Yeah yeah . project manager: so would it not be best to rather than one way is to do each of the presentations and then make decisions going back to the various presentations as they were . Maybe w user interface: Yeah , that's probably a better one , to discuss it straight away . project manager: 'Cause at that point then you've got the details up there , so if we wanted to know for instance that the scroll wheel required the regular and what required advance . Then if we were able to see that down then we could make the decision at that point in time industrial designer: . project manager: industrial designer: As I say it only specified that we need a more advanced circuit board for the scroll wheel , project manager: project manager: No the scroll wheel required the regular , so the industrial designer: Yeah if if you down . industrial designer: but the scroll wheel requires a mini m minimally a regular chip , project manager: industrial designer: which is in the higher price range . The display requires an advanced chip user interface: I think the scroll wheel project manager: the display requires an advanced chip which in turn is more expense . industrial designer: And note that the push button just requires a simple chip , so that would keep the price down . user interface: Yeah , and if we're going for sleek and sexy , I think a scroll wheel is maybe a bit kinda bulky ? marketing: user interface: I I've got pictures well I've seen pictures with it kind of sticking off the side of it , project manager: Right . So is marketing: So are we going for the w are we going for the simple one , are we ? user interface: Yeah , a simple pushbuttons . industrial designer: Did everyone get this on the speech recognition ? The it was basically what we said before , the idea that you record in a set message , and then it picks up that message and replies to you . Maybe we should go on what we're certain of rather than project manager: So if we go for the simple push button , so effectively we're going for the simple printed circuit board are we ? Or are we going for the regular ? industrial designer: if it's just the push button then it just needs the simple circuit board . But is there any other okay , that's true for the for for that element , but we have to take all el elements into consideration . And so if there is one element that requires the more expensive one , or say the regular one , or the more advanced , then that would have to be the same for all of them . But marketing: I suppose we need we need to find out what circuit board that requires , maybe before we m make a decision . user interface: But the way that I interpret that it doesn't seem to send out a signal to the telly , it just it's like a parrot just rep reply replying to your message . industrial designer: Okay , so we'd have a simple circuit board project manager: industrial designer: and that would be an extra that would be in addition to it . user interface: And I don't think you could really perform any of the remote functions with it . user interface: 'Cause the example that they've given there is good morning coffee machine , good morning Jo . project manager: user interface: But I think that's maybe as far as that one could go ? project manager: Okay . industrial designer: Yeah that makes sense , so we'd stick with the simple circuit board and then think of the speech recognition as an extra an extra possibility . user interface: And it says that project manager: You were you were wanting to go for the kinetic power supply . industrial designer: yeah I I thought so just for just for ease of not having to replace the batteries . project manager: And how does it get charged up ? industrial designer: It's I think it works on the basis they have some kind of ball bearings inside . It's it's some on watches which you you kind of you shake to power it up . industrial designer: So you'd you'd move the remote around a little bit and then that powers it up to use it . project manager: So the speech recognition was Are we going for speech recognition ? No ? 'Cause that required the advanced user interface: I think it would be helpful to find it , but I don't think it'd marketing: Just industrial designer: yeah I think did we decide it didn't affect the circuit board , it just affected user interface: Yeah , I think so . industrial designer: It was just project manager: I had speech recognition requires advanced req require industrial designer: Oh no th that's what that's what I thought , but maybe maybe it doesn't . marketing: 'Cause it's s it's separate isn't it , project manager: Speech recognition you reckon then is s simple . marketing: it's not part of the industrial designer: It's it's just an addition thing it's yeah . project manager: And so we would want it in as an extra because it doesn't appear to cost too much . industrial designer: 'Kay shall I pass on to you now ? user interface: I think project manager: In fact , it wouldn't really cost anymore , would it ? user interface: I'll just just check what it said . Actually I don't think it really says anything about the cost , but it says that it's already in the coffee machines , so like it's already kind of marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: I assume it would cost extra , but Maybe we maybe we'll find out how much that does cost and have to decide slightly later . From looking at the remotes that are out there at the minute , none of them are particularly sleek and sexy . I haven't actually got the examples of the scroll button there , but there's some curved cases that you can see , a range of sizes . Does that move it ? project manager: Sorry ? user interface: It just seems to be skipping on without us doing anything . some of the remotes that I looked at , one of the models da did actually have voice recognition where you could where it was connected to the remote control functions . And it was quite a swish model , where it can control four devices , T_V_ , cable , satellite , video , D_V_D_ , audio . So maybe it's better not to try and compete with that sort of thing and just to market it as a completely different like different viewpoint as a kind of finding your lost control industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . the scroll buttons , as you've already mentioned , there's examples of those , but they don't look as sleek as other models . And there's no real advantage and because it impacts on other on the materials and the price it's not great . There was children's remote , where they just had a very limited range of buttons and they were b bright and colourful and you you could program them so that they could only look at certain channels . user interface: but I don't know if that's really in our field ? industrial designer: I guess I guess we're going for the biggest market , maybe not , user interface: But that's something that's out there . industrial designer: but Was it was it specified that we went for the biggest ? project manager: Well we're to go for the international market rather than a local market but that that wouldn't necessarily preclude user interface: . So you have your basic model which you would sell at whatever , and then you could have additional features in you know like a You'd have model one , model two and model three , and therefore you can sub-divide your market up . project manager: industrial designer: So maybe the children's remote should be like a a next step , but maybe I dunno for ours , maybe we should project manager: Anyway you could add on for an extra package , but on this basic one I'm reckoning that we're going for the basic model to be discussed here and that you would have for future reference the possibility of adding in extra features at extra cost to take care of specialist market segments . project manager: Is that user interface: Right well that's something that we can be aware of . I think because there's already very good voice recognition technology out there , and because ours might not cover the same functions that the leading brands do , it might be a good idea to market it as a finder function . industrial designer: So you also said for going for the international market that some some maybe older people might not like the speech recognition . user interface: Yeah , 'cause I think you program this one yourself , like to say like whatever you want to your question . marketing: Yeah and ours is quite a cheap device , so I don't know how much we'll be able to put into it . And you were talking about scroll buttons ? user interface: yeah I think I think we've decided that it's gonna increase the cost project manager: Okay . project manager: Alright , so we're just gonna have the the rubber buttons , was that right ? industrial designer: Yes yes . user interface: and just to be aware that there are kind of specialist functions and specialist remotes but we probably don't want to focus on those like such as the children's remote . So it gave the example of say your volume buttons for up and down , they might both have a V_ on for volume , let's think how they did this . project manager: Good in in Flip it round in ninety degree a hundred and eighty degrees and have it up and down . So that would show that volume was going up , whereas the one underneath would see the volume going down . What did they say ? I think the thing was that if you decide to do this , to have triangular buttons , somebody might look at this one and say oh well this triangular button is pointing up , and that's the first thing that they see project manager: Right . user interface: Actually that can't be right , can it ? Oh well , no , they might see yeah , they might see this pointing down and think right that's gonna turn the volume down , project manager: user interface: whereas the actual button's pointing up , so the function is to turn the button up . user interface: So , be careful what you put on the buttons industrial designer: So maybe we could have like user interface: and be careful of the shape that you make them , industrial designer: Yeah . So maybe we could have volume written on the side and then up and down on the on the buttons themselves . project manager: And 'cause the idea was to have limited it was to have sizable amount of information on it . project manager: 'Cause it was sixteen buttons , wasn't it that were industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: so what was the decision on the design of the volume button ? industrial designer: Are we are we gonna go through the design of all the buttons at the moment , or are we gonna t marketing: I've I've got some things to say about possible design things from trend watching . Right , I've been looking at some trends in in sort of basically fashion on top of doing the research into the remote control market the the one that's the one I talked about last time , that we'd sort of asked people about remote controls and what what was good about them , what was bad , what they used . And we've also been looking at sort of fa sort of fashions and what people are wanting out of consumer goods at the moment . marketing: So user interface: marketing: So just to summarise the most important things which came out of the remote control market investigation . And then third and l less important than the other two , there should be an ease of use as well . And apparently , the fashion trends are that people want sort of clothes and shoes and things with a fruit and vegetables theme . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: but the feel of the material should be spongy , industrial designer: marketing: which is contrary to last year , apparently . project manager: user interface: marketing: So we need to emphasise the fancy design with on on our remote control above all else . And then also try and add in technological informat innovation which could be our sort of find the thing with a hand clap . And then we need to ma sort of make it easy to use that's as a third priority , so perhaps fewer fewer buttons and functions as we've as we've discussed . user interface: marketing: And then maybe find a way to incorporate these trends so that we sort of capture people's imaginations . So maybe we could make the buttons shaped like fruit and veg , or the the buttons could be spongy , somehow . And then sort of even wackier than that , we could maybe have a fruit or vegetable shaped remote , say in the shape of a banana or something like that . project manager: marketing: How how far we actually want to go along and sort of follow the trends , do we think the trends are particularly important for this type of gadget , or or you know , do they not matter that much ? user interface: I think if you start making the buttons fruit shaped , it might make it more complicated to use . project manager: Well you were just talking about you've got to be careful how you shape your buttons , 'cause you're can mis-direct people . And I would've thought the functionality 'cause the people get cheesed off by things by having to read instructions et cetera , so . user interface: Maybe just one button , say the standby button is quite kinda separate from all the other functions . user interface: And then that wouldn't get in the way of like kinda one to nine , industrial designer: user interface: and it wouldn't confuse the numbers . No th that that incorporates the trend whilst at the same time not confusing people , if you're looking for functionality . industrial designer: Well I dunno I I guess maybe fruit and vegetables may be popular at the moment , but as we know how fickle the fashion markets are , project manager: But what are they gonna be next Yeah . S project manager: But but th but okay but you you can incorporate the tr If y if you change all the buttons then you've got the problem that this year's fruit and veg , next year's I was gonna say animals or elephants or w whatever . Yeah , project manager: That means you're constantly changing your production schedule , marketing: I'm not project manager: and you've gotta make different moulds and everything else , marketing: Yeah . marketing: I'm not I'm not sure what what what the sort of timescale we're thinking of selling the product over is . industrial designer: it just seems realistic that the remote control market isn't the kind of thing which takes in those kinds of fashion trends . project manager: Well user interface: But I suppose as long as it's quite a subtle design , marketing: industrial designer: Maybe still with a rubber design we could project manager: Was that in the sort of fashion sense that this Or was the spongy feel was that sort of fashion ? It was , wasn't it ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: So the user interface: It seems like you're gonna have rubber cases , as well as buttons . user interface: And that you can make them curved or double-curved and that would be the kind of sleek and sexy look . industrial designer: Oh yeah yeah one of the things were if you had rubber buttons then you had to have a rubber case . industrial designer: oh no no no user interface: Oh right , that fits , doesn't it ? industrial designer: sorry it's if you use the rubber double curved case then you must use rubber buttons . user interface: And that would fit in with what we want , wouldn't it , for the spongy feel , to have everything rubber . The m the main problem is how f how frequently do the fashions change ? 'Cause in essence in the production you want things to stay you want to basically mint them out marketing: project manager: 'cause if you've got fashion changes and that you're incorporating , then it means that your stock is is last year's stock marketing: project manager: and therefore you're selling it or having to sell it at a discounted rate which you wouldn't want to do . Whereas if you kept the product the same but you could have a difference from year to year , it seems to me that you could incorporate a fashion statement if you like , rather than changing the whole kit and caboodle . project manager: You're just changing one aspect like like the standby button or something like that , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: and especially 'cause then you could make it something that industrial designer: I suppose we maybe are limited in the fact that we still have to put the logo on the actual marketing: project manager: Well you two are obviously gonna find that out fairly quickly when you move over to your kit modelling stage as to how much pl how much how much how pliable is Plasticine . user interface: industrial designer: Maybe we could think of the the cases like changing with the fashions project manager: industrial designer: like the Nokia phones where you could take the casing off the outside . industrial designer: Yeah the a the actual the sort of the look from the outside , so where the buttons would stay the same , and the general function of the remote would stay the same , marketing: user interface: Yeah and then you could have Oh but you still would have to have the logo on every new case , industrial designer: Yeah , that's true . project manager: Yeah you you could do a colour change , so therefore you would yeah yeah that's effectively what they did with the with the mobile phones , was to have some in blue , some in red , some in rather than all in black industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: or , you know , which four do you want , as long as it's black ? user interface: . user interface: But we are supposed to use the company colour scheme , aren't we ? project manager: Yes oh that's true user interface: We haven't really seen that yet industrial designer: Oh okay yes project manager: that might no marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: that is user interface: It might and we might be able to do both but it might clash with certain things . project manager: Well not necessarily , because you could have your company We're we're meant to be finishing up . a lot of computers for instance like like on the one you've got there , it actually has a sort of stick on badge marketing: project manager: so what you would al all you would really need , whether it , you know , whether the casing be w any colour , could be any colour , but that badge would then have to stick out on top of it so that in a sense , with a with a logo like that , because it's on a white background , the only colour that it might not stick out so well on would be a white casing . project manager: And in fact a lot of companies get somebody else to make them and literally just badge them themselves with their own badge over the top . project manager: And in fact the way they've got that there even if you had that on a white , which is the predominant colour of the the Windows badge , you'd still be able to see it clearly from you know a white casing product . industrial designer: And whether we'd have a big enough market to have this kind of like secondary market of selling the cases might be something to consider . project manager: user interface: Well if it's for young people , like the phone generation , that sort of thing'd probably go down well , marketing: user interface: and the market research has been on that side of things , hasn't it ? marketing: Yeah , it's people say that it's the look , they want the fancy looking thing but I'm Yeah . I think with the mobiles , it's the , you know it's a communication device , people see you with it all about and industrial designer: Yeah I suppose , user interface: industrial designer: where you you keep the remote hidden under the sofa most of the time . marketing: i if it project manager: It's in in the house , isn't it , I suppose . user interface: Okay , so if we just went for one colour of a rubber case marketing: I think project manager: So don't change case . user interface: Did we decide on the rubber case ? The spongy feel , or did we think that that might go as a trend ? marketing: Well , it was different last year . I don't know whether it's one of those things that like sort of having all fruit shaped keys , that that probably would go out of fashion very quickly , project manager: Yeah . marketing: whereas just the fact that it was a rubber case is probably less less of something that y you're gonna end up hating in a year , you know . If you're going for fashion trends like that they'll need t you'd have to have interchangeable cases industrial designer: So then th th that would project manager: so that you could industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: or 'cause otherwise someone's gonna have to buy a complete new remote rather than just a case . industrial designer: it seems to make sense that we we'd just maybe stick with the standard rubber case , marketing: . There's flat , marketing: user interface: there's single-curved and there's double-curved . industrial designer: Maybe curves give it like the slightly more aesthetic feel ? But the double curve wouldn't require us to perform miracles with the Plasticine . user interface: marketing: project manager: user interface: Well it says that marketing: When you say d when you say double-curved , what what exactly does that mean ? user interface: I'm not exactly sure . See how the one Oh I'm not plugged in , am I ? marketing: No you're not connected to me anymore . project manager: One one thing to cons user interface: Shall I just turn it round for time ? project manager: one thing to consider is that in some ways you want by having a fairly standard case it means they can all fit together on top of each other marketing: That should come up . project manager: therefore for storage purposes in shops and the like and it makes it easier that you can if you can store them up on top of each other . project manager: Whereas if you do fancy things with it , you then gotta put it in a ca a a packaging box that that does that . And the cost of packaging could be quite important vis-a-vis the total cost of the product . industrial designer: So shall we go through quickly and just work out what we've decide on , if we have to kind of project manager: So but marketing: Yeah . user interface: but you can see some of them have got kind of bulges , like the second one and the end one where there's a curve there . user interface: I'm not exactl I don't know if a double curve is maybe it comes up slightly , or ? marketing: That's what I was trying to work out . S so do you wanna go for curves , more curves ? marketing: Shall we industrial designer: project manager: We're meant to be f we're meant to be finishing this meeting in about a minute or so . user interface: Shall we go for single curve , just to compromise ? industrial designer: We'll go for single curve , yeah . industrial designer: So did we did we decide on the kinetic power supply ? The one you move around ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: and we don't really know much about the colour scheme or logo yet do we , industrial designer: Oh we ca user interface: but possibly a sticker . industrial designer: Yeah yeah , we'll still have the Are we gonna go for the simple circuit board just to keep the cost down ? I th I think we can by by not having anything too complicated . Yeah and and the voice recognition , we can use that can't we , just to find it . industrial designer: And see we could always decide against it if something comes up that's just something to that we seemed to leave out . user interface: Yeah that sounds like it wouldn't do too much harm in a couple of years . what sort of shape do we want ? project manager: So we've got spongy feel buttons as well , have we ? marketing: Don't know , maybe just project manager: As well as or w or was that marketing: Yeah . project manager: So it's rubber buttons , industrial designer: Yeah , it was just project manager: so it's not really spongy feel buttons , it's just rubber buttons . marketing: project manager: Okay so what what shape are we making the standby button ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: Shall we vote on it ? industrial designer: We will go for the a a a apples apples . user interface: Anyone got any suggestions ? marketing: Apple apple a a qu Quite a big one , as well . project manager: A red apple ? Is it ? user interface: Yeah 'cause we wanna incorporate a bit of colour if we can , once we find out industrial designer: Okay . And then we're gonna are you gonna work on keeping the button design quite simple ? Just like the Just working out what we're gonna do for the next time . project manager: Sorry what was that last thing again there ? user interface: just to keep the shape of the buttons simple . I thought you were going for a single curve and user interface: Ah just the shape of the buttons . industrial designer: And j yeah , just keeping the sort of the labelling them labelling of them fairly simple as well

User Interface suggested that instead of competing with remotes that already have voice recognition, they should focus on a different approach, such as a finder function for the lost control. They found two types of remotes: multi-functional and user-friendly. Considering the target audience of under forty years old, they emphasized the importance of both user-friendliness and multi-functionality. Based on user feedback, User Interface pointed out that remote control buttons are often too numerous and small, making it difficult for users to understand their functions. They preferred to minimize the number of buttons and make frequently used buttons larger and strategically placed for a simpler and less intimidating design. While initially suggesting forward-looking features like controlling personal video recorders, User Interface ultimately agreed to focus on regular features.

Question: What were the challenges faced during language generation? Article: grad d: grad e: What does your thing say on the back ? grad d: Testing . grad f: Yeah , well , I g guess it 's coming up then , or grad d: Cuz it 's That starts counting from zero and these start counting from one . grad d: Your mike number is what we 're t grad e: Look at the back . grad d: Ho ! grad b: So grad d: I 've bested you again , Nancy . Damn ! Foiled again ! grad d: So is Keith showing up ? He 's talking with George right now . , is he gonna get a rip rip himself away from from that ? grad b: He 'll probably come later . grad d: Oh , then it 's just gonna be the five of us ? professor c: Yeah . grad e: Well , he he was very affirmative in his way of saying he will be here at four . So , Eva just reported she 's really happy about the CBT 's being in the same order in the XML as in the be Java declaration format grad f: Yeah . The e grad e: so you don't have to do too much in the style sheet transversion . grad e: The , Java the embedded Bayes wants to take input , a Bayes - net in in some Java notation and Eva is using the Xalan style sheet processor to convert the XML that 's output by the Java Bayes for the into the , E Bayes input . grad f: Actually , maybe I could try , like , emailing the guy and see if he has any something already . grad f: That 'd be weird , that he has both the Java Bayes and the embedded Bayes in grad d: But that 's some sort of conversion program ? grad f: Yeah . grad e: And , well pretty mu pretty much on t on the top of my list , I would have asked Keith how the " where is X ? " hand parse is standing . grad d: So the trees for the XML trees for the for the gene for the synthesizer are written . Just gonna be you know professor c: Oh ! You were gonna send me a note about hiring grad e: Yes . grad e: OK , so natural language generation produces not a just a surface string that is fed into a text - to - speech but , a surface string with a syntax tree that 's fed into a concept - to - speech . grad e: Now and this concept - to - speech module has certain rules on how if you get the following syntactic structure , how to map this onto prosodic rules . grad e: And Fey has foolheartedly agreed to rewrite , the German concept syntax - to - prosody rules grad b: I didn't know she spoke German . And therefore the , if it 's OK that we give her a couple of more hours per week , then she 'll do that . grad d: What language is that written i Is that that Scheme thing that you showed me ? grad e: Yeah . grad d: She knows how to program in Scheme ? I hope ? grad e: No , I My guess is I I asked for a commented version of that file ? If we get that , then it 's doable , even without getting into it , even though the Scheme li , stuff is really well documented in the Festival . grad d: Well , I guess if you 're not used to functional programming , Scheme can be completely incomprehensible . But anyway , send me the note and then I 'll - I 'll check with , Morgan on the money . Oh , so this was You know , on the generation thing , if sh y she 's really going to do that , then we should be able to get prosody as well . grad d: Are we gonna Can we change the voice of the of the thing , because right now the voice sounds like a murderer . grad b: Wh - Which one ? grad d: The the little Smarticus Smarticus sounds like a murderer . grad e: It is , we have the choice between the , usual Festival voices , which I already told the SmartKom people we aren't gonna use because they 're really bad . grad b: Festival ? professor c: It 's the name of some program , grad b: Oh , oh . grad e: OGI has , crafted a couple of diphone type voices that are really nice and we 're going to use that . grad d: Does OGI stand for ? Original German Institute ? professor c: Orego grad b: So . grad b: Oregon Graduate Insti professor c: Oregon @ @ Graduate Institute grad d: Oh . professor c: It turns out there 's the long - standing links with these guys in the speech group . professor c: In fact , there 's this guy who 's basically got a joint appointment , Hynek Hermansky . And it 's probably also absolutely uninteresting for all of you to , learn that as of twenty minutes ago , David and I , per accident , managed to get the whole SmartKom system running on the , ICSI Linux machines with the ICSI NT machines thereby increasing the number of running SmartKom systems in this house from one on my laptop to three . grad e: I suggested to try something that was really kind of even though against better knowledge shouldn't have worked , but it worked . grad b: Will it work again , grad e: Maybe maybe maybe a bit for the AI i intuition thing . It - it 's just like why why the generation ma the presentation manager is now working ? grad a: ! This is something you ha you get used to as a programmer , right ? grad e: Which grad a: You know , and it 's cool , it works out that way . So , the the people at Saarbruecken and I decided not to touch it ever again . grad a: What what thing is this ? grad e: Where is X ? grad a: OK . grad e: Oh , but by , we can ask , did you get to read all four hundred words ? professor c: I did . That professor c: You know , i Yeah , it grad d: Each paragraph is good , though . grad b: Yeah , I didn't know about it until Robert told me , like , professor c: Yeah , I I ra I ran across it in I don't even know where , you know some just some weird place . And , yeah , I I 'm surprised I didn't know about it grad b: Y yeah . I was like , why didn't Dan tell me ? professor c: since we know all the invited speakers , an grad a: Right . Before we get started on this st so I also had a nice email correspondence with Daphne Kohler , who said yes indeed she would love to work with us on the , you know , using these structured belief - nets and stuff but starting in August , that she 's also got a new student working on this and that we should get in touch with them again in August and then we 'll figure out a way for you you to get seriously connected with , their group . So , And it looks to me like we 're now at a good point to do something start working on something really hard . grad a: Oh ! professor c: w Which is mental spaces and and - or grad a: ! grad b: It 's hard . But the other part of it is the way they connect to these , probabilistic relational models . So there 's all the problems that the linguists know about , about mental spaces , and the cognitive linguists know about , but then there 's this problem of the belief - net people have only done a moderately good job of dealing with temporal belief - nets . professor c: So there 's a term " dynamic belief - net " , doesn't mean that . But one of the things I w would like to do over the next , month , it may take more , is to st understand to what extent we can not only figure out the constructions for them for multiple worlds and sort of what the formalism will look like and where the slots and fillers will be , but also what that would translate into in terms of belief - net and the inferences . So the story is that if you have these probabilistic relational models , they 're set up , in principle , so that you can make new instances and instances connect to each other , and all that sort of stuff , so it should be feasible to set them up in such a way that if you 've got the past tense and the present tense and each of those is a separate , belief structure that they do their inferences with just the couplings that are appropriate . But that 's g that 's , as far as I can tell , it 's it 's putting together two real hard problems . One is the linguistic part of what are the couplings and and when you have a certain , construction , that implies certain couplings and other couplings , you know , between let 's say between the past and the present , or any other one of these things and then we have this inference problem of exactly technically how does the belief - net work if it 's got , let 's say one in in , you know , different tenses or my beliefs and your beliefs , or any of these other ones of of multiple models . So you know , in the long run we need to solve both of those and my suggestion is that we start digging into them both , in a way we that , you know , th hopefully turns out to be consistent , so that the . But anyway , so that 's , grad a: Oh yeah , like , I solved the the problem of we were talking about how do you various issues of how come a plural noun gets to quote " count as a noun phrase " , you know , occur as an argument of a higher construction , but a bare singular stem doesn't get to act that way . grad a: and it would take a really long time to explain it now , but I 'm about to write it up this evening . I solved that at the same time as " how do we keep adjectives from floating to the left of determiners and how do we keep all of that from floating outside the noun phrase " to get something like " I the kicked dog " . No , I know , I th I I think that is gonna be sort of the key to this wh to th the big project of the summer of of getting the constructions right is that people do manage to do this so there probably are some , relatively clean rules , they 're just not context - free trees . professor c: And if we if the formalism is is good , then we should be able to have , you know , sort of moderate scale thing . And that by the way is is , Keith , what I encouraged George to be talking with you about . professor c: The p And Oh , another thing , there was this , thing that Nancy agreed to in a in a weak moment this morning that grad a: ! grad b: I was really strong . professor c: Anyway , that we were that we 're gonna try to get a , first cut at the revised formalism by the end of next week . professor c: just trying to write up essentially what what you guys have worked out so that everybody has something to look at . We 've talked about it , but only the innermost inner group currently , grad a: grad a: There 's The group as a whole knows but no individual member kno professor c: Well that that yeah th there 's one of the advantages of a document , right ? , grad a: Yeah . Anyway , so , with a little luck l let 's , let 's have that as a goal anyway . grad a: So , what was the date there ? professor c: And grad a: Monday or ? It 's a Friday . grad b: But , but but the two of us will probably talk to you at well before th grad a: I thought you said beginning of n Yeah . Anyway , w let 's talk separately about how t grad a: Yeah , I have a busy weekend but after that Yeah , gung - ho . grad a: Great , professor c: Now if it turns out that that effort leads us into some big hole that 's fine . There 's a really hard problem we haven't solved yet that , that 's just fine . grad a: But at at least sort of try and work out what the state of the art is right now . professor c: Right , t t if to the extent that we have it , let 's write it grad a: OK . professor c: and to the extent we don't , let 's find out what we need to do . professor c: So , grad e: Can we ? Is it worth thinking of an example out of our tourism thing domain , that involves a a a decent mental space shift or setting up professor c: I think it is , but but I interrupted before Keith got to tell us what happened with " where is the Powder - Tower ? " or whatever grad b: Right . , what was supposed to happen ? I 've sort of been actually caught up in some other ones , so , you know , I don't have a write - up of or I haven't elaborated on the ideas that we were already talking about which were grad e: yeah . I think I think we already came to the conclusion that we have two alternative paths that we two alternative ways of representing it . grad e: grad a: The question of whether the polysemy is sort of like in the construction or pragmatic . grad a: so d ' you Is it clear what we 're talking about here ? grad b: I agree . grad a: The question is whether the construction is semantic or like ambiguous between asking for location and asking for path . grad e: It 's grad a: or or whether the construction semantically , is clearly only asking for location grad e: Should we have a a a grad b: grad a: but pragmatically that 's construed as meaning " tell me how to get there " . grad e: So assume these are two , nodes we can observe in the Bayes - net . grad e: So these are either true or false and it 's also just true or false . If we encounter a phrase such as " where is X ? " , should that set this to true and this to true , and the Bayes - net figures out which under the c situation in general is more likely ? , or should it just activate this , have this be false , and the Bayes - net figures out whether this actually now means ? professor c: w that 's a s grad b: Slightly different . professor c: So I a I I th I agree with you that , it 's a disaster to try to make separate constructions for every , pragmatic reading , grad a: professor c: there there 's some that grad b: Or have every construction list all the possible pragmatic implications of the same one . But , you know , c almost certainly " can you pass the salt " is a construction worth noting that there is this th this this this grad a: Yeah . Is it is it like that or is it just sort of obvious from world knowledge that no one you wouldn't want to know the location without wanting to know how to get there or whatever . grad e: One Or in some cases , it 's it 's quite definitely professor c: Yeah . Well the question is basically , is this conventional or conversational implicature ? professor c: Exactly . professor c: And I guess , see , the more important thing at this stage is that we should be able to know how we would handle it in ei f in the short run it 's more important to know how we would treat technically what we would do if we decided A and what we would do if we decided B , than it is t to decide A or B r right now . professor c: So I guess In the short run , let 's let 's be real clear on h what the two alternatives would be . grad e: And then the we had another idea floating around , which we wanted to , get your input on , and that concerns the But the nice thing is w we would have a person that would like to work on it , and that 's Ir - Irina Gurevich from EML who is going to be visiting us , the week before , August and a little bit into August . , and one of the reas one of the those ideas was , so , back to the old Johno observation that if y if you have a dialogue history and it said the word " admission fee " was , mentioned , it 's more likely that the person actually wants to enter than just take a picture of it from the outside . Now what could imagine to , you know , have a list for each construction of things that one should look up in the discourse history , yeah ? That 's the really stupid way . Then there is the really clever way that was suggested by Keith and then there is the , middle way that I 'm suggesting and that is you you get X , which is whatever , the castle . The ontology will tell us that castles have opening hours , that they have admission fees , they have whatever . And then , this is We go via a thesaurus and look up certain linguistic surface structures that are related to these concepts and feed those through the dialogue history and check dynamically for each e entity . We look it up check whether any of these were mentioned and then activate the corresponding nodes on the discourse side . But Keith suggested that a a much cleaner way would be is , you know , to keep track of the discourse in such a way that you if you know that something like that ha has been mentioned before , this just a continues to add up , you know , in th in a grad a: So if someone mentions admission f fees , that activates an Enter schema which sticks around for a little while in your rep in the representation of what 's being talked about . And then when someone asks " where is X ? " you 've already got the the Enter schema activated grad b: Kind of a priming professor c: professor c: grad d: Well , is it doesn't it seem like if you just managed the dialogue history with a a thread , that you know , kept track of ho of the activity of , cuz it would the the thread would know what nodes like , needed to be activated , so it could just keep track of how long it 's been since something 's been mentioned , and automatically load it in . But here 's here 's a way in th in the bl Bayes - net you could you could think about it this way , that if at the time " admissions fee " was mentioned you could increase the probability that someone wanted to enter . grad d: We - yeah th th that 's what I wa I wasn't I was I wasn't thinking in terms of Enter schemas . I was just professor c: Fair enough , OK , but , but , in terms of the c c the current implementation right ? so that grad b: It would already be higher in the context . professor c: th that th the the the conditional probability that someone So at the time you mentioned it This is this is essentially the Bayes - net equivalent of the spreading activation . professor c: It 's In some ways it 's not as good but it 's the implementation we got . Now Now my guess is that it 's not a question of time but it is a question of whether another intervening object has been mentioned . professor c: we could look at dialo this is Of course the other thing we ha we do is , is we have this data coming grad a: Yeah . professor c: but but skipping that so so but my guess is what what 'll probably will happen , Here 's a here 's a proposed design . is that there 're certain constructions which , for our purposes do change the probabilities of EVA decisions and various other kinds and th that the , standard way that that the these contexts work is sort of stack - like or whatever , but that 's sort of the most recent thing . And so it could be that when another , en tourist entity gets mentioned , you grad b: Renew professor c: re re essentially re - initiali you know , re - i essentially re - initialize the state . professor c: And of course i if we had a fancier one with multiple worlds you could have , you could keep track of what someone was saying about this and that . professor c: You know , " I wanna go in the morning grad a: " Here 's my plan for today . " professor c: Yeah , or Yeah , in the morning morning I I 'm planning t to go shopping , grad a: hypothetically . professor c: tal so I 'm talking about shopping and then you say , you know , well , " What 's it cost ? " or something . professor c: But I do th think that the It 'll turn out that it 's gonna be depend pretty much on whether there 's been an override . grad e: Yeah , if if you ask " how much does a train ride and and cinema around the vineyards cost ? " and then somebody tells you it 's sixty dollars and then you say " OK How much is , I would like to visit the " whatever , something completely different , " then I go to , you know , Point Reyes " , professor c: Yeah . grad e: it it 's not more likely that you want to enter anything , but it 's , as a matter of fact , a complete rejection of entering by doing that . grad b: So when you admit have admission fee and it changes something , it 's only for that particular It 's relational , right ? It 's only for that particular object . Well , and and and the simple idea is that it 's on it 's only for m for the current , tourist e entity of instre interest . But that 's this this function , so , has the current object been mentioned in in with a question about concerning its professor c: No , no . Is When th When the this is mentioned , the probability of of , let 's say , entering changes grad b: Of that object . grad d: You could just hav , just basically , ob it It observes an er , it sets the a node for " entered " or " true " or something , professor c: Yeah . Now , But I think Ro - Robert 's right , that to determine that , OK ? you may well want to go through a th thesaurus grad d: " discourse enter " . professor c: and and So , if the issue is , if so now th this construction has been matched and you say " OK . Does this actually have any implications for our decisions ? " Then there 's another piece of code that presumably does that computation . professor c: But but what 's Robert 's saying is is , and I think he 's right , is you don't want to try to build into the construction itself all the synonyms and all you know , all the wo maybe . Well , it 's just another , sort of , construction side is how to get at the possible inferences we can draw from the discourse history or changing of the probabilities , and - or grad b: Guess it 's like I g The other thing is , whether you have a m m user model that has , you know , whatever , a current plan , whatever , plans that had been discussed , and I don't know , grad d: What , what 's the argument for putting it in the construction ? Is it just that the s synonym selection is better , or ? professor c: Oh , wel Well , the ar the The argument is that you 're gonna have the If you 've recognized the word , you 've recognized the word , which means you have a lexical construction for it , so you could just as well tag the lexical construction with the fact that it 's a , you know , thirty percent increase in probability of entering . You So you could you could you could invert invert the whole thing , so you s you tag that information on to the lexicon grad d: Mmm . at at Yeah , and this is grad e: Even though the lexical construction itself out out of context , won't do it . grad e: " But I but I 'm not interested in the opening times " is sort of a more a V type . But , we 'll , we have time to This is a s just a sidetrack , but I think it 's also something that people have not done before , is , sort of abuse an ontology for these kinds of , inferences , on whether anything relevant to the current something has been , has crept up in the dialogue history already , or not . And , I have the , If we wanted to have that function in the dialogue hi dialogue module of SmartKom , I have the written consent of Jan to put it in there . professor c: So the point is , it 's very likely that Robert 's thesis is going to be along these lines , grad b: Oh , s professor c: and the local rules are if it 's your thesis , you get to decide how it 's done . So if , you know if this is seriously , if this becomes part of your thesis , you can say , hey we 're gonna do it this way , that 's the way it 's done . So h he 's got a th he 's got a meet meeting in Germany with his thesis advisor . , this is this is , speaking of hard problems , this is a very good time , to start trying to make explicit where construal comes in and you know , where c where the construction per - se ends and where construal comes in , grad a: But that 's part of what the f grad b: We have many jobs for you , Ro - Robert . professor c: is is because th it is gonna have implicit in it grad e: Was I ? In the room ? grad b: No , you weren't there on purpose . professor c: Yeah , that That 's the point , is is th grad a: Yeah . grad d: Yeah , but it he the decisions I made wer had to do with my thesis . So consequently don't I get to decide then that it 's Robert 's job ? professor c: No . grad b: Well , I 'll just pick a piece of the problem and then just push the hard stuff into the center and say it 's Robert 's . grad e: I 've always been completely in favor of consensus decisions , grad b: I can professor c: Right . professor c: not grad e: It it might even be interesting then to say that I should be forced to , sort of pull some of the ideas that have been floating in my head out of the , out of the top hat professor c: Yes . grad e: Yes , and , it 's Ha - None of that is basically still around , grad b: I didn't get professor c: And a another draft OK . grad e: but it 's professor c: D i grad a: That 's normal . professor c: I i grad b: Oh , I guess it 's good I didn't read it . professor c: and grad e: Yeah , and I would like to d discuss it and , you know , get you guys 's input professor c: Right . professor c: So that , so th thi this , so this is the point , is we we 're going to have to cycle through this , grad a: Yeah . professor c: but th the draft of the p proposal on the constructions is is going to tell us a lot about what we think needs to be done by construal . grad b: grad e: Meeting regular meeting time for the summer , we really haven't found one . It 's - it 's a coincidence that he can't do couldn't do it today here . professor c: And the NTL meeting moved to Wednesday , grad e: So professor c: cuz of of , grad e: Yeah , it was just an exception . professor c: Yeah , you weren't here , but but but s , And so , if that 's OK with you , grad a: It 's i Is it staying basically at the Wednesday noon ? professor c: you would grad a: OK . How do we feel about doing it Wednesdays ? Because it seems to me that this is sort of a time where when we have things to discuss with other people , there they seem to be s tons of people around . professor c: The only disadvantage is that it may interfere with other grad e: Or subgroup meetings professor c: s you know , other other No , you , people in this group connecting with with grad b: Those people who happen to be around . I I you know I have no fixed grad a: To tell you the truth , I 'd rath I 'd , I 'd would like to avoid more than one ICSI meeting per day , if possible . that grad e: The I 'd like to have them all in one day , grad a: Yeah , I can understand that . professor c: Well p grad e: so package them up and then professor c: people people differ in their tastes in this matter . I 'm always here anyway , grad e: It 's OK , that grad b: so It doesn't matter . grad e: Well , if one sort of thing is , this room is taken at after three - thirty pr pretty much every day by the data collection . grad e: So we just knew i grad b: So did you just say that Ami can't make one o ' grad e: No , he can . About the c the th grad b: Could we do Thursday at one - thirty ? Would that that be horrible ? grad e: No . grad b: Oh really ? grad e: Because , this room is again taken at two - thirty by Morgan . grad e: And the s meeting recorder meeting meeting meeting recording on meeting meetings grad b: OK , OK , OK . professor c: I I could grad b: we usually meet Tuesday or l like , linguists , at two . Do you want to meet again here bef grad d: And the s Is the Speech - Gen meeting still at on Tuesdays ? grad e: w Well , actually we w we we did scrap our Monday time just because Bhaskara couldn't come Monday . grad a: That doesn't apply to a grad d: Although I thought you wanted to go camping on Monday er , take off Mondays a lot so you could go camping . ! grad b: Well , the linguists ' meeting i happens to be at two , but I think that 's . grad a: And , you know , of course Nancy and I are just sort of always talking anyway and sometimes we do it in that room . grad e: Monday ? professor c: OK , whate What I think Robert 's saying is that grad a: Earlier in the week professor c: earlier we At least for next week , there 's a lot of stuff we want to get done , grad a: grad b: At o o o o one , two , three ? grad e: One , two , three ? Three 's too late . professor c: Oh , I i Yeah , I actually Two is the earliest I can meet on Monday . professor c: Here I 'm blissfully agreeing to things and realizing that I actually do have some stuff scheduled on Monday . grad b: You guys will still remind me , right ? grad d: No way ! grad b: Y you 'll come and take all the the headph the good headphones first and then remind me . grad e: And grad b: Why do I have this unless I 'm gonna write ? grad e: do I get to see th , your formalism before that ? grad b: Fine . grad e: I wo I would like I would sort of get a get a notion of what what you guys have in store for me . professor c: Well m @ @ you know , w maybe Mond - Maybe we can put This is part of what we can do Monday , if we want . grad b: Yeah , so there was like , you know , m m in my head the goal to have like an intermediate version , like , everything I know . grad b: And then , w I would talk to you and figure out everything you know , that you know , see if they 're consistent . Why don't w Maybe you and I should meet sort of more or less first thing Monday morning and then we can work on this . I might I might , grad e: You - y grad b: s You said you 're busy over th until the weekend , right ? grad a: Yeah , sort of through the weekend because Kate has a photography show . So , maybe I 'll send you some grad a: if you have time after this I 'll show you the noun phrase thing . OK , and we 'll You wanna m grad e: So the idea is on Monday at two we 'll we 'll see an intermediate version of the formalism for the constructions , grad a: Yeah . grad b: So that 's OK for you grad e: and do an on - line merging with my construal ideas . grad e: So it won't be , like , a for semi - formal presentation of my proposal . grad b: Cuz then you 'll find out more of what we 're making you do . Can you also write it up ? grad b: It 's like , " this is what we 're doing . " grad e: I 'll I 'll send you I 'll I 'll send you a style file , right ? grad b: OK . grad e: You just grad b: I already sent you my fi my bib file . grad a: Someday we also have to we should probably talk about the other side of the " where is X " construction , which is the issue of , how do you simulate questions ? What does the simspec look like for a question ? grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , now , we we w grad a: We had to we had an idea for this which seemed like it would probably work . I professor c: OK ? So let 's think of a name for for whatever the this intermediate structure is . Oh , we talked about semspec , for " semantic spec specification " grad a: Mmm . grad a: It 's more general professor c: You know , so it 's a m minimal change . professor c: Right , a little substi substi You know , that 's what text substitution macros are for . professor c: Anyway , so let 's let 's for the moment call it that until we think of something better . professor c: And , yeah , we absolutely need to find Part of what was missing were markings of all sorts that weren't in there , incl including the questions grad a: professor c: We didn't we never did figure out how we were gonna do emphasis in in , the semspec . grad b: Yeah , we 've talked a little bit about that , too , which , it 's hard for me to figure out with sort of our general linguistic issues , how they map onto this particular one , grad a: Yeah . professor c: But that 's part of the formalism is got to be , how things like that get marked . grad b: W do you have data , like the the You have preliminary data ? Cuz I know , you know , we 've been using this one easy sentence and I 'm sure you guys have , maybe you are the one who 've been looking at the rest of it grad a: I grad b: it 'd it 'd be useful for me , if we want to have it a little bit more data oriented . grad a: To tell you the truth , what I 've been looking at has not been the data so far , grad b: Yeah . grad a: I just sort of said " alright let 's see if I can get noun phrases and , major verb co , constructions out of the way first . grad a: So , I have not really approached a lot of the data , but obviously like these the the question one , since we have this idea about the indefinite pronoun thing and all that , you know , I ca can try and , run with that , you know , try and do some of the sentence constructions now . grad a: Oh yeah , the basic idea is that , you know , let 's see if I can formulate this . grad e: So you perform the mental sum and then , you know , " who fixed the car with a wrench ? " You basically are told , to to do this In the in analogously to the way you would do " someone fixed the car with a wrench " . And then you hand it back to your hippocampus and find out what that , you know , grad a: Means . grad a: The WH question has this as sort of extra thing which says " and when you 're done , tell me who fills that slot " or w you know . And , you know , this is sort of a nice way to do it , the idea of sort of saying that you treat from the simulation point of view or whatever you treat , WH constructions similarly to , indefinite pronouns like " someone fixed the car " because lots of languages , have WH questions with an indefinite pronoun in situ or whatever , grad b: Use actually the same one . So it makes sense professor c: Alright , which is grad a: professor c: Skolemization . professor c: In in logic , it 's it 's @ @ it 's actual Huh ? grad b: Right . professor c: That - that 's not that 's not saying it 's bad , grad a: Right . Anyway , but just that kind of thing and we 'll figure out exactly how to write that up and so on , but professor c: Good . We sort of just dropped that cuz it was too weird and we didn't even know , like , what we were talking about exactly , what the object of study was . Well , if if , i part of of what the exercise is , t by the end of next week , is to say what are the things that we just don't have answers for yet . grad e: Well , if you if you do wanna discuss focus background and then get me into that because , I wo I w scientifically worked on that for for almost two years . grad b: Yeah , you should definitely , be on on that maybe maybe by after Monday we 'll y you can see what things we are and aren't grad a: Yeah . grad b: I would say that tha that those discussions have been primarily , Keith and Keith and me , but like in th the meeting , he sort of I thin like the last meeting we had , I think we were all very much part of it grad a: Yeah . grad b: but grad a: Sometimes Hans has been sort of coming in there as sort of like a devil 's advocate type role or something , grad b: but different perspec Yeah . grad a: like " This make you know , I 'm going to pretend I 'm a linguist who has nothing to do with this . " And he 'll just go off on parts of it which definitely need fixing grad b: Right . grad a: but aren't where we 're at right now , so it 's grad b: Like like what you call certain things , grad a: Yeah . grad b: But in a sense , it 's good to know that he of all people professor c: OK . grad b: you know , like maybe a lot of people would have m much stronger reactions , so , you know , he 's like a relatively friendly linguist grad a: Yeah . professor c: OK , which was that o one of the things I would like to see happen is a paper that was tentatively called " Towards a formal cognitive semantics " which was addressed to these linguists who haven't been following this stuff at all . professor c: So it could be that he 's actually , at some level , thinking about how am I going to communicate this story grad a: Yeah . professor c: But if he g if he turns is is really gonna turn around and help t to write this version that does connect with as many as possible of the other linguists in the world then then it becomes important to use terminology that doesn't make it hard grad a: professor c: it 's gonna be plenty hard for for people to understand it as it is , grad a: Yeah . I just wanted t to I have to catch up with him , and I wanted t to get a feeling for that . grad a: So I don't know what his take will be on these meetings exactly , you know . grad a: Cuz sometimes he sort of sounds like we 're talking a bunch of goobledy - gook from his point of view . grad b: I think it 's good when we 're when we 're into data and looking at the some specific linguistic phenomenon in in English or in German , in particular , whatever , that 's great , professor c: Yeah . grad b: and Ben and and Hans are , if if anything , more you know , they have more to say than , let 's say , I would about some of these things . grad b: But when it 's like , well , w how do we capture these things , you know , I think it 's definitely been Keith and I who have d you know , who have worried more about the grad a: That 's I I I think that should be the the core group grad b: s Which is fine . professor c: and that 's , you know , I think very close to the maximum number of people working together that can get something done . And then we 're gon we 're gonna because of this other big thing we haven't talked about is actually implementing this stuff ? So that I guess the three of us are gonna connect tomorrow about that . I was just gonna say , though , that , for instance , there was you know , out of a meeting with Johno came the suggestion that " oh , could it be that the meaning constraints really aren't used for selection ? " which has sort of been implicit in the parsing strategy we talked about . grad b: In which case we w we can just say that they 're the effects or the bindings . Which , so far , in terms of like putting up all the constraints as , you know , pushing them into type constraints , the when I 've , you know , propo then proposed it to linguists who haven't yet given me you know , we haven't yet thought of a reason that that wouldn't work . professor c: Yeah , it has to in the sense that you 're gonna use them eventu it 's you know , it 's sort of a , generate and test kind of thing , grad b: if there are some constraints that you hold back and don't use , in your initial matching then you 'll match some things grad b: professor c: I I d I don't think there 's any way that it could completely fail . It it could be that , you wind up The original bad idea of purely context - free grammars died because there were just vastly too many parses . And so th the concern might be that not that it would totally fail , but that grad b: Right ? So by just having semantic even bringing semantics in for matching just in the form of j semantic types , right ? professor c: it would still genera grad b: Like " conceptually these have to be construed as this , this , and this " might still give us quite a few possibilities professor c: Yeah . , cuz I think i I think it 's As you know , I think it 's real hard and if w if we Right . grad e: So , you your dance card is completely filled now ? grad a: Shoot . grad e: Why don't grad b: No , that 's not really true , grad a: Bummer . grad b: but like grad d: What about What about DDR ? grad b: It 's almost true . grad f: grad b: Oh , I don't have it this weekend , so , tsk don't have to worry about that . professor c: DDR , he asked ? grad b: Speaking of dance , Dance Dance Revolution I can't believe I 'm It 's a it 's like a game , but it 's for , like , dancing . Hard to It 's like karaoke , but for dancing , and they tell you what It 's amazing . Well , y you know of it ? I i i it 's one of your hobbies ? It 's great exercise , I must say . They have , like , places instead of like Yeah , instead of karaoke bars now that have , like , DDR , like Yeah , yeah , I didn't until I started hanging out with this friend , who 's like " Oh , well , I can bring over the DDR if you want

The translation of the German SmartKom into English poses challenges, particularly for those unfamiliar with functional programming, as the generation rules are written in LISP.

Question: What additional functions did the customers express willingness to pay a higher price for, and what other points were raised by the product manager and marketing specialist regarding the product's functions? Article: user interface: project manager: and , I'll be taking minutes on this one , and Being hooked up to the PowerPoint for this meeting isn't very necessary for myself , because it'll be more about , what you guys are bringing to the meeting today . 'Cause I was too busy carried away doing my own thing , marketing: industrial designer: which is not obviously not a very good part of a team-working thing . industrial designer: so I was looking at how we're going to go about the working design , and what we actually need to do , and what the remote control needs to do . And it needs to allow a person to have a portable desi device , so they can control the television from wherever they are . , from , on a functional side of things , we found out that wh from our previous meeting , we decided that there're certain points that will make our product unique . And we could use illuminated buttons , which we are all familiar with when we're using a mobile phone , or something fam familiar . Or we could use fluorescent materials which would just take in the light during the day , and then as soon as they go off they would glow in the dark . So if we lost the remote control , perhaps there could be a button on the television set itself , which you could press , and then an alarm from the handset would sound where it was , hopefully in the room . , another thing I think we d missed out on on the last meeting was the fact that we should consider the environmental impact of our design . , from previous researches I've carried out on other projects , we've learnt about smart materials where specific alloys of metals have a shape memory . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: So they can be heated and and cooled , and they change the shape of the metal . So , for example , a screw that's holding something together could expand and it would force all the components apart . So , the benefits of this for our product would be that when it came to the end of its product life , if it was heated , everything would spring apart . So , all the individual components could be easily separated , and then some could be reused , some could be recycled , and I think that would be very important for products now . Especially 'cause there's much responsibility for all the companies who are coming up with like new designs . 'Cause all , we all know that our resources are being limited , and we have to be very environmentally conscious . project manager: So that , someone could have this product for as long as they felt that they wanted it , and then once they contribute it , then that company can break down the part , the parts better ? industrial designer: And then Yeah . Yeah they would , you would make the , the product as you normally would , apart from the , the bits that hold it all together would be made out of this shape-memory alloy . , the user would return the p product to the company , 'cause it's the product's responsibility to get rid of what they've made . , and then the company could then just use , make use of this shape-memory alloys to split up the components , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: and then either reuse some bits , and other bits which are obviously gonna wear out with time , or not usable , they might be like be able to put into scrap metal . Something like the case , if it's scratched or something , you would want to reuse it , but you might be able to melt it down and reuse it again somewhere else . Would we be the company that would break down these , or metals ? Or would we contribute to another group ? industrial designer: You could we could probably empl em employ a , a side company or something to do that for us . industrial designer: but project manager: One thing we have to consider is our one hundred percent turnover goal that we have for our financial sector . project manager: so we'll have to investigate how much that will cost us , cost the company , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Well I the fact of the shape-memory alloys is that they , they don't need to be manually de deconstructed . industrial designer: So I suppose it does need like high contact , yeah , you know high quality machinery , and very specific machinery , but project manager: Alright . project manager: I'm sorry , could you industrial designer: There we go project manager: Those were industrial designer: . , an' yeah , well how the infrared will actually be sent through the chip to be received by the chip on the television set itself . industrial designer: Okay ? So , now is it F_ eight again to escape ? Or escape ? There we go . Can you see ? marketing: Oh , user interface: Do you think Is it , function eight yeah ? project manager: Yeah . , in this case it's the function of the remote control , which is to send messages to the television , television set . By taking inspiration from other similar designs , we'll try and come up with an original trendy remote control , which is sellable international . , multifunctional controls can be difficult to use , as the multitude of buttons can be confusing . A single function remote control is simpler to use , but it means you have to have other remote controls for your other entertainment devices . user interface: I think that a single function remote control would be preferable , because it's easier to use . , it will make an original design more obtainable , as we have less functional necessities to include in the design . And probably more sellable just because it's more compatible with a r a wider range of devices . Does anyone have any questions ? marketing: So as far as we know , a single function television remote control is us usable internationally ? user interface: Well , it's just that , when we're creating it , we're , we have to make it compatible with different brands of devices . user interface: And it would be easier to make it compatible with just different brands of television devices rather than other ent , marketing: D_V_D_s and V_C_R_ ? user interface: yeah , project manager: Right . project manager: Does everyone agree with this ? Does anyone object and , and find the multifunctional might be a better way to go ? industrial designer: I was just wondering about the , what , what Genevieve said before , about having like some hidden controls like having the outer casing . And that would probably , I d , well well what you said before about it being a more profitable simplistic design . Do you think ? marketing: Yeah , I think I agree with the single design thing for now , because we're trying to do so much , that if we're trying to make a unique , user-friendly , dadada , and it's also multi also multifunctional , we're gonna go over budget for one thing . project manager: Alright , well , marketing: project manager: are you ready for your presentation Genevieve ? marketing: Yes I am . Except you're not hooked up to the marketing: Oh , user interface: marketing: I'm not hooked up , but other than that , completely ready . , if you all remember from the email we got before our very first kick-off meeting , with the coffee machine ? The functional requirements of that was to produce hot coffee quickly . , I've done some marketing research , a lot of interviews with remote control users , and some internet research . project manager: I'm sorry , what was that last thing that you just said ? marketing: we should be looking towards trends in both clothing and interior design . marketing: Any trends that are going on in , in the public , even media , industrial designer: . marketing: you know who's famous , what T_V_ shows are being watched , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: the other twenty five percent didn't specify if they love them or found them , you know , neutral . project manager: I'm sorry , that eighty percent of users would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy . You mean that they would spend more money on a fancy-looking remote control ? marketing: Yeah , they're willing , they're willing to spend money on a remote control with personality . marketing: As opposed to your basic , you know , oval black , all same size button remote control . project manager: And another thing with lots of surfing , we'd probably have to work on something that could be a lot more durable , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: because I find with channel-changers that , a lot of the numbers get rubbed down if they're printed on the button . marketing: And actually to go with that , I'm gonna give you some statistics on the relevancy of the buttons , how much they're used . , so obviously when commercials come on they're changing it , so as you said we want a durable button that's not gonna run down . user interface: It has T_V_ has like information , it has information on holidays , the news , entertainment . marketing: So like a running banner , underneath project manager: No it's a button that you press , and then you , like a menu pops up . industrial designer: It's like user interface: And you have page numbers like for the menu , and you press the page numbers with your remote , and it , it'll come up . industrial designer: Yeah , it's just information that , like television timetables , what's on , what's on now , what's on next , on every channel , and marketing: Right . Well I guess I'm not with it , because I wasn't But it's , it's being used fourteen times an hour . So it looks like something that we're gonna want to do some research on and include on our remote control . You know if you get a new T_V_ set , you tune in all the channels , industrial designer: To get the right reception and picture , I suppose . marketing: Is that what it is ? People with arthritis and such ? project manager: That's rather sad . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: marketing: maybe our industrial designer: Oh , I'm guessing that's what it is . marketing: But we'll have to also avoid , you know , buttons responding to the slightest touch as well . Ninety one point two percent said that they would pay extra money to have voice recogni voice recognition included on their remote control . , and you can see that number decreases a bit with ol s Interestingly enough , twenty five to thirty five is the lowest amount . So I guess we're gonna have to figure out what age group we're , we're targeting , and if and if voice recognition is something we wanna look into . project manager: I agree with if we're targeting young adults then it would be something we should look into . project manager: and especially if we are trying to be trendy , go with fashions , things like that . project manager: ages like from thirty five to sixty five which show lower numbers probably won't be as concerned . I don't know if it'd be , if we'd still have a remote , or if you're talking to your television and saying change channel . marketing: So it m it may be too complicated for us , but it's something to keep in mind anyway . industrial designer: And if there was conversation in the room at the same time , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: although in theory it doesn't tend to be when you're watching television , project manager: industrial designer: but could be very difficult to get the specific design . project manager: We need to decide if that is our intention is , is a simplistic design . project manager: because if , if it is then I think voice , voice-activated marketing: It looks like project manager: Yeah , and that would sort of negate the whole remote control thing , marketing: project manager: because if people can activate the television with their voice then they won't be using a , they won't be talking into a remote , I'm sure . an L_C_D_ screen though might be something that , you know , you can shift through pages kind of li the way this PowerPoint is working . industrial designer: What , what would appear on the screen ? project manager: I have no idea still . marketing: now that's , I , I dunno exactly what exactly we'd put on there . Could it it It would be good if it had the actual programme that was on , and what was next . But that would probably be industrial designer: Like linked in with the teletext , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: or sort of like an teletext at your fingers , without having to access that through the television . user interface: marketing: Well I guess that's something we can all take back to our respective research . Every remote control looks the same , so in my opinion it should be , user-friendly and unique . user interface: marketing: So if we're , if we're aiming to make this an international university , universally accepted product industrial designer: . if we wanted to concentrate on fifteen to twenty five years olds , we could go for the fancy stuff . But if we wanna make fifty million , and and have everyone want this remote control , we should maybe stick to the basics . user interface: And we should keep in mind that fifteen to twenty five year olds might not have twenty five Euros to spend on a remote control . Like their priorities might not be a fancy remote control , when they're just starting out marketing: you know , a sixteen year old boy would say , yeah I'd pay extra for voice recognition , until they realise that's three months allowance . marketing: so I I think , I think the older generations we should be catering to a bit more . And if one of the largest , or most complained about thing is that it takes so long to get to know how to use a remote control , user interface: Twenties . project manager: I'm sure that something like an L_C_D_ screen or remote control would be just furthering that problem . Before we go into more discussion on we want this design to look like , I've received some information from the management that will affect some of our decisions . , for one thing , because Having controls with D_V_D_ , V_C_R_ , that sort of thing , would really complicate the design of the remote control . , we've decided not to include them and make it a specific , just a specific television function . Which is good as , as we've sort of decided that we would like to go with that anyway . Another thing that might affect other decisions is that the management feels that teletext is outdated , because more people are using the internet now . industrial designer: Were they , was the management suggesting use of the internet rather than teletext , or just avoiding both altogether ? project manager: well , we don't have the resources or or possibility of using the internet with the remote control , industrial designer: Yeah . This is for the design , the design of the product is that we wanna create , more of a sense that people know that this is from our company . So , all the remote controls must have our We'll incorporate our logo and colour in in some way . project manager: So , perhaps our logo on the bottom , or wherever you feel like it would look good . project manager: it doesn't have to be the colour of our of our company industrial designer: Just project manager: but , another thing is that , industrial designer: project manager: we need to , we probably would have to have that colour and , and logo decided upon . , I'm assuming that we already have one , but for the purposes of this meeting I , I wasn't offered a , like a type of logo or colour , so if that could be somewhere on the design so that we can be recognisable . , so , now we need to discuss , and come to a decision on our remote control functions , of , of how this is going to be . industrial designer: marketing: Okay , so I Are we going to write off the L_C_D_ option ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: I think it would be annoying though if I don't use teletext that much , but if it was on your T_V_ , you'd want to be able to use it , if project manager: Yeah , but another thing is that if we're reaching an international crowd , I know for one that in North America there is no such thing as teletext , so it'd be really superfluous . project manager: Do you know if anywhere else has it ? industrial designer: I don't know . industrial designer: But if Was it a management decision that we're having project manager: It was a management decision , industrial designer: Okay . project manager: so it's , it's pretty much out of our hands at this point . industrial designer: Minimal marketing: And the What was the word they used ? F findability is important . project manager: 'Cause I'm sure that could be inex inexpensive because we could use the same kind of infrared user interface: Yeah . user interface: Would you be able to , put the little device anywhere ? 'Cause isn't our remote control for all T_V_s , so industrial designer: If user interface: you'd ha industrial designer: Do you mean the the link between the user interface: Yeah , with the button that you pressed . user interface: C 'cause then it would only be a applicable to one T_V_ set , so it would need to be something that you could stick somewhere , or something . project manager: Yeah , it would have t industrial designer: Maybe something adhesive that you could like stick onto the back of any set that would be yeah not very obtrusive . Then it wouldn't , it probably wouldn't be able to use It would be able to use the same reception on the remote c control I guess , but the actual device would have to have its own infrared signaller . user interface: Would it need a battery then ? project manager: Maybe , industrial designer: Pr probably . industrial designer: Unless it could be project manager: That's your department you'll have to sort that out . , unless some way , it could have some universal connection to like the socket , the same socket that the T_V_'s supplied from . project manager: Yeah , you'll have to industrial designer: So , more research into that one . project manager: Yeah , you'll have to investi Do some research on that , user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . , alright , and I'm sure that , the glow-in-the-dark , fluorescent , whatever , system , is a go ahead . Is everyone interested in that ? industrial designer: Y marketing: On the buttons ? user interface: I I like the light up suggestion . user interface: 'Cause you know the way fluorescent lights lose their brightness after certain time , so industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: it doesn't user interface: I would go for marketing: It could it could be a tactile thing as well . right , if w if we're minimising buttons , we might be able to make them actually larger . industrial designer: Like a raised marketing: and I don't know what we could do for , for channels . S user interface: Well just the numbers could be embossed , couldn't it ? Like raised . user interface: Just little arrows , that you could feel , maybe ? industrial designer: Yeah marketing: Yeah . marketing: I just thought that it , it might be sucking more battery power , if there , if it is a light up . project manager: But industrial designer: And also y , Heather you mentioned before , like how it should be accessible to everybody . industrial designer: So like you say tactile might be better , because it'd be more available to everybody . Could we somehow We could , may , possibly , sorry , incorporate them both so that the buttons could maybe be in the shape of the numbers themselves and be made out of some glow-in-the-dark material . project manager: 'Cause I d I don't think that glow-in-the-dark material , like the actual soft plastic , costs that much more than other colours . marketing: I guess the other option , referring to the battery thing is , you know how cellphones will t light up for fifteen seconds or something , when you're s and then it goes , industrial designer: Yeah . I know , I'm thinking of mostly when you're watching a movie you turn all the lights off right . marketing: And you don't want to turn on the lights , to turn it down , because there's suddenly an explosion , and it's gonna wake up the baby . industrial designer: I project manager: for the meeting , but I think we should discuss this light subject a little bit more before we close . What were you talking about with the lighting up buttons ? marketing: Oh , just if it was kinda the same way that a cell You know how a cellphone will light up for about ten , fifteen seconds when you touch a button , after having not touched it for a while . marketing: if instead of a constant light up on the , on the remote control , if it lights up for ten seconds when it's touched again . marketing: Yeah , and you , you touch it and it just kind of lights up a bit , and it gives a faint glow . industrial designer: So , self-timed marketing: So if you have all the lights off in your living room , you'll , you'll temporarily see it . project manager: So , do you think that we should do the lighting up thing , and the glow-in-the-dark thing , and the shape of the numbers ? Do we have to kind of decide what we're gonna do with this . And as you're saying like numbers can wear off if they're just sort of like painted on , you know printed . And it could , if it's that softer rubber material it'll be , maybe , better for people with els no industrial designer: durable . project manager: what's it called , R_S_I_ , what was it that we were talking about ? industrial designer: Oh yeah . , did we want to go for the glow-in-the-dark look ? industrial designer: project manager: Or did we want to go for the lighting up instantly ? user interface: If project manager: Like should we do both ? Or we can have one or the other ? Because it might , for , for our design purposes , the lighting up thing might be better because glow-in-the-dark material has a funny kinda colour . industrial designer: Yeah , and we could marketing: whereas we're trying to be trendy and fashionable . industrial designer: Yeah there are now like loads , or a huge range of different colours that it could light up in as well , marketing: So industrial designer: which could like link in with the company colours . industrial designer: or like we've just limited t with the , just ordinary phosphorescent so project manager: Right . user interface: I was thinking though , if it was glow-in-the-dark , you could put the Real Reaction symbol as glow-in-the-dark , and then it would be constantly advertised . And do you have anything marketing: What project manager: Do you have anything to say ? marketing: Oh sorry . So I I dunno if there's something that diff , you know like five different face plates . I dunno if this will start making it more complicated , but it could increase the popularity of the , of the remote . Interchangeable thing ? marketing: Yeah , project manager: Like an iPod or something ? user interface: That would be good . marketing: And I dunno if we'd want to go with like T_V_ show themes or something . user interface: Yeah , and then that would be more profitable like as a sideline to the remote as well . You could start out with three , and if , if we hit it big then we can add some on . industrial designer: als project manager: You'd just get one mould , user interface: No . industrial designer: Interchan And also possible , we could gain out of that by advertising certain T_V_ shows , or project manager: Yeah . project manager: So , if it takes off then we'll , we'll , we'll try that out . project manager: Do we need to reach a decision on that right now ? industrial designer: I've project manager: Because we need to investigate the financial implications . Is it industrial designer: Let's project manager: Does it need to be decided on now ? Or should we industrial designer: I think we could probably leave that 'til later on , then

The marketing specialist discovered that a large percentage of the public would prefer voice recognition on the remote controls instead of buttons, but the project manager raised concerns about the limitations and the clash with the intention of a simple design. Additionally, the marketing specialist suggested installing an LCD screen and linking it with the teletext function. They also discussed the target age group, with the assumption that teenagers would not be willing to pay for an expensive remote control, while the elder age group would be more inclined. Ultimately, the group agreed to cater the product to the age group of early twenties.

Question: Summarize the team's concerns about disk space, PhD I's thoughts on segmentation, the discussion on getting fluent English speakers, the conclusion on semantic specification, and provide a description of the semantic specification. Article: grad f: I 'm What ? Really ? Oh , that 's horrible ! Disincentive ! grad a: OK , we 're recording . So , So basically the result of m much thinking since the last time we met , but not as much writing , is a sheet that I have a lot of , like , thoughts and justification of comments on but I 'll just pass out as is right now . And so one on one side is on one side is a sort of the revised sort of updated semantic specification . grad e: This is just one sheet , right ? grad d: Ah ! Just one sheet . And in some ways it 's it 's it 's very similar to There are very few changes in some ways from what we 've , b done before but I don't think everyone here has seen all of this . , as usual the disclaimers are there are all these things are it 's only slightly more stable than it was before . grad f: And , after a little bit more discussion and especially like Keith and I I have more linguistic things to settle in the next few days , it 'll probably change again some more . grad f: maybe I will let 's start b let 's start on number two actually on the notation , because that 's , I 'm thinking , possibly a little more familiar to , to people . OK , so the top block is just sort of a sort of abstract nota it 's sort of like , listings of the kinds of things that we can have . grad f: So something like , Well , there 's an example the textual example at the end has clausal construction . So , just to show it doesn't have to be beautiful It could be , you know , simple old text as well . professor c: So so the current syntax is if it s if there 's a type it 's before construct grad f: Yeah , right . And as usual I guess all the constructions her all the examples here have only , tsk one type of constituent , that is a constructional constituent . But in general instead of the word " construct " , th here you might have " meaning " or " form " as well . OK ? So if there 's some element that doesn't that isn't yet constructional in the sense that it maps form and meaning . OK , the main change with the constructs which each of which has , the key word " construct " and then some name , and then some type specification , is that it 's it 's pro it 's often sometimes the case in the first case here that you know what kind of construction it is . So for example whatever I have here is gonna be a form of the word " throw " , or it 's gonna be a form of the word , you know , I don't know , " happy " , or something like that . Or , you know , some it 'll be a specific word or maybe you 'll have the type . You 'll say " I need a p spatial relation phrase here " or " I need a directional specifier here " . So a very common example of this is that , you know , in directed motion , the first person to do something should be an agent of some kind , often a human . Right ? So if I you know , the , run down the street then I I I run down the street , it 's typed , " I " , meaning category is what 's there . The the new kind is this one that is sort of a pair and , sort of skipping fonts and whatever . The idea is that sometimes there are , general constructions that you know , that you 're going to need . It 's it 's the equivalent of a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase , or something like that there . grad f: And then , you might know something much more specific depending on what construction you 're talking about , about what meaning what specific meaning you want . So the example again at the bottom , which is directed motion , you might need a nominal expression to take the place of , you know , " the big th " , you you know , " the big the tall dark man " , you know , " walked into the room " . grad f: But because of the nature of this particular construction you know not just that it 's nominal of some kind but in particular , that it 's some kind of animate nominal , and which will apply just as well to like , you know , a per you know , a simple proper noun or to some complicated expression . , so I don't know if the syntax will hold but something that gives you a way to do both constructional and meaning types . None of these examples have anything different for formal constraints ? But you can refer to any of the , sort of available elements and scope , right ? which here are the constructs , to say something about the relation . And I think i if you not if you compare like the top block and the textual block , we dropped like the little F subscript . So so by saying if I just said " Name one " then that means name one formal and we 're talking about formal struc Which which makes sense . , there are certain times when we 'll have an exception to that , in which case you could just indicate " here the meaningful for some reason " . Right ? Or Actually it 's more often that , only to handle this one special case of , you know , " George and Jerry walk into the room in that order " . grad f: So we have a few funny things where something in the meaning might refer to something in the form . But but s we 're not gonna really worry about that for right now and there are way We can be more specific if we have to later on . OK , and so in terms of the the relations , you know , as usual they 're before and ends . I should have put an example in of something that isn't an interval relation but in form you might also have a value binding . You know , you could say that , you know , " name - one dot " , t you know , " number equals " , you know , a plural or something like that . grad f: There are certain things that are attribute - value , similar to the bindings below but they 're just us usually they 're going to be value value fillers , right ? OK , and then again semantic constraints here are just are just bindings . And Johno and I I you you and I can like fight about that if you like ? but about changing it to " semantic n effects " , which I thought was a little bit too order - biased grad b: Well Th grad f: and " semantic bindings " , which I thought might be too restrictive in case we don't have only bindings . And so it was an issue whether constraints , there were some linguists who reacted against " constraints " , saying , " oh , if it 's not used for matching , then it shouldn't be called a constraint " . But I think we want to be uncommitted about whether it 's used for matching or not . Right ? Cuz there are I think we thought of some situations where it would be useful to use whatever the c bindings are , for actual , you know , sort of like modified constraining purposes . professor c: Well , you definitely want to de - couple the formalism from the parsing strategy . So that whether or not it 's used for matching or only for verification , I grad e: Yeah . professor c: but we don't want to grad f: Yeah , there was one time when when Hans explained why " constraints " was a misleading word for him . grad f: And I think the reason that he gave was similar to the reason why Johno thought it was a misleading term , which was just an interesting coincidence . , but , And so I was like , " OK , well both of you don't like it ? professor c: It 's g it 's gone . grad b: But grad f: So that that 's why That 's why I 'll stick with it . grad a: Well , you know what ? grad f: So grad a: If you have an " if - then " phrase , do you know what the " then " phrase is called ? professor c: Th grad f: What ? Con - , a consequent ? grad a: Yeah . Anyway , so the other the other strategy you guys could consider is when you don't know what word to put , you could put no word , grad f: grad b: So that 's why you put semantic constraints up top and meaning bindings down down here ? grad f: Oh , oops ! No . grad b: So this should be semantic and grad f: Sometimes I 'm intentionally inconsistent grad b: grad f: cuz I 'm not sure yet . grad b: Th - so this definitely should be " semantic constraints " down at the bottom ? grad e: Sure . grad f: Well , unless I go with " meaning " but i , I kind of like " meaning " better than " semantic " grad b: Or professor c: Oh , whatever . grad f: but I think there 's vestiges of other people 's biases . grad f: OK , so I think the middle block doesn't really give you any more information , ex than the top block . And the bottom block similarly only just illus you know , all it does is illustrate that you can drop the subscripts and and that you can drop the , that you can give dual types . grad f: So basically now , this is actually this little change actually goes along with a big linguistic change , which is that " designates " isn't only something for the semantics to worry about now . grad f: So we want s " designates " to actually know one of the constituents which acts like a head in some respects but is sort of , really important for say composition later on . So for instance , if some other construction says , you know , " are you of type is this part of type whatever " , the " designates " tells you which sort of part is the meaning part . OK , so if you have like " the big red ball " , you know , you wanna know if there 's an object or a noun . grad f: there is a slight complication here which is that when we talk about form it 's useful sometimes to talk about , to talk about there also being a designated object and we think that that 'll be the same one , right ? So the ball is the head of the phrase , " the r the " , " big red ball " , and the entity denoted by the word " ball " is sort of the semantic head in some ways of of this sort of , in interesting larger element . And there 's there 's ca some cases where the grammar depends on some form property of the head . grad f: And , you might be able to say things like if the head has to go last in a head - final language , you can refer to the head as a p the , you know the formal head as opposed to the rest of the form having to be at the end of that decision . grad f: So that 's a useful thing so that you can get some internal structural constraints in . Were you finished ? grad f: there was a list of things that isn't included but you you can you can ask a question . So , i if I understand this the aside from , construed and all that sort of stuff , the the differences are mainly that , we 've gone to the possibility of having form - meaning pairs for a type grad f: professor c: if we go back far enough grad f: Well , except for their construction meaning , so it 's not clear that , Well , right now it 's a c contr construction type and meaning type . A well , and a previous , you know , version of the notation certainly allowed you to single out the meaning bit by it . I don't think that it was often used to give an extra meaning const type constraint on the meaning , which is really what we want most of the time I think . grad f: I I don't know if we 'll ever have a case where we actually h if there is a form category constraint , you could imagine having a triple there that says , you know that 's kind of weird . grad e: I professor c: In fact , these are , as long as as Mark isn't around , these are form constraints . The fact that it 's n , a nominal expression I would say on most people 's notion of of f you know , higher form types , this i this is one . grad e: It 's that now , I 'm mentioned this , I I don't know if I ever explained this but the point of , I mentioned in the last meeting , the point of having something called " nominal expression " is , because it seems like having the verb subcategorize for , you know , like say taking as its object just some expression which , designates an object or designates a thing , or whatever , that leads to some syntactic problems basically ? So you wanna , you know you sort of have this problem like " OK , well , I 'll put the word " , let 's say , the word " dog " , you know . And then we have a construction that says , oh , you can have " the " preceding a noun . And so you 'd have this sort of problem that the verb has to meet the designatum . grad e: And you could get , you know , " the kicked dog " or something like that , meaning " kicked the dog " . grad e: so you kind of have to let this phrase idea in there professor c: That I I have no problem with it at all . Right , n s you may be you may not be like everyone else in in Berkeley , grad e: Yeah . grad e: we we we sort of thought we were getting away with , with , a p grad f: we don't mind either , so grad e: this is not reverting to the X - bar theory of of phrase structure . grad e: I just know that this is Like , we didn't originally have in mind that , that verbs would subcategorize for a particular sort of form . grad f: Well , there 's an alternative to this grad e: At least in English . grad f: which is , The question was did we want directed motion , professor c: Yeah . grad f: did we want it to worry about , anything more than the fact that it , you know , has semantic You know , it 's sort of frame - based construction . So one option that , you know , Keith had mentioned also was like , well if you have more abstract constructions such as subject , predicate , basically things like grammatical relations , grad e: grad f: those could intersect with these in such a way that subject , predicate , or subject , predicate , subject , verb , ob you know , verb object would require that those things that f fill a subject and object are NOM expressions . But it y y it 's yeah , just moving it moving the c the cons the constraints around . professor c: OK , so that 's grad f: But there does basically , the point is there has to be that constraint somewhere , right ? professor c: Right . professor c: And so that was the grad f: Robert 's not happy now ? grad a: No ! grad f: Oh , OK . professor c: OK , and sort of going with that is that the designatum also now is a pair . grad f: Yeah , the un sort of the un - addressed questions in this , definitely would for instance be semantic constraints we talked about . grad f: Here are just bindings but , right ? we might want to introduce mental spaces You know , there 's all these things that we don't professor c: The whole the mental space thing is clearly not here . grad f: Right ? So there 's going to be some extra you know , definitely other notation we 'll need for that which we skip for now . professor c: By the way , I do want to get on that as soon as Robert gets back . professor c: obviously , construal is a b is a b is a big component of that grad e: But sort of as soon as he gets back I think , we ought to grad f: grad e: So what 's the what 's the time frame ? I forgot again when you 're going away for how long ? grad a: Just , as a sort of a mental bridge , I 'm not I 'm skipping fourth of July . grad f: What ? You 're missing like the premier American holiday ? What 's the point of spending a year here ? grad a: I 've had it often enough . grad f: Construal , OK , so Oh , so there was one question that came out . , which is , so something like " past " which i you know , we think is a very simple , we 've often just stuck it in as a feature , professor c: Right . grad f: you know , " oh , this event takes place before speech time " , OK , is what this means . , it 's often thought of as it is also considered a mental space , professor c: Right . grad f: So there 's this issue of well sometimes there are really exotic explicit space builders that say " in France , blah - blah - blah " , grad e: grad f: and you have to build up you ha you would imagine that would require you , you know , to be very specific about the machinery , whereas past is a very conventionalized one and we sort of know what it means but it we doesn't don't necessarily want to , you know , unload all the notation every time we see that it 's past tense . grad f: So , you know , we could think of our , just like X - schema " walk " refers to this complicated structure , past refers to , you know , a certain configuration of this thing with respect to it . grad f: So so we 're kind of like having our cake and eating it professor c: Yeah . No , I think I think that i we 'll have to see how it works out when we do the details grad f: So , i i grad a: Do you want to do the same for space ? grad f: Wha - sorry ? grad a: Space ? grad f: Space ? grad a: Here ? Now ? grad f: Oh , oh , oh , oh , instead of just time ? grad a: So there are very conventionalized like deictic ones , right ? And then I think for other spaces that you introduce , you could just attach y whatever grad a: . grad a: well this this basically would involve everything you can imagine to fit under your C dot something grad e: N grad a: you know , where where it 's contextually dependent , grad f: Yeah . grad a: what is in the future , where is this , what is here , what is there , what is " grad f: we 'll we 'll get that on the other side a little , like very minimally . grad f: And you know , you could imagine for both of those are absolute things you could say about the time and place , and then there are many in more interestingly , linguistically anyway , there are relative things that , you know , you relate the event in time and space to where you are now . If there 's something a lot more complicated like , or so hypothetical or whatever , then you have to do your job , grad e: I 'm I 'm s curious about how much of the mental , I 'm not sure that the formalism , sort of the grammatical side of things , is gonna have that much going on in terms of the mental space stuff . You know , basically all of these so - called space builders that are in the sentence are going to sort of I think of it as , sort of giving you the coordinates of , you know assuming that at any point in discourse there 's the possibility that we could be sort of talking about a bunch of different world scenarios , whatever , and the speaker 's supposed to be keeping track of those . The , the construction that you actually get is just gonna sort of give you a cue as to which one of those that you 've already got going , you 're supposed to add structure to . grad e: So " in France , Watergate wouldn't have hurt Nixon " or something like that . , well , you say , " alright , I 'm supposed to add some structure to my model of this hypothetical past France universe " or something like that . The information in the sentence tells you that much but it doesn't tell you like exactly what it what the point of doing so is . So for example , depending on the linguistic con , context it could be like the question is for example , what does " Watergate " refer to there ? Does it , you know does it refer to , if you just hear that sentence cold , the assumption is that when you say " Watergate " you 're referring to " a Watergate - like scandal as we might imagine it happening in France " . But in a different context , " oh , you know , if Nixon had apologized right away it wouldn't you know , Watergate wouldn't have hurt him so badly in the US and in France it wouldn't have hurt him at all " . Now we 're s now that " Watergate " we 're now talking about the real one , grad f: They 're real , right . grad e: and the " would " sort of it 's a sort of different dimension of hypothe - theticality , right ? We 're not saying What 's hypothetical about this world . grad e: In the first case , hypothetically we 're imagining that Watergate happened in France . grad e: In the second case we 're imagining hypothetically that Nixon had apologized right away grad f: grad f: It seems like , the grammatical things such as the auxiliaries that you know introduce these conditionals , whatever , give you sort of the the most basi grad e: grad f: th those we I think we can figure out what the possibilities are , right ? grad e: And then how they interact with some extra thing like " in France " or " if such - and - such " , that 's like there are certain ways that they c they can grad e: Yeah . grad f: You know , one is a more specific version of the general pattern that the grammat grammar gives you . But , you know , whatever , professor c: Yeah , in the short run all we need is a enough mechanism on the form side to get things going . professor c: I , you you grad e: But the whole point of the whole point of what Fauconnier and Turner have to say about , mental spaces , and blending , and all that stuff is that you don't really get that much out of the sentence . An individual sentence could mean a hundred different things depending on , quote , " what the space configuration is at the time of utterance " . grad e: And so somebody 's gonna have to be doing a whole lot of work but not me , I think . Oh , I yeah , I , I think that 's Not k I th I don't think it 's completely right . , in fact a sentence examples you gave in f did constrain the meaning b the form did constrain the meaning , grad e: Yeah . professor c: and so , it isn't , grad e: Sure , but like what what was the point of saying that sentence about Nixon and France ? That is not there is nothing about that in the in the sentence really . professor c: that that that we 're not expecting much out of the , f grad e: Yeah . professor c: but , it seems to me that th these we we you know , we 've talked about maybe a half a dozen linguistics theses in the last few minutes or something . professor c: I , that that 's my feeling that that these are really hard , problems that decide exactly what what 's going on . grad f: OK , so , one other thing I just want to point out is there 's a lot of confusion about the terms like " profile , designate , focus " , et cetera , et cetera . grad f: for now I 'm gonna say like " profile " 's often used like two uses that come to mind immediately . So " hypotenuse " , you profiled this guy against the background of the right t right triangle . They use it to really mean , this in a frame th this is the profiles on the these are the ones that are required . Which which I 'm not saying one and two are mutually exclusive but they 're they 're different meanings . For us , OK , so how is it professor c: Does that Is that really what they mean in in grad f: so " designate " FrameNet ? professor c: I didn't know that . grad f: I knew that I thought that that would be something like there 's another term that I 've heard for that thing professor c: Right , OK . Anyway , so I think the the " designate " that we have in terms of meaning is really the " highlight this thing with respect to everything else " . But the second one seems to be useful but we might not need a notation for it ? We don't have a notation for it but we might want one . So for example we 've talked about if you 're talking about the lexical item " walk " , you know it 's an action . Well , it also has this idea it carries along with it the idea of an actor or somebody 's gonna do the walking . Or if you talk about an adjective " red " , it carries along the idea of the thing that has the property of having color red . So I d don't yet know , I have no commitment , as to whether we need it . It might be it 's the kind of thing that w a parser might want to think about whether we require you know , these things are like it 's semantically part of it professor c: N no , no . If you walk " in " , like well , in what ? professor c: Right , there 's grad f: You know , like you have to have the So so it 's only semantically is it it is still required , say , by simulation time though professor c: Right . So it 's that I meant the idea of like that the semantic value is filled in by sim simulation . I don't know if that 's something we need to spa to to like say ever as part of the requirement ? or the construction ? or not . professor c: Or , or or , so the grad f: Have it construed , professor c: Yeah , yeah . professor c: right , yeah , w this is gonna be a b you 're right , this is a bit of in a mess and we still have emphasis as well , or stress , or whatever . grad f: OK , well we 'll get , I we have thoughts about those as well . grad f: the I w I would just s some of this is just like my you know , by fiat . I don't - you know , there 's lots of different ways in the world that people use it . grad f: So , s I think that the way I we would like to think , I think is focus is something that comes up in , lots of basically this is the information structure . grad f: OK , it 's like , it 's not it might be that there 's a syntactic , device that you use to indicate focus or that there are things like , you know , I think Keith was telling me , things toward the end of the sentence , post - verbal , tend to be the focused focused element , grad e: Mmm . You know , if I " I walked into the room " , you tend to think that , whatever , " into the room " is sort of like the more focused kind of thing . grad f: And when you , you have stress on something that might be , you know , a cue that the stressed element , or for instance , the negated element is kind of related to information structure . , so so I think that 's kind of nice to keep " focus " being an information structure term . So , like " stress " , th stress is kind of a pun on you might have like whatever , like , accent kind of stress . grad f: And that 's just a , w we 'll want to distinguish stress as a form device . grad f: t , and distinguish that from it 's effect which is , " Oh , the kind of focus we have is we 're emphasizing this value often as opposed to other values " , right ? So focus carries along a scope . Like if you 're gonna focus on this thing and you wanna know it sort of evokes all the other possibilities that it wasn't . grad f: so my classic my now - classic example of saying , " Oh , he did go to the meeting ? " , grad e: Yeah . grad f: that was my way of saying as opposed to , you know , " Oh , he didn't g " or " There was a meeting ? " grad e: Yeah . grad f: And so , the like if you said he you know , there 's all these different things that if you put stress on a different part of it then you 're , c focusing , whatever , on , grad e: grad f: " he walked to the meeting " as opposed to " he ran " , or " he did walk to the meeting " as opposed to " he didn't walk " . grad f: so we need to have a notation for that which , I think that 's still in progress . But it did one one implication it does f have for the other side , which we 'll get to in a minute is that I couldn't think of a good way to say " here are the possible things that you could focus on " , cuz it seems like any entity in any sentence , you know , or any meaning component of anyth you know all the possible meanings you could have , any of them could be the subject of focus . grad f: But I think one the one thing you can schematize is the kind of focus , right ? So for instance , you could say it 's the the tense on this as opposed to , the the action . Or it 's , it 's an identity thing or a contrast with other things , or stress this value as opposed to other things . So , it 's it is kind of like a profile profile - background thing but I I can't think of like the limited set of possible meanings that you would that you would focu grad e: Light up with focus , yeah . Li - , the best thing I can come up with is that information has a list of focused elements . For instance , you Oh , one other type that I forgot to mention is like query elements and that 's probably relevant for the like " where is " , you know , " the castle " kind of thing ? grad e: grad f: Because you might want to say that , location or cert certain WH words bring you know , sort of automatically focus in a , you know , " I don't know the identity of this thing " kind of way on certain elements . So that 's onl there are there are many more things that are uncl that are sort of like a little bit unstable about the notation but it 's most I think it 's this is , you know , the current current form . Other things we didn't totally deal with , grad e: Oh , there 's a bunch . grad f: well , we 've had a lot of other stuff that Keith and I have them working on in terms of like how you deal with like an adjective . grad f: And , we should have put an example of this and we could do that later . grad f: But I think the not inherently like the general principles still work though , that , we can have constructions that have sort of constituent structure in that there is like , you know , for instance , one , you know , they they have constituents , right ? So you can like nest things when you need to , but they can also overlap in a sort of flatter way . So if you don't have like a lot of grammar experience , then like this this might , you know , be a little o opaque . But , you know , we have the properties of dependency grammars and some properties of constituents constituent - based grammar . So that 's I think that 's sort of the main thing we wanted to aim for grad e: This my f grad f: As a word ? grad a: No , as as Just don't don't think about it . grad f: As a What 's that ? grad a: If grad f: Sorry . grad a: canonically speaking you can if you look at a a curve over sentence , you can find out where a certain stress is and say , " hey , that 's my focus exponent . grad a: grad f: You mean t forget about stress , the form cue ? grad a: The form bit grad e: Yeah . grad a: because , as a form cue , not even trained experts can always well , they can tell you where the focus exponent is sometimes . grad f: OK , grad a: And all grad e: Yeah , I I 'm sort of inclined to say let 's worry about specifying the information structure focus of the sentence grad f: I believe you , yeah . Ways that you can get it come from th grad e: hhh , the phonology component can handle actually assigning an intonation contour to that . grad e: You know , later on we 'll worry about exactly how grad a: Or or map from the contour to to what the focus exponent is . grad e: But figure out how the grad a: But , if you don't know what you 're what you 're focus is then you 're you 're hopeless - - ly lost anyways , grad e: Yeah . grad a: and the only way of figuring out what that is , is , by sort of generating all the possible alternatives to each focused element , decide which one in that context makes sense and which one doesn't . So , you know , again , that 's something that h humans can do , grad f: Well , yeah , I wouldn't have assumed that it 's an easy problem in in absence of all the oth grad a: u u grad f: you need all the other information I guess . grad a: But it 's it 's what it , it 's pretty easy to put it in the formalism , though . grad a: you can just say whatever stuff , " i is the container being focused or the the entire whatever , both , and so forth . professor c: Yeah , so b b but I think the poi I 'm not sure I understand but here 's what I th think is going on . That if we do the constructions right when a particular construction matches , it the fact that it matches , does in fact specify the focus . professor c: k , at at the very least it constrai grad f: I think that 's that 's , th that 's certainly true . And depending on the construction it may or may not f specify the focus , right ? professor c: Oh , for sure , yes . There are constrai yeah , it 's not every but there are constructions , where you t explicitly take into account those considerations grad f: Yeah . grad a: And " John is on the bus " versus " was " , and e grad f: Is on . grad a: and will we have u is it all the same constructions ? Just with a different foc focus constituent ? grad f: Yeah , I would say that argument structure in terms of like the main like sort of , grad a: grad f: I don't know the fact that you can get it without any stress and you have some whatever is predicated anyway should be the same set of constructions . So , then you have a separate thing that picks out , you know , stress on something relative to everything else . professor c: oh , I 'm sorry , grad f: And it would professor c: go ahead , grad f: yeah , professor c: finish . grad f: and it w and that would have to it might be ambiguous as , whether it picks up that element , or the phrase , or something like that . grad f: So that should , you know , interact with it should overlap with whatever other construction is there . professor c: S s the question is , do we have a way on the other page , when we get to the s semantic side , of saying what the stressed element was , or stressed phrase , or something . Well , so that 's why I was saying how since I couldn't think of an easy like limited way of doing it , all I can say is that information structure has a focused slot professor c: Right . grad f: and I think that should be able to refer to professor c: So that 's down at the bottom here when we get over there . grad f: Yeah , and , infer and I don't have I don't have a great way or great examples professor c: I 'll - I 'll wait . grad f: but I think that something like that is probably gonna be , more more what we have to do . grad f: But , grad a: So grad f: OK , that was one comment . And you had another one ? grad a: Yeah , well the once you know what the focus is the everything else is background . It 's like , " oh ! " It was an epiphany that it you know , topic and focus are a contrast set . So topic is Topic - focused seems to me like , background profile , OK , or a landmark trajector , or some something like that . grad f: Now I don't know whether I n I don't have as many great examples of like topic - indicating constructions on like focus , right ? , topic it seems kind of you know , I think that might be an ongoing kind of thing . grad e: Yeah , that 's what " wa " is , just to mark which thing is the topic . grad f: and one thing that I didn't do consistently , is when we get there , is like indicate what kind of thing fits into every role . I think I have an idea of what it should be but th you know , so far we 've been getting away with like either a type constraint or , you know , whatever . You know , it 'll be it 'll be another predication or it 'll be , I don't know , some value from from some something , some variable and scope or something like that , or a slot chain based on a variable and scope . OK , so well that 's should we flip over to the other side officially then ? grad a: - , . Now we 'll go back to s OK , so this doesn't include something which mi mi may have some effect on on it , which is , the discourse situation context record , right ? So I didn't I I meant just like draw a line and like , you know , you also have , some tracking of what was going on . grad f: And sort of this is a big scale comment before I , you know , look into the details of this . But for instance you could imagine instead of having I I changed the name of it used to be " entities " . And " scenario " is essentially what kind of what 's the basic predication , what event happened . And actually it 's just a list of various slots from which you would draw draw in order to paint your picture , a bunch of frames , bi and bindings , right ? , and obviously there are other ones that are not included here , general cultural frames and general like , other action f grad e: The middle thing used to be " entities " because you could imagine it should be like really a list where here was various information . And this is intended to be grammatically specifiable information about a referent , you know , about some entity that you were going to talk about . So " Harry walked into the room " , " Harry " and " room " , you know , the room th but they would be represented in this list somehow . But the important things for grammatical purposes are for things like number , gender , ki the ones I included here are slightly arbitrary but you could imagine that , you need to figure out wheth if it 's a group whether , some event is happening , linear time , linear spaces , like , you know , are are they doing something serially or is it like , I 'm I 'm not sure . Because this partly came from , Talmy 's schema and I 'm not sure we 'll need all of these actually . But , and then the " status " I used was like , again , in some languages , you know , like for instance in child language you might distinguish between different status . So , th the the big com and and finally " discourse segment " is about sort of speech - act - y information structure - y , like utterance - specific kinds of things . So the comment I was going to make about , changing entity the entity 's block to reference is that you can imagine your discourse like situation context , you have a set of entities that you 're sort of referring to . And you might that might be sort of a general , I don't know , database of all the things in this discourse that you could refer to . And I changed to " reference " cuz I would say , for a particular utterance you have particular referring expressions in it . And and these could actually just point to , you know , the the ID in my other list of enti active entities , right ? So , th there 's there 's all this stuff about discourse status . You know , there 's this , hierarchy there 's a schematization of , you know , things can be active or they can be , accessible , inaccessible . grad f: It was the one that , you know , Keith , emailed to us once , to some of us , not all of us . It was like in this particular set , s you know , instance , it has been referred to recently or it hasn't been , grad e: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , they 're contex and for instance , I used to have a location thing there but actually that 's a property of the situation . And it 's again , time , you know at cert certain points things are located , you know , near or far from you professor c: Well , this is recursive grad f: and professor c: cuz until we do the , mental space story , we 're not quite sure Th - th grad f: Yeah . So I so for now I thought , well maybe I 'll just have in this list the things that are relevant to this particular utterance , right ? Everything else here is utterance - specific . , and I left the slot , " predications " , open because you can have , things like " the guy I know from school " . grad f: Or , you know , like your referring expression might be constrained by certain like unbounded na amounts of prep you know , predications that you might make . And it 's unclear whether , you could just have in your scenario , " here are some extra few things that are true " , right ? grad e: grad f: So it 's it 's a little bit different from just saying " all these things are true from my utterance " . grad e: Right , " this guy I know from school came for dinner " does not mean , " there 's a guy , I know him from school , and he came over for dinner " . Right ? So Or maybe that 's like a restrictive , non - restrictive grad e: Yeah . grad f: you know , it 's like it gets into that kind of thing for , but maybe I 'm mixing , you know this is kind of like the final result after parsing the sentence . grad f: So you might imagine that the information you pass to , you know in identifying a particular referent would be , " oh , some " you know , " it 's a guy and it 's someone I know from school " . grad f: So maybe that would , you know , be some intermediate structure that you would pass into the disc to the , whatever , construal engine or whatever , discourse context , to find you know , either create this reference , grad e: grad f: in which case it 'd be created here , and you know , so so you could imagine that this might not So , I 'm uncommitted to a couple of these things . grad a: But to make it m precise at least in my mind , it 's not precise . grad a: So " house " is gender neuter ? In reality grad f: it could be in grad a: or in professor c: Semantically . , it could be that , maybe you 'd maybe not all these , I wou I would say that I tried to keep slots here that were potentially relevant to most most things . grad a: No , just to make sure that we everybody that 's completely agreed that it it has nothing to do with , form . grad a: Then " predications " makes sense to to have it open for something like , accessibility or not . So maybe having made that big sca sort of like large scale comment , should I just go through each of these slots , each of these blocks , a little bit ? grad e: Sure . And just a note , which was that , s so when we actually ha so for instance , some of them seem more inherently static , OK , like a container or sort of support - ish . And others are a little bit seemingly inherently dynamic like " source , path , goal " is often thought of that way or " force " , or something like that . But in actual fact , I think that they 're intended to be sort of neutral with respect to that . And so , I think this came up when , Ben and I were working with the Spaniards , the other day the " Spaniettes " , as we called them , to decide like how you want to split up , like , s image schematic contributions versus , like , X - schematic contributions . And I think again , it 's gonna be something in the X - schema that tells you " is this static or is this dynamic " . , that , you know , is it , a state or is it a change of state , or is it a , action of some kind ? grad a: i i i is there any meaning to when you have sort of parameters behind it and when you don't ? grad f: . grad a: Just means grad f: Oh , oh ! You mean , in the slot ? grad a: grad f: no , it 's like X - sc it 's it 's like I was thinking of type constraints but X - schema , well it obviously has to be an X - schema . " Agent " , the the performer of the X - schema , that s depends on the X - schema . You know , and I in general it would probably be , you know grad e: So the difference is basically whether you thought it was obvious what the possible fillers were . grad f: " aspectual type " probably isn't obvious but I should have So , I just neglected to stick something in . " Perspective " , " actor " , " undergoer " , " observer " , grad b: Mmm . grad f: I think we 've often used " agent " , " patient " , obser grad e: " Whee ! " That 's that one , right ? grad f: Yeah , exactly . , and so one nice thing that , we had talked about is this example of like , if you have a passive construction then one thing it does is ch you know definitely , it is one way to for you to , you know , specifically take the perspective of the undergoing kind of object . And so then we talked about , you know , whether well , does that specify topic as well ? Well , maybe there are other things . I 'm gonna trail off on that one cuz it 's not that f important right now . professor c: N now , for the moment we just need the ability to l l write it down if if somebody figured out what the rules were . So by default it 'll be like " true " , I guess , you know , if you 're specifying events that did happen . You could imagine that you skip out this you know , leave off this polarity , you know , not don't have it here . But the reason why I left it in is cuz you might have a change of state , let 's say , where some state holds and then some state doesn't hold , and you 're just talking , you know if you 're trying to have the nuts and bolts of simulation you need to know that , you know , whatever , the holder doesn't and professor c: No , I th I think at this lev which is it should be where you have it . grad f: OK , it 's so it 's it 's it 's fine where it is . professor c: how you get it may may in will often involve the discourse grad f: So , OK . professor c: but but by the time you 're simulating you sh y you should know that . grad e: So , I 'm still just really not clear on what I 'm looking at . The " scenario " box , like , what does that look like for an example ? Like , not all of these things are gonna be here . It 's a grab bag of grad e: " part of what I 'm going to hand you is a whole bunch of s , schemas , image , and X - schemas . grad f: And for a particular instance which I will , you know , make an example of something , is that you might have an instance of container and path , let 's say , as part of your , you know , " into " you know , definition . grad f: So you would eventually have instances filled in with various various values for all the different slots . grad f: And they 're bound up in , you know , their bindings and and and values . Do you have to say about the binding in your is there a slot in here for that tells you how the bindings are done ? professor c: No , no , no . I let 's see , I think we 're we 're not I don't think we have it quite right yet . OK , then this says that when an analysis is finished , the whole analysis is finished , you 'll have as a result , some s resulting s semspec for that utterance in context , grad e: OK . professor c: So that that the who that this is the tool kit under whi out of which you can make a semantic specification . But B , which is more relevant to your life , is this is also the tool kit that is used in the semantic side of constructions . professor c: So this is an that anything you have , in the party line , anything you have as the semantic side of constructions comes , from pieces of this ignoring li grad e: OK . professor c: so that the , you know , goal of the , " source , path , goal " has to be the landmark of the conta you know , the interior of this container . These are all so far these structures , especially from " path " and on down , these are sort of relatively familiar , image schematic kind of slots . grad f: So you 'll say , " event one causes event B professor c: And and and and this this this again may ge our , and we and and , of course , worlds . , if y if I said " time " is , you know , " past " , that would say " set that this world " , you know , " somewhere , before the world that corresponds to our current speech time " . Yeah , so " cause " and Other frames that could come in , unfortunately you could bring in say for instance , " desire " or something like that , grad e: And actually there is right now under " discourse segments " , " attitude " ? grad e: So there are a couple things where I like , " oh , I 'm not sure if I wanted to have it there grad e: Well that 's grad f: or " Basically there was a whole list of of possible speaker attitudes that like say Talmy listed . And , like , well , I don't you know , it was like " hope , wish . And it 's like , well , I feel like if I wanted to have an extra meaning I don't know if those are grammatically marked in the first place . So if I wanted to I would stick in an extra frame in my meaning , saying , e so th it 'd be a hierarchical frame them , right ? You know , like " Naomi wants wants su a certain situation and that situation itself is a state of affairs " . So so , " want " itself can be i i i i i grad f: u Can be just another frame that 's part of your professor c: Well , and it i basically it 's an action . professor c: in in our in our s terminology , " want " can be an action and " what you want " is a world . , so anyway , Keith So is this comfortable to you that , once we have this defined , it is your tool kit for building the semantic part of constructions . professor c: And then when we combine constructions semantically , the goal is going to be to fill out more and more of the bindings needed in order to come up with the final one . professor c: And that 's the wh and and , that according to the party line , that 's the whole story . So , there 's this stuff in the off in the scenario , which just tells you how various what schemas you 're using and they 're how they 're bound together . And I guess that some of the discourse segment stuff is that where you would sa grad f: grad e: that 's OK , that 's where the information structure is which sort of is a kind of profiling on different parts of , of this . There 's almost , we keep coming back to how focus is like this this , trajector - landmark thing . grad e: So if I say , You know , " In France it 's like this " . You know , great , we 've learned something about France but the fact is that utterances of that sort are generally used to help you draw a conclusion also about some implicit contrast , like " In France it 's like this " . And therefore you 're supposed to say , " Boy , life sure " grad f: Right . grad e: And so grad f: S so I would prefer not to worry about that for right now grad e: OK . grad f: and to think that there are , grad e: That comes in and , grad f: discourse level constructions in a sense , topic topic - focus constructions that would say , " oh , when you focus something " then grad e: If you stressed , you know , " John went to the " , you know , " the bar " whatever , you 're focusing that grad e: grad f: So similarly for a whole sentence , you know , " in France such - and - such happens " . grad f: So the whole thing is sort of like again implicitly as opposed to other things that are possible . grad a: So that 's his that 's the best way of talking about focus , is I think his way . grad a: I never know how to pronounce his name because he 's sort of , professor c: S Swede ? grad a: he is Dutch professor c: Dutch ? grad a: and , but very confused background I think . grad a: But , I don't know where he is right now but alternative semantics is if you type that into an , browser or search engine you 'll get tons of stuff . grad a: And what I 'm kind of confused about is is what the speaker and the hearer is is sort of doing there . grad f: So for a particular segment it 's really just a reference to some other entity again in the situation , right ? So for a particular segment the speaker might be you or might be me . I guess that that that that 's not very clear from here grad a: Yeah , but you Don't we ultimately want to handle that analogously to the way we handle time and place , grad f: that 's not allowed here . grad a: because " you " , " me " , " he " , " they " , you know , " these guys " , all these expressions , nuh , are in in much the same way contextually dependent as " here , " and " now , " and " there " grad f: professor c: So it 's it 's Fred and Mary , grad f: So th professor c: so the speaker would be Fred and the grad a: Ah ! grad f: Right , so the constructions might of course will refer , using pronouns or whatever . grad f: In which case they have to check to see , who the , speaker in here wa in order to resolve those . But when you actually say that " he walked into " , whatever , the " he " will refer to a particular You you will already have figured who " he " or " you " , mmm , or " I " , maybe is a bett better example , who " I " refers to . , and then you 'd just be able to refer to Harry , you know , in wherever that person whatever role that person was playing in the event . grad a: And down there in the speaker - hearer part ? grad f: S so , that 's I think that 's just n for instance , Speaker is known from the situation , right ? You 're when you hear something you 're told who the speaker is , you know who the speaker is . In fact , that 's kind of constraining how in some ways you know this before you get to the you fill in all the rest of it . grad f: how else would you grad a: You know , it 's the speaker may in English is allowed to say " I . grad a: But wouldn't the " I " then set up the the s s referent that happens to be the speaker this time grad f: grad a: Or " you " grad f: So grad a: much like the " you " could n grad f: S so OK , so I would say ref under referent should be something that corresponds to " I " . And maybe each referent should probably have a list of way whatever , the way it was referred to . So that 's " I " but , should we say it it refers to , what ? , if it were " Harry " it would refer to like some ontology thing . If it were if it 's " I " it would refer to the current speaker , OK , which is given to be like , you know , whoever it is . So so again , this , this this is gonna to get us into the mental space stuff grad f: Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . professor c: Except s it 's it 's trickier than that because , the reference for example So he where it gets really tricky is there 's some things , grad f: Yeah . professor c: and this is where blends and all terribl So , some things which really are meant to be identified and some things which aren't . So I thought of having like for each referent , having the list of of the things t with which it is identified . grad f: for instance , So , I guess , it sort of depends on if it is a referring exp if it 's identifiable already or it 's a new thing . grad f: If it 's a new thing you 'd have to like create a structure or whatever . If it 's an old thing it could be referring to , usually w something in a situation , right ? Or something in ontology . grad f: So , there 's a you know , whatever , it c it could point at one of these . professor c: I just had a I just had an an idea that would be very nice if it works . grad f: For what ? professor c: I haven't told you what it is yet . , we might be able to handle context in the same way that we handle mental spaces because , you have somewhat the same things going on of , things being accessible or not . professor c: it c it it , I think if we did it right we might be able to get at least a lot of the same structure . professor c: So that pulling something out of a discourse context is I think similar to other kinds of , mental space phenomena . And And professor c: I 've I 've I 've never seen anybody write that up but maybe they did . grad e: There 's things like ther you know , there 's all kinds of stuff like , in I think I mentioned last time in Czech if you have a a verb of saying then grad f: So so by default grad e: you know , you say something like or or I was thinking you can say something like , " oh , I thought , you are a republican " or something like that . grad e: you know , sort of the past tense being copied onto the lower verb doesn't happen there , so you have to say something about , you know , tense is determined relative to current blah - blah - blah . grad e: There 's languages where , if you have a verb of saying then , ehhh , where OK , so a situation like " Bob said he was going to the movies " , where that lower subject is the same as the person who was saying or thinking , you 're actually required to have " I " there . grad e: and it 's sort of in an extended function professor c: So we would have it be in quotes in English . grad e: it 's been analyzed by the formalists as being a logophoric pronoun , which means a pronoun which refers back to the person who is speaking or that sort of thing , right ? professor c: OK . grad e: but , that happens to sound like the word for " I " but is actually semantically unrelated to it . grad f: Oh , no ! professor c: Oh , good , I love the formali grad e: grad f: Really ? grad e: Yeah . , Mary Dalrymple , this book , a ninety - three book on , on pronoun stuff . And then the same thing for ASL where , you know , you 're signing and someone says something . And then , you know , so " he say " , and then you sort of do a role shift . So , the point is that pronoun references , you know , sort of ties in with all this mental space stuff and so on , and so forth . professor c: So that that d that does sound like it 's co consistent with what we 're saying , yeah . grad f: OK , so it 's kind of like the unspecified mental spaces just are occurring in context . And then when you embed them sometimes you have to pop up to the h you know , depending on the construction or the whatever , you you you 're scope is m might extend out to the the base one . grad f: It would be nice to actually use the same , mechanism since there are so many cases where you actually need it 'll be one or the other . grad f: It 's like , oh , actually , it 's the same same operation . grad e: It 's like it 's like what 's happening that , yeah , what what 's happening , there is that you 're moving the base space or something like that , right ? grad f: Yeah , yeah . grad e: So that 's that 's how Fauconnier would talk about it . grad e: things like pronoun reference and tense which we 're thinking of as being these discourse - y things actually are relative to a Bayes space which can change . professor c: cuz it it it to the extent that it works , it y grad f: Ties it all into it . grad f: Yeah , that 's why I said " point to Robert " , when I did it . Mmm , isn't , I 'm I was sort of dubious why why he even introduces this sort of reality , you know , as your basic mental space and then builds up grad e: grad a: d doesn't start with some because it 's so obvi it should be so obvious , at least it is to me , that whenever I say something I could preface that with " I think . grad a: So there should be no categorical difference between your base and all the others that ensue . professor c: No , but there 's there 's a Gricean thing going on there , that when you say " I think " you 're actually hedging . You can , th put just the phrase " I think " as a parenthetical in the middle of a sentence and so on , and so forth . grad e: So grad f: Actually one of the child language researchers who works with T Tomasello studied a bunch of these constructions and it was like it 's not using any kind of interesting embedded ways just to mark , you know , uncertainty or something like that . grad a: Yeah , but about linguistic hedges , those those tend to be , funky anyways because they blur professor c: So we don't have that in here either do we ? grad e: Yeah . grad f: Hhh , I there used to be a slot for speaker , it was something like factivity . grad f: But it 's something grad e: Well we were just talking about this sort of evidentiality and stuff like that , right ? grad f: we we were talking about sarcasm too , right ? Oh , oh . grad e: that 's what I think is , sort of telling you what percent reality you should give this professor c: So we probably should . grad e: Yeah , and the fact that I 'm , you know the fact maybe if I think it versus he thinks that might , you know , depending on how much you trust the two of us or whatever , grad f: Yeah . grad e: you know grad a: If you study how people use that it 's also grad f: What 's the word ? grad a: " about . professor c: And I think And I think y if you want us to spend a pleasant six or seven hours you could get George started on that . grad e: Would you believe that that paper lead directly to the development of anti - lock brakes ? grad f: What ? professor c: No . grad f: So , and and I think , someone had raised like sarcasm as a complication at some point . Yeah , let 's I I don't I think grad f: And we just won't deal with sarcastic people . professor c: Yeah , grad e: I don't really know what like We we don't have to care too much about the speaker attitude , right ? Like there 's not so many different hhh , I don't know , m grad f: Certainly not as some Well , they 're intonational markers I think for the most part . grad f: I don't know too much about the like grammatical grad e: I just mean There 's lots of different attitudes that that the speaker could have and that we can clearly identify , and so on , and so forth . grad e: But like what are the distinctions among those that we actually care about for our current purposes ? professor c: Right . grad f: Oh , yeah , do we have any ? grad e: Here it is three - fifteen already . professor c: so , I I don't know the answer but but , it does seem that , you know , this is this is coming along . It 's as far as I can tell there 's this one major thing we have to do which is the mental the whole s mental space thing . professor c: So we had started with the idea that the actual , constraint was related to this tourist domain and the kinds of interactions that might occur in the tourist domain , assuming that people were being helpful and weren't trying to d you know , there 's all sorts of God knows , irony , and stuff like which you isn't probably of much use in dealing with a tourist guide . So y , no end of things th that that , you know , we don't deal with . grad a: But it professor c: And grad a: i isn't that part easy though professor c: Go ahead . grad a: because in terms of the s simspec , it would just mean you put one more set of brack brackets around it , and then just tell it to sort of negate whatever the content of that is in terms of irony grad e: Yeah . grad f: Yeah , in model theory cuz the semantics is always like " speaker believes not - P " , you know ? professor c: Right . grad f: Right , right , but , professor c: Anyway , so so , I guess , let me make a proposal on how to proceed on that , which is that , it was Keith 's , sort of job over the summer to come up with this set of constructions . , and my suggestion to Keith is that you , over the next couple weeks , n grad e: Mmm . professor c: don't try to do them in detail or formally but just try to describe which ones you think we ought to have . professor c: And , so th these are this is a set of things that I think we ought to deal with . professor c: And then we 'll we 'll we 'll go back over it and w people will will give feedback on it . professor c: And then then we 'll have a at least initial spec of of what we 're actually trying to do . professor c: And that 'll also be useful for anybody who 's trying to write a parser . professor c: So a and we get this this , portals fixed and then we have an idea of the sort of initial range . And then of course Nancy you 're gonna have to , do your set of but you have to do that anyway . professor c: So so we 're gonna get the w we 're basically dealing with two domains , the tourist domain and the and the child language learning . And then my proposal would be to , not totally cut off more general discussion but to focus really detailed work on the subset of things that we 've we really want to get done . professor c: And then as a kind of separate thread , think about the more general things and and all that . grad a: Well , I also think the detailed discussion will hit you know , bring us to problems that are of a general nature and maybe even professor c: without doubt . professor c: But what I want to do is is is to to constrain the things that we really feel responsible for . professor c: So that that we say these are the things we 're really gonna try do by the end of the summer grad e: professor c: and other things we 'll put on a list of of research problems or something , because you can easily get to the point where nothing gets done because every time you start to do something you say , " oh , yeah , but what about this case ? " grad e: Anyways grad b: There 's that quote in Jurafsky and Martin where where it goes where some guy goes , " every time I fire a linguist the performance of the recognizer goes up . So , is is that does that make sense as a , a general way to proceed ? grad f: Sure , yeah . grad e: Yeah , yeah , we 'll start with that , just figuring out what needs to be done then actually the next step is to start trying to do it . The one big grad b: Ooo , can I ask a grad e: You ran out of power . grad a: Huh ? grad b: Can I ask a quick question about this side ? grad a: Yeah . grad b: Is this , was it intentional to leave off things like " inherits " and grad f: Oops . grad f: not really just on the constructions , right ? grad b: Yeah , like constructions can inherit from other things , grad f: grad b: am I right ? grad f: yeah . grad e: yeah , there should be I I wanted to s find out someday if there was gonna be some way of dealing with , if this is the right term , multiple inheritance , professor c: grad e: where one construction is inheriting from , from both parents , grad f: - huh . So let me grad e: Cuz the problem is that then you have to grad f: Yeah . professor c: my argument is there 's nothing you can do with that that you can't do by just having more constructions . professor c: It 's uglier and it d doesn't have the deep linguistic insights and stuff . grad e: No , by all means , professor c: And so I what I 'd like to do is is in the short run focus on getting it right . professor c: And when we think we have it right then saying , " aha ! , grad e: Yeah . professor c: can we make it more elegant ? " grad e: Yeah , that 's professor c: Can can we , What are the generalizations , and stuff ? grad e: Yeah . professor c: But rather than try to guess a inheritance structure and all that sort of stuff before we know what we 're doing . professor c: So I would say in the short run we 're not gonna b grad e: Yeah . And and it could be that half way through we say , " aha ! , we we now see how we want to clean it up . professor c: and inheritance is only one , that 's one way to organize it but there are others . , thanks to Eva on our web site we can now , if you want to run JavaBayes , you could see get download these classes . And then it will enable you she modified the GUI so it has now a m a m a button menu item for saving it into the embedded JavaBayes format . Do you want to say something about that , that it works , right ? With the grad d: I was just checking like , when we wanna , get the posterior probability of , like , variables . You know how you asked whether we can , like , just observe all the variables like in the same list ? You can't . grad a: OK , that 's that 's a bit unfortunate grad d: So Yeah . grad a: but for the time being it 's it 's it 's fine to do it grad d: You just have to have a long list of , you know , all the variables . grad f: all the things you want to query , you just have to like ask for separately . grad a: Well that 's probably maybe in the long term that 's good news because it forces us to think a little bit more carefully how how we want to get an out output . We 're really running late , so I had , an idea yesterday but , I don't know whether we should even start discussing . grad a: the construal bit that , has been pointed to but hasn't been , made precise by any means , may w may work as follows . I thought that we would , that the following thing would be in incredibly nice and I have no clue whether it will work at all or nothing . , imagine you you write a Bayes - net , grad f: Bayes ? grad a: Bayes - net , grad f: OK . grad a: You consult consult your ontology which will tell you a bunch of stuff , and parts , and properties , - - grad f: Grout out the things that that you need . grad a: then y you 'd simply write , these into onto your your white piece of paper . You won't get you won't really get any C P T 's , therefore we need everything that that configures to what the situation is , IE , the context dependent stuff . grad a: And that fills in your CPT 's with which you can then query , the the net that you just wrote and find out how thing X is construed as an utterance U . And the embedded JavaBayes works exactly like that , that once you we have , you know , precise format in which to write it , so we write it down . And the the nice thing about this idea is that you don't ever have to sit down and think about it or write about it . You may have some general rules as to how things can be can be construed as what , so that will allow you to craft the the the initial notes . professor c: it sounds to me like you want P R grad a: P R Ms - , PRM , since you can unfold a PRM into a straightforward Bayes - net professor c: Beca - because it b because No , no , you can't . So once you have instantiated the PRM with the instances and ther then you can then you can unfold it . In professor c: Well , no , but it matters a lot because you what you want are these generalized rules about the way things relate , th that you then instantiate in each case . professor c: Yeah , and that 's grad a: professor c: Yeah , that 's the only way it could work . I we have a our local expert on P R , but my guess is that they 're not currently good enough to do that . It 's related to the Hobbs abduction story in that you th you throw everything into a pot and you try to come up with the , grad a: Except there 's no no theorem prover involved . professor c: No , there isn't a theorem prover but there but but the , The cove the the P R Ms are like rules of inference and you 're you 're coupling a bunch of them together . professor c: And then ins instead of proving you 're trying to , you know , compute the most likely . But you yeah , it 's a good it 's a it 's a good thing to put in your thesis proposal . grad a: What 's it ? professor c: So are you gonna write something for us before you go ? grad a: Yes . So , what 's what when are we gonna meet again ? grad f: When are you leaving ? grad a: Fri - , grad f: Thursday , Friday ? grad a: Thursday 's my last day here . Do you mean by we , the whole ben gang ? professor c: N no , I didn't mean y just the two of us . But the question is do you want to , for example , send the little group , a draft of your thesis proposal and get , another session on feedback on that ? Or grad a: We can do it Th - Thursday again . Should we do the one PM time for Thursday since we were on that before or ? grad a: Sure . grad a: Thursday at one ? I can also maybe then sort of run through the , the talk I have to give at EML which highlights all of our work . grad a: If it 's equal for all ? What should we do ? grad f: Yeah , it 's fine . grad a: It 's equal to all of us , so you can decide one or four . grad a: Liz actually said she likes four because it forces the Meeting Recorder people to cut , you know the discussions short <doc-sep>three two three four seven six five five three one six two four one six seven seven eight nine zero nine four zero zero three zero one five eight one seven three five three two six eight zero three six two four three zero seven four five zero six nine four seven four eight five seven nine six one five O seven eight O two zero nine six zero four zero zero one two Yeah , you don't actually n need to say the name . grad c: OK , this is Barry Chen and I am reading transcript professor f: That 'll probably be bleeped out . professor f: not that there 's anything defamatory about eight five seven or or anything , but grad c: OK . so here 's what I have for I I was just jotting down things I think th w that we should do today . This is what I have for an agenda so far , We should talk a little bit about the plans for the the field trip next week . a number of us are doing a field trip to OGI And mostly First though about the logistics for it . professor f: in and kind of go around see what people have been doing talk about that , a r progress report . If we find some holes in some things that that someone could use some help with , he 's he 's volunteering to help . So , and , then , talk a little bit about about disks and resource resource issues that that 's starting to get worked out . And then , anything else anybody has that isn't in that list ? grad d: I was just wondering , does this mean the battery 's dying and I should change it ? professor f: I think that means the battery 's O K . professor f: d do you grad d: Oh OK , so th phd a: Yeah , that 's good . I I it was it was kind of my bright idea to have us take a plane that leaves at seven twenty in the morning . this is The reason I did it was because otherwise for those of us who have to come back the same day it is really not much of a of a visit . So the issue is how how how would we ever accomplish that ? what what what part of town do you live in ? grad c: I live in , the corner of campus . OK , so would it be easier those of you who are not , you know , used to this area , it can be very tricky to get to the airport at at , you know , six thirty . Would it be easier for you if you came here and I drove you ? Yeah ? Yeah , yeah , OK . It 'll take it it it won't be bad traffic that time of day and and phd a: I guess once you get past the bridge that that would be the worst . professor f: And then Martin Luther King to nine - eighty to eight - eighty , phd a: Yeah . phd a: Oh , I professor f: So that leaves us fifty minutes before the plane it 'll just yeah . So Great , OK so that 'll It 's , it 's still not going to be really easy but well Particularly for for for Barry and me , we 're not we 're not staying overnight so we don't need to bring anything particularly except for a pad of paper and So , and , you , two have to bring a little bit grad c: OK . professor f: but you know , don't don't bring a footlocker and we 'll be OK So . I 'll I 'll I 'll I 'll give you my phone number , If I 'm not here for a few m after a few minutes then grad c: Wake you up . I just , it for me it just means getting up a half an hour earlier than I usually do . , I I I figured maybe wait on the potential goals for the meeting until we talk about wh what 's been going on . phd g: So , it means that , well , it is , a digit French database of microphone speech , downsampled to eight kilohertz and I 've added noise to one part , with the actually the Aurora - two noises . professor f: OK , So the HTK base lines so this is using mel cepstra and so on , or ? Yeah . professor f: And again , I guess the p the plan is , to then given this What 's the plan again ? phd g: The plan with these data ? professor f: With So So Does i Just remind me of what what you were going to do with the what what what what 's y You just described what you 've been doing . phd g: we actually we want to , mmm , analyze three dimensions , the feature dimension , the training data dimension , and the test data dimension . So we have the , TI - digit task , the Italian task , the French task and the Finnish task . professor f: Yeah ? phd g: So we have numbers with systems neural networks trained on the task data . And then to have systems with neural networks trained on , data from the same language , if possible , with , well , using a more generic database , which is phonetically phonetically balanced , and . professor f: So - so we had talked I guess we had talked at one point about maybe , the language ID corpus ? phd g: Yeah . professor f: Is that a possibility for that ? phd g: Ye - Yeah , but , these corpus , w w there is a CallHome and a CallFriend also , The CallFriend is for language ind identification . This could be a a problem for Why ? Because , the the SpeechDat databases are not telephone speech . That 's really funny isn't it ? cuz th this whole thing is for developing new standards for the telephone . phd g: Yeah , but the the idea is to compute the feature before the before sending them to the Well , you don't do not send speech , you send features , computed on th the the device , professor f: professor f: Oh I see , so your point is that it 's it 's it 's the features are computed locally , and so they aren't necessarily telephone bandwidth , or telephone distortions . phd a: Did you happen to find out anything about the OGI multilingual database ? professor f: Yeah , that 's wh that 's wh that 's what I meant . phd g: Yeah , it 's professor f: I said @ @ , there 's there 's there 's an OGI language ID , not the not the , the CallFriend is a is a , LDC w thing , right ? phd g: Yea - Yeah , there are also two other databases . One they call the multi - language database , and another one is a twenty - two language , something like that . professor f: But I 'm not sure phd g: So professor f: we ' r e e The bandwidth shouldn't be such an issue right ? Because e e this is downsampled and and filtered , right ? So it 's just the fact that it 's not telephone . some of this stuff 's recorded in the car , and some of it 's there 's there 's many different acoustic differences . , unless we 're going to include a bunch of car recordings in the in the training database , I 'm not sure if it 's completely rules it out phd g: Yeah . professor f: if our if we if our major goal is to have phonetic context and you figure that there 's gonna be a mismatch in acoustic conditions does it make it much worse f to sort of add another mismatch , if you will . professor f: i i I I guess the question is how important is it to for us to get multiple languages , in there . Well , actually , for the moment if we w do not want to use these phone databases , we we already have English , Spanish and French , with microphone speech . professor f: So that 's what you 're thinking of using is sort of the multi the equivalent of the multiple ? phd g: Well . phd g: So w f for for Italian , which is close to Spanish , French and , i i , TI - digits we have both , digits training data and also more general training data . professor f: Well , we also have this Broadcast News that we were talking about taking off the disk , which is is microphone data for for English . phd g: Yeah , and perhaps , We were thinking that perhaps the cross - language issue is not , so big of a issue . u So that th Well , the the guy who has to develop an application with one language can use the net trained o on that language , or a generic net , professor f: depen it depen it depends how you mean " using the net " . phd g: but not trained on a professor f: So , if you 're talking about for producing these discriminative features that we 're talking about you can't do that . But if we say , " No , you have to have a different feature set for each language , " I think this is ver gonna be very bad . , in principle , conceptually , it 's sort of like they want a re @ @ well , they want a replacement for mel cepstra . professor f: So , we say " OK , this is the year two thousand , we 've got something much better than mel cepstra . " OK ? And so we give them these gobbledy - gook features but these gobbledy - gook features are supposed to be good for any language . professor f: Cuz you don't know who 's gonna call , and you know , so it 's it 's it 's , how do you know what language it is ? Somebody picks up the phone . Someone picks up the phone , right ? phd g: Well , I chh professor f: And and he he picks up the ph phd g: Yeah , but the the application is there is a target language for the application . professor f: you talk on the phone , phd g: Yeah ? professor f: and it sends features out . If it 's th in the phone , but professor f: But that 's the image that they have . phd g: well , it that that could be th at the server 's side , professor f: It could be , phd g: and , well . professor f: but that 's the image they have , right ? So that 's that 's , one could argue all over the place about how things really will be in ten years . But the particular image that the cellular industry has right now is that it 's distributed speech recognition , where the , probabilistic part , and and s semantics and so forth are all on the servers , and you compute features of the , on the phone . We might might or might not agree that that 's the way it will be in ten years , but that 's that 's that 's what they 're asking for . Now , it 's the OGI , folks ' perspective right now that probably that 's not the biggest deal . And they may very well be right , but I I was hoping we could just do a test and determine if that was true . Maybe maybe we have a couple languages in the training set and that gives us enough breadth , that that that the rest doesn't matter . , the other thing is , this notion of training to which I I guess they 're starting to look at up there , training to something more like articulatory features . , and if you have something that 's just good for distinguishing different articulatory features that should just be good across , you know , a wide range of languages . professor f: but Yeah , so I don't th I know unfortunately I don't I see what you 're comi where you 're coming from , I think , but I don't think we can ignore it . , tr for instance training on English and testing on Italian , or Or we can train or else , can we train a net on , a range of languages and which can include the test the test @ @ the target language , grad c: Test on an unseen . phd g: or professor f: Yeah , so , there 's there 's , This is complex . So , ultimately , as I was saying , I think it doesn't fit within their image that you switch nets based on language . professor f: from a purist 's standpoint it 'd be nice not to because then you can say when because surely someone is going to say at some point , " OK , so you put in the German and the Finnish . professor f: now , what do you do , when somebody has Portuguese ? " you know ? , and , however , you aren't it isn't actually a constraint in this evaluation . So I would say if it looks like there 's a big difference to put it in , then we 'd make note of it , and then we probably put in the other , because we have so many other problems in trying to get things to work well here that that , you know , it 's not so bad as long as we we note it and say , " Look , we did do this " . phd g: Mmm ? phd a: And so , ideally , what you 'd wanna do is you 'd wanna run it with and without the target language and the training set for a wide range of languages . phd a: And that way you can say , " Well , " you know , " we 're gonna build it for what we think are the most common ones " , professor f: Yeah . phd a: but if that somebody uses it with a different language , you know , " here 's what 's you 're l here 's what 's likely to happen . " professor f: Yeah , cuz the truth is , is that it 's it 's not like there are , al although there are thousands of languages , from , the point of view of cellular companies , there aren't . professor f: There 's you know , there 's fifty or something , you know ? So , an and they aren't you know , with the exception of Finnish , which I guess it 's pretty different from most most things . I guess Finnish is a is is a little bit like Hungarian , supposedly , right ? phd a: I don't know anything about Finnish . professor f: Or is I think well , I kn oh , well I know that H , H , I 'm not a linguist , but I guess Hungarian and Finnish and one of the one of the languages from the former Soviet Union are in this sort of same family . professor f: But they 're just these , you know , countries that are pretty far apart from one another , have I guess , people rode in on horses and brought their phd a: . I re - installed , HTK , the free version , so , everybody 's now using three point O , which is the same version that , OGI is using . And , so we 've been talking about this this , cube thing , and it 's beginning more and more looking like the , the Borge cube thing . , but I I 'm Am I professor f: So are are you going to be assimilated ? phd a: Resistance is futile . , the the stuff that we 've been working on with TIMIT , trying to get a , a labels file so we can , train up a train up a net on TIMIT and test , the difference between this net trained on TIMIT and a net trained on digits alone . professor f: And again , when y just to clarify , when you 're talking about training up a net , you 're talking about training up a net for a tandem approach ? grad c: Yeah , yeah . professor f: And and the inputs are PLP and delta and that sort of thing , grad c: Well , the inputs are one dimension of the cube , professor f: or ? grad c: which , we 've talked about it being , PLP , M F C Cs , J - JRASTA , JRASTA - LDA phd g: . professor f: Yeah , but your initial things you 're making one choice there , grad c: Yeah , professor f: right ? grad c: right . professor f: Which is PLP , or something ? grad c: I I haven't I haven't decided on on the initial thing . , so so you take PLP and you you , do it , you you , use HTK with it with the transformed features using a neural net that 's trained . professor f: And that 's the and , and th and then the testing would be these other things which which which might be foreign language . , those listening to this will not have a picture either , so , I guess I 'm I 'm not any worse off . It sounds s I I get I think I get the general idea of it , grad c: Yeah , yeah , professor f: yeah . phd a: So , when you said that you were getting the labels for TIMIT , are y what do you mean by that ? grad c: b May Oh , I 'm just I 'm just , transforming them from the , the standard TIMIT transcriptions into into a nice long huge P - file to do training . Were the digits , hand - labeled for phones ? grad c: the the digits phd a: Or were they those labels automatically derived ? grad c: Oh yeah , those were those were automatically derived by by Dan using , embedded embedded training and alignment . phd a: I was just wondering because that test you 're t grad c: - huh . phd a: I I think you 're doing this test because you want to determine whether or not , having s general speech performs as well as having specific speech . professor f: Well , especially when you go over the different languages again , because you 'd the different languages have different words for the different digits , phd a: And I was professor f: so it 's phd a: yeah , so I was just wondering if the fact that TIMIT you 're using the hand - labeled stuff from TIMIT might be confuse the results that you get . phd a: Right , but if it 's better , it may be better because it was hand - labeled . professor f: you know , I I I guess I 'm sounding cavalier , but , I think the point is you have , a bunch of labels and and they 're han hand hand - marked . It would be another interesting scientific question to ask , " Is it because it 's a broad source or because it was , you know , carefully ? " phd a: And that 's something you could ask , but given limited time , I think the main thing is if it 's a better thing for going across languages on this training tandem system , phd a: Yeah . professor f: then it 's probably phd a: What about the differences in the phone sets ? grad c: between languages ? phd a: No , between TIMIT and the the digits . Well , there 's a mapping from the sixty - one phonemes in TIMIT to to fifty - six , the ICSI fifty - six . grad c: And then the digits phonemes , there 's about twenty twenty - two or twenty - four of them ? Is that right ? phd a: Out of that fifty - six ? phd g: Yep . phd g: But , actually , the issue of phoneti phon phone phoneme mappings will arise when we will do severa use several languages phd e: Yeah . phd g: because you Well , some phonemes are not , in every languages , and So we plan to develop a subset of the phonemes , that includes , all the phonemes of our training languages , phd a: phd e: SAMPA phone ? For English American English , and the the the language who have more phone are the English . But n for example , in Spain , the Spanish have several phone that d doesn't appear in the E English and we thought to complete . But for that , it needs we must r h do a lot of work because we need to generate new tran transcription for the database that we have . phd b: Other than the language , is there a reason not to use the TIMIT phone set ? Cuz it 's larger ? As opposed to the ICSI phone set ? grad c: Oh , you mean why map the sixty - one to the fifty - six ? phd b: Yeah . I have professor f: I forget if that happened starting with you , or was it o or if it was Eric , afterwards who did that . phd a: Yeah , and I think some of them , they were making distinctions between silence at the end and silence at the beginning , when really they 're both silence . phd a: I th I think it was things like that that got it mapped down to fifty - six . professor f: Yeah , especially in a system like ours , which is a discriminative system . And the ones that are gone , I think are I think there was they also in TIMIT had like a glottal stop , which was basically a short period of silence , phd b: phd b: Well , we have that now , too , right ? phd a: I don't know . professor f: i It 's actually pretty common that a lot of the recognition systems people use have things like like , say thirty - nine , phone symbols , right ? , and then they get the variety by by bringing in the context , the phonetic context . What there 's Can you describe what what 's on the cube ? grad c: Yeah , w I th I think that 's a good idea professor f: grad c: to to talk about the whole cube professor f: Yeah , yeah . , do you wanna do it ? professor f: OK , so even even though the meeting recorder doesn't doesn't , and since you 're not running a video camera we won't get this , but if you use a board it 'll help us anyway . professor f: but you 've got the wireless on , grad c: Yeah , I have the wireless . OK , well , professor f: he can't , actually , but grad c: s basically , the the cube will have three dimensions . So the the training for HTK is always that 's always set up for the individual test , right ? That there 's some training data and some test data . And , yeah , the training for the HTK models is always , fixed for whatever language you 're testing on . So , then I think it 's probably instructive to go and and and show you the features that we were talking about . grad c: Yeah , just the multi - band features , right ? phd g: And grad c: Yeah . phd a: What about mel cepstrum ? Or is that grad c: Oh , phd a: you don't include that because it 's part of the base or something ? phd e: Yeah databases . professor f: Well , y you do have a baseline system that 's m that 's mel cepstra , phd e: Yeah . at least at least conceptually , you know , it doesn't meant you actually have to do it , phd g: Yeah . phd a: It 'd be an interesting test just to have just to do MFCC with the neural net phd e: Without the phd a: and everything else the same . D Because I think that for a bunch of their experiments they used , mel cepstra , actually . phd a: Is that Was that distributed with Aurora , or ? grad c: One L or two L 's ? phd a: Where did that ? professor f: The newer one . And , oh yeah , and professor f: Is it French French or Belgian French ? There 's a phd g: It 's , French French . Yeah , Herve always insists that Belgian is i is absolutely pure French , has nothing to do with but he says those those those Parisians talk funny . grad c: right ? Spanish Oh , Spanish stories ? phd e: Albayzin is the name . phd a: What about TI - digits ? grad c: TI - digits all these Aurora f d data p data is from is derived from TI - digits . grad c: basically , they they corrupted it with , different kinds of noises at different SNR levels . professor f: y And I think Stephane was saying there 's there 's some broader s material in the French also ? phd g: Yeah , we cou we could use grad c: OK . phd b: Did the Aurora people actually corrupt it themselves , or just specify the signal and the signal - t grad c: They they corrupted it , themselves , phd b: OK . grad c: but they also included the the noise files for us , right ? Or phd g: Yeah . professor f: I 'm just curious , Carmen , I couldn't tell if you were joking or i Is it is it Mexican Spanish , phd e: No no no no . phd g: Yeah , the No , the French is f yeah , from , Paris , grad c: Oh , from Paris , OK . And , with within the training corporas , we 're , thinking about , training with noise . So , incorporating the same kinds of noises that , Aurora is in incorporating in their , in their training corpus . , I don't think we we 're given the , the unseen noise conditions , though , right ? professor f: I think what they were saying was that , for this next test there 's gonna be some of the cases where they have the same type of noise as you were given before hand and some cases where you 're not . professor f: So , presumably , that 'll be part of the topic of analysis of the the test results , is how well you do when it 's matching noise and how well you do where it 's not . grad c: So , I guess we can't train on on the the unseen noise conditions . , i i i i it does seem to me that a lot of times when you train with something that 's at least a little bit noisy it can it can help you out in other kinds of noise even if it 's not matching just because there 's some more variance that you 've built into things . professor f: exactly how well it will work will depend on how near it is to what you had ahead of time . professor f: and then your testing corpus ? grad c: the testing corporas are , just , the same ones as Aurora testing . grad c: we ' r we 're gonna get German , right ? Ge - At the final test will have German . professor f: Well , so , yeah , the final test , on a guess , is supposed to be German and Danish , phd g: yeah . professor f: Oh , there 's a there 's Spanish testing in the Aurora ? phd g: not yet , but , yeah , e phd e: Yeah , it 's preparing . phd g: and , well , according to Hynek it will be we will have this at the end of November , or . phd g: Yeah professor f: So that 's , three hundred and forty - three , different systems that are going to be developed . grad d: What a what about noise conditions ? professor f: What ? grad d: w Don't we need to put in the column for noise conditions ? professor f: Are you just trying to be difficult ? grad d: No , I just don't understand . grad c: Well , th , when when I put these testings on there , I 'm assumi professor f: I 'm just kidding . And they 're all they 're all gonna be test tested , with one training of the HTK system . grad d: And do we do all our training on clean data ? grad c: no , no , phd e: Also , we can clean that . grad c: we 're we 're gonna be , training on the noise files that we do have . professor f: So , Yeah , so I guess the question is how long does it take to do a a training ? , it 's not totally crazy t , these are a lot of these are built - in things and we know we have programs that compute PLP , we have MSG , we have JRA you know , a lot of these things will just kind of happen , won't take a huge amount of development , it 's just trying it out . professor f: But how how long does it take , do we think , for one of these trainings ? grad c: That 's a good question . , cuz , so , for instance , I think the major advantage of MSG grad c: Oh ! professor f: Yeah , grad c: Och ! professor f: good point . A major advantage of MSG , I see , th that we 've seen in the past is combined with PLP . grad c: Now , this is turning into a four - dimensional cube ? phd a: Well , you just select multiple things on the one dimension . professor f: Yeah , so , you don't wanna , Let 's see , seven choose two would be , twenty - one different combinations . phd b: It 's not a complete set of combinations , though , professor f: Probably phd b: right ? It 's not a complete set of combinations , though , professor f: What ? phd b: right ? grad c: No . Yeah , there 's grad c: That would be professor f: yeah , so PLP and MSG I think we definitely wanna try cuz we 've had a lot of good experience with putting those together . phd a: When you do that , you 're increasing the size of the inputs to the net . Do you have to reduce the hidden layer , or something ? professor f: Well , so , so i it doesn't increase the number of trainings . phd a: No , no , I 'm I 'm just wondering about number of parameters in the net . Do you have to worry about keeping that the same , or ? professor f: I don't think so . phd b: There 's a computation limit , though , isn't there ? professor f: Yeah , it 's just more compu Excuse me ? phd b: Isn't there like a limit on the computation load , or d latency , or something like that for Aurora task ? professor f: Oh yeah , we haven't talked about any of that at all , have we ? grad c: No . What it is is that there 's there 's , it 's just penalty , you know ? That that if you 're using , a megabyte , then they 'll say that 's very nice , but , of course , it will never go on a cheap cell phone . , and , expensive cell phones , exa expensive hand - helds , and so forth , are gonna have lots of memory . So it 's just that , these people see the the cheap cell phones as being still the biggest market , so . But , yeah , I was just realizing that , actually , it doesn't explode out , It 's not really two to the seventh . But it 's but but i i it doesn't really explode out the number of trainings cuz these were all trained individually . Right ? So , if you have all of these nets trained some place , then , you can combine their outputs and do the KL transformation and so forth grad c: phd a: But wh what about a net that 's trained on multiple languages , though ? professor f: Well , you gotta do the KL transformation , phd g: Eight y professor f: but phd a: Is that just separate nets for each language then combined , or is that actually one net trained on ? phd e: Necessary to put in . Right ? phd g: So , in the broader training corpus we can we can use , the three , or , a combination of of two two languages . professor f: Yeah , so , I guess the first thing is if w if we know how much a how long a a training takes , if we can train up all these these combinations , then we can start working on testing of them individually , and in combination . professor f: Because the putting them in combination , I think , is not as much computationally as the r training of the nets in the first place . But there is the testing also , which implies training , the HTK models phd e: The the model the HTK model . professor f: How long does it take for an , HTK training ? phd g: It 's around six hours , I think . professor f: No , I 'm sorry , ru running on what machine ? phd e: Ravioli . phd g: Yeah , I I think it 's - it 's - it 's not so long because , well , the TI - digits test data is about , how many hours ? , th , thirty hours of speech , I think , professor f: It 's a few hours . professor f: so , clearly , there there 's no way we can even begin to do an any significant amount here unless we use multiple machines . professor f: Right ? So so w we there 's plenty of machines here and they 're n they 're often not in in a great great deal of use . So , I think it 's it 's key that that the that you look at , you know , what machines are fast , what machines are used a lot , are we still using P - make ? Is that ? grad c: Oh , I don't know how w how we would P - make this , though . professor f: Well , you have a , once you get the basic thing set up , you have just all the , a all these combinations , grad c: Yeah . It 's it 's let 's say it 's six hours or eight hours , or something for the training of HTK . How long is it for training of of , the neural net ? grad c: The neural net ? . phd b: How big is the net ? phd e: For Albayzin I trained on neural network , was , one day also . professor f: And I think there there there 's I think you folks are probably go the ones using them right now . phd a: Is it faster to do it on the SPERT , or ? professor f: don't know . grad c: It 's it 's still a little faster on the professor f: Used to be . Or either Adam or or Dan did some testing and they found that the SPERT board 's still still faster . grad c: And the benefits is that , you know , you run out of SPERT and then you can do other things on your your computer , professor f: You could set up , you know , ten different jobs , or something , to run on SPERT different SPERT boards and and have ten other jobs running on different computers . So , it 's got to take that sort of thing , or or we 're not going to get through any significant number of these . professor f: So this is Yeah , I kind of like this because what it No grad c: OK . professor f: no , what I like about it is we we we do have a problem that we have very limited time . You know , so , with very limited time , we actually have really quite a quite a bit of computational resource available if you , you know , get a look across the institute and how little things are being used . And , on the other hand , almost anything that really i you know , is is new , where we 're saying , " Well , let 's look at , like we were talking before about , voiced - unvoiced - silence detection features and all those sort " that 's phd e: Yeah . But if it 's new , then we have this development and and and learning process t to to go through on top of just the the all the all the work . So what I like about this is you basically have listed all the things that we already know how to do . And , you 're just saying let 's look at the outer product of all of these things and see if we can calculate them . a a Am I am I interpreting this correctly ? Is this sort of what what you 're thinking of doing in the short term ? phd g: Mmm . professor f: So so then I think it 's just the the missing piece is that you need to , you know you know , talk to talk to , Chuck , talk to , Adam , sort out about , what 's the best way to really , you know , attack this as a as a as a mass problem in terms of using many machines . , and , then , you know , set it up in terms of scripts and so forth , and , in in kind o some kind of structured way . , and , you know , when we go to , OGI next week , we can then present to them , you know , what it is that we 're doing . And , we can pull things out of this list that we think they are doing sufficiently , grad c: Mmm . professor f: that , you know , we 're not we won't be contributing that much . phd b: How big are the nets you 're using ? grad c: for the for nets trained on digits , we have been using , four hundred order hidden units . And , for the broader class nets we 're we 're going to increase that because the , the digits nets only correspond to about twenty phonemes . , w we 're gonna professor f: Oh , it 's not actually broader class , it 's actually finer class , but you mean y You mean more classes . professor f: Carmen , did you do you have something else to add ? We you haven't talked too much , and phd e: D I begin to work with the Italian database to nnn , to with the f front - end and with the HTK program and the @ @ . And I trained eh , with the Spanish two neural network with PLP and with LogRASTA PLP . professor f: Well , JRASTA has the potential to do better , but it doesn't always . It 's it 's , instead of doing RASTA with a log , you 're doing RASTA with a log - like function that varies depending on a J parameter , which is supposed to be sensitive to the amount of noise there is . So , it 's sort of like the right transformation to do the filtering in , is dependent on how much noise there is . It 's a little complicated because once you do that , you end up in some funny domain and you end up having to do a transformation afterwards , which requires some tables . professor f: so it 's it 's it 's a little messier , there 's more ways that it can go wrong , but if if if you 're careful with it , it can do better . phd e: and I think to to to recognize the Italian digits with the neural netw Spanish neural network , and also to train another neural network with the Spanish digits , the database of Spanish digits . Was for me , n it was a difficult work last week with the labels because the the program with the label obtained that I have , the Albayzin , is different w to the label to train the neural network . professor f: I 'm sorry , phd e: I 'm sorry , professor f: I have a p I had a problem with the pronunciation . phd e: Oh , also that professor f: So , OK , so let 's start over . professor f: So , TI TIMI TIMIT 's hand - labeled , and and you 're saying about the Spanish ? phd e: The Spanish labels ? That was in different format , that the format for the em the program to train the neural network . Yeah , but n yes , because they have one program , Feacalc , but no , l LabeCut , l LabeCut , but don't doesn't , eh , include the HTK format to convert . I ask e even I ask to Dan Ellis what I can do that , and h they he say me that h he does doesn't any any s any form to to do that . And at the end , I think that with LabeCut I can transfer to ASCII format , and HTK is an ASCII format . And I m do another , one program to put ASCII format of HTK to ase ay ac ASCII format to Exceed professor f: phd e: Actually that was complicated , professor f: So you phd e: but well , I know how we can did that do that . So it 's just usual kind of sometimes say housekeeping , right ? To get these get these things sorted out . professor f: So it seems like there 's there 's some peculiarities of the , of each of these dimensions that are getting sorted out . And then , if if you work on getting the , assembly lines together , and then the the pieces sort of get ready to go into the assembly line and gradually can start , you know , start turning the crank , more or less . And , we have a lot more computational capability here than they do at OGI , so I think that i if What 's what 's great about this is it sets it up in a very systematic way , so that , once these all of these , you know , mundane but real problems get sorted out , we can just start turning the crank phd e: professor f: and and push all of us through , and then finally figure out what 's best . , the first thing was , we we actually had thought of this as sort of like , not not in stages , but more along the the time axis . grad c: je - je - je - je - je check out the results and and go that way . No , I 'm just saying , I 'm just thinking of it like loops , grad c: - huh . professor f: right ? And so , y y y if you had three nested loops , that you have a choice for this , a choice for this , and a choice for that , grad c: Yeah . professor f: And , the thing is that once you get a better handle on how much you can realistically do , concurrently on different machines , different SPERTs , and so forth , and you see how long it takes on what machine and so forth , you can stand back from it and say , " OK , if we look at all these combinations we 're talking about , and combinations of combinations , and so forth , " you 'll probably find you can't do it all . professor f: OK , so then at that point , we should sort out which ones do we throw away . professor f: Which of the combinations across you know , what are the most likely ones , and And , I still think we could do a lot of them . But , probably when you include all the combinations , you 're actually talking about a thousand of them or something , and that 's probably more than we can do . And I know that , Stephane 's working from an NT machine , so his his home directory exists somewhere else . We 're over the next year or two , we 're gonna be upgrading the networks in this place , grad c: So , it actually has reached the point where it 's a significant drag on the time for something to move the data from one place to another . professor f: So , you you don't w especially in something with repetitive computation where you 're going over it multiple times , you do don't want to have the the data that you 're working on distant from where it 's being where the computation 's being done if you can help it . Now , we are getting more disk for the central file server , which , since it 's not a computational server , would seem to be a contradiction to what I just said . But the idea is that , suppose you 're working with , this big bunch of multi multilingual databases . professor f: Then , when you 're working with something and accessing it many times , you copy the piece of it that you 're working with over to some place that 's close to where the computation is and then do all the work there . And then that way you you won't have the the network you won't be clogging the network for yourself and others . So , it 's gonna take us It may be too late for this , p precise crunch we 're in now , but , we 're , It 's gonna take us a couple weeks at least to get the , the amount of disk we 're gonna be getting . We 're actually gonna get , I think four more , thirty - six gigabyte drives and , put them on another another disk rack . We ran out of space on the disk rack that we had , so we 're getting another disk rack and four more drives to share between , primarily between this project and the Meetings Meetings Project . But , we 've put another I guess there 's another eighteen gigabytes that 's that 's in there now to help us with the immediate crunch . But , are you saying So I don't know where you 're Stephane , where you 're doing your computations . If i so , you 're on an NT machine , so you 're using some external machine phd g: Yeah , it , Well , to It 's Nutmeg and Mustard , I think , professor f: Do you know these yet ? phd g: I don't know what kind . , are these are these , computational servers , or something ? I 'm I 've been kind of out of it . professor f: Unfortunately , these days my idea of running comput of computa doing computation is running a spread sheet . Yeah , I 'm not sure what 's available on is it you said Nutmeg and what was the other one ? phd g: Mustard . Yeah , so basically , Chuck will be the one who will be sorting out what disk needs to be where , and so on , and I 'll be the one who says , " OK , spend the money . Which , n these days , if you 're talking about scratch space , it doesn't increase the , need for backup , and , I think it 's not that big a d and the the disks themselves are not that expensive . Right now it 's phd a: What you can do , when you 're on that machine , is , just go to the slash - scratch directory , and do a DF minus K , and it 'll tell you if there 's space available . phd a: and if there is then , professor f: But wasn't it , I think Dave was saying that he preferred that people didn't put stuff in slash - scratch . It 's more putting in d s XA or XB or , phd a: Well , there 's different there , there 's professor f: right ? phd a: Right . So there 's the slash - X - whatever disks , and then there 's slash - scratch . And if it 's called " slash - scratch " , it means it 's probably an internal disk to the machine . And so that 's the kind of thing where , like if , OK , if you don't have an NT , but you have a a a Unix workstation , and they attach an external disk , it 'll be called " slash - X - something " , if it 's not backed up and it 'll be " slash - D - something " if it is backed up . And if it 's inside the machine on the desk , it 's called " slash - scratch " . It 's easy to unhook the external disks , put them back on the new machine , but then your slash - scratch is gone . So , you don't wanna put anything in slash - scratch that you wanna keep around for a long period of time . But if it 's a copy of , say , some data that 's on a server , you can put it on slash - scratch because , first of all it 's not backed up , and second it doesn't matter if that machine disappears and you get a new machine because you just recopy it to slash - scratch . So tha that 's why I was saying you could check slash - scratch on those on on , Mustard and and Nutmeg to see if if there 's space that you could use there . Yeah , and we do have , yeah , so so you yeah , it 's better to have things local if you 're gonna run over them lots of times so you don't have to go to the network . professor f: Right , so es so especially if you 're right , if you 're if you 're taking some piece of the training corpus , which usually resides in where Chuck is putting it all on the on the , file server , then , yeah , it 's fine if it 's not backed up because if it g g gets wiped out or something , y it is backed up on the other disk . phd a: Yeah , so , one of the things that I need to I 've started looking at , is this the appropriate time to talk about the disk space stuff ? professor f: Sure . Dan David , put a new , drive onto Abbott , that 's an X disk , which means it 's not backed up . So , I 've been going through and copying data that is , you know , some kind of corpus stuff usually , that that we 've got on a CD - ROM or something , onto that new disk to free up space on other disks . We haven't deleted them off of the slash - DC disk that they 're on right now in Abbott , but we I would like to go through sit down with you about some of these other ones and see if we can move them onto , this new disk also . So , anything that that you don't need backed up , we can put on this new disk . , but if it 's experiments and you 're creating files and things that you 're gonna need , you probably wanna have those on a disk that 's backed up , just in case something goes wrong . So far I 've I 've copied a couple of things , but I haven't deleted anything off of the old disk to make room yet . So I I guess I 'll need to get together with you and see what data we can move onto the new disk . professor f: yeah , I I just an another question occurred to me is is what were you folks planning to do about normalization ? phd g: . So that this could be another dimension , but we think perhaps we can use the the best , normalization scheme as OGI is using , so , with parameters that they use there , professor f: Yeah , I think that 's a good idea . phd g: u u professor f: it 's i i we we seem to have enough dimensions as it is . professor f: probably the on - line line normalization because then it it 's if we do anything else , we 're gonna end up having to do on - line normalization too , so we may as well just do on - line normalization . So , I guess , yeah , th the other topic I maybe we 're already there , or almost there , is goals for the for next week 's meeting . i i i it seems to me that we wanna do is flush out what you put on the board here . Like a s like a slide ? professor f: so w we can say what we 're doing , grad c: OK . And , also , if you have sorted out , this information about how long i roughly how long it takes to do on what and , you know , what we can how many of these trainings , and testings and so forth that we can realistically do , then one of the big goals of going there next week would be to to actually settle on which of them we 're gonna do . Anything else that I a a Actually started out this this field trip started off with with , Stephane talking to Hynek , so you may have you may have had other goals , for going up , and any anything else you can think of would be we should think about accomplishing ? , I 'm just saying this because maybe there 's things we need to do in preparation . And and the other the the last topic I had here was , d Dave 's fine offer to to , do something on this . he 's doing he 's working on other things , but to to do something on this project . So the question is , " Where where could we , most use Dave 's help ? " phd g: yeah , I was thinking perhaps if , additionally to all these experiments , which is not really research , well it 's , running programs professor f: Yeah . phd g: and , trying to have a closer look at the perhaps the , speech , noise detection or , voiced - sound - unvoiced - sound detection and Which could be important in i for noise noise phd a: I think that would be a I think that 's a big big deal . Because the you know , the thing that Sunil was talking about , with the labels , labeling the database when it got to the noisy stuff ? The That that really throws things off . You know , having the noise all of a sudden , your your , speech detector , the the , What was it ? What was happening with his thing ? professor f: phd a: He was running through these models very quickly . professor f: The only problem , maybe that 's the right thing the only problem I have with it is exactly the same reason why you thought it 'd be a good thing to do . But I think the first responsibility is sort of to figure out if there 's something that , an an additional , that 's a good thing you remove the mike . professor f: over years , if he 's if he 's interested in , you know , voiced - unvoiced - silence , he could do a lot . But if there if in fact there 's something else that he could be doing , that would help us when we 're we 're sort of strapped for time We have we we 've , you know , only , another another month or two to you know , with the holidays in the middle of it , to to get a lot done . If we can think of something some piece of this that 's going to be The very fact that it is sort of just work , and i and it 's running programs and so forth , is exactly why it 's possible that it some piece of could be handed to someone to do , because it 's not , yeah , so that that 's the question . And we don't have to solve it right this s second , but if we could think of some some piece that 's that 's well defined , that he could help with , he 's expressing a will willingness to do that . phd e: Yes , maybe to , mmm , put together the the label the labels between TIMIT and Spanish or something like that . professor f: So what we were just saying is that that , I was arguing for , if possible , coming up with something that that really was development and wasn't research because we we 're we have a time crunch . And so , if there 's something that would would save some time that someone else could do on some other piece , then we should think of that first . See the thing with voiced - unvoiced - silence is I really think that that it 's to do to do a a a a poor job is is pretty quick , or , you know , a so - so job . You can you can you can throw in a couple fea we know what what kinds of features help with it . But I remember , in fact , when you were working on that , and you worked on for few months , as I recall , and you got to , say ninety - three percent , and getting to ninety - four really really hard . So , And th th the other tricky thing is , since we are , even though we 're not we don't have a strict prohibition on memory size , and and computational complexity , clearly there 's some limitation to it . So if we have to if we say we have to have a pitch detector , say , if we if we 're trying to incorporate pitch information , or at least some kind of harmonic harmonicity , or something , this is another whole thing , take a while to develop . , one I think one of the a lot of people would say , and I think Dan would also , that one of the things wrong with current speech recognition is that we we really do throw away all the harmonicity information . Reason for doing that is that most of the information about the phonetic identity is in the spectral envelopes are not in the harmonic detail . So wh that so the the other suggestion that just came up was , well what about having him work on the , multilingual super f superset kind of thing . , coming up with that and then , you know , training it training a net on that , say , from from , from TIMIT or something . What what would you what would you think it would wh what would this task consist of ? phd g: Yeah , it would consist in , well , creating the the superset , and , modifying the lab labels for matching the superset . professor f: creating a superset from looking at the multiple languages , phd g: Well , creating the mappings , actually . phd g: Yeah , yeah , with the @ @ three languages , phd e: Maybe for the other language because TIMIT have more phone . grad c: There 's , Carmen was talking about this SAMPA thing , and it 's , it 's an effort by linguists to come up with , a machine readable IPA , sort of thing , right ? And , they they have a web site that Stephane was showing us that has , has all the English phonemes and their SAMPA correspondent , phoneme , professor f: Yeah . grad c: and then , they have Spanish , they have German , they have all all sorts of languages , mapping mapping to the SAMPA phonemes , which phd e: Yeah , the tr the transcription , though , for Albayzin is n the transcription are of SAMPA the same , how you say , symbol that SAMPA appear . phd b: I was gonna say , does that mean IPA is not really international ? grad c: No , it 's it 's saying phd a: It uses special diacritics and stuff , which you can't do with ASCII characters . professor f: What , Has OGI done anything about this issue ? Do they have Do they have any kind of superset that they already have ? phd g: I don't think so . Well , they they they 're going actually the the other way , defining , phoneme clusters , apparently . phd a: So they just throw the speech from all different languages together , then cluster it into sixty or fifty or whatever clusters ? phd g: I think they 've not done it , doing , multiple language yet , but what they did is to training , English nets with all the phonemes , and then training it in English nets with , kind of seventeen , I think it was seventeen , broad classes . But Hynek didn't add didn't have all the results when he showed me that , so , well . phd g: But professor f: Is there 's some way that we should tie into that with this . Right ? , if if in fact that is a better thing to do , should we leverage that , rather than doing , our own . Right ? So , if i if if they s , we have i we have the the trainings with our own categories . And now we 're saying , " Well , how do we handle cross - language ? " And one way is to come up with a superset , but they are als they 're trying coming up with clustered , and do we think there 's something wrong with that ? phd g: I think that there 's something wrong professor f: OK . What w phd g: or Well , because Well , for the moment we are testing on digits , and e i perhaps u using broad phoneme classes , it 's it 's OK for , classifying the digits , but as soon as you will have more words , well , words can differ with only a single phoneme , and which could be the same , class . Although , you are not using this for the phd g: So , I 'm professor f: You 're using this for the feature generation , though , not the phd g: Yeah , but you will ask the net to put one for th th the phoneme class professor f: Yeah . phd a: So you 're saying that there may not be enough information coming out of the net to help you discriminate the words ? professor f: Yeah . phd b: Fact , most confusions are within the phone phone classes , right ? I think , Larry was saying like obstruents are only confused with other obstruents , et cetera , et cetera . grad c: So so , maybe we could look at articulatory type stuff , professor f: But that 's what I thought they were gonna grad c: right ? professor f: Did they not do that , or ? phd g: I don't think so . Well , professor f: So phd g: they were talking about , perhaps , but they d professor f: They 're talking about it , phd g: I d professor f: but that 's sort of a question whether they did phd g: w Yeah . professor f: Instead of the the the the superclass thing , which is to take So suppose y you don't really mark arti To really mark articulatory features , you really wanna look at the acoustics and and see where everything is , and we 're not gonna do that . So , the second class way of doing it is to look at the , phones that are labeled and translate them into acoustic , articulatory , features . You won't really have these overlapping things and so forth , phd a: So the targets of the net are these ? professor f: but phd a: Articulatory features . phd a: But that implies that you can have more than one on at a time ? professor f: Right . And , I don't know if our software this if the qu versions of the Quicknet that we 're using allows for that . Do you know ? grad c: Allows for ? professor f: Multiple targets being one ? grad c: Oh , we have gotten soft targets to to work . professor f: is that we could we could , just translate instead of translating to a superset , just translate to articulatory features , some set of articulatory features and train with that . Now the fact even though it 's a smaller number , it 's still fine because you have the the , combinations . So , in fact , it has every , you know it had has has every distinction in it that you would have the other way . We could I don't know , if you had the phone labels , you could replace them by their articulatory features and then feed in a vector with those , things turned on based on what they 're supposed to be for each phone to see if it if you get a big win . phd a: So , if your net is gonna be outputting , a vector of basically of well , it 's gonna have probabilities , but let 's say that they were ones and zeros , then y and you know for each , I don't know if you know this for your testing data , but if you know for your test data , you know , what the string of phones is and and you have them aligned , then you can just instead of going through the net , just create the vector for each phone and feed that in to see if that data helps . Eh , eh , what made me think about this is , I was talking with Hynek and he said that there was a guy at A T - andT who spent eighteen months working on a single feature . And because they had done some cheating experiments professor f: This was the guy that we were just talking a that we saw on campus . phd a: Well , Hynek said that that , I guess before they had him work on this , they had done some experiment where if they could get that one feature right , it dramatically improved the result . phd a: So I was thinking , you know it made me think about this , that if it 'd be an interesting experiment just to see , you know , if you did get all of those right . So that 's that 's equivalent to saying that you 've got got all the phones right . professor f: Although , yeah , it would be make an interesting cheating experiment because we are using it in this funny way , phd a: Yeah . phd a: And then you also don't know what error they 've got on the HTK side . phd b: The soft training of the nets still requires the vector to sum to one , though , right ? grad c: To sum up to one . phd b: So you can't really feed it , like , two articulatory features that are on at the same time with ones cuz it 'll kind of normalize them down to one half or something like that , for instance . Is it always softmax grad c: it 's sig No , it 's actually sigmoid - X phd g: or ? Yeah . grad c: for the phd g: So if you choose sigmoid it 's o it 's OK ? grad c: You , professor f: Did we just run out of disk , grad c: I think I think apparently , the , professor f: or ? phd b: Why don't you just choose linear ? Right ? grad c: What 's that ? phd b: Linear outputs ? grad c: Linear outputs ? phd b: Isn't that what you 'll want ? grad c: . Right , but during the training , we would train on sigmoid - X phd b: Oh , you Yeah ? grad c: and then at the end just chop off the final nonlinearity . professor f: So , we 're we 're we 're off the air , or ? About to be off the air .<doc-sep> , why don't we s again start off with with , Yeah , I 'll get it . And then , given that , Liz and Andreas are gonna be ten , fifteen minutes late , we can try to figure out what we can do most effectively without them here . , what else ? grad f: professor d: What 's SmartKom ? SmartKom ? grad f: we wanna talk about if w if we wanna add the data to the mar Meeting Recorder corpus . professor d: What what what are we collecting here ? phd e: Data ? grad f: So why don't we have that on the agenda and we 'll we 'll get to it and talk about it ? phd e: The SmartKom data ? professor d: Yeah , right . I think it was Andreas wanted to talk about segmentation and recognition , and update on SRI recognition experiments . professor d: grad f: And then if ti if there 's time I wanted to talk about digits , but it looked like we were pretty full , so I can wait till next week . I think the a certainly the segmentation and recognition we wanna maybe focus on when An - Andreas is here since that was particularly his thing . phd e: And also the SmartKom thing should b professor d: SmartKom also , Andreas . professor d: So , I think they 'll be inter I 'll be interested in all this , but but , probably , if we had to pick something that we would talk on for ten minutes or so while they 're coming here . Or I guess it would be , you think , reorganization status , or ? grad f: Yeah . phd b: maybe I said maybe we said this before just that we met and we talked about it and we sort of have a plan for getting things organized and postdoc a: And I and I think a crucial part of that is the idea of of not wanting to do it until right before the next level zero back - up so that there won't be huge number of of added , phd b: Right . Not not much @ @ grad f: Although Dave basically said that if we wanna do it , just tell him and he 'll do a d level zero then . phd b: Oh , so maybe we should just go ahead and get everything ready , and grad f: Yep . So , I think we do need to talk a little bit about Well , we don't need to do it during this meeting . So , naming conventions and things like that , that I 've been trying to keep actually up to date . postdoc a: I 'm sorry , you 've been what ? Showing them ? professor d: OK . Well , maybe , since that that was a pretty short one , maybe we should talk about the IBM transcription status . So , we , we did another version of the beeps , where we separated each beeps with a spoken digit . Chuck came up here and recorded some di himself speaking some digits , and so it just goes " beep one beep " and then the phrase , and then " beep two beep " and then the phrase . , I think they 'll have a b easier time keeping track of where they are in the file . grad f: And we did it with the automatic segmentation , and I don't think We ne we didn't look at it in detail . phd b: And grad f: I sorta spot - checked here and there and it sounded pretty good . grad f: And , we 'll just hafta see what we get back from them . phd b: And the main thing will be if we can align what they give us with what we sent them . phd b: And I think we 'll be able to do that at with this new beep format . grad f: so the problem wi last time is that there were errors in the transcripts where they put beeps where there weren't any , or and they put in extraneous beeps . phd b: Yeah , one interesting note is , or problem I dunno if this was just because of how I play it back , I say , SND - play and then the file , every once in a while , @ @ , like a beep sounds like it 's cut into two beeps . phd b: Yeah , and I I dunno if that 's an , artifact of playback phd e: Yeah . But with this new format , that hopefully they 're not hearing that , and if they are , it shouldn't throw them . grad f: Well , maybe we better listen to it again , make sure , but , certainly the software shouldn't do that , phd b: Yeah . phd b: I it 's probably just , you know , mmm , somehow the audio device gets hung for a second , phd e: Yeah . phd e: Yeah ? postdoc a: As long as they have one number , and they know that there 's only one beep maximum that goes with that number . postdoc a: Well , you know , actually , are we having them phd b: So th grad f: " Seven four eight beep seven beep eight three two " . postdoc a: Yeah , but are we having them do digits ? grad f: Yes . Because , we don't we didn't In order to cut them out we 'd have to listen to it . phd b: We can we can ignore it when we get it back , grad f: Although we could tell them we could tell them , if you hear someone reading a digits string just say " bracket digit bracket " phd b: huh . That 'd be what I 'm having the transcribers here do , cuz it can be extracted later . And then I wanted to talk about but as I said I we may not have time what we should do about digits . professor d: Le - let 's talk about it , because that 's that 's something that I I know Andreas is less interested in than Liz is , grad f: OK . It 's good grad f: Do we have anything else to say about transcription ? About IBM stuff ? phd b: Brian I I sent bresset sent Brian a message about the meeting and I haven't heard back yet . , how 're we doing on the on the rest of it ? postdoc a: We 're doing well . postdoc a: And , I 've prepared , a set of five which I 'm which I 'm calling set two , which are now being edited by my head transcriber , in terms of spelling errors and all that . She 's also checking through and mar and and monitoring , the transcription of another transcriber . postdoc a: And , I 've moved on now to what I 'm calling set three . I sort of thought if I do it in sets groups of five , then I can have , like , sort of a a parallel processing through through the the current . postdoc a: And and you indicated to me that we have a g a goal now , for the for the , the , DARPA demo , of twenty hours . So , I 'm gonna go up to twenty hours , be sure that everything gets processed , and released , and and that 's that 's what my goal is . Package of twenty hours right now , and then once that 's done , move on to the next . But I guess the other thing is that , that that 's kinda twenty hours ASAP because the longer before the demo we actually have the twenty hours , the more time it 'll be for people to actually do cool things with it . And and I don't think it 's possible , really , to do this full - time , but , that what it shows is motivation to do as many hours as possible . professor d: Yeah , I guess the So the difference if if , if the IBM stuff works out , the difference in the job would be that they p primarily would be checking through things that were already done by someone else ? postdoc a: Again . We 'll we 'll expect that they 'll have to move some time bins and do some corrections . postdoc a: And I you know , I 've also d , discovered So with the new transcriber I 'm So , lemme say that my , So , At present , the people have been doing these transcriptions a channel at a time . And , that sort of , is useful , and t you know , and then once in a while they 'll have to refer to the other channels to clear something up . Well , I realize that , w i we we 're using the pre - segmented version , and , the pre - segmented version is extremely useful , and wouldn't it be , useful also to have the visual representation of those segments ? And so I 've , I , I 've trained the new one , the new the newest one , to , use the visual from the channel that is gonna be transcribed at any given time . Because what happens then , is you scan across the signal and once in a while you 'll find a blip that didn't show up in the pre - segmentation . postdoc a: And that 'll be something like I it 's ver it 's interesting . A backchannel , or postdoc a: Once in a while it 's a backchannel . postdoc a: Sometimes it seems to be , similar to the ones that are being picked up . postdoc a: And they 're rare events , but you can really go through a meeting very quickly . You just you just , you know , yo you s you scroll from screen to screen , looking for blips . And , I think that we 're gonna end up with , better coverage of the backchannels , professor d: Yeah . postdoc a: but at the same time we 're benefitting tremendously from the pre - segmentation because there are huge places where there is just absolutely no activity at all . phd b: So they can they can , scroll through that pretty quick ? postdoc a: Yeah . So I think that that 's gonna , also eh , you know , speed the efficiency of this part of the process . grad f: so , we have a whole bunch of digits that we 've read and we have the forms and so on , but only a small number of that ha well , not a small number only a subset of that has been transcribed . And , Liz and Andreas actually they 're not here , but , they did say at one point that they thought they could do a pretty good job of just doing a forced alignment . And , again , I don't think we 'll be able to do with that alone , because , sometimes people correct themselves and things like that . But so , I was just wondering what people thought about how automated can we make the process of finding where the people read the digits , doing a forced alignment , and doing the timing . What about just actually doing recognition ? grad f: Well , we we know what they read , because we have the forms . phd b: Right , Morgan ? professor d: phd b: Is that what you 're ? professor d: Yeah , I 'm I 'm not quite sure what I 'm talking about . And , there 's the issue that that they we know what what was said , but do we ? grad f: so one option i professor d: Because people make mistakes and stuff . I was just asking , just out of curiosity , if if with , the SRI recognizer getting one percent word error , would we would we do better ? So , if you do a forced alignment but the force but the but the transcription you have is wrong because they actually made mistakes , or false starts , it 's it 's much less c it 's much less common than one percent ? grad f: But that 's pretty uncommon . grad f: Well , I guess yeah , I guess if we segmented it , we could get one percent on digits . I 'm not saying it should be one way or the other , but it 's If grad f: But , Well , there there 're a couple different of doing it . You know , they 're doing it anyway , and unless we tell them different , they 're gonna transcribe it . professor d: Well grad f: And my my tendency right now is , well , if IBM comes back with this meeting and the transcript is good , just let them do it . professor d: Yeah , it 's Y you raised a point , kind of , euphemistically but , m maybe it is a serious problem . Ho - what will they do when they go hear " beep seven beep seven three five two " , you think they 'll we 'll get ? grad f: It 's pretty distinct . postdoc a: Well it it well , it 'd be preceded by " I 'm reading transcript so - and - so " ? phd b: Yeah . postdoc a: So , I think if they 're processing it at grad f: it 'll be it will be in the midst of a digit string . grad f: So it sure , there there might be a place where it 's " beep seven beep eight beep eight beep " . But , you know , they they 're they 're gonna macros for inserting the beep marks . We 'll have to see , but I don't think it 's gonna be a problem . Well , I I I dunno , I I think that that 's if they are in fact going to transcribe these things , certainly any process that we 'd have to correct them , or whatever is needs to be much less elaborate for digits than for other stuff . grad f: We have so many of them , and it 'd be nice to actually do something with them . Yeah , I phd i: You mean there 're more than ten ? grad f: Anything else ? Your mike is a little low there . So , You you have to go a little early , right ? At twenty phd i: Well , I can stay till about , three forty . professor d: So there was some In in Adam 's agenda list , he had something from you about segmentation this last recognition ? phd i: Well , yeah . phd i: so , we had a discussion Don and Liz and I had discussion last week about how to proceed with , you know , with Don 's work , phd e: Ch phd i: and and and , one of the obvious things that occur to us was that we 're since we now have Thilo 's segmenter and it works , you know , amazingly well , we should actually basically re - evaluate the recognition , results using you know , without cheating on the segmentations . phd e: So phd i: And , that should be fairly phd e: And how do we find the transcripts for those so that ? Yeah . So , there 's actually phd e: It 's not that phd i: Why do you ask ? grad f: I could phd i: No , actually , NIST has , m a fairly sophisticated scoring program that you can give a , a time , grad f: Hand ones . phd i: You know , you basically just give two time - marked sequences of words , and it computes the the , you know , the the th phd b: It does all the work for you . phd i: So , it we just and we use that actually in Hub - five to do the scoring . phd e: So , basically you give some time constraints for for the references and for for the hypothesis , phd i: So , we ha Yeah . phd g: Maybe the start of your speech and the end of it , phd i: So do phd e: OK . , so that was the one thing , and the other was that , What was the other problem ? Oh ! That Thilo wanted to use the recognizer alignments to train up his , speech detector . phd i: so that we could use , you know there wouldn't be so much hand labelling needed to , to generate training data for for the speech detector . phd i: So , you can you can phd b: It 'll give you a lot more data , too . So , it 's basically s I think , eight meetings or something which which I 'm using , and , it 's before it was twenty minutes of one meeting . phd i: That won't be perfect the alignments aren't perfect , phd e: Yeah . But phd i: but , it 's probably still better to have all this extra data , than phd g: Yeah . If you find that you can lower the false alarms that you get where there 's no speech , that would be useful for us to know . So , r right now you get f fal you know , false false , speech regions when it 's just like , breath or something like that , phd e: OK . phd g: and I 'd be interested to know the wha if you retrain , phd e: Yeah . I 'll can make an can , like , make a c comparison of of the old system to the to the new one , and then phd g: Yeah , just to see if by doing nothing in the modeling of just having that training data wh what happens . professor d: another one that we had on Adam 's agenda that definitely involved you was s something about SmartKom ? grad f: Right . So , Rob Porzel eh , Porzel ? and the , Porzel and the , SmartKom group are collecting some dialogues . grad f: Basically they have one person sitting in here , looking at a picture , and a wizard sitting in another room somewhere . And , it involves starting I believe starting with a It 's it 's always the wizard , but it starts where the wizard is pretending to be a computer and it goes through a , speech generation system . And they wanted to use this equipment , and so the w question came up , is well , here 's some more data . Should this be part of the corpus or not ? And my attitude was yes , because there might be people who are using this corpus for acoustics , as opposed to just for language . So , I just wanted to understand it , cuz I I 'm , hadn't quite followed this process . So , it 's wizard in the sen usual sense that the person who is asking the questions doesn't know that it 's , a machi not a machine ? phd i: Right . phd i: Actually actually , w w the the We do this I dunno who came up with it , but I think it 's a really clever idea . We simulate a computer breakdown halfway through the session , and so then after that , the person 's told that they 're now talking to a , to a human . grad f: But of course they don't know that it 's the same person both times . phd i: So , we we collect we collect both human - computer and human - human data , essentially , in the same session . professor d: You might wanna try collecting it the other way around sometime , saying that th the computer isn't up yet postdoc a: . professor d: and then so then you can separate it out whether it 's the beginning or end kind of effects . " phd b: It 's a lot more believable , too , grad f: " No ! " phd b: if you tell them that they 're the computer part is running on a Windows machine . grad f: Abort abort , retry , fail ? phd g: So did they actually save the far - field data ? phd e: Yes . phd g: Cuz at first they weren't they weren't sa phd i: Yeah . grad f: and I said , " well that 's silly , if if we 're gonna try to do it for a corpus , there might be people who are interested in acoustics . professor d: S phd e: We wer we just wanted to do phd i: No , the the question is do we save one or two far - field channels or all of them ? phd g: Right . professor d: grad f: That that if we have someone who is doing acoustic studies , it 's nice to have the same for every recording . phd i: It 's to be traini to b training data and development data for the SmartKom system . phd b: Where does this ? professor d: phd g: Maybe we can have him vary the microphones , too , professor d: Well , phd e: B phd g: or they 're different s speakers . grad f: Right ? phd e: But but I 'm not sure about the legal aspect of of that . phd e: What they or , is is that our data which we are collecting here , professor d: We 've never signed anything that said that we couldn't use anything that we did . professor d: I L look , it seems to me that if we 're doing it anyway and we 're doing it for these these purposes that we have , and we have these distant mikes , we definitely should re should save it all as long as we 've got disk space , phd i: professor d: So should we save it ? grad f: And then professor d: Now th Yeah . professor d: anybody who 's training something up could choose to put it eh , to u include this or not . But it 's some other data we have , and if somebody doing experiment wants to train up including that then they can . grad f: So it 's It it I guess it the begs the question of what is the meeting corpus . So if , at UW they start recording two - person hallway conversations is that part of the meeting corpus ? professor d: I think it 's I I think I th think the idea of two or more people conversing with one another is key . phd g: What if we just give it a a name like we give these meetings a name ? professor d: No , it doesn't . phd g: And then later on some people will consider it a meeting and some people won't , postdoc a: Well this professor d: Yeah . So so s so part of the reason that I wanted to bring this up is , do we wanna handle it as a special case or do we wanna fold it in , phd g: and Just give it a title . professor d: I think it is a s grad f: we give everyone who 's involved as their own user ID , give it session I Ds , let all the tools that handle Meeting Recorder handle it , or do we wanna special case it ? And if we were gonna special case it , who 's gonna do that ? phd e: So . phd i: Well , it it makes sense to handle it with the same infrastructure , since we don't want to duplicate things unnecessarily . phd e: It it it postdoc a: I think phd i: But as far as distributing it , we shouldn't label it as part of this meeting corpus . phd i: We should let it be its own corp postdoc a: Well it 's it well , because grad f: I don't see why not . professor d: It 's scenario - based , it 's it 's human - computer interface it 's really pretty different . professor d: But I I I have no problem with somebody folding it in for some experiment they 're gonna do , but I don't think i it it doesn't match anything that we 've described about meetings . professor d: Whereas everything that we talked about them doing at at UW and so forth really does . So w so what does that mean for how we are gonna organize things ? postdoc a: . professor d: You can you can Again , as as I think Andreas was saying , if you wanna use the same tools and the same conventions , there 's no problem with that . It 's just that it 's , you know , different directory , it 's called something different , it 's you know . Right ? grad f: Yeah , but those are folded in , phd i: It might also be potentially confusing . grad f: and just simply in the file you mark somewhere that this is this type of interaction , rather than another type of interaction . phd i: Yeah , I th professor d: Well , I don I wouldn't call reading digits " meetings " . Right ? , we we we were doing grad f: Well , but but , I put it under the same directory tree . professor d: Well grad f: You know , it 's in " user doctor speech data MR " . phd g: Can we just have a directory called , like , " other stuff " ? grad f: Other . My preference is to have a single procedure so that I don't have to think too much about things . professor d: O - You you can use whatever procedure you want that 's p convenient for you . grad f: If we do it any other way that means that we need a separate procedure , and someone has to do that . professor d: All I 'm saying is that there 's no way that we 're gonna tell people that reading digits is meetings . And similarly we 're not gonna tell them that someone talking to a computer to get travel information is meetings . But if it makes it easier for you to pu fold them in the same procedures and have them under the same directory tree , knock yourself out . phd b: There 's a couple other questions that I have too , professor d: You know ? phd b: and and one of them is , what about , consent issues ? And the other one is , what about transcription ? Are ? phd e: Transcription is done in Munich . phd i: That 's a that 's another argument to keep it separate , because it 's gonna follow the SmartKom transcription conventions and not the ICSI meeting transcription conventions . But I 'm sure no one would have a problem with our folding it in for some acoustic modeling or or some things . Do we h do we have , American - born folk , reading German German , pla , place names and so forth ? Is that ? phd e: Yeah . professor d: Heidelberg grad f: So phd i: Exactly grad f: Disk might eventually be an issue so we might we we might need to , get some more disk pretty soon . grad f: We 're probably a little more than that because we 're using up some space that we shouldn't be on . So , once everything gets converted over to the disks we 're supposed to be using we 'll be probably , seventy - five percent . phd b: Well , when I was looking for space for Thilo , I found one disk that had , I think it was nine gigs and another one had seventeen . grad f: Were those backed - up or non - backed - up ? phd b: Those were non - backed - up . The non - backed - up , phd b: I haven't looked to see how much of that we have . So , pretty much anytime we need a disk , we can get it at the rate that we 're phd i: You can I shouldn't be saying this , but , you can just you know , since the back - ups are every night , you can recycle the backed - up diskspace . professor d: Yeah , I me and there 's been this conversation going on about getting another file server , and and we can do that . professor d: We 'll take the opportunity and get another big raft of of disk , I guess . phd i: Well , I think I think there 's an argument for having you know , you could use our old file server for for disks that have data that is very rarely accessed , and then have a fast new file server for data that is , heavily accessed . It 's the back it 's the back - up capaci grad f: It 's the back - up system . phd b: I think I think the file server could become an issue as we get a whole bunch more new compute machines . phd b: And we 've got , you know , fifty machines trying to access data off of Abbott at once . phd i: I think I think we 've raised this before and someone said this is not a reliable way to do it , but the What about putting the stuff on , like , C - CD - ROM or DVD or something ? grad f: Yeah . The the th phd i: But they wear out just from sitting on the shelf ? grad f: Yep . grad f: But the r the write once , and the read - writes , don't last . postdoc a: Would it be ? professor d: Year or two ? grad f: Yep . phd i: But if that then you would think you 'd hear much more clamoring about data loss phd e: Yeah . phd i: and professor d: yeah , all the L grad f: I I don't know many people who do it on CD . , they 're the most fo professor d: LDC - all the LDC distributions are on CD - ROM . grad f: They 're on CD , but they 're not tha that 's not the only source . But if you go if you go k phd i: But , you know , we have phd g: But we have like thirty you know , from ten years ago ? professor d: We have all sorts of CD - ROMs from a long time ago . grad f: The the pressed ones last for phd g: usually they 're grad f: well , not forever , they 've been finding even those degrade . grad f: But , the burned ones , when I say two or three years what I 'm saying is that I have had disks which are gone in a year . phd g: That 's what I grad f: On the average , it 'll probably be three or four years . But , I I you don't want to per p have your only copy on a media that fails . phd i: So how about ? So so how about putting them on that plus , like on a on on DAT or some other medium that isn't risky ? grad f: I think th , we can already put them on tape . Well , if if if you if they last Say , they actually last , like , five years , huh , in in the typical case , and and occasionally you might need to recreate one , and then you get your tape out , but otherwise you don't . Can't you just you just put them on ? grad h: So you just archive it on the tape , and then put it on CD as well ? phd i: Yeah . phd b: What 'd be nice is a system that re - burned the C Ds every year . professor d: Well grad f: Well , the C Ds are are an op phd e: Yeah . professor d: You know I would think grad f: So for archiving , we 'll just use tape . phd i: One one thing I don't understand is , if you have the data if if you if the meeting data is put on disk exactly once , then it 's backed - up once and the back - up system should never have to bother with it , more than once . grad f: Well , regardless Well , first of all there was , a problem with the archive in that I was every once in a while doing a chmod on all the directories an or recursive chmod and chown , because they weren't getting set correctly every once in a while , phd i: grad f: and I was just , doing a minus R star , not realizing that that caused it to be re - backed - up . phd i: But but this back - up system is smart enough to figure out that something hasn't changed and doesn't need to be backed - up again . professor d: The b I think th the at least the once tha that you put it on , it would it would kill that . grad f: Sure , but we still have enough changed that the nightly back - ups are starting to take too long . So , what if we buy , what what do they call these , high density ? grad f: Well , why don't you have this have a this conversation with Dave Johnson tha rather than with me ? phd i: No , no . Because this is maybe something that we can do without involving Dave , and and , putting more burden on him . How about we buy , one of these high density tape drives ? And we put the data actually on non - backed - up disks . And we do our own back - up once and for all all , and then and we don't have to bother this @ @ up ? grad f: Actually , you know , we could do that just with the tape with the current tape . What kind of tape drive is it ? grad f: I dunno but it 's an automatic robot so it 's very convenient . phd i: Is it is ? professor d: Wh The o the one that we have ? grad f: You just run a program to restore them . phd i: But it might interfere with their back - up schedule , phd g: But professor d: No , we have s we Don't we have our own ? phd i: eh . professor d: Something wi th that doesn't that isn't used by the back - up gang ? Don't we have something downstairs ? postdoc a: Well they phd b: What kinda tape drive ? professor d: Just in ? Yeah . So your your point is , and I think it 's a good one , that we could just get more disk and put it there . professor d: Yeah , that 's basically what I was gonna say , is that a disk is is so cheap it 's es essentially , you know , close to free . professor d: And we can take care of that by putting it on non - back up drives and just backing it up once onto this tape . phd g: So , who 's gonna do these back - ups ? The people that collect it ? grad f: Well , I 'll talk to Dave , and and see what th how what the best way of doing that is . phd b: It 's probably gonna n grad f: There 's a little utility that will manually burn a tape for you , and that 's probably the right way to do it . That 's what I 'm wondering , if grad f: Well we 're g we 're gonna automate that . phd g: you don't have to physically put a tape in the drive ? grad f: No . phd i: Yeah , but then you 're effectively using the resources of the back - up system . phd i: Yeah , just give a dedi grad f: It we already have it there and it it 's phd i: Well , I 'm saying is @ @ i if you go to Dave , and and and ask him " can I use your tape robot ? " , he will say , " well that 's gonna screw up our back - up operation . He 'll say " if if that means that it 's not gonna be backed - up standardly , great . phd g: What about if the times overlap with the normal back - up time ? grad f: it 's it 's just it 's just a utility which queues up . grad f: And then you can tell it to then remove it from the disk or you can , you know , do it a a few days later or whatever you wanna do , after you confirm that it 's really backed - up . grad f: NW ? postdoc a: You saying NW archive ? grad f: NW archive . postdoc a: Yep And if you did that during the day it would never make it to the nightly back - ups . phd i: Well , it if he you have to put the data on a on a non - backed - up disk to begin with . postdoc a: Well , but you can have it NW archive to you can have , a non - backed - up disk NW archived , grad f: Right . phd i: So that so that otherwise you don't you postdoc a: and it 'll never show up on the nightly back - ups . grad f: So , that means we 'll probably wanna convert all all those files filesystems to non - backed - up media . professor d: another , thing on the agenda said SRI recognition experiments ? What 's that ? phd i: SRI recognition ? Oh . Chuck , do you have any any updates ? phd b: N I 'm successfully , increasing the error rate . So , I 'm just playing with , the number of Gaussians that we use in the the recognizer , and phd i: Well , you have to sa you have to tell people that you 're you 're doing you 're trying the tandem features . It sai because , the meeting before , you said " OK , we got it down to where they 're they 're within a tenth of a percent " . phd i: So so , when So I I had I ha grad f: That was a quick response . phd i: So , we had reached the point where phd g: I 'm well rehearsed . phd i: we had reached the point where , on the male portion of the development set , the , or one of the development sets , I should say the , the male error rate with , ICSI PLP features was pretty much identical with , SRI features . phd i: So , phd g: Is there less training data ? phd i: phd g: we don phd i: No , actually there 's more training data . So , so then Oh , and plus the the vocal tract length normalization didn't actually made things worse . phd i: So So professor d: So but you see , now , between between the males and the females , there 's certainly a much bigger difference in the scaling range , than there is , say , just within the males . And what you were using before was scaling factors that were just from the the m the SRI front - end . professor d: but now you 're looking over a larger range and it may not be so fine . phd i: Well , So I just d so the one thing that I then tried was to put in the low - pass filter , which we have in the So , most most Hub - five systems actually band - limit the , at about , thirty - seven hundred , hertz . So , And I 'm now , trying the Oh , and suddenly , also the v the vocal tract length normalization only in the test se on the test data . So , you can do vocal tract length normalization on the test data only or on both the training and the test . phd i: And you expect it to help a little bit if you do it only on the test , and s more if you do it on both training and test . phd i: And so the It now helps , if you do it only on the test , and I 'm currently retraining another set of models where it 's both in the training and the test , and then we 'll we 'll have , hopefully , even better results . So But there 's It looks like there will still be some difference , maybe between one and two percent , for the females . phd i: And it is true that the , that the you know , we are using the But it can't be just the VTL , professor d: - huh . phd i: because if you don't do VTL in both systems , you know , the the females are considerably worse in the with the PLP features . phd g: Well , what 's the standard ? Yeah , so I thought the performance was actually a little better on females than males . phd i: that ye overall , yes , but on this particular development test set , they 're actually a little worse . We 're looking at the discrepancy between the SRI system and the SRI system when trained with ICSI features . I 'm just wondering if that if if you have any indication of your standard features , grad f: What 's Are the freq ? phd g: you know , if that 's also different or in the same direction or not . professor d: You 're This is lemme ask a q more basic que phd g: Cuz professor d: is this , iterative , Baum - Welch training ? phd i: professor d: Or is it Viterbi training ? Or ? phd i: It 's Baum - Welch training . And how do you determine when to to stop iterating ? phd i: Well , actually , we we just basically do a s a fixed number of iterations . , which Eh , we used to do only three , and then we found out we can squeeze And it was basically , we 're s we 're keeping it on the safe side . It might be that one more iteration would would help , but it 's sort of professor d: Or maybe or maybe you 're doing one too many . professor d: it 's it 's phd i: No , but with Baum - Welch , there shouldn't be an over - fitting issue , really . grad f: Well , you can try each one on a cross - validation set , phd i: . professor d: It d if you if you remember some years ago Bill Byrne did a thing where he was he was looking at that , grad f: can't you ? professor d: and he showed that you could get it . We can Well , that 's that 's the easy one to check , professor d: Yeah . phd i: because we save all the intermediate models grad f: Do you ? phd i: and we can professor d: And in each case , ho grad f: What ? professor d: I 'm sorry in each case how do you determine , you know , the the usual fudge factors ? The , the , language , scaling , acoustic scaling , phd i: I I 'm actually re - optimizing them . And the pru the question he was asking at one point about pruning , Remember that one ? phd i: Pruning ? professor d: Well , he was he 's it looked like the probabil at one point he was looking at the probabilities he was getting out at the likelihoods he was getting out of PLP versus mel cepstrum , and they looked pretty different , phd i: Pruning in the ? phd b: Yeah , the likelihoods were lower for the PLP . professor d: And so , there 's the question phd i: I you mean did you see this in the SRI system ? phd b: Well , the likelihoods are phd b: and phd i: You can't directly compare them , because , for every set of models you compute a new normalization . professor d: But , still it 's a question phd i: So professor d: if you have some threshold somewhere in terms of beam search or something , phd b: Well , yeah . phd b: if you have one threshold that works well because the range of your likelihoods is in this area phd i: We prune very conservatively . , as we saw with the meeting data , we could probably tighten the pruning without really So we we basically we have a very open beam . professor d: Right ? Here we 're - we 're saying that we there gee , there 's this b eh , there 's this difference here . Right ? But but but but , let 's suppose just for a second that , we 've sort of taken out a lot of the the major differences , between the two . professor d: we 're already sort of using the mel scale and we 're using the same style filter integration , and and , well , we 're making sure that low and high phd i: Actually , there is the difference in that . grad f: And what 's the top frequency of each ? phd i: Well , now it 's the same . But professor d: Before we i i th with straight PLP , it 's trapezoidal also . phd i: Well But professor d: But then we had a slight difference in the in the scale . phd i: Since currently the Feacalc program doesn't allow me to change the filter shape independently of the scale . phd i: And , I did the experiment on the SRI front - end where I tried the y where the standard used to be to use trapezoidal filters . So , it 's not I don't think the filter shape by itself will make a huge difference . professor d: So , f i We 've always viewed it , anyway , as the major difference between the two , is actually in the smoothing , that the that the , PLP , and and the reason PLP has been advantageous in , slightly noisy situations is because , PLP does the smoothing at the end by an auto - regressive model , phd i: So one thing I haven't done yet is to actually do all of this with a much larger with our full training set . So right now , we 're using a I don't know , forty ? I i it 's it 's eh it 's a f training set that 's about , you know , by a factor of four smaller than what we use when we train the full system . phd i: And the Baum - Welch should be much less of a factor , if you go full whole hog . phd i: And so , w so , just so the strategy is to first sort of treat things with fast turn - around on a smaller training set and then , when you 've sort of , narrowed it down , you try it on a larger training set . professor d: Now the other que related question , though , is is , what 's the boot models for these things ? phd i: Th - th the boot models are trained from scratch . So we compute , So , we start with a , alil alignment that we computed with the b sort of the best system we have . So we com we do a , you know , w We collect the , the observations from those alignments under each of the feature sets that that we train . And then , from there we do , There 's a lot of , actually The way it works , you first train a phonetically - tied mixture model . And then from that you you do the you you go to a state - clustered model , professor d: Yeah . This it migh Th - the thought is is is possible another possible partial cause is if the boot models used a comple used a different feature set , that phd i: phd i: Yeah , but professor d: you know , they they will find boundaries a little differently , though You know , all th all that sort of thing is actually slightly different . I 'd expect it to be a minor effect , phd i: But but but , what I 'm what I 'm saying is professor d: but phd i: So , we e w f w For a long time we had used boot alignments that had been trained with a with the same front - end but with acoustic models that were , like , fifteen percent worse than what we use now . phd i: And with a dict different dictionary with a considerably different dictionary , which was much less detailed and much less well - suited . phd i: And so , then we switched to new boot alignments , which which now had the benefit of all these improvements that we 've made over two years in the system . phd i: So , what I 'm saying is , the exact nature of these boot alignments is probably not a big factor in the quality of the final models . But it it I st still see it as , there 's there 's a history to this , too , phd i: Yeah . professor d: but but I I I th I think it could be the things that it the data is being viewed in a certain way , that a beginning is here rather than there and so forth , phd i: Yeah . Anyway , I I I should really reserve , any conclusions until we 've done it on the large training set , and until we 've seen the results with the with the VTL in training . At some point you also might wanna take the same thing and try it on , some Broadcast News data or something else that actually has has some noisy noisy components , so we can see if any conclusions we come to holds across different data . grad h: ! professor d: So , is there something quick about Absinthe that you ? phd i: With this said . Just what we were talking about before , which is that I ported a Blass library to Absinthe , and then got got it working with fast - forward , and got a speedup roughly proportional to the number of processors times the clock cycle . grad f: I 'm in the process of doing it for Quicknet , but there 's something going wrong and it 's about half the speed that I was estimating it should be , and I 'm not sure why . But the what it means is that it 's likely that for net training and forward passes , we 'll Absinthe will be a good machine . phd i: A few more processors ? How many are you shooting for ? grad f: There 're five now . grad f: And it 's also five - fifty megahertz and you can get a gigahertz . phd i: Can you mix t , processors of different speed ? grad f: I don't think so . grad f: We 'd have to get a almost certainly have to get a , Netfinity server . And , so , these are the demos for the , July , meeting and , DARPA mee grad f: July what ? Early July ? Late July ? professor d: Oh , I think it 's July fifteenth . So , we talked about getting something together for that , but maybe , maybe we 'll just put that off for now , given that But I think maybe we should have a a sub - meeting , I think , probably , Adam and and , Chuck and me should talk about should get together and talk about that sometime soon . Gets our grad f: Which is gonna be a little hard for a couple people because we have different digits forms . So , the idea is just to read each line with a short pause between lines , grad c: Alright . grad f: not between And , since we 're in a hurry , we were just gonna read everyone all at once <doc-sep>But all all I know is that it seems like every time I am up here after a meeting , and I start it , it works fine . And if I 'm up here and I start it and we 're all sitting here waiting to have a meeting , it gives me that error message and I have not yet sat down with been able to get that error message in a point where I can sit down and find out where it 's occurring in the code . professor d: So so the , the new procedural change that just got suggested , which I think is a good idea is that , we do the digit recordings at the end . And that way , if we 're recording somebody else 's meeting , and a number of the participants have to run off to some other meeting and don't have the time , then they can run off . It 'll mean we 'll get somewhat fewer , sets of digits , but , I think that way we 'll cut into people 's time , if someone 's on strict time , less . , so , let 's see , we were having a discussion the other day , maybe we should bring that up , about , the nature of the data that we are collecting . @ @ that , we should have a fair amount of data that is , collected for the same meeting , so that we can , I don't know . Wh - what what were some of the points again about that ? Is it phd f: well , OK , I 'll back up . phd f: at the previous at last week 's meeting , this meeting I was griping about wanting to get more data and I I talked about this with Jane and Adam , and was thinking of this mostly just so that we could do research on this data , since we 'll have a new this new student di does wanna work with us , phd a: Well , great . phd f: And he 's already funded part - time , so we 'll only be paying him for sort of for half of the normal part - time , phd a: What a deal . grad b: And what 's he interested in , specifically ? phd f: So he 's comes from a signal - processing background , but I liked him a lot cuz he 's very interested in higher level things , like language , and disfluencies and all kinds of eb maybe prosody , grad b: Anyway , I thought OK , maybe we should have enough data so that if he starts he 'd be starting in January , next semester that we 'd have , you know , enough data to work with . phd f: But , Jane and Adam brought up a lot of good points that just posting a note to Berkeley people to have them come down here has some problems in that you m you need to make sure that the speakers are who you want and that the meeting type is what you want , and so forth . So , I thought about that and I think it 's still possible , but I 'd rather try to get more regular meetings of types that we know about , and hear , then sort of a mish - mosh of a bunch of one one - time grad b: One offs ? phd f: Yeah , just because it would be very hard to process the data in all senses , both to get the , to figure out what type of meeting it is and to do any kind of higher level work on it , like well , I was talking to Morgan about things like summarization , or what 's this meeting about . it 's very different if you have a group that 's just giving a report on what they did that week , versus coming to a decision and so forth . Then I was , talking to Morgan about some new proposed work in this area , sort of a separate issue from what the student would be working on where I was thinking of doing some kind of summarization of meetings or trying to find cues in both the utterances and in the utterance patterns , like in numbers of overlaps and amount of speech , sort of raw cues from the interaction that can be measured from the signals and from the diff different microphones that point to sort of hot spots in the meeting , or things where stuff is going on that might be important for someone who didn't attend to listen to . And in that , regard , I thought we definitely w will need it 'd b it 'd be nice for us to have a bunch of data from a few different domains , or a few different kinds of meetings . So this this meeting is one of them , although I 'm not sure I can participate if I You know , I would feel very strange being part of a meeting that you were then analysing later for things like summarization . phd f: and then there are some others that menti that Morgan mentioned , like the front - end meeting and maybe a networking group meeting . phd f: But basically , for anything where you 're trying to get a summarization of some kind of meeting meaning out of the meeting , it would be too hard to have fifty different kinds of meetings where we didn't really have a good grasp on what does it mean to summarize , grad b: Yeah . phd f: but rather we should have different meetings by the same group but hopefully that have different summaries . And then we need a couple that of We don't wanna just have one group because that might be specific to that particular group , but @ @ three or four different kinds . So , in general , I was thinking more data but also data where we hold some parameters constant or fairly similar , grad b: phd f: like a meeting about of people doing a certain kind of work where at least half the participants each time are the same . grad b: professor d: Now , let l l let me just give you the other side to that cuz I ca because I I don't disagree with that , but I think there is a complimentary piece to it too . professor d: As many people here a a and talking about the kind of thing that you were just talking about it would have too few people from my point of view . So , I think I would also very much like us to have a fair amount of really random scattered meetings , of somebody coming down from campus , and and , phd c: professor d: sure , if we can get more from them , fine , postdoc e: professor d: but if we only get one or two from each group , that still could be useful acoustically just because we 'd have close and distant microphones with different people . postdoc e: Can I can I say about that that the the issues that I think Adam and I raised were more a matter of advertising so that you get more native speakers . Because I think if you just say an And in particular , my suggestion was to advertise to linguistics grad students because there you 'd have so people who 'd have proficiency enough in English that that , it would be useful for for purposes You know . postdoc e: But you know , I think I 've been I 've I I 've gathered data from undergrads at on campus and if you just post randomly to undergrads I think you 'd get such a mixed bag that it would be hard to know how much conversation you 'd have at all . And and the English you 'd have The language models would be really hard to build professor d: Well , you want to i postdoc e: because it would not really be it would be an interlanguage rather than than a professor d: Well , OK , first place , I I I don't think we 'd just want to have random people come down and talk to one another , I think there should be a meeting that has some goal and point cuz I I think that 's what we 're investigating , postdoc e: OK . phd f: It has to be a a pre - existing meeting , like a meeting that would otherwise happen anyway . professor d: So I was I was thinking more in terms of talking to professors , and and and , senior , d and , doctoral students who are leading projects and offering to them that they have their hold their meeting down here . The second point is I think that for some time now , going back through BeRP I think that we have had speakers that we 've worked with who had non - native accents and I th I think that postdoc e: Oh , oh . postdoc e: No , it 's more a matter of , proficiency , e e just simply fluency . postdoc e: I deal with people on on campus who I think sometimes people , undergraduates in computer science , have language skills that make , you know that their their fluency and writing skills are not so strong . professor d: You 're just talking about postdoc e: Well , e I just think , grad b: We all had the same thought . postdoc e: but you know , it 's like when you get into the graduate level , no problem . professor d: But grad b: Well , I think that , I think that the only thing we should say in the advertisement is that the meeting should be held in English . And and I think if it 's a pre - existing meeting and it 's held in English , I I think it 's probably OK if a few of the people don't have , g particularly good English skills . postdoc e: OK , now can I can I say the other aspect of this from my perspective which is that , there 's there 's this this issue , you have a corpus out there , it should be used for for multiple things cuz it 's so expensive to put together . postdoc e: And if people want to approach , i so I know e e You know this The idea of computational linguistics and probabilistic grammars and all may not be the focus of this group , professor d: - huh . postdoc e: but the idea of language models , which are fund you know generally speaking , you know , t t terms of like the amount of benefit per dollar spent or an hour invested in preparing the data , professor d: postdoc e: if you have a choice between people who are pr more proficient in , i more fluent , more more close to being academic English , then it would seem to me to be a good thing . I postdoc e: Because otherwise y you don't have the ability to have , so if if you have a bunch of idiolects that 's the worst possible case . If you have people who are using English as a as an interlanguage because they they don't , they can't speak in their native languages and but their interlanguage isn't really a match to any existing , language model , professor d: - huh . professor d: Well , that 's pretty much what you 're going to have in the networking group . But the thing is , I think that these people are of high enough level in their in their language proficiency that professor d: I see . postdoc e: I I 'm I 'm just thinking that we have to think at a at a higher level view , could we have a language model , a a grammar a grammar , basically , that , wo would be a a possibility . postdoc e: So y so if you wanted to bring in a model like Dan Jurafsky 's model , an and do some top - down stuff , it to help th the bottom - up and merge the things or whatever , it seems like , I don't see that there 's an argument professor d: postdoc e: I 'm I what I think is that why not have the corpus , since it 's so expensive to put together , useful for the widest range of of central corp things that people generally use corpora for and which are , you know , used in computational linguistics . professor d: OK , well , i i let 's let 's see what we can get . , it it I think that if we 're aiming at at , groups of graduate students and professors and so forth who are talking about things together , and it 's from the Berkeley campus , probably most of it will be OK , postdoc e: Yes , that 's fine . And my point in m in my note to Liz was I think that undergrads are an iff iffy population . grad b: Well , not to mention the fact that I would be hesitant certainly to take anyone under eighteen , probably even an anyone under twenty - one . professor d: Oh , you age - ist ! grad b: What 's that ? Well , age - ist . Well , Morgan , you were mentioning that Mari may not use the k equipment from IBM if they found something else , cuz there 's a professor d: They 're they 're yeah , they 're d they 're assessing whether they should do that or y do something else , hopefully over the next few weeks . phd f: Cuz , one remote possibility is that if we st if we inherited that equipment , if she weren't using it , could we set up a room in the linguistics department ? And and , there there may be a lot more or or in psych , or in comp wherever , in another building where we could , record people there . I think we 'd have a better chance grad b: I think we 'd need a real motivated partner to do that . But if there were such a it 's a remote possibility , then , you know , one of us could you know , go up there and record the meeting or something rather than bring all of them down here . phd f: So it 's just a just a thought if they end up not using the the hardware . professor d: Well , the other thing Yeah , the other thing that I was hoping to do in the first place was to turn it into some kind of portable thing so you could wheel it around . , and grad b: Well , I know that space is really scarce on at least in CS . phd f: But you may not need a separate room , you know , grad b: That 's true . phd f: the idea is , if they have a meeting room and they can guarantee that the equipment will be safe and so forth , and if one of us is up there once a week to record the meeting or something grad b: True . professor d: Well , maybe John would let us put it into the phonology lab or something . grad b: Yeah , I think it would be interesting because then we could regularly get another meeting . phd c: But I I I think you need , another portable thing a another portable equipment to to do , eh , more e easier the recording process , eh , out from ICSI . phd c: Eh , if you you want to to record , eh , a seminar or a class , eh , in the university , you you need It - it would be eh eh very difficult to to put , eh , a lot of , eh , head phones eh in different people when you have to to record only with , eh , this kind of , eh , d device . grad b: Yeah , but I think if we if we wanna just record with the tabletop microphones , that 's easy . grad b: Right ? That 's very easy , phd c: Ye - Yeah , yeah . professor d: Actually , that 's a int that raises an interesting point that came up in our discussion that 's maybe worth repeating . We realized that , when we were talking about this that , OK , there 's these different things that we want to do with it . So , it 's true that we wanna be selective in some ways , the way that you were speaking about with , not having an interlingua and , these other issues . But on the other hand , it 's not necessarily true that we need all of the corpus to satisfy all of it . So , a a as per the example that we wanna have a fair amount that 's done with a small n recorded with a small , typ number of types of meetings But we can also have another part that 's , just one or two meetings of each of a of a range of them and that 's OK too . , i We realized in discussion that the other thing is , what about this business of distant and close microphones ? , we really wanna have a substantial amount recorded this way , that 's why we did it . But what about For th for these issues of summarization , a lot of these higher level things you don't really need the distant microphone . phd f: Right , I c I think there 's grad b: And you don't really need the close microphone , you mean . phd f: Yea - yeah yeah , you actually don't really even need any fancy microphone . postdoc e: Which one did you mean ? professor d: You d You don't ne it doesn't you just need some microphone , somewhere . professor d: but phd f: use , but I think that any data that we spend a lot of effort to collect , professor d: Yeah . phd f: you know , each person who 's interested in , we have a cou we have a bunch of different , slants and perspectives on what it 's useful for , they need to be taking charge of making sure they 're getting enough of the kind of data that they want . phd f: And So in my case , I think there w there is enough data for some kinds of projects and not enough for others . phd f: And so I 'm looking and thinking , " Well I 'd be glad to walk over and record people and so forth if it 's to help th in my interest . phd f: And other people need to do that for themselves , h or at least discuss it so that we can find some optimal professor d: Right . professor d: But I think that I 'm raising that cuz I think it 's relevant exactly for this idea up there that if you think about , " Well , gee , we have this really complicated setup to do , " well maybe you don't . professor d: Maybe if if If really all you want is to have a a a recording that 's good enough to get a , a transcription from later , you just need to grab a tape recorder and go up and make a recording . professor d: we we could have a fairly We could just get a DAT machine and phd f: Well , I agree with Jane , though , on the other hand that phd c: Yeah . phd f: So that might be true , you may say for instance , summarization , or something that sounds very language oriented . You may say well , " Oh yeah , you just do that from transcripts of a radio show . phd f: But what you what I was thinking is long term what would be neat is to be able to pick up on Suppose you just had a distant microphone there and you really wanted to be able to determine this . phd f: So I do think that long term you should always try to satisfy the greatest number of of interests and have this parallel information , which is really what makes this corpus powerful . phd f: Otherwise , you know , lots of other sites can propose individual studies , so professor d: but I I think that the i We can't really underestimate the difficulty shouldn't really u underestimate the difficulty of getting a setup like this up . professor d: And so , it took quite a while to get that together and to say , " Oh , we 'll just do it up there , " phd f: OK . professor d: If you 're talking about something simple , where you throw away a lot of these dimensions , then you can do that right away . Talking about something that has all of these different facets that we have here , it won't happen quickly , it won't be easy , and there 's all sorts of issues about th you know keeping the equipment safe , or else hauling it around , and all sorts of o phd f: So then maybe we should try to bring people here . professor d: I think the first priority should be to pry to get try to get people to come here . phd f: that 's that 's OK , so professor d: We 're set up for it . phd f: Yeah , I And I think we can get people to come here , that But the issue is you definitely wanna make sure that the kind of group you 're getting is the right group so that you don't waste a lot of your time and the overhead in bringing people down . professor d: Yeah , they have to do their digits or they don't get they don't get their food . professor d: Yeah grad b: Should I pursue that ? phd f: Oh , definitely , yeah . grad b: So I 'm not sure whether they 'll still be so willing to volunteer , but I 'll send an email and ask . phd f: I 'd love to get people that are not linguists or engineers , cuz these are both weird grad b: Right . professor d: The the The oth the other h phd f: well , I know , I shouldn't say that . The o the o the other The other thing is , that we we talked about is give to them , burn an extra CD - ROM . professor d: and give them So if they want a basically and audio record of their phd f: Well , I thought that was I thought he meant , " Give them a music CD , " like they g Then he said a CD of the of their speech professor d: Oh . phd f: and I guess it depends of what kind of audience you 're talking to , but You know , I personally would not want a CD of my meeting , grad b: Mmm . Of the meeting ? phd f: but maybe yeah , maybe you 're professor d: If you 're having some planning meeting of some sort and you 'd like phd f: right . professor d: We 're saying , " Look , you know , you 're gonna get this . It 's actually p It 's probably gonna be pretty useless to you , grad b: Yep . professor d: but you 'll ge appreciate , you know , where it 's useful and where it 's useless , phd f: Right . professor d: and then , we 're gonna move this technology , so it 'll become useful . phd a: What if you could tell them that you 'll give them the the transcripts when they come back ? postdoc e: Alth phd f: But we might need a little more to incentivize them , that 's all . postdoc e: I hav I have to raise a little eensy - weensy concern about doing th giving them the CD immediately , because of these issues of , you know , this kind of stuff , where maybe You know ? professor d: Good point . professor d: So we can so we can postdoc e: We could burn it after it 's been cleared with the transcript stage . phd f: If It should be the same CD - ROM that we distribute publically , grad b: That 's a good point . phd f: right ? professor d: Although it 's phd f: Otherwise they 're not allowed to play it for anyone . postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right , say " Yeah , well , I got this CD , and , Your Honor , I " grad b: Yeah . So that was that topic , and then , I guess another topic would be where are we in the whole disk resources question for grad b: We are slowly slowly getting to the point where we have enough sp room to record meetings . So I did a bunch of archiving , and still doing a bunch of archiving , I I 'm in the midst of doing the P - files from , Broadcast News . phd c: Eleven ? grad b: And it 'll take another eleven to do the clone . phd a: Where did you copy it to ? grad b: Well , it 's Abbott . professor d: Sk - It 's copying from one place on Abbott to another place on Abbott ? grad b: Tape . phd a: Ah ! grad b: So I 'm archiving it , and then I 'm gonna delete the files . postdoc e: One thing The good news about that that is that once once it 's archived , it 's pretty quick to get back . professor d: Is it ? postdoc e: it it it The other direction is fast , but this direction is really slow . phd a: Generating a clone ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's a good point . phd a: Oh ! Hunh ! professor d: S postdoc e: Now , what will Is the plan to g to So stuff will be saved , it 's just that you 're relocating it ? , so we 're gonna get more disk space ? Or did I ? grad b: No , the the these are the P - files from Broadcast News , which are regeneratable regeneratable postdoc e: OK . grad b: And so they they were two gigabytes per file and we had six of them or something . professor d: Or maybe six ? grad b: The SUN , ha , takes more disks than the Andatico one did . The SUN rack takes Th - One took four and one took six , or maybe it was eight and twelve . professor d: How many How much phd a: Is there a difference in price or something ? grad b: Well , what happened is that we we bought all our racks and disks from Andatico for years , according to Dave , and Andatico got bought by another company and doubled their prices . I 've been looking at the , Aurora data and , first first look at it , there were basically three directories on there that could be moved . One was called Aurora , one was Spanish , which was Carmen 's Spanish stuff , and the other one was , SPINE . phd a: And so , I wrote to Dan and he was very concerned that the SPINE stuff was moving to a non - backed - up disk . So , I realized that well , probably not all of that should be moved , just the CD - ROM type data , the the static data . So I moved that , and then , I asked him to check out and see if it was OK . I told him he could delete it if he wanted to , I haven't checked today to see if he 's deleted it or not . And then Carmen 's stuff , I realized that when I had copied all of her stuff to XA , I had copied stuff there that was dynamic data . professor d: So , but , y you 're figuring you can record another five meetings or something with the space that you 're clearing up from the Broadcast News , but , we have some other disks , some of which you 're using for Aurora , but are we g do we have some other other space now ? grad b: Yep . So , so , we have space on the current disk right now , where Meeting Recorder is , and that 's probably enough for about four meetings . phd a: OK , I but the stuff I 'm moving from Aurora is on the DC disk that we grad b: I don't remember . Yeah , we were at a hundred percent and then we dropped down to eighty - six for reasons I don't understand . And then with Broadcast News , that 's five or six more meetings , so , you know , we have a couple weeks . , so , yeah , I think I think we 're OK , until we get the new disk . phd a: So should , One question I had for you was , we need we sh probably should move the Aurora an and all that other stuff off of the Meeting Recorder disk . Is there another backed - up disk that you know of that would ? grad b: We should put it onto the Broadcast News one . grad b: But , so we could ' jus just do that at the end of today , once the archive is complete , and I 've verified it . professor d: OK , @ @ So , then I guess th the last thing I 'd had on my my agenda was just to hear hear an update on what what Jose has been doing , phd c: - huh . professor d: so phd c: I have , eh , The result of my work during the last days . Eh , and the the last , eh , days , eh , I work , eh , in my house , eh , in a lot of ways and thinking , reading eh , different things about the the Meeting Recording project . phd c: But for me , eh is interesting because , eh , eh , here 's i is the demonstration of the overlap , eh , problem . phd c: It 's a real problem , a frequently problem , because you have overlapping zones eh , eh , eh , all the time . phd c: Eh , by a moment I have , eh , nnn , the , eh , n I I did a mark of all the overlapped zones in the meeting recording , with eh , a exact mark . Oh , you did that by hand ? phd c: Heh ? That 's eh , yet b b Yeah , by b b by hand by hand because , eh , eh " Why . " grad b: Can I see that ? Can I get a copy ? professor d: Oh . phd c: My my idea is to work phd a: Wow ! phd c: I I I do I don I don't @ @ I don't know , eh , if , eh , it will be possible because I I I haven't a lot eh , enough time to to to work . , only just eh , six months , as you know , but , eh , my idea is , eh , is very interesting to to work in in the line of , eh , automatic segmenter . phd c: Eh but eh , eh , in my opinion , we need eh , eh , a reference eh session to t to to evaluate the the the tool . And so are you planning to do that or have you done that already ? phd c: And No , no , with i grad b: Have you done that or are you planning to do that ? phd c: Sorry ? No , I I plan to do that . Darn ! phd c: I plan I plan , but eh , eh , the idea is the is the following . I I will I will eh , talk about eh , in the in the blackboard about the my ideas . phd c: Eh , eh This information eh , with eh , exactly time marks eh , for the overlapping zones eh overlapping zone , and eh , a speaker a a pure speech eh , eh , speaker zone . , eh zones eh of eh speech of eh , one speaker without any any eh , noise eh , any any acoustic event eh that eh , eh , w eh , is not eh , speech , real speech . And , I need t true eh , silence for that , because my my idea is to to study the nnn the the set of parameters eh , what , eh , are more m more discriminant to eh , classify . The idea is to eh to use eh , I 'm not sure to eh yet , but eh my idea is to use a a cluster eh algorithm or , nnn , a person strong in neural net algorithm to eh to eh study what is the , eh , the property of the different feat eh feature , eh , to classify eh speech and overlapping eh speech . phd c: And my idea is eh , it would be interesting to to have eh , a control set . And my control set eh , will be the eh , silence , silence without eh , any any noise . postdoc e: Which means that we 'd still You 'd hear the grad b: Yeah , fans . phd c: Eh , I eh , noise eh , eh claps eh , tape clips , eh , the difference eh , professor d: phd c: eh , eh , event eh , which , eh , eh , has , eh eh , a hard effect of distorti spectral distortion in the in the eh speech . grad b: So so you intend to hand - mark those and exclude them ? professor d: phd c: Yeah , I have mark in in in in that Not in all in all the the file , grad b: phd c: only eh , eh , nnn , mmm , I have eh , ehm I don't remind what is the the the the quantity , but eh , I I have marked enough speech on over and all the overlapping zones . I have , eh , two hundred and thirty , more or less , overlapping zones , and is similar to to this information , grad b: Whew ! phd c: because with the program , I cross the information of , of Jane with eh , my my segmentation by hand . phd c: And the the idea is , eh , I I will use , eh , I want My idea is , eh , to eh to classify . phd c: I I need eh , the exact eh , mark of the different , eh , eh , zones because I I want to put , eh , for eh , each frame a label indicating . I I I put , eh , eh , for each frame a label indicating what is th the type , what is the class , eh , which it belong . phd c: Eh , the class you will overlapping speech " overlapping " is a class , eh , " speech " @ @ the class that 's grad b: Nonspeech . phd a: These will be assigned by hand ? phd c: a I I I ha I h I I put the mark by hand , phd a: Based on the - huh . phd c: because , eh , my idea is , eh , in in the first session , I need , eh , I I need , eh , to be sure that the information eh , that , eh , I I will cluster , is is right . Because , eh , eh , if not , eh , I will I will , eh , return to the speech file to analyze eh , what is the problems , grad b: Well , training , and validation . And I I 'd prefer I would prefer , the to to have , eh , this labeled automatically , but , eh , eh , fro th I need truth . So , the difference between the top two , i So so I start at the bottom , so " silence " is clear . By " speech " do you mean speech by one sp by one person only ? phd c: Speech Yeah . postdoc e: So this is un OK , and then and then the top includes people speaking at the same time , or or a speaker and a breath overlapping , someone else 's breath , or or clicking , overlapping with speech So , that that 's all those possibilities in the top one . phd c: Eh , in the first moment , because , eh , eh , I I have information , eh , of the overlapping zones , eh , information about if the , eh , overlapping zone is , eh , from a speech , clear speech , from a one to a two eh speaker , or three speaker , or is is the zone where the breath of a speaker eh , overlaps eh , onto eh , a speech , another , especially speech . postdoc e: So it 's basi it 's basically speech wi som with with something overlapping , which could be speech but doesn't need to be . phd c: No , no , es especially eh , overlapping speech from , eh , different eh , eh , speaker . Eh professor d: No , but there 's but , I think she 's saying " Where do you In these three categories , where do you put the instances in which there is one person speaking and other sounds which are not speech ? " phd c: Ah ! professor d: Which category do you put that in ? postdoc e: Yeah , that 's right . Yeah , he here I I put eh speech from eh , from , eh , one speaker without , eh , eh , any any any events more . postdoc e: Oh ! professor d: Right , so where do you put speech from one speaker that does have a nonspeech event at the same time ? phd c: Where ? Where What is the class ? professor d: Which catege which category ? postdoc e: Like a c phd c: No . phd c: For for the by the @ @ no , @ @ because I I I I want to limit the the nnn , the the study . grad b: Yeah , so that 's what he was saying before , is that he excluded those . phd c: " Why ? Why ? What 's the reason ? " because i it 's the first study . In the in the future , the the idea is to to extend the class , phd a: Is is phd c: to consider all the all the information , you you mentioned before professor d: Yeah . phd c: but eh , the the first idea Because eh , I don't know what hap what will happen with the study . i it 's pure phd a: What if there was a door - slam or something ? phd c: No , no , it 's pure silence . professor d: What you Well w I I think what you m I think what you mean is that it 's nonspeech segments that don't have impulsive noises . professor d: Right ? Cuz you 're calling what you 're calling " event " is somebody coughing or clicking , or rustling paper , or hitting something , which are impulsive noises . Right ? phd c: h here yet , yet I I I I I think I I think , eh , there are that some kind of noises that , eh , don't don't wanted to to be in that , eh , in that control set . phd c: But I prefer , I prefer at at the first , eh , the the silence with eh , this eh this kind of the of eh of noise . professor d: Right , it 's , it 's " Background " might be might be a better word than " silence " . phd c: And , with this information The idea is eh , eh , nnn , I have a label for for each , eh , frame and , eh with a cluster eh algorithm I and postdoc e: Well , we needed to get the categories , yeah . And eh I am going to prepare a test bed , eh , well , eh , a a set of feature structure eh , eh , models . phd c: I have to to test , but eh I phd a: You have your own ? phd c: Yeah , yeah , yeah . Is a modified version of of of a pitch tracker , eh , from , eh , Standar - eh Stanford University in Stanford ? No . phd a: Oh ! What 's it written in ? phd c: Eh , em , I I I don't remember what is the the name of the of the author , because I I have several I have eh , eh , em , eh , library tools , from eh , Festival and of from Edinburgh eh , from Cambridge , eh , and from our department . phd c: And And I have to because , in general the pitch tracker , doesn't work very well and grad b: Bad . This this is And th the idea is to to , eh , to obtain , eh , for example , eh , eh diff eh , eh , different well , no , a great number of eh FEC for example , eh , eh , twenty - five , eh , thirty thirty parameters , eh , for for each one . And in a first eh , nnn , step in the investi in the research in eh , my idea is try to , eh , to prove , what is the performance of the difference parameter , eh to classify the different , eh , what is the the the the front - end approach to classify eh , the different , eh , frames of each class eh and what is the the , nnn , nnn , nnn , eh , what is the , the error eh , of the data grad b: Supervised clustering . phd c: and the second is try to eh , to use some ideas eh , similar to the linear discriminant analysis . phd c: Eh ? Eh , similar , because the the idea is to to study what is the contribution of eh , each parameter to the process of classify correctly the different the different parameters . What sort of classifier ar ? phd c: Eh , the the the classifier is nnn by the moment is eh is eh , similar , nnn , that the classifier used eh , in a quantifier vectorial quantifier is eh , used to to eh , some distance to to put eh , a vector eh , in in a class different . grad b: Unimodal ? phd c: Is Yeah ? W with a model , is is only to cluster using a eh , @ @ or a similarity . grad b: So is it just one cluster per phd c: A another possibility it to use eh a netw netw a neural network . phd c: But eh what 's the p What is my idea ? What 's the problem I I I I see in in in if you you use the the neural network ? If w when this kind of eh , mmm , cluster , clustering algorithm to can test , to can eh observe what happened you you can't you can't eh , eh put up with your hand in the different parameter , grad b: Right , you can't analyse it . phd c: but eh If you use a neural net is is a good idea , but eh you don't know what happened in the interior of the neural net . professor d: Well , actually , you can do sensitivity analyses which show you what the importance of the different parce pieces of the input are . professor d: It 's hard to w w what you It 's hard to tell on a neural net is what 's going on internally . professor d: But it 's actually not that hard to analyse it and figure out the effects of different inputs , especially if they 're all normalized . professor d: Well , this isn't tru if if if you really wonder what different if if phd c: Yeah . phd c: But professor d: Yeah , then a decision tree is really good , but the thing is here he 's he 's not he 's not like he has one you know , a bunch of very distinct variables , like pitch and this he 's talking about , like , a all these cepstral coefficients , and so forth , grad b: Right . professor d: in which case a a any reasonable classifier is gonna be a mess , and it 's gonna be hard to figure out what what phd c: And grad b: Right . professor d: I , I think the other thing that one , this is , I think a good thing to do , to sort of look at these things at least See what I 'd I 'd Let me tell you what I would do . Instead of taking all the MFCC 's , or all the PLP 's or whatever , I would just take a couple . professor d: OK ? Like like C - one , C - two , something like that , so that you can visualize it . professor d: OK , so before you do build up any kind of fancy classifiers , just take a look in two dimensions , at how these things are split apart . professor d: That I think will give you a lot of insight of what is likely to be a useful feature when you put it into a more complicated classifier . professor d: And the second thing is , once you actually get to the point of building these classifiers , @ @ what this lacks so far is the temporal properties . So if you 're just looking at a frame and a time , you don't know anything about , you know , the structure of it over time , and so you may wanna build @ @ build a Markov model of some sort , or or else have features that really are based on on on some bigger chunk of time . But don't anyway , this is my suggestion , is don't just , you know , throw in twenty features at it , the deltas , and the delta del and all that into some classifier , even even if it 's K - nearest - neighbors , you still won't know phd c: Yeah . professor d: what it 's doing , even You know it 's , I think to know what it 's to have a better feeling for what it 's grad b: Yep . professor d: look at at som some picture that shows you , " Here 's These things , are offer some separation . " And , in LPC , the thing to particularly look at is , I think is something like , the residual phd c: Yeah . S postdoc e: Can I ask ? It strikes me that there 's another piece of information , that might be useful and that 's simply the transition . So , w if you go from a transition of silence to overlap versus a transition from silence to speech , there 's gonna be a b a big informative area there , it seems to me . phd c: I eh the the Meeting Recorder project , for me , has eh , two eh , w has eh several parts , several p objective professor d: But eh , at the first , in the acoustic , eh , eh , parts of the project , eh I think you eh we have eh two main eh objective . And for that , if you don't use , eh , eh , a speech recognizer , eh broad class , or not broad class to to try to to to label the different frames , I think the Ike criterion or BIC criterion eh will be enough to detect the change . When you you have , eh , eh s eh the transition of speech or or silence eh to overlap zone , this criterion is enough with probably with , eh , this kind of , eh , eh the the the more eh use eh use eh used eh em normal , regular eh parameter MF - MFCC . But eh eh I I understand that you your objective is to eh classify , to know that eh that zone not is only a new zone in the in the file , that eh you have eh , but you have to to to know that this is overlap zone . because in the future you will eh try to to process that zone with a non - regular eh eh speech recognizer model , I suppose . phd c: you you will pretend to to to process the overlapping z eh zone with another kind of algorithm professor d: phd c: because it 's very difficult to to to obtain the transcription from eh using eh eh a regular , normal speech recognizer . phd c: A model to detect more acc the mor most accurately possible that is p , will be possible the , eh the mark , the change and another another model will @ @ or several models , to try s but eh several model eh robust models , sample models to try to classify the difference class . grad b: I 'm I 'm I 'm sorry , I didn't understand you what you said . What what model ? postdoc e: phd c: Eh , the the classifiers of the of the n to detect the different class to the different zones before try to to recognize , eh with eh to transcribe , with eh a speech recognizer . phd c: And my idea is to use eh , for example , a neural net postdoc e: So p phd c: with the information we obtain from this eh this eh study of the parameter with the selected parameter to try to eh to put the class of each frame . phd c: you you eh , eh have obtained in the first eh , step with the for example , BIC eh , eh criterion compare model postdoc e: phd c: And You I don't - u professor d: OK , but , I I think in any event we 're agreed that the first step is phd c: i postdoc e: Yeah . professor d: Because what we had before for for , speaker change detection did not include these overlaps . professor d: So the first thing is for you to to build up something that will detect the overlaps . professor d: Right ? So again , I think the first thing to do to detect the overlaps is to look at these , in in in in grad b: Features ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , I again , the things you 've written up there I think are way too way too big . professor d: OK ? If you 're talking about , say , twelfth twelfth - order MFCC 's or something like that it 's just way too much . All you 'll be able to do is put it into a classifier and see how well it does . professor d: Whereas I think if you have things if you pick one or two dimensional things , or three of you have some very fancy display , and look at how the the different classes separate themselves out , you 'll have much more insight about what 's going on . professor d: Well , you 'll you 'll get a feeling for what 's happening , you know , phd c: Yeah . professor d: so if you look at Suppose you look at first and second - order cepstral coefficients for some one of these kinds of things and you find that the first - order is much more effective than the second , and then you look at the third and there 's not and not too much there , you may just take first and second - order cepstral coefficients , phd c: Yeah . professor d: right ? And with LPC , I think LPC per se isn't gonna tell you much more than than than the other , maybe . , and on the other hand , the LPC residual , the energy in the LPC residual , will say how well , the low - order LPC model 's fitting it , which should be pretty poorly for two two or more people speaking at the same time , and it should be pretty well , for w for for one . professor d: And so I i again , if you take a few of these things that are are prob promising features and look at them in pairs , I think you 'll have much more of a sense of " OK , I now have , doing a bunch of these analyses , I now have ten likely candidates . phd c: but eh , eh eh eh eh I don't know it is the first eh way to to do that and I would eh like to to know what eh , your opinion . Eh all this study in the f in the first moment , I I w I I will pretend to do with eh eh equalizes speech . grad b: With postdoc e: With what ? With what ? grad b: Right . phd c: Eh , why ? Because eh the spectral distortion is more eh a lot eh clearer , very much clearer if we compare with the PDA . phd c: fff ! Because the n the noise eh to sp the signal - to - noise relation is eh is is low . phd c: I don't know eh i i that eh the the result of the of the study eh with eh with eh this eh this speech , the mix speech eh will work exactly with the eh PDA files . phd c: eh What , I , what what is the effect of the low ' signal to to to noise relation , you know , eh with professor d: N u We Well , I think I think I think it 's not a it 's not at all unreasonable . It makes sense to start with the simpler signal because if you have features which don't aren't even helpful in the high signal - to - noise ratio , then there 's no point in putting them into the low signal ratio , one would think , anyway . professor d: And so , if you can get @ @ again , my prescription would be that you would , with a mixed signal , you would take a collection of possible , features look at them , look at how these different classes that you 've marked , separate themselves , and then collect , in pairs , and then collect ten of them or something , and then proceed with a bigger classifier . professor d: And then if you can get that to work well , then you go to the other signal . And then , and you and you know , they won't work as well , but how m you know , how much grad b: Right . Because it I think it would be interesting to see if some features work well with close mixed , and And don't professor d: . professor d: That 's well , the It it 's it 's true that it also , it could be useful to do this exploratory analysis where you 're looking at scatter plots and so on in both cases . phd c: I I I I think that the the eh parameter we found , eh , eh worked with both eh , speech file , postdoc e: That 's good . phd c: but eh what is the the the relation of eh of the performance when eh you use eh the , eh eh speech file the PDA speech files . Is eh is not easy eh to to solve , because if you I I I have seen the the the speech file from eh PDA , and s some parts is very difficult because you you don't see the spectrum the spectrogram . phd c: Is very difficult to apply eh , eh a parameter to detect change when you don't see . Well , that that that 's another reason why very simple features , things like energy , and things things like harmonicity , and residual energy are , yeah are are better to use than very complex ones because they 'll be more reliable . phd a: Yeah , I maybe this is a dumb question , but w I thought it would be I thought it would be easier if you used a PDA professor d: Nah . phd a: because can't you , couldn't you like use beam - forming or something to detect speaker overlaps ? grad b: Well , if you used the array , rather than the signal from just one . professor d: Yeah , no , you you 're you 're right grad b: But that 's professor d: that In fact , if we made use of the fact that there are two microphones , you do have some location information . which we don't have with the one and and so that 's phd a: Is that not allowed with this project ? professor d: well , no , we we don't have any rules , r really . professor d: I think I I think I think it 's it 's it 's a it 's an additional interesting question . professor d: I think you wanna know whether you can do it with one , because you know it 's not necessarily true that every device that you 're trying to do this with will have two . professor d: if , on the other hand , we show that there 's a huge advantage with two , well then that could be a real point . professor d: But , we don't n even know yet what the effect of detecting having the ability to detect overlaps is . postdoc e: There there is a complication though , and that is if a person turns their back to the to the PDA , then some of the positional information goes away ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , it it it does , i it d it does , but the the the issue is that that phd a: No , it 's not it 's not that so much as postdoc e: And then , And if they 're on the access on the axis of it , that was the other thing I was thinking . postdoc e: He You mentioned this last time , that that if if you 're straight down the midline , then then the r the left - right 's gonna be different , grad b: Yeah , we hav need to put it on a little turntable , phd c: I I I I I th grad b: and phd a: Well , it 's phd c: Yeah . postdoc e: It seems to me that that it 's not a p , you know , it 's this the topograph the topology of it is is a little bit complicated . phd a: I don't I don't know ho phd c: I I I think Sorry . I I I think because the the the distance between the two microph eh , microphone , eh , in the PDA is very near . But it 's from my opinion , it 's an interesting idea to to try to study the binaural eh problem eh , with information , because I I found difference between the the speech from from each micro eh , in the PDA . It - it 's not amplitude , postdoc e: Oh yeah ! Oh I agree ! And we use it ourselves . postdoc e: But I 'm just I 'm just saying that the way we 're seated around a table , is not the same with respect to each to each person with respect to the PDA , phd c: No . postdoc e: so we 're gonna have a lot of differences with ref respect to the speaker . phd c: But professor d: That 's So so i @ @ I think the issue is , " Is there a clean signal coming from only one direction ? " phd a: Right . professor d: If it 's not coming from just one direction , if it if th if there 's a broader pattern , it means that it 's more likely there 's multiple people speaking , phd c: Yeah . phd a: So it 's sort of like how how confused is it about where the beam is . professor d: Yeah , is there a narrow Is there a narrow beam pattern or is it a a distributed beam pattern ? So if there 's a distributed beam pattern , then it looks more like it 's it 's , multiple people . OK , it just it just seemed to me that , that this isn't the ideal type of separation . , I I think it 's I can see the value o professor d: Oh , ideal would be to have the wall filled with them , but But the thing is just having two mikes If you looked at that thing on on Dan 's page , it was When when there were two people speaking , and it looked really really different . phd a: Did - Sorry , b I 'm not sure what Dan 's page is that you mean . professor d: You take the signal from the two microphones and you cros and you cross - correlate them with different lags . So when one person is speaking , then wherever they happen to be at the point when they 're speaking , then there 's a pretty big maximum right around that point in the l in in the lag . professor d: So if at whatever angle you are , at some lag corresponding to the time difference between the two there , you get this boost in the in in the cross - correlation value function . phd a: So so if there 's two grad b: And if there are multiple people talking , you 'll see two peaks . postdoc e: Well , let me ask you , if if both people were over there , it would be less effective than if one was there and one was across , catty - corner ? phd c: Yeah . The - the Oh , I 'm sorry , postdoc e: No ? professor d: if they 're right next to one another ? phd a: If I was if I was here and Morgan was there and we were both talking , it wouldn't work . professor d: i i postdoc e: Next next one over n over on this side of the P PDA . postdoc e: Versus you versus you know , and we 're catty - corner across the table , and I 'm farther away from this one and you 're farther away from that one . grad b: Or or even if , like , if people were sitting right across from each other , you couldn't tell the difference either . Yeah , so it 's postdoc e: And so my point was just that it 's it 's gonna be differentially differentially varia valuable . postdoc e: it 's not to say , I certainly think it 's extremely val And we we humans n n depend on you know , these these binaural cues . professor d: But it 's almost but it 's almost a I think what you 're talking about i there 's two things . professor d: There 's a sensitivity issue , and then there 's a pathological error issue . professor d: If someone just happens to be sitting right there then we won't get good information from it . and i and if there So it And if it 's the two of you guys on the same side professor d: if they 're if they 're close , it 's just a question of the sensitivity . professor d: So if the sensitivity is good enough and we just we just don't have enough , experience with it to know how postdoc e: Yeah . postdoc e: Oh I 'm not I 'm not trying to argue against using it , by any means . I just wanted to point out that that weakness , that it 's topo topologically impossible to get it perfect for everybody . professor d: the other thing you can do , if , i We 're assuming that it would be a big deal just to get somebody convince somebody to put two microphones in the PDA . And then you know then you 're sort of Yeah , then then you pretty much could cover phd a: Once you got two postdoc e: Interesting . phd a: Well what about just doing it from these mikes ? postdoc e: Interesting . phd c: It will be more interesting to study the PZM because the the the separation I I think professor d: @ @ But - but that 's , we can we 'll be all of this is there for us to study . professor d: But but but the thing is , one of the at least one of the things I was hoping to get at with this is what can we do with what we think would be the normal situation if some people get together and one of them has a PDA . phd a: That 's what I was asking about , what are the constraints ? phd c: Yeah . professor d: Well , that 's that 's the constraint of one question that I think both Adam and I were were were interested in . professor d: but you know if you can instrument a room , this is really minor league compared with what some people are doing , right ? Some people at at , yeah , at Brown and and and and at and at Cape , grad b: Big micro @ @ arrays . phd a: Didn't they have something at Cape ? professor d: they both have these , you know , big arrays on the wall . And you know , if you could do that , you 've got microphones all over the place grad b: Very finely . professor d: you know p tens of microphones , and and phd a: Oh ! I saw a demo . professor d: And if you do that then you can really get very nice kind of selectivity phd a: Yeah . grad b: Oh , I saw one that was like a hundred microphones , a ten by ten array . phd a: And you could In a noisy room , they could have all kinds of noises and you can zoom right in on somebody . grad b: It was all in software and they and you could pick out an individual beam and listen to it . professor d: But , the reason why I haven't focused on that as the fir my first concern is because , I 'm interested in what happens for people , random people out in some random place where they 're p having an impromptu discussion . And you can't just always go , " well , let 's go to this heavily instrumented room that we spent tens of thousands of dollars to se to set up " . phd a: No , what you need to do is you 'd have a little fabric thing that you unroll and hang on a wall . phd a: It has all these mikes and it has a plug - in jack to the PDA . grad b: But I think professor d: The other thing actually , that gets at this a little bit of something else I 'd like to do , is what happens if you have two P D grad b: Yep . professor d: and they communicate with each other ? And then You know , they 're in random positions , the likelihood that , basically there wouldn't be any l likely to be any kind of nulls , if you even had two . grad b: Though All sorts of interesting things you can do with that , postdoc e: Interesting . grad b: not only can you do microphone arrays , but you can do all sorts of multi - band as well . postdoc e: Ah ! phd a: I still like my rug on the wall idea , so if anybody patents that , then grad b: But I think postdoc e: Well , you could have strips that you stick to your clothing . phd a: Hats ? grad b: In terms of the research th research , it 's really it 's whatever the person who is doing the research wants to do . , I i I i I would actually kind of like us to wind it down , see if we can still get to the end of the , birthdays thing there . professor d: So grad b: Well , I had a couple things that I did wanna bring out . grad b: One is , do we need to sign new these again ? postdoc e: Well , it 's slightly different . phd a: Are they new ? postdoc e: Cuz it it 's slightly different . professor d: Oh , this morning we didn't sign anything cuz we said that if anybody had signed it already , we didn't have to . grad b: Yeah , I I should 've checked with Jane first , but the ch the form has changed . grad b: I had some things I wanted to talk about with the thresholding stuff I 'm doing . postdoc e: I had to make one grad b: But , if we 're in a hurry , we can put that off . postdoc e: Well , should I I have some results to present , but I guess we won't have time to do that this time . But it seems like the anonymization is , is also something that we might wanna discuss in greater length . , wha what postdoc e: If if we 're about to wind down , I think what I would prefer is that we , delay the anonymization thing till next week , and I would like to present the results that I have on the overlaps . @ @ It sounds like u , there were there were a couple technical things people would like to talk about . Why don't we just take a couple minutes to to briefly do them , and then and then and then and then and then we grad b: OK , go ahead , Jane . postdoc e: I 'd Oh , I 'd prefer to have more time for my results . postdoc e: And I think the anonymization , if y if you want to proceed with that now , I just think that that 's that 's a discussion which also n really deserves a lo a you know , more that just a minute . postdoc e: I really do think that , because you raised a couple of possibilities yourself , you and I have discussed it previously , and there are different ways that people approach it , e and I think we should grad b: Alright . We 're we 're just We 're getting enough data now that I 'd sort of like to do it now , before I get overwhelmed with once we decide how to do it postdoc e: Well , OK . I I 'll give you the short version , but I do think it 's an issue that we can't resolve in five minutes . postdoc e: OK , so the the short thing is , we have , tape recording , sorry , digitized recor recordings . postdoc e: Now , in terms of like the transcript , the question becomes what symbol are you gonna put in there for everybody 's name , and whether you 're gonna put it in the text where he says " Hey Roger " or are we gonna put that person 's anonymized name in instead ? grad b: No , because then that would give you a mapping , and you don't wanna have a mapping . postdoc e: OK , so first decision is , we 're gonna anonymize the same name for the speaker identifier and also in the text whenever the speaker 's name is mentioned . Because that would give you a mapping between the speaker 's real name and the tag we 're using , and we don't want postdoc e: I I don't think you understood what I what I said . postdoc e: So , so in within the context of an utterance , someone says " So , Roger , what do you think ? " OK . Then , it seems to me that Well , maybe I it seems to me that if you change the name , the transcript 's gonna disagree with the audio , and you won't be able to use that . grad b: We don't we wanna we ha we want the transcript to be " Roger " . grad b: Because if we made the the transcript be the tag that we 're using for Roger , someone who had the transcript and the audio would then have a mapping between the anonymized name and the real name , and we wanna avoid that . postdoc e: OK , well , but then there 's this issue of if we 're gonna use this for a discourse type of thing , then and , you know , Liz was mentioning stuff in a previous meeting about gaze direction and who 's who 's the addressee and all , then to have " Roger " be the thing in the utterance and then actually have the speaker identifier who was " Roger " be " Frank " , that 's going to be really confusing and make it pretty much useless for discourse analysis . postdoc e: Now , if you want to , you know , in some cases , I I I know that Susan Ervin - Tripp in some of hers , actually did do , a filter of the s signal where the person 's name was mentioned , except professor d: Yeah Yeah , once you get to the publication you can certainly do that . postdoc e: And and I cer and I So , the question then becomes one level back . , how important is it for a person to be identified by first name versus full name ? Well , on the one hand , it 's not a full identity , we 're taking all these precautions , and they 'll be taking precautions , which are probably even the more important ones , to they 'll be reviewing the transcripts , to see if there 's something they don't like OK . On the other hand , this is a small this is a small pool , and people who say things about topic X e who are researchers and well - known in the field , they 'll be identifiable and simply from the from the first name . However , taking one step further back , they 'd be identifiable anyway , even if we changed all the names . postdoc e: So , is it really , You know ? grad b: Ugh ! postdoc e: Now , in terms of like so I I did some results , which I 'll report on n next time , which do mention individual speakers by name . Now , it would be very possible for me to take those data put them in a in a study , and just change everybody 's name for the purpose of the publication . And someone who looked professor d: You can go , you know , " Z " , for instance . , yeah , t it doesn't , I 'm not knowledgeable about this , but it certainly doesn't bother me to have someone 's first name in in the in the transcript . postdoc e: Yeah , and and in the form that they sign , it does say " your first name may arise in the course of the meetings " . So again , th the issue is if you 're tracking discourse things , you know , if someone says , " Frank said this " and then you wanna connect it to something later , you 've gotta have this part where that 's " Frank colon " . grad b: Yeah , shoot ! professor d: Right ? postdoc e: Yeah , and and you know , even more i i , immediate than that just being able to , Well , it just seems like to track track from one utterance to the next utterance who 's speaking and who 's speaking to whom , cuz that can be important . postdoc e: S i You know , " You raised the point , So - and - so " , it 's be kind of nice to be able to know who " you " was . postdoc e: And ac and actually you remember furthermore , you remember last time we had this discussion of how you know , I was sort of avoiding mentioning people 's names , professor d: Yeah , I was too . Well , if we 're going to step in after the fact and change people 's names in the transcript , we 've basically done something one step worse . Well , I would sug I I don't wanna change the names in the transcript , phd c: Yeah . grad b: but that 's because I 'm focused so much on the acoustics instead of on the discourse , and so I think that 's a really good point . L let me just back up this to make a a brief comment about the , what we 're covering in the meeting . I realize when you 're doing this that , I didn't realize that you had a bunch of things that you wanted to talk about . So I think what would be helpful would be , i and I 'll I 'll mention this to to Liz and Andreas too , that , before the meeting if anybody could send me , any any , agenda items that they were interested in and I 'll I 'll take the role of organizing them , into into the agenda , postdoc e: OK . I 've no desire to to make it up , but if if no one 's told me things , then I 'm just proceeding from my my guesses , and and , and i ye yeah , I I 'm sorry it ended up with your out your time to , I 'm just always asking Jose what he 's doing , you know , and and so it 's There 's , there 's obviously other things going on . grad b: How will we how would the person who 's doing the transcript even know who they 're talking about ? Do you know what I 'm saying ? phd a: " The person who 's doing the transcript " The IBM people ? grad b: Yeah . , so so how is that information gonna get labeled anyway ? postdoc e: How do you mean , who what they 're who they 're talking about ? grad b: so if I 'm saying in a meeting , " oh and Bob , by the way , wanted wanted to do so - and - so " , postdoc e: How do you mean ? phd a: They 're just gonna write " Bob " on it or do @ @ grad b: if you 're doing Yeah , @ @ they 're just gonna write " Bob " . If you 're if you 're doing discourse analysis , postdoc e: They won't be able to change it themselves . professor d: What ar how are they gonna do any of this ? grad b: Yeah , really . postdoc e: Well , I I 'm betting we 're gonna have huge chunks that are just totally un untranscribable by them . professor d: they 're gonna say speaker - one , or speaker - two or speaker I I phd a: They can't do that . phd c: Yeah , I think grad b: Well , the current one they don't do speaker identity . phd c: grad b: because in NaturallySpeaking , or , excuse me , in ViaVoice , it 's only one person . I think that My understanding from Yen Is it Yen - Ching ? Is that how you pronounce her name ? professor d: Yu - Ching , Yu - Ching . postdoc e: Oh , Yu - Ching ? Yu - Ching ? grad b: y Yu - Ching . postdoc e: was that , they will that they will adopt the part of the conventions that that we discussed , where they put speaker identifier down . But , you know , h they won't know these people , so I think it 's Well , they 'll they 'll adopt some convention but we haven't specified to them So they 'll do something like speaker - one , speaker - two , is what I bet , but I 'm betting there 'll be huge variations in the accuracy of of their labeling the speakers . professor d: And it and it may very well be , since they 're not going to sit there and and and worry ab about , it being the same speaker , they may very well go the eh the the first se the first time it changes to another speaker , that 'll be speaker - two . professor d: And the next time it 'll be speaker - three even if it 's actually speaker - one . grad b: Yeah we we can probably regenerate it pretty easily from the close - talking mikes . phd c: postdoc e: Yes , I was thinking , the temp the time values of when it changes . grad b: The p It 's a good point , " which what do you do for discourse tracking ? " phd c: Because y y you don't know to know , eh you don't need to know what i what is the iden identification of the of the speakers . If if if if someone says , " what what is Jose doing ? " and then Jose says something , you need to know that that was Jose responding . postdoc e: Unless we adopt a different set of norms which is to not id to make a point of not identifying people by name , which then leads you to be more contextually ex explicit . You know ? , so when we did this las last week , I felt that you know , now , Andreas may , @ @ , he he i sometimes people think of something else at the same time and they miss a sentence or something , and and because he missed something , then he missed the r the initial introduction of who we were talking about , and was was unable to do the tracking . postdoc e: But I felt like most of us were doing the tracking and knew who we were talking about and we just weren't mentioning the name . phd a: But , you know , like , at the beginning of this meeting Or , you I think said , you know , or s Liz , said something about , " is Mari gonna use the equipment ? " , how would you say that ? postdoc e: Yeah ? phd a: you have to really think , you know , about what you 're saying bef grad b: if you wanted to anonymize . Yeah , is professor d: " Is you know who up in you know where ? " phd a: Yeah . professor d: Right ? Use the phd a: I think it would be really hard if we made a policy where we didn't say names , plus we 'd have to tell everybody else . grad b: Yeah , darn ! , what I was gonna say is that the other option is that we could bleep out the names . phd a: I I think the I think I don't know , my own two cents worth is that you don't do anything about what 's in the recordings , you only anonymize to the extent you can , the speakers have signed the forms and all . grad b: Well , but that but that as I said , that that that works great for the acoustics , but it it hurts you a lot for trying to do discourse . grad b: Because you don't have a map of who 's talking versus their name that they 're being referred to . phd a: I thought we were gonna get it labelled speaker - one , speaker - two grad b: Sure but , h then you have to know that Jose is speaker - one and phd a: Why do you have to know his name ? professor d: OK , so suppose someone says , " well I don't know if I really heard what , what Jose said . professor d: So u phd a: Oh , I see , you wanna associated the word " Jose " in the dialogue with the fact that then he responded . professor d: And so , if we pass out the data to someone else , and it says " speaker - five " there , we also have to pass them this little guide that says that speaker - five is Jose , grad b: And that violates our privacy . professor d: and if were gonna do that we might as well give them " Jose " say it was " Jose " . postdoc e: Now , I I think that we have these two phases in the in the data , which is the one which is o our use , University of Washington 's use , IBM , SRI . postdoc e: And within that , it may be that it 's sufficient to not change the to not incorporate anonymization yet , but always , always in the publications we have to . postdoc e: And I think also , when we take it that next step and distribute it to the world , we have to . But I but I don that 's that 's a long way from now and and it 's a matter of between now and then of d of deciding how grad b: Making some decisions ? postdoc e: i i it You know , it may be s that we we 'll need to do something like actually X out that part of the the audio , and just put in brackets " speaker - one " . phd c: the ? ? grad b: You know , what we could do also is have more than one version of release . professor d: I I think that we we have a need to have a consistent licensing policy of some sort , and postdoc e: But I also think a consistent licensing policy is important . phd a: Well , one thing to to take into consideration is w are there any For example , the people who are funding this work , they want this work to get out and be useful for discourse . phd a: If we all of a sudden do this and then release it to the public and it 's not longer useful for discourse , you know grad b: Well , depending on how much editing we do , you might be able to still have it useful . grad b: But , n excuse me , but you could bleep out just the names . professor d: She No , but she 's saying , from the argument before , she wants to be able to say if someone said " Jose " in their in their thing , and then connect to so to what he said later , then you need it . But in the transcript , you could say , everywhere they said " Jose " that you could replace it with " speaker - seven " . But I I also wanna say that people grad b: And then it wouldn't meet match the audio anymore . professor d: And th and the other thing is if if if Liz were here , what she might say is that she wants to look if things that cut across between the audio and the dialogue , postdoc e: Well , you see ? So , it 's complicated . postdoc e: But it 's g but I think it was good to introduce the thing and we can do it next time . grad b: I didn't think when I wrote you that email I wasn't thinking it was a big can of worms , but I guess it is . postdoc e: Well it Discourse , you know Also I wanted to make the point that that discourse is gonna be more than just looking at a transcript . postdoc e: It 's gonna be looking at a t You know , and prosod prosodic stuff is involved , and that means you 're going to be listening to the audio , and then you come directly into this confronting this problem . phd a: Maybe we should just not allow anybody to do research on discourse , postdoc e: So . professor d: maybe we should only have meetings between people who don't know one another and who are also amnesiacs who don't know their own name . grad b: Did you read the paper on Eurospeech ? postdoc e: We could have little labels . I I I wanna introduce my Reservoir Dogs solution again , which is everyone has like " Mister White " , " Mister Pink " , " Mister Blue " . Did you read the paper a few years ago where they were reversing the syllables ? They were di they they had the utterances . phd a: But so , the syllables were in the same order , with respect to each other , but the acous grad b: Everything was in the same order , but they were the individual syll syllables were played backwards . phd a: What did it sound like ? grad b: People had no difficulty in interpreting it . So what we need is something that 's the reverse , that a speech recognizer works exactly the same on it but people can't understand it . professor d: What , what does the speech recognizer care ? grad b: Ah , anyway . professor d: postdoc e: Oh , do we do digits ? Or ? What do we do ? grad b: OK , we 'll quickly do digits . like as if you were talking like , " nine eight six eight seven ? " postdoc e: Well , you know , in the in the one I transcribed , I did find a couple instances I found one instance of contrastive stress , where it was like the string had a li So it was like " nine eight two four , nine nine two four " . So they were like looking ahead , postdoc e: And phd a: huh ? postdoc e: Well , they differed . , I 've I am sort of interested in in And sometimes , you know , I s And I I never know . phd a: Well , I was thinking that it must get kind of boring for the people who are gonna have to transcribe this postdoc e: and I phd a: They may as well throw in some interesting intonations

The professor highlighted the issue of network congestion and decreased task efficiency caused by copying information between drives. However, the team was acquiring four additional 36 GB drives. The professor also expressed the need for more information regarding the available space on computational servers. PhD I suggested re-evaluating recognition methods without cheating on the segmentation and explained the use of recognizer alignments for training the speech detector, which may require hand labeling for data generation. Postdoc E advocated for proficient English speakers to ensure a stable language model, regardless of accent, as long as they can effectively follow English grammar. The revised semantic specification and construction formalism offer greater stability compared to previous versions, incorporating construction types, meaning types, and formal considerations such as verb subcategorization. The semantic specification is divided into three levels: "scenario" describes the current event using Source-Path-Goal, Container, etc.; "referent" includes grammatical information and ontology references for discourse entities; and "discourse segment" encompasses utterance-specific elements.

Question: What were the main questions raised by the Project Manager and team members regarding the Industrial Designer's presentation? Article: It's not as interesting as it should be because we just had the meeting , marketing: project manager: but I'll show them . I've put a f a file in the project management folder , which says exactly what kind of decisions we should take . this because of our last model was very functional , but it people didn't like that , so our new mo model must be very good-looking . project manager: marketing: such as an L_C_D_ screen , speech acknowledgement , as we talked about earlier . marketing: So we have to have something like that , like we project manager: L_C_D_ and our our fronts . industrial designer: Easy to use ? project manager: Well , easy to use s is a bit contradictionary with the first marketing: Yeah ? industrial designer: I think that's your ta user interface: project manager: Functional is not an issue , and then easy to use . industrial designer: you can make a very complicated remote anyway , so ease of use It's not a very comp complicated device . But the most important thing is that it looks great and people say wow , that's real great great concept . project manager: user interface: marketing: The group we are targeting is very pleased with fruit and vegetables . industrial designer: marketing: So we we we might cons consider in front of in in that sort of way . project manager: Well the the handy thing about our fronts is that we can follow these trends e ev every year . And the materials ? I have heard several things , so I I'll have to change that on the way . project manager: Well maybe it it it is , industrial designer: We should move to something project manager: but it doesn't look strong . Y Hard plastic i is of course pretty pretty tough , but it doesn't have a really really tough look . it's generally the case that senior and wealthy people above forty five years old like , as you said , particularly the traditional materials as such as wood and materials such as that . industrial designer: And then we have young and dynamic people , which is of course our group , the people we aim at . Soft materials is of course agai again a bit a contradiction with our material choice of what you said , that it should be hard an and and and and strong looking . And if also a finding but not very ap applicable here , that sports and gaming devices such as discmans for jogging and that those kind of devices , gaming devices , should define the characteristics of the device . But since we don't have a really a sports or gaming device , so we don't really have to consider that . project manager: Sports , they're that are accessible on on your L_C_D_ window user interface: Soccer fronts . project manager: All the results ? industrial designer: Well I also have several examples of styles , marketing: We keep coming back to the fronts . industrial designer: It looks like Well you know you recognise the shapes , project manager: industrial designer: it's very primary colours , bright colours and round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: You also see this device , it's not very round and Fruity of course . industrial designer: So to give you an idea of marketing: Well it's got a strong look , this . Although it's plastic , it's it's grey to to to give it iron look . Well we have to make a project manager: Well you can make th th th that middle ring can you you can make another colour . I don't think that's very practical , project manager: No , it isn't . industrial designer: Because if we make it grey or or silvery looking , it it does make it a lot more does make it looking a lot more stronger . industrial designer: 'Cause if you look at this , it it doesn't look very very strong , marketing: Yeah but the industrial designer: becau But this is plastic , and and this too , but marketing: But it doesn't have to look strong . project manager: So , if you ti industrial designer: Well user interface: And it it doesn't have to be strong , also . project manager: Well marketing: Nah yeah the feel project manager: You you Maybe you should have some some coloured titanium or something . But solar energy is not very practical inside a house , because you don't have a have a lot of sun . marketing: industrial designer: And kinetic and and and dynamos are are not very practical , I think , for for a simple remote , marketing: industrial designer: that's a bit , oh , that's a bit That's a bit much . If you use the curved case , a curved case , double curved then you can't use titanium . project manager: What do you exactly mean with double curved ? industrial designer: Now this to give it a more modern look . project manager: Double curved ? industrial designer: I'll draw it , project manager: It it mean user interface: Yeah . marketing: industrial designer: And it makes it gives it a more u user friendly shape , than if you have . No otherwi no difficult scroll things or some things like that , because it makes more complex and expensive . And , as we agreed , we don't use a speaker or a sensor or speak speech controlled device . But we do use an L_C_D_ screen , so we we do have to consider of we have to use a more advanced chip , which is more complex and expensive . But It's worth the trouble I think , project manager: Well user interface: The buttons can be made of an a soft material . project manager: marketing: user interface: there are new developments in speech recognition systems , and they are already being used on coffee machines . user interface: it's not really speech recognition , it's more like you can talk to the chip , record the message and record an answer , and then once you talk to the remote , then he will a answer with the the prerecorded message that you left . So if I say hi Mike , and you have recorded hi Mike back , then you will get that . That's a bit user interface: But i it's just a marketing: But that that makes it cheap . marketing: It's it's just a an extra function , project manager: But it has no functionality for our remote at all . user interface: No marketing: No but user interface: but that's the gadget they want , or the gimmicks . user interface: Well , as I said earlier I think the L_C_D_ screen should be positioned at the lower end of the remote . project manager: user interface: the buttons for screen width and general settings and and that kind of stuff marketing: user interface: we can also do let that kind of functions be shown in the L_C_D_ screen , instead of extra buttons . project manager: So you put a menu in the L_C_D_ ? user interface: I think young people and yeah w well every user would like that . the buttons should be positioned positioned the same way as they are on a , well , conventional remote , I think . And I drew an example , industrial designer: user interface: but it did not work quite the well the way I wanted it to do . user interface: ? Well I have the I can draw it again , industrial designer: Can you draw it now ? user interface: and I know what I did wrong . marketing: How do you give input to the menu on the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: with the the up and down and and well buttons and the marketing: Alright . industrial designer: Those are the the cha the channel buttons of course ? user interface: Yeah just the numbers . industrial designer: And then below is the L_C_D_ screen ? user interface: These these will be bigger in the the real design . user interface: This must be the Okay button used to interact with the L_C_D_ screen . user interface: And with this you can , yes , go to through the menus project manager: Yeah . user interface: and that can the video button should be an apart button , marketing: You've project manager: Yes . project manager: And what's the menu button ? user interface: it's marketing: And you you need a you need a speaker . user interface: ? marketing: For the user interface: This button can also be the Menu button , we use in the menus industrial designer: project manager: But how did How do you get out of the menu then ? Yeah . user interface: Well we we can add another button here , but project manager: Maybe I you could j just do an an exit with Okay . project manager: Yes , well but bec because when you push Menu you get in , industrial designer: Yeah ? Yeah ? project manager: and then you have to push Okay when you get to a choice . That's you you should have user interface: No no , we we we should add a extra Menu button industrial designer: No . project manager: Or you can put in the L_C_D_'s window an option Get Out . user interface: Ah once you have an extra Menu button , you don't need that that extra option . user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: marketing: Or don't user interface: if we decide to to implement that , maybe we should . industrial designer: Why would you put it then , and where is the recording the microphone ? user interface: Well they that could be anywhere . user interface: Well the speaker and the microphone , I think , are the same little hole thingy . industrial designer: but we could d do , but it's perhaps more expensive , the speaker on the back or something . user interface: Well i there are a all already being implemented in in coffee machines , so they won't be very expensive . And oh I think as you can see so , the L_C_D_ screen does look better at the lower end , or at the bottom . project manager: Yes ? user interface: You can But I did not like it very much , but marketing: user interface: Well these are quite obvious , very ugly remote . user interface: No , well th marketing: Nei They're n they're not trendy . user interface: this is for children but th industrial designer: Tho Yeah those marketing: It doesn't look strong . user interface: W but with the colours i it's a bit the way we're going to . industrial designer: But it it must not look too childish of course huh ? project manager: It's it's all too much buttons . I think we should , if it's possible , one with colours , but marketing: Nah th It's too expensive . user interface: I don't know project manager: Well , that's too expensive I think . project manager: It still has t marketing: You can make the the underside , you can make it more round , where the L_C_D_ is . user interface: Well marketing: I dunno if you know the No Nokia telephone , with the round thing at at the bottoms , s something like that . It's just a half round half half circle at And then it falls exactly over the hand , and that's very nice . All the the materials from the case , the electric cable that's all your your side of the story . now from the user interface , your package ? where No well , that's more like the buttons where they have to come . marketing: Materials are the most , most impor project manager: So as you said , fruity is in , well sells good . so if we go through them industrial designer: Copy paste this story into a into a Word document , and then put the answers after the subjects . industrial designer: Well we have to decide all these things ? user interface: Yeah but all these examples are of a coffee machine . project manager: Yeah well Why should I industrial designer: W we can override them ? marketing: project manager: Yeah . I suggest Well what do I suggest actually ? project manager: What what kind of properties should it have ? Well we just listened . user interface: Why don't we use titanium or or a hard , yeah , some kind of metal for the the the whole remote except the front . industrial designer: Yeah but the non-removable elements of the of the remote , so not the front , could be titanium , user interface: Yeah . user interface: And I don't know if you can make steel just any way you want it to . user interface: Well any colour industrial designer: According to my sources , it's it's totally possible to make an entire Titanium is available , and we can make an entire remote out of it , if we want . marketing: So , we're going for a titanium back and a plastic front ? project manager: I've user interface: . project manager: So material , hard plastic for the front ? industrial designer: Yeah , for the front and then titanium for the back . marketing: But then you have the problem , when you have a titanium back , you can't switch it . industrial designer: Well but marketing: You know ? industrial designer: The titan titanium isn't isn't v very Yeah , i it doesn't curves . Titanium is very No no no , but you know b Titanium is very basic colour , marketing: Yeah , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: and it doesn't really matter if we have a purple front on it or a orange front . industrial designer: And even if it does doesn't match , it will People like colours that don't match . industrial designer: Excuse me ? marketing: user interface: The electrical cable does industrial designer: project manager: It's from our coffee industrial designer: Yeah copper i just a ba basic user interface: No we don't use an electrical cable . industrial designer: Yeah in project manager: industrial designer: Yeah well inside the remote control we use a couple of project manager: Of course . project manager: Well marketing: project manager: all the all the inside work of our remote is standard work . user interface: and I will project manager: Well you can put that in into the shared folder , user interface: The shared folder . And what do we ? user interface: project manager: We thing that fruit and bright colours are industrial designer: Yeah the the the front w marketing: I think we can launch a couple of packages . marketing: Yeah but if you if you launch five different packages like iPod mini user interface: Yeah , right For the initiative launch . project manager: We should not give them the m the most lovely front when they buy it for the first time . user interface: Well you can you can give them s s three or so , industrial designer: The most boring fronts possible . industrial designer: Yeah but you you can have some basic colours , and then we come with the special patterns on them , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Red red , blue and green you give them or something , industrial designer: and and marketing: Yeah . this fruit and bright colours , yeah well I think we'll have to in the next half an hour , we'll have to s s specify the different types we want to launch , when we well introduce our remote . industrial designer: we still have to make We have still have to make the es the the real basic design . project manager: Well I'll have to , before I get another warning for five minutes , I'm going to get Where is my mouse ? where is my mouse ? industrial designer: marketing: Lost my mouse . industrial designer: How Yeah yeah , but how do I user interface: But bu we stay we stay here or something ? project manager: Yes well we'll get it to hear that I think . Th they're saying SMARTboard and that's it marketing: You can take the SMARTboard . And take it to our rooms and project manager: so you can you you are going to make a prototype , and y Well that's includes specifying the buttons etcetera . well you will go and do something else on the project user interface: industrial designer: Some Some non functional tasks . project manager: what are you going to do ? I don't know what product evaluation exactly means , but you'll get the specifications . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: No but project manager: How long do we still have ? industrial designer: Well , can we talk about something else ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah ? user interface: Will we use round buttons or square ones for the for the numbers ? industrial designer: Round I think . user interface: And these these s these buttons are more triangle-ish shaped project manager: Why does marketing: Curvy . industrial designer: But now I see the marketing: And this must be volume I think , project manager: Heh ? marketing: and this programme . project manager: We can't get user interface: Well most of the time up and down is programme and left and right are volume , I think . user interface: Yeah , it depends , but If you turn up the volume , you always see this thingy go up . industrial designer: Well we We we j we'll just give them an marketing: Yeah , that's right . industrial designer: project manager: So what are we going to do ? I as Project Manager ha don't have a clue . I think a logo , our company logo , and the slogan should be or could be project manager: Also the slogan ? On the industrial designer: Yeah , why not ? If there's enough space , you can put user interface: I I'd say only the logo . project manager: And well you c On the back , you can put h At the bottom , you can put the logo with the industrial designer: Right corner , or maybe here in the middle ? user interface: the text ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: yeah , at the back ? marketing: But the logo the logo shouldn't be exchangeable , when you get off the front . industrial designer: Yeah it it should be hard on the on the on the board , project manager: Yeah well marketing: Yeah . marketing: Yeah , user interface: Yeah , but then you must really yeah push it in or something . industrial designer: I l I like the idea of the of the slogan on the on the on the thing . user interface: industrial designer: But am I the only one , or user interface: Yeah , on the backside . industrial designer: No not on the front , user interface: On the back Yes , you you can , yeah , push that in , industrial designer: but on the backside . industrial designer: I think it's a nice idea , to make it more recognisable , that the next to the logo you have the slogan . project manager: Yes , slogan from company on the back with logo industrial designer: But we'll we'll take that with us into the design . industrial designer: Do you do you see a bit of the of the of the titanium ? O on the front ? project manager: Five minutes left . industrial designer: maybe if we make this this this lower part titanium , user interface: Yes we could industrial designer: the front is the the upper part , and the the bit with the with the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: of between we can do but But then you have two parts of front , two fronts that user interface: No , they have two fronts , marketing: No no no no . industrial designer: This enti entire bottom ? marketing: Else you you get problems with the L_C_D_ . user interface: No , you can you can just And then not a straight line but some sort of wave or something . industrial designer: it's marketing: Yeah , project manager: What ? industrial designer: Yeah yeah . industrial designer: That's a bit too much , but project manager: No that's nothing . project manager: Well I think we can , I just It's marketing: It's not relaxing . project manager: Yeah , o user interface: the fourth one is empty , isn't it ? marketing: project manager: Oh user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: You have to empty one huh ? project manager: Oh , we have a one . marketing: industrial designer: What are you doing chief ? project manager: So , you can draw a Yeah . user interface: Yeah I think we have to wait ? industrial designer: Yeah project manager: Well I'll get a I'll get the message . marketing: No user interface: industrial designer: But I don't Do we have to stay here , marketing: project manager: No , I think industrial designer: or I think we have to return first . Well we have b you have to have a bit of humour in the in the discussions too , marketing: You just have to push harder . industrial designer: project manager: We know you'll you'll you'll hate it but industrial designer: But th youth doesn't care about functio functionality , so marketing: No . project manager: Well , that's not bad , is it ? industrial designer: Well they marketing: No . project manager: So is it user interface: Yes , but you you get really close to the screen with your hand , industrial designer: user interface: and I don't think that's industrial designer: marketing: . user interface: industrial designer: Where's the good old chalk board with the the green board with the , how do you call it , chalk , yeah . industrial designer: Maybe if i if that thing is recalibrated , we can draw a thing quick , and then before it goes off again . Alright now we know what to do , so user interface: We'll stay here ? project manager: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Maybe w maybe we maybe w m Can we get email here ? project manager: No , get away <doc-sep>industrial designer: Who is gonna do a PowerPoint presentation ? user interface: Think we all industrial designer: You will as well ? user interface: Huh . I just wanna 'cause basically I can't re I've really crap at remembering everyone's name so I just wanna rather than going Miss Marketing and Miss this and Miss that wanted to know your names again . industrial designer: Okay I'm project manager: just gonna leave this up here 'cause I'll you know . And you're s r R_E_I_S_S_ marketing: I am Reissa . this is gonna go a lot better than the last meeting , basically , industrial designer: user interface: project manager: 'cause I know what I'm supposed to be doing now . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: I am your Project Manager , and , yeah , I'm just here to industrial designer: project manager: sort of liaise between the three of you and get things going , get people talking and and I'm gonna be making notes and sending them off to the powers that be and stuff basically . right , this for the purposes of this meeting what this meeting is all about is I'm gonna have some presentations from all three of you , what you've been working on for the last wee while , when you haven't been getting hit with spam on your computers and and , you know , filling out silly questionnaires and things . We'll we'll talk about what we actually need as a final coming together of it all . and then we'll , yeah , we'll sort of conclude anything else comes up at the end of it . industrial designer: How long is the meeting ? project manager: This meeting it's not very long . So I want each of your presentations to not be too long , five five minutes , something like that . project manager: if you haven't done a PowerPoint thingy , it doesn't matter , it it just it just says that you it's that's just one particular medium . If you haven't had time to prepare one , you can draw stuff on the noteboard , you can talk to us , you can you know however you want to do your little presentation , basically , you can . project manager: are you b are you joining in with this meeting here marketing: I yeah , yeah . project manager: or are y or are y or are you are you just are you just doing some Internet shopping there ? user interface: Think she's finishing up her presentation . Alright , let's have well , we all know that it's it's a remote control that we're gonna be dealing with . project manager: I think the first thing we should look at is probably the what it is that it is actually supposed to be . project manager: You don't have to worry about screwing it in just industrial designer: Are we getting i Really ? project manager: there you go . marketing: industrial designer: So the working design , I've got a very quick presentation on this , so I've oh no , you can't see a thing . So the idea is that we've got the energy source , which in our case will pr , oh well okay , never mind . So I think maybe two batteries , I dunno what they're called six , or something like that . industrial designer: and then then on the remote control itself will have the sender for the signal , which could be an infra-red signal , which will be sent by an electronic chip . industrial designer: And the sender will send to the telly itself an infra-red signal to tell it to switch on or switch channels . industrial designer: Sorry the presentation wasn't very clear but project manager: I prefer the pe I prefer the human touch personally . industrial designer: should I erase this or project manager: Do you wanna just give us a moment , I just wanna copy this down . project manager: I dunno if you guys have got any questions for Catherine on any of this ? industrial designer: Fine . Or suggestions ? marketing: Is a battery like the only way of industrial designer: Well , it's just , you don't want it plugged in really , s user interface: Yeah , alternate energy source , like win wind power or project manager: Yeah , you blow on it and i industrial designer: In indoors . marketing: No I meant like industrial designer: marketing: No 'cause like cha 'cause always changing batteries can get like annoying . industrial designer: marketing: The battery's down and maybe , I dunno , solar charged ? industrial designer: I dunno , swi I th I th I think changing your batteries once every six months is not really a pain , but project manager: Yeah , it's worked for the last fifty years you know . user interface: One question I have , and I don't know how much control we have over this is , as far as the infra-red signal , do we have control over , you know , how far away you can be from the receiving unit , the the T_V_ , and still have it be operational ? , maybe we want one with a strong signal stream . project manager: It's never gonna be more than it's never gonna be , you kno unless you've got a T_V_ the size of a football pitch , it's not doesn't have to go that far , user interface: industrial designer: Well , the thing is you you don't project manager: does it ? Doesn't have to go through a wall , because you're not gonna be looking through a wall . marketing: Yeah , but if like you're on the phone in the other room and you need turn television off or something and you don't really want to go into the put the telephone down , and go into the other room . industrial designer: Well , we can make the the signal strong enough to go through walls if if you fancy it . I didn't think about that but marketing: How about Bluetooth ? Instead of using infra-red , use Bluetooth . industrial designer: Why not ? I just think that it's it's gonna cost more marketing: Isn't that a better signal ? project manager: Yeah , yeah I d it sounds like you you w don't wanna overcomplicate things . industrial designer: and I'm I'm not sure it's you're gonna use it . industrial designer: It's a fancy idea it's quite nice , but then I don't th I dunno , either you if you wanna watch the telly you're in the room , project manager: Yeah , exactly . industrial designer: you are gonna project manager: Basically , we're we're desi we're designing and marketing a television remote control unit . industrial designer: But project manager: We're not w w w w designing something that you can plug in a headset to and and you know connect to your laptop computer and stuff . industrial designer: Oh , we can we can keep the idea if you i We can see at a later stage , maybe , I don't marketing: 'S just an idea . industrial designer: Do you need the border ? user interface: I'm just gonna use the PowerPoint . user interface: Yeah , and basically , as far as methods , I was I was looking looking at looking at already existing remotes , trying to find some inspiration from designs that are already out there . Thinking of what we can retain , what we can do away with , what we what we can perfect a little bit as far as design . we don't want to do something that's too radical of a change , I guess , people want a remote that's familiar , that has their favourite functionalities and and does the basics , but project manager: yeah . user interface: so we can improve what's out there and maintain that , the basic functionality that people want . so things that seem like absolute must-haves would be a volume control , so up-down keys for that , channel keys up-down , but then also a numerical key pad so that they can just key directly to the channel that they want , rather than doing up-down , and a mute button . one thing that I didn't include here , that I forgot that we talked about last time , was doing some sort of lock function . And so in the research that I was doing there's basically two types of remotes , ones that are engineering centred and ones that are more user centred , which I don't know if I can access the web page from here , but I can show you . So this is a engineer centred one , so you see it's rather busy , but it also lets you play your movie , stop your movie , fast-forward , all this , freeze frame . it's it's easier to g just glance at this and see what's possible to do , project manager: Yeah . user interface: And I judging from what what we all talked about during our last meeting I kind of gathered that that's what we were going after , or the direction we were going in at least . So , the engineering centred ones provide a lot of functionality , but it can be a little bit overwhelming , so the user centred ones just focus on ease of use . and this sort of overlaps with what the marketing person , Reissa , marketing: user interface: because we we need to find out what what people want before we make firm decisions on this . This w research that you've been doing looki looking at other , you know , existing units stuff . have you found that anyone else has do has looked into the locking function or user interface: No that that that seemed like a novel idea as f as far as I know . I dunno , what do you guys have a a yea or nay on that a feeling about whether that's really necessary ? project manager: I would say it's If it's simple to do , which I think it probably should be , user interface: Yeah . project manager: even if it's a physical , you know , a f a like a f a physical switch or a physical cover for the remote , even something like that , then yes , user interface: project manager: it's like , you know , like s you said earlier on ab ab ab a flip thing , something like that , user interface: Right . I've had word down from head office that something that we should be centred well , something we should take into account is we've gotta keep the corporate image within this remote control unit . project manager: You know , the the company it's it's , from what I can see from our other products , are yellow with blue writing on them . project manager: So it's kinda gotta look it's gotta look new and s you know something fashionable . If if remote control well , if telephones can be fashionable , then maybe remote control units can be . user interface: Well yeah these , I think , we can so we talked about the layout in my presentation and what I didn't mention yet really is is the sort of like the ergonomic design . Because we need user interface: I t I think we can make big improvements over these two that you see here , . industrial designer: user interface: everything is going t ergonomic , you know , there's you know mice for your computers that are very ergonomic and keyboards and that could be one of our niches p sort of in the market , I guess . user interface: Yeah , then you just have to do function F_ eight and it should come up . Well , for our marketing report we observed remote control users in a usability lab , and also gave so this is research and we also gave participants questionnaires to fill out . total number of people tested were a hundred just so you know , so that hundred people were tested and these were the findings . eighty f eighty per cent of them would spend more money if the rem remote control looked really cool and fancy . So , they don't like like the way they operate it doesn't like match how people behave . per cent of the users say that they only use ten per cent of the buttons on a remote , so probably if you have like one , two , three , four , five , the whole up to z ten , they probably don't use those , they only use the up and down channel . project manager: You are a child of technology , aren't you ? marketing: so yeah I was thinking something easy to use , especially for older people . And it's easy to find , so I don't know whether maybe and also we asked them whether they wanted whether they'd be interested in voice activating . marketing: so basically the majority except for the forty five to fifty five year olds for some reason didn't want a voice activated one . And neither did the older generation , but the younger generation who we are catering for , like who have most of the money nowadays , do want a voice act speech recognition in a remote . industrial designer: project manager: but do the younger generation have the money ? They they don't . project manager: It's older generation , they're the ones that have gone out and marketing: Well the twenty five to thirty five year old , and thirty five , and the thirty five to forty five , forty five point seven per cent say no , so project manager: People people from the age of thirty f there's a big drop off there . marketing: project manager: For people up to the age of thirty five , you're kinda saying , yeah , they want it . but no they're not sort of most people that have the money are people from the age of thirty five to fifty five , user interface: Yeah , that would be my guess as well . marketing: So they don't project manager: d and tha marketing: Well project manager: and that's a that's quite a minority there , so yeah , it's not even like fifty fifty that's th thirty five per cent . user interface: What about just from the the prospective of our manufacturing cost ? if if it's twelve fifty per unit . marketing: also with with buttons , a thing called R_S_I_ , so wrist sense user interface: Repetitive strain rep repetitive strain injury marketing: Huh ? user interface: or like from doing marketing: Yeah , repetitive strains injury , so they don't I think people who watch T_V_ maybe too often , keep changing channel hurts their wrist . project manager: So y so it's so it's so you got user interface: project manager: so that's something we should have a look into then i when desi when designing the ergonomics of marketing: Yeah user interface: . project manager: see have a look if there's any w any medical background we can find out about this . industrial designer: Maybe it could be , instead of pressing button it could be just touching a marketing: Yeah . project manager: Let's jus marketing: Maybe project manager: we just want need to cover our arses so that people aren't gonna sue us in ten years' time , say your remote control gave me repetitive strain injury . project manager: I'll see if I can get see if I can get hold of them for the next meeting . I think we can do some really in in that department , the the ergonomic department , we can make some some really good improvements . Maybe th the buttons not so high up so you don't have to press so much , user interface: . okay , so we've basically we've decide we've d we've decided that it's gonna be , you know , we're going for a basic television remote . project manager: Now going back to the industrial design of it , you know , we were looking at whether to use maybe infra-red or Bluetooth . I think , we should just go with the simplest option on everything , and that would be infra-red , energy source , that would be batteries . mean we we can look into using the s , you know , the little tiny weeny batteries , all like special long-lasting batteries . But a in there's no I don't think there's any point in making a remote control unit that's gonna last for fifty years , because technology will have changed and , you know , we won't have televisions in ten years' time . user interface: Yeah , it seems like we're all on the pretty much on the same page . Have you been ge has have any of you lot been getting loads of crap spam on your computers ? user interface: Oh it's probably just you , 'cause you're the project manager . Do oh have you guys found out if we can if we can e-mail stuff to each other ? marketing: Yeah , you can . I industrial designer: Well , in the project announcement , you've got the addresses , I think . marketing: I think he's participant one , aren't you ? industrial designer: So Project Manager , it's participant one at A_M_I_ . project manager: Can you all d e-mail me your e-mail addresses ? marketing: project manager: . industrial designer: You have them i you have them , user interface: Well it's just w it's just it's just par participant one , participant two . project manager: Send me , yeah industrial designer: You want to have friends , don't you ? project manager: yeah , okay . user interface: So are we headed towards like a b a big yellow and black remote as far as maybe that's our next meeting that we discuss that . project manager: Is it yellow and black or is it yellow and blue ? I I kind of thought it was blue writing on a yellow background , but I might be just going a bit user interface: Well , it's like white on i white and blue on a black background with white with yellow borders . project manager: Well , maybe you can come up with a few with a couple of different ideas ? industrial designer: It wouldn't be user interface: . marketing: Can't we have different colours in the remotes , so somebody can choose different col project manager: Well , see the thing is is we've gotta keep the company image . project manager: It's gotta say people have gotta look at this remote control and instantly recognise that it's a Real Reaction i product . marketing: But if it's a R_R_ , it would be Real Reaction , project manager: There's loads of companies that called R_R_ . project manager: This is slog but this is the slogan , this is the the the the type . user interface: And this is something that came on down from from the higher ups , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Not necessarily even if i it just has to ye but you have to look at the product and instantly know that it's one of our products industrial designer: Well you could project manager: as opposed to a Sony product or a , you know , a Panasonic product . project manager: It's got to so maybe , so you can have a look at our our other products and see if they all follow a s similar vein , perhaps . industrial designer: It could come But it could come in different colours and have the R_R_ colours just somewhere project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: like just around the lock button could be the R_R_ logo or colours and project manager: Yeah . project manager: If we've if we've finished at five minutes before the meeting's supposed to finish , then that means we get an extra five minutes for lunch . I just have to there's a few little bits and pieces I have to write down , but Take your headsets off , kick back , smoke 'em if you got 'em <doc-sep>industrial designer: project manager: So in last meeting we have discussed the conceptual design and we asked you to prepare a prototype for the for the remote control . And so we have and we we are both agreed on some two versions of the prototypes , because we were no not decided whether we wanted to have an L_C_D_ or not because it's too expensive . industrial designer: You can choose the direction and if you just push on it it's considered like a enter function . industrial designer: You have on the on the side here the microphone for the for the speech recognition system here . user interface: industrial designer: And here the the switch that control if you want project manager: Why you why you you put it in the the side ? industrial designer: Well I I I think it's the project manager: It's not a good place maybe . industrial designer: Yeah but user interface: No i i it's the all around camer microphone isn't it . marketing: Is it an only a single mic or a microphone array ? industrial designer: Well so it's a microphone array . industrial designer: No user interface: Yeah industrial designer: it's just a single microphone , and you I I think we we put it here because I think when you when you are browsing your L_C_D_ you will be close to user interface: . industrial designer: well it's better to to to place it here th than here , for instance . industrial designer: And here is a little switch that control if you want the the speaker recognition system to to be on or off . project manager: How much does it cost this one ? industrial designer: Well this this prototype is made for about well fi fi fifteen fifteen dollars user interface: For the project manager: Fifteen dollars ? user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: fifteen dollars , project manager: Ah it's above it's above the budget . industrial designer: but well it's not it's not yeah , but it's just a prototype and if we if we optimises the the voila . project manager: How many b battery is there ? industrial designer: How many , excuse me ? project manager: Battery . industrial designer: Well f battery , we use about user interface: Is it n the two A_A_s batteries in it . industrial designer: Yeah and you just project manager: So one one battery ? industrial designer: On yeah one battery . industrial designer: marketing: user interface: You just n marketing: Now what is the whole day rating for that ? industrial designer: The excuse me ? marketing: Whole day's rating . user interface: marketing: What type of battery ? industrial designer: Oh yeah it's just a r simple battery a rechargeable user interface: Yeah yeah . industrial designer: So and if you want to charge the battery you just put the remote control like that to plug in the the charger user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Then the next time you pick it , oh project manager: industrial designer: it works . user interface: I forgot to tell you there is only a single button there , b this button industrial designer: Yeah just explain the button Norman . This button is like the mouse is like a joystick , industrial designer: user interface: you can move in three hundred and sixty degrees of direction so you can make a turn and it the additi functions associated to all the actions you ma you have a click you have a double click all in a single button . industrial designer: user interface: You can move up , down , left , right , or you can do a swing . So even though it's a single button , but it is pretty s flexible because of the three hundred and sixty degree movement . marketing: And the L_C_D_ is this one , on the remote ? user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: project manager: I think it's not a good idea because after maybe one or two months of function is getting destroyed . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah it's project manager: industrial designer: So we have the the second version also with the different button configuration . marketing: industrial designer: So basically th it's the same marketing: -huh and also the switch . user interface: marketing: And I think you forgot a point here to have an button to find the charger , user interface: Oh no marketing: because that's a major that's a user interface: th actually th we'll come to that point in our industrial designer: Yeah it's it's it's embed in the speech recognition system . marketing: Okay industrial designer: So marketing: and if you disable speech recognition system then ? user interface: W w I'll I'll come to that point later on . user interface: Th they either these with the the the charger any project manager: With the remote control . project manager: Okay so the price of the charger included in the user interface: it's a standard module so you should get it for a cheap price . user interface: It's that same charger that you can use for the hand-phone but again depends on the types . I think we have to investigate more on that , but project manager: The price should be below twelve and a half Euro . Yeah project manager: Well that's so user interface: but as the Marketing Manager says , people is willing to people are willing to pay more for good design . project manager: We have we have just marketing: Yeah people are willing to pay more , user interface: industrial designer: marketing: but the company is not willing to invest more at the moment . project manager: And the price of production user interface: industrial designer: Alright please go on Norman with the special features . marketing: Or user interface: Yeah we'll we'll come up to that , the the the thing that makes this the controller cheap is that it is modular so you want more function you pay more . If you want less function i i if you want a reasonable price you pay for the functions that you add on to the system , marketing: user interface: so is modular . user interface: Yeah yeah , project manager: user interface: for example the L_C_D_ , you can take it you can put it put it back in , or you can use the other one , marketing: Something like customised . industrial designer: user interface: You want a microphone to put in the speech recogniser you don't wan you pay less for the system you see . industrial designer: You also have the the the two other modules for the parental control project manager: But user interface: yeah yeah you should present that . industrial designer: that that you ca you can add up to the to your remote control marketing: And this is other one ? user interface: industrial designer: i i if you if you want to to have more more power on what you do , and which channel you want to choose and so on . industrial designer: H here is just the the the module for the kids and th if the parents want to watch T_V_ , up they come up with their modules , marketing: . industrial designer: they just plug in it user interface: Yeah industrial designer: and they can have all the control they want here . industrial designer: We also have this module for old people with big buttons , clearly labelled , user interface: . Simplicity meaning that we have few buttons , powerful is that all the controls with the one you saw we saw earlier in the meetings with lots of buttons n but here you only have few buttons but you retain the the same powerful functionalities . So that's the best idea , the cond that that's our an innovation i in this design here . The first one is the speech recogniser , again it's detachable or add-on . And then we also have security feature for example this here oop industrial designer: user interface: it's very robust , it doesn't break and the material , what's the material again ? industrial designer: The titanium project manager: Titanium . industrial designer: and so it's very user interface: Again and the battery life is is an is an endurable one , again because this is A_A_ batteries you can choose the types of battery you want . user interface: Lithium-ion may be a good one , but you can replace it with cheaper one , again you pay for what you get , and then y the other p points are robust and misplacement reminder . So when you finish watching your T_V_ and you the you t you turn off the T_V_ , and then there's this message coming out that please put that back to the charger , so so that's the or is it marketing: Okay . Yeah and And it also use a programmable channel and vocabulary , so we didn't define the vocabulary so it's up to the user to define marketing: . user interface: so sorry ? project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: And then because of the chil because children are using the device so we have also a a of T_V_ programmes by genre , and this can be used by the adult or by the children . So it's pretty powerful , and that's that's why the num buttons are reduced , because of this feature . project manager: What what's user interface: Maybe we can improve more on the design but project manager: Maybe yeah . industrial designer: project manager: What's the price to p to produce ? user interface: this is the industrial designer: Well so the price to produce For the simplest one , say we start from four dollars to produce such a device . project manager: With with with the charge ? industrial designer: it's about it The without without the charger marketing: With the charger ? project manager: Okay . user interface: Yeah industrial designer: it's about well two dollars to produce the microphone and speech recognition systems . user interface: industrial designer: Two dollars for the for the add-on modules , and finally three dollars for the charger . So if you sum up everything wi with the L_C_D_ , which costs two dollar , you have two plus four plus four plus two plus two . industrial designer: so the total cost if you if you want all the fuct functionalities will be about fifteen dollars . project manager: No it's industrial designer: But it's just if you want all functionalities . user interface: marketing: Yeah it's a nice input project manager: We marketing: but we have an other inputs from the l public demands . project manager: marketing: I think we will just have a rough look and then we can make our statements , and we can finalise the product based on this discu user interface: Yeah . user interface: marketing: So the marketing made an evaluation criteria and these were some of the findings , and in the market the people are not really interested with L_C_D_ , without L_C_D_ , with speech recognition interface , or without speech recognition interface , but most of the people what they are interested is first thing is , they want to have an fancy look and feel , it should be very fancy with colourful and very handy to hold . user interface: marketing: Of course in that we could put L_C_D_ or recognition to be more technologically innovative . industrial designer: Well I think that the technical in innovation is is in the product itself since we haven't yet a remote who are allowing to to choose interactively with the T_V_ screen with just four buttons . marketing: Okay and if we go to the next slide , here you can find these are the latest fashion updates , and so this in Paris and Milan they have detected this trends that the this year it's going to be an year of fruit and vegetable , so people are really interested to see if they have an remote in the shape of the fruit or a vegetable , or whatever they like . marketing: And the second thing is , and if the material , they really do not want it to be very hard , as in the case of very pl plastic or titanium , it should be somewhat spongy . user interface: But the the problem is that is it robust to mishandling ? industrial designer: Okay . user interface: We have you should find a material that is robust at the same time spongy . user interface: marketing: So these are the f three criteria on which we are going to build our remote . marketing: say that we have a seven point scale , from one to seven , user interface: industrial designer: marketing: So now you have with L_C_D_ and without L_C_D_ , user interface: . marketing: so on this scale , if it is true , if it is if it has a fancy look you could just tell me one , or if it is false , it doesn't it looks it doesn't look much fancy , then you could just tell me seven . So user interface: So marketing: We can make our study on this and user interface: so is the e evaluation depending on us or other users ? marketing: No no we have you have designed two products now , project manager: Yeah . user interface: But who will give the scoring we ourself or or a third party ? project manager: You . marketing: According to you , no according to you designers , how will feel does it with L_C_D_ and without L_C_D_ ? user interface: . marketing: D is it very fancy or doesn't look much fancy ? industrial designer: Well it doesn't look much fancy I'll I'll say three or four . marketing: And you both agree for that ? project manager: And you ? user interface: I think we can improve on the design . It's it it project manager: user interface: we have been focused all all this time on the on the technical aspect , functional aspect , but also the simplicity . marketing: So I take three on with L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: Yeah a three . marketing: So without L_C_D_ how would you rate it ? user interface: Yeah . I think it's it's more easy to make f fancy things when it's not complicated marketing: Four . industrial designer: so removing the L_C_D_ gives us a li more liberty to to have a fancy look . industrial designer: Well it's it's the same for both so I will give a five , six . marketing: Five with L_C_D_ and user interface: industrial designer: Well five also Norman please . user interface: Yeah project manager: user interface: from the innovation aspect I feel that what is most innovative of our prototype compared to the existing prototypes that we saw l in the last meeting is that the retrieval of T_V_ programmes by content , because that is really innovative , and for now and another innovation we have is simplicity and simplicity , few buttons , we've A lot of functionalities . user interface: So that is that is for both th marketing: So without L_C_D_ ? user interface: Our gi I think that the our our product is has the best in all well this is a biased judgement industrial designer: user interface: because we designed them . marketing: No no according to design aspect we want to know how would you feel the innovativeness ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: And without L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: for both it's the the same innovations . So I there is high innovativeness included if you make it with L_C_D_ y industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: there w there was a there was a issue here is that what are what is the display on the L_C_D_ ? marketing: So we can't go project manager: industrial designer: Talk about user interface: We haven't really determined what are actually actually project manager: marketing: that what you are sayin that's what the design user interface: it's good to have a L_C_D_ but what are we gonna display on a L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: marketing: No it's like this , project manager: marketing: on the L_C_D_ , according to what I understand from your model is , you have a joystick here , and you have L_C_D_ , you just press your joystick , you get here a programme . Yeah but industrial designer: Yeah project manager: But industrial designer: but you have the same programme on the T_V_ screen . marketing: No on the T_V_ you don't it doesn't display on the T_V_ now . industrial designer: If you have the L_C_D_ , but if n marketing: L_C_D_ ? Then there is no meaning in having it on the T_V_ . marketing: Or then again you have a channels , volume and all the stuff and what a user interface: But you cannot display all on a L_C_D_ . marketing: that depends upon your design , so user interface: Anyway for for the users who who who opt for L_C_D_ we'll give them the give them the L_C_D_ , marketing: user interface: we give what the customer wants , right . user interface: marketing: So without L_C_D_ you want to put it fi the same level of innovativeness ? And which do you recommend e easy to use , with L_C_D_ or without L_C_D_ ? user interface: industrial designer: Well I think both are really easy to use because there are few button buttons , user interface: Yeah industrial designer: and well t p the menu are clear , well-organised , so user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Well with little knowing of the technology you can you can easily use the product user interface: industrial designer: so I will give a six for the easy to use . user interface: Yeah I think project manager: No it's just if I I see the the f the rate I think it's better to do it without L_C_D_ . project manager: Because that's with L_C_D_ just will increase the price , marketing: Yeah . project manager: and I thi i they have the same rate so without L_C_D_ it will be user interface: Yeah . marketing: Or we can just go back to the previous slide where we ha we have a few updates . S industrial designer: And if the the well if we have less technology we have more liberty to for the shape and things like that so marketing: Yeah that's right . For kids they want simply the s similarit for the old people they want simplicity , marketing: Yeah yeah that's right . we can ha have build a more complex design if if they want it , but but what I'm trying to say here is that the we have different sets of buttons for different kinds of people . marketing: So without L_C_D_ I just take it five ? project manager: user interface: W marketing: Or you want it to be six ? user interface: I think it's the same . industrial designer: Yes as you say , with better project manager: Without L_C_D_ . marketing: S s oh I think it's better to have this without L_C_D_ . marketing: As our Programme Manager s Pro Project Manager says that without L_C_D_ it is going to reduce the cost also , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yes and to give us more liberty to have a fancy look so user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: so let's go back to our laboratory and user interface: To improve on the design . project manager: what about the integration of speech recognition ? user interface: Huh ? The speech recogniser is a add-on module . industrial designer: It's optional yeah , since well according to this study people more likes more to have a spongy remote control than project manager: I think it will be I think i user interface: marketing: Yeah . project manager: I think it will be better if we have all these modules in the same remote control , because maybe parents will lose these marketing: Yeah , but if you have an add-ons , the kids may just hide the parental module project manager: Yeah . project manager: Or maybe parents they can for forget where they put it or , industrial designer: project manager: so mayb better if you have all this in the same marketing: In the same set , yeah , project manager: marketing: and and individual buttons to make them work . user interface: The problem is if i we are bla if a customer wants a certain component , and doesn't want the parental control because it's a couple who do not have children when you sell the product in the market you could meet any kind of people , and not all people will need all the functionalities we propose to them . I don't know , project manager: So you mean that even if these modules will be will be functional will be optional . user interface: what do you think ? Yes exa what do you think , I don't know . project manager: marketing: how to how to how to make a marketing survey that how many married couple or how many couples have a T_V_ user interface: Yeah . But the the question is n does those modularity increase the production cost or decrease the production cost ? project manager: I think it inc increase . industrial designer: Oh no , project manager: industrial designer: because if you if you add something well yeah maybe because it's three different pieces to to to build but project manager: . industrial designer: Yeah yeah yeah user interface: industrial designer: it's I think it's cheaper if you if you already built the all the functionalities on the same module , but user interface: . marketing: On the same P_C_B_ user interface: Well well the other aspect is that if in the when they have the ar existing product you you gonna maintain the the you're gonna keep the same customer , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Yeah i i so if don't don't buy now they can buy i in the future . So in in that way you're actually keeping the cus the same customer , attracting them to come back in again and again . industrial designer: user interface: We're not trying to follow the Microsoft and we don't want to the m project manager: marketing: Updates and we sell it . industrial designer: user interface: Yeah well if the buyers can be up the th would be can be upgraded , it would be a good thing right ? project manager: industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: And what's the idea about the shape of the remote controls ? industrial designer: Well so marketing: can they be made into a fruit and vegetable types ? industrial designer: Yeah yeah marketing: Do you require different types of P_C_B_s and industrial designer: I think we are yeah but we are also the well the components will have to change because we have to deal with the shape and but I don't think it will increase the cost too much so user interface: . marketing: Or it could be like this the P_C_B_ would be the same for all , but only the exterior shape is different o for all . industrial designer: well but it's a bit complicated to if if if you need machines to different machines to ah well user interface: Yeah . For example the i the mobile phones nowaday , they sell different kinds of skin marketing: Yeah , yeah that's right . industrial designer: and then add on skins and with with this tex spongy texture things like that . project manager: So industrial designer: So we finished the prototype presentation if you have something else to say . user interface: marketing: I think the Project Manager would be interested to look about the financial issues in making these models . We have to give answers so marketing: user interface: I suppose that you this criteria , is it ? project manager: Project evaluation . This room is a bit small , but industrial designer: project manager: user interface: but I think it's okay for us to work with . marketing: I feel it's fine , we know we don't need I think it's okay . marketing: what type of product would you think could we make this more interesting ? user interface: we I I know something , we need more cakes , more biscuits on the table while we have meetings . industrial designer: Yeah and also more well more seriously I think it's it's a good idea to have clear clear points whenever we do a meeting marketing: user interface: . industrial designer: prior to the meeting to have well a list with the points who will be discussed or things like that , but I think it's alright . marketing: And the evaluation was project manager: Without without L_C_D_ , without speech recognition , it will be simple . marketing: So project manager: Yeah free free coffee user interface: Alright then , we finished ? industrial designer: Okay . project manager: Yeah thank you for your work and marketing: Yeah thank you , thank you very much <doc-sep>project manager: Yeah on your computer , or the industrial designer: But where ? project manager: What's the name ? industrial designer: project manager: What's the name of it ? industrial designer: It was about the working of the remote control . I just had an half an hour j to study it user interface: industrial designer: and I don't get it . industrial designer: First I will tell you something about the findings , what I discovered about the remote control . then I'll have some kind of map , and it's the top of the remote control . The remote control is a very difficult thing to to explain to just all of you wh who haven't seen a remote control inside . there's a lot of plastic on it , marketing: industrial designer: because its not so expensive . And there are a lot of wires , which connect the components in it , the battery , and there are switches and things like that . but we can also use it a bleep like something , when the battery's empty , then there is a bleep . And also the bleep , when what I told you about when you lost it , and you push a button , and then you hear bleep bleep , and we will find it . Why ? industrial designer: If we w if we use only just one small pen-light , then it will be cheaper than when we use two . When you use it on the television , you've you need the television , wh which can use it . But I think this our remote control is for the televisions we we sell in our company ? project manager: Okay . industrial designer: Or is it also for other company for other televisions ? project manager: I think we have to use it also on other televisions though . And on the other tele televisions , you can also use it , but then we won't use the project manager: Yeah but I don't I think it They are two different things though . But , to have a trendy remote control , we can also make something like the Nokia mobile phones . marketing: Will this will this add to the cost ? industrial designer: then it won't be will have just one cover on the original one . D does it make it more difficult to design ? industrial designer: I think it will be a little more difficult , but not too much . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah but then we'll have to to just put five covers on it , and see if it works . project manager: Yeah but are their profits bigger than their cost ? industrial designer: a p a a cover made in in China , it it won't be I guess so expensive I think . I don't think When you have a remote control , do you change the cover ? Would you change the cover ? industrial designer: Maybe . industrial designer: But maybe I think trendy people or like children where you can paint on it , and the the children think , oh this is my remote control , I made a picture on it . And the other people ? What do you think about it ? marketing: user interface: Yeah it's a good idea . But If if it Yeah , I don't I'm not sure if it will make profit enough to industrial designer: Okay . industrial designer: user interface: I thought the the the technical function design was to for a remote control to to to have some influence on the T_V_ set . And and and and well basic operations like on and off , and switching channels , and and maybe teletext or something like that . But shall we make a basic remote control , just swapping channels and volume and power button and well nothing much more . any ideas about that ? Basic or multifunctional ? project manager: We'll got back on that later . project manager: industrial designer: user interface: marketing: So So I'm gonna have a presentation about the market , about yeah what people think . among them design , d d how d did they like the use of it , what frustrations they had while using remote controls . Which buttons find users very important and which which not ? And how much would they use them ? Well the most used button is the channel selection . not important they found the audio , that's not the volume but specific the the pitch , or the left or right . And to come back on the the swapping things , I don't think , I I think the younger will be most interest in it . If you have an L_C_D_ on the remote control , what would you think of it . Now if we look back at this graph , we can see that among the first group is about sixty percent . of course n saying we aim at the young group doesn't say that old people won't buy it . So if you make a remote control that is very easy to use , that's especially aimed at this group , even the young group will also be more interested . So you don't have to have a lot of audio options , or screen options to change the brightness . One thing I did not say I think , is that a lot of users also said then I would buy a good looking remote control if there will be one . industrial designer: If we aim for the younger people , and there will be a lot of features like L_C_D_ or the the the speech f recognising , the cost will be a lot of h a lot higher . user interface: And I don't I don't think twenty five Euros for a remote is really cheap or something . not everyone who is looking T_V_ can go to internet when they want to see the latest news . marketing: project manager: So what controls do we need ? Who first ? user interface: Well a power button ? marketing: project manager: Okay . Do we make a menu ? project manager: Menu ? yes the n newer televisions ha do have menus . project manager: And Hello ? That's ch marketing: I think it will be q quite easy to use , to have four arrows . And if you press the menu button you get into the menu , and you can use the same buttons . project manager: On the L_C_D_ screen , you mean ? marketing: well yeah that depends on if you have the menu on the T_V_ . project manager: Think it's better to have it on the remote control , 'cause it it has to work on all televisions . But well if you aim at the younger market , a as they as s as we seen in the usability lab , they will buy a nice looking remote control . So if we have a L_C_D_ sh screen , and not too many buttons , I think that will incre even when it's a bit more cost , it will still sell . industrial designer: And we don't yet have to decide what the remote control would look like ? Or project manager: No that's for the next phase

The Project Manager and Industrial Designer had a discussion about the use of two batteries, with the Industrial Designer arguing that it would increase the size and cost. The button design was also questioned, and it was agreed that the menu button would only work on newer televisions. The Industrial Designer suggested using soft colors and materials like rubber, as young people are the target audience. They also proposed a double curved case shape and simple push buttons. The idea of a speaker, sensor, or speech-controlled device was rejected. The team considered having separate modules for different functions but decided that having all functions in one set would be cheaper. The Industrial Designer considered batteries as the energy source, while Marketing suggested solar charging. The team discussed the operational distance of the infra-red signal and the need for a strong signal stream. The idea of through-wall signal and Bluetooth was considered but deemed unnecessary due to budget constraints and lack of necessity.

Question: What were the main topics discussed in the meeting regarding QR research funding, potential relocation of children to fewer sites, maintenance of support and funds for the national youth voluntary service, forgivable loan to commercial property owners, and possible official solutions to the problem involving more funding, a new immigration policy, and the help of the minister? Article: lynne neagle am: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome Suzy Davies to the committee, and to thank Mark Reckless and Darren Millar, who have left us, for their service and hard work as members of the committee. We will move on then to our evidence session on our inquiry into the impact of Brexit on higher and further education. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Cabinet Secretary for Education, and Eluned Morgan AM, Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning. Can I just ask you to introduce your officials for the record, please? kirsty williams am: Bore da, Lynne, and thank you for the invitation to join you. Eluned and I are joined this morning by Huw Morris, who's the group director at SHELL—skills, higher education and lifelong learning—and Marie Knox, who is deputy director, overseeing European transition. I'd like to ask you both, if that's okay, a little bit about preparedness. But if I could start with higher education, I understand that—I don't know, it must be about 18 months ago now—Ken Skates told another committee in this place that there had been nine sector analyses done. Presumably, one of those was HE, because of the—well, Welsh Government had a presence, and still does, in Brussels, related to higher education. I don't know if you've got any comments on that research, or whether it's been brought to your attention yet. kirsty williams am: Well, Suzy, following the vote, I was very keen that we work very closely with colleagues in higher education and further education, to get an understanding from on the ground about the potential impact. So, in terms of preparedness, we started that group in the September, and that work from that group, which includes both HE and FE, has been instrumental in helping the Government form its views, which were articulated in the Government's White Paper, 'Securing Wales' Future'. There has been ongoing work being done—as the debate in London and Europe becomes a little bit more clear, then it becomes a little less clear, and then a little bit more clear, but, bearing in mind the difficulties of working in an ever-changing field, we have been refining those approaches. Each institution has been looking at their own institution, because, as you can imagine, although we have an overview of the sector, the challenges are very different for individual institutions—so their exposure, for instance, to the number of European Union students that they have at their college, or the work that they might be doing with Horizon 2020, or their success—and there has been considerable success in the HE field in securing structural funds for various projects—the exposure and the potential impact of leaving the EU, in a 'no deal' or in a 'deal' scenario, is very, very different. suzy davies am: Maybe just to use the 'no deal' scenario is probably the easiest, isn't it? kirsty williams am: The 'no deal'? suzy davies am: Well, yes, because that's the worst-case scenario, so let's look at that one. huw morris: As the Cabinet Secretary mentioned, the higher education Brexit working group's been meeting since September 2016 and has been looking at that in general. More recently, when the prospect of no deal became talked about, officials have been visiting individual institutions to talk to them about their preparedness for that. As you'll be aware, the funding for much of the activity is secured, we believe, even under a 'no deal' scenario, until December 2020; that's a letter we had from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I think the research you're referring to may be research that Cardiff University has been doing with the Bevan Foundation and others. suzy davies am: Well, that's really helpful because my understanding was that this Cardiff University research had superseded all those nine sector analyses. Certainly, there are published papers by Max Munday and a team at Cardiff University on the impact of Brexit on the Welsh economy, but for HE and FE and apprenticeship provision, it's as the Cabinet Secretary outlined. suzy davies am: So, are there any formal risk assessments that are available for us to scrutinise, for example? For HE and FE for that matter. kirsty williams am: Well, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales have been doing some specific work; I can't comment on how wide they would want that to be shared. We have been doing some broad analysis, as I said, for the sector, looking at what we can do to mitigate the risk, bearing in mind that each institution is an autonomous institution, a principle that they guard really jealously, and rightly so. So, we have been, as Huw said, because the prospect of a 'no deal' has become, perhaps, more to the forefront, officers have been visiting each institution to try and make sure and to satisfy us, as people who fund part of their activity, that they have their own plans in place to deal with these scenarios. So, for instance, we continue to work with officials in Westminster around Erasmus+ provision in a 'no deal' scenario, what a UK stand-alone project would look like, the impacts of a 'no deal' on Horizon 2020. So, we look at the broader picture and we are encouraging continually individual institutions to make sure that they themselves are looking at their specific needs within that. suzy davies am: Well, if there is something that's shareable, I'm sure we'd be very pleased to see it— kirsty williams am: Anything that we've got— suzy davies am: —particularly with FE, actually, because, of course, we haven't got a HEFCW for FE; you're doing that regulation yourself. I'd expect to see that type of work evidenced somewhere from within Welsh Government, and we would be able to see that then. suzy davies am: Yes, because the student thing isn't such an issue, is it? eluned morgan am: You've got to remember that the FE colleges are much more anchored within their communities, they're much more localised, and so, for example, the number of EU students in these colleges is significantly lower. The number of staff in these colleges—I think they've analysed that there are only about 71 people. So, we're keeping in touch with them and we're letting them know what we are being told in terms of the Home Office settled status and what we can do to protect those 71. suzy davies am: What are they telling you about European social fund funding, though, because, as you say, they're locally anchored—the impact on FE of ESF funding is probably more significant than the issues we're talking about with higher education. How are you finding this out? Is this through one-to-one conversations? eluned morgan am: We are engaging with them all, and, obviously, we're engaging with ColegauCymru, who've done their own analysis, and what we found, in particular, is that the real problems are probably in relation to ESF funding and apprenticeships. But what you've got to remember is that that link between apprenticeships and the local work community is absolutely crucial. eluned morgan am: —the economy nosedives, or if there's an issue that we see—just the dislocation of companies in those areas as a result of Brexit—then that will inevitably have an impact on the number of apprenticeships that will be on offer. So, it's those kinds of things, but at the moment I think it's worth pointing out that about £15 million a year goes into the FE sector just in relation to apprenticeships. suzy davies am: Can I just come back finally on that, before handing over? In both your areas of responsibility, there's going to be an impact on Welsh Government in how it responds to that, as well. Can you tell me a little bit about the European transition team, which I think is about building resilience within the Welsh Government to deal with the impacts of Brexit? Is that a formal arrangement you have with officials? I don't really know much about this team, but it seems to meet fortnightly to get Welsh Government ready for Brexit, so could you just give us some clues on this? marie knox: Yes, in terms of the European transition team, that's the central co-ordinating group that pulls together all the leads in each department who are pulling together the work on European transition. So, I attend that group in relation to higher education and further education, and, obviously, other representatives in terms of agriculture, transport, the economy, et cetera. suzy davies am: It's great that you're on that group, but what does it actually do? That's the bit I wasn't sure about. marie knox: I guess it provides the governance structure for the Welsh Government as a whole in relation to European transition. So, individual departments do their own work, and the European transition team provides the governance structure, and, also, they lead on the discussions with the Department for Exiting the European Union, No. 10, the Joint Ministerial Committee—those kinds of ministerial arrangements. This discussion between HEFCW and higher education, these challenges in terms of how ready they are for the changes to come, and the work that the Government is doing with FE, I suspect, is happening at an organisational level. So, I just want to hear a little about where the student voice comes into that discussion and where the engagement happens in terms of the students. kirsty williams am: So, we have a close working relationship with the National Union of Students. They have been very clear, and I think there is a huge amount of consensus between the Welsh Government, what the universities are asking for and what the students are asking for. You'll have seen, only earlier this week, the very powerful campaign by NUS Wales about the importance of Erasmus+ arrangements. Many of us, I know, have had the opportunity to study abroad as part of our own studies, and there's a lot to be gained from it. We've been very clear from the outset, as have the sector and the student voice, about the importance of participation in that scheme. Our HE institutions, to a greater extent than FE, have faculty staff from the EU—it runs at about 11 per cent. They want to have the best teachers, they want access to the best learning opportunities, and we've been very clear about the importance of providing security and stability for those staff, making sure we send very clear messages that they're very welcome and we value their contribution. Again, as far as we've been able to, we've been able to give messages about the security of funding for European students for the next academic year. We're working to the limits of what I feel comfortable in being able to guarantee without further guarantees from Westminster. So, we've been working closely with the student voice, and I think, Llyr, what's very clear is there is a consensus about what is important across the Government, the institutions and student voice. So, that is making sure we send very clear messages about Wales's institutions being open for business and that we welcome both EU and international students, that we value the contribution of faculty, and that we want to be able to continue in Horizon 2020. That's especially important if we're looking at attracting postgraduate work and postgraduate students into our system, as well as Erasmus+. As I said, there's a consensus, I think, between the Government, the institutions and the students about what we need the UK Government to achieve for us. lynne neagle am: Before we move on to student recruitment, it's increasingly the view of many experts that we're heading for a 'no deal' Brexit. Can I ask both of you what specific plans you've put in place in the event of such a 'no deal' Brexit happening and us crashing out next spring? eluned morgan am: Well, I think it's really difficult for us to prepare for a 'no deal' Brexit, but obviously we need to think through very carefully what that might look like, and I think that scenario planning is starting to happen. So, in relation to FE, what we do have is funding—ESF funding—which the UK Government has said that they will underwrite until 2020. So, in March next year, if there is no deal, the immediate impact on FE is unlikely to hit in the way that we may have feared. The problem then becomes: what exactly is the deal with the EU in future, because we will have some kind of relationship, and what that impact will be on the broader economy and our ability to work with companies locally, and industries, to provide that link between training needs? So, the colleges, basically, are providing the training for lots of the apprenticeships, and so if the number of companies reduces, then that is likely to have an impact. Farming is obviously one that we are concerned about, because that could have a difference in terms of day one of no deal. Health and social care—obviously, we are concerned that there are a number of people who work in that sector who are EU citizens. What is the impact? Are they going to feel unwelcome? Are they likely, then, to return home? Where will that skills gap, therefore, be? So, that's a problem for us. So, one of the things we're doing is we've developed these regional skills partnerships where we ask local employers, 'What is it that you need in terms of skills development?' and we are now asking further education colleges to respond to that need. So, rather than them just getting people through the college system, who are easy to get in because they're doing courses that they're excited about, let's try and encourage them to do courses where we know there are skills shortages. So, that is a new structure that we've developed that is already having an impact; there's a £10 million project there. In manufacturing, obviously, if there's no deal, the rules of origin, that could have an immediate impact. Just-in-time—we could have real problems in terms of dislocation there; and hospitality and tourism. So, those are the sectors we have most concerns about, and all of them have very strong links to the FE sector. kirsty williams am: From the HE perspective, from a point of principle, we just have to keep working towards some kind of deal. Although the prospect of no deal, maybe, has risen up the agenda, we have got to be consistent in our messages to the Westminster Government: we need a deal. If that worst-case scenario was to happen, because of the underwrite guarantee, actually, for European regional development fund and European social fund programmes in the HE sector, it would be business as usual. And because of the current underwrite guarantee, the forthcoming bids for Erasmus and Horizon 2020 would be covered, but they would be the last applications that could be made. You'll be aware that there are some proposals for an extension to that guarantee, but from my understanding and our understanding of it, that would only give us third-country status for Horizon 2020 and Erasmus. What that does mean is that we would have limited access to the Horizon 2020 programme, and if you look at the activity that is currently being undertaken by the Welsh HE sector under that programme, that would mean that we'd probably lose about 50 per cent of that work, because that's the split between the bits we would still be able to access and what we are currently accessing. As I've already said, we have made a guarantee for EU student support for the next academic year, but, without clarity from the Treasury, I don't think it would be prudent of me to commit Welsh Government to anything further than that. What can we do? You'll be aware that we have been working with Universities Wales to access resources under the European transition fund, under the Global Wales programme, to look to boost international marketing of the HE sector and to talk about the strengths that we have in the sector. And we continue to look at other opportunities within the EU transition pot of money to assist the universities and the FE sector in that regard. We also continue to look to respond to the Reid review proposals, about how we can beef up our own research and continue to engage with UK Research and Innovation to make sure that, with any research money that comes out of that negotiation, Wales is in a competitive position to be able to bid successfully for that. I'm going to, because we've got a lot of questions, appeal for brief questions and answers that are as concise as possible, please. hefin david am: How does the Welsh Government account for the fact that EU student applications in Wales this year—that Wales is the only country in the UK to have seen a significant drop? kirsty williams am: Okay, well, I think the first thing to remember is that we will not get a full picture of student recruitment until, first of all, November and then the true picture, because some institutions, as you would know, have two admissions dates—we won't get the full picture until the spring. I think it was inevitable, given the change in Government policy with regard to student support, which had previously allowed European students to benefit from a tuition fee grant, and given the fact that that option is no longer available to them, that that has had an impact on EU recruitment, and there's no point trying to hide from that. hefin david am: So, together with leaving the EU, that's a double-whammy effect that's hitting Wales harder than the rest of the UK. kirsty williams am: It just puts us in the same position as EU students applying to England, but it was inevitable. It was anticipated that this could be a consequence of the change in policy, and I think we see that reflected in the initial figure, although, as I said, we won't get the true picture until the first census in November, and then, ultimately, the final picture in the spring. hefin david am: How concerned are you by that? kirsty williams am: Clearly, we want our universities to be able to attract students from both the EU and from around the world. The fact that the tuition fee grant arrangements may have had an impact on European Union students at this stage does not preclude the fact that Wales, up until now, has been successful in recruiting international students. So, the change in the fee regime should not be a barrier to the recruitment of international students, because, actually, international students outside of the EU make up a bigger proportion of students not from the UK who come to our institutions. hefin david am: That's a fair point, but it's unfortunate timing, though, isn't it? kirsty williams am: I think, from a public policy point of view and moving towards a sustainable way of funding our HE sector, then both my priority and, I would say, the priority of the institutions was to see the implementation of Diamond, which is what we have done. What about the fact that we've got a relatively imbalanced higher education profile compared to other countries of the UK with regard to high, medium and low-tariff universities? We've got one high-tariff university, and they're the ones that tend to show the growth in recruitment of EU students. Are you concerned about that balance of profile in the HE sector? kirsty williams am: As I said in answer to your question earlier, there is a difference reflected in the exposure of institutions to EU and international students. I would argue that it's not necessarily the case that institutions that are not high-tariff are not able to do very well in this sector. If you look, for instance, at Swansea University—if you look at the work Swansea University has done, that shows you what is possible. hefin david am: What is Swansea's success, then? What can we learn from Swansea? kirsty williams am: What I think is important—and this is not about any one institution—what I think is really important is that we look to—. It's a combination, I believe, for all universities, of getting their offer right—so, having a curriculum at their institution that is attractive and offers courses that people want to study. It's about that curriculum being delivered in an excellent fashion, so high quality ratings for teaching, as well as having an infrastructure that is attractive to students. So, it's all about getting the offer right and providing what students, both domestically and internationally, want. hefin david am: But the evidence would therefore suggest that that model of success that you've just outlined is happening in Swansea but it isn't happening in other institutions, and they're seeing a drop. kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, I think what we can see from Cardiff, Swansea and others is that it is possible to do very well in the sector. kirsty williams am: As I said, what we can see is that, if you get the offer right, I think we have something very special that the HE sector can market itself on. llyr gruffydd am: Just coming back to the drop in EU students, you mentioned that one of the reasons probably is the change in the funding that's available to students coming here. So, does that suggest that, under the current regime, Wales was punching above its weight in terms of attracting students and we've lost that advantage? I know we're gaining in other ways in introducing the new system, but really we're not much different to England in terms of fees now, so why would they come to Wales as opposed to going anywhere else? kirsty williams am: I think you're right; there was an added incentive, potentially, to come to a Welsh institution because of the availability of the tuition fee grant. That advantage is no longer there, which is why we need to work alongside the sector, as we're doing with the Global Wales programme, to increase their ability to market HE in the round across the world. There's something for everybody, whether you want to be in a city like Cardiff or whether you want a coastal experience in a small town like Aber. So, we've got a lot to offer and that's why it's really important that, although we have seen a change in the tuition fees, which may have an impact, we are investing with universities, for instance, in the Global Wales programme. lynne neagle am: In terms of the drop that we've seen in Wales, which is differential amongst institutions, will you be taking any specific action to try and prevent Brexit exacerbating that? kirsty williams am: We are working with HEFCW and individual institutions, as I said, to test their preparedness. We can't tell them what to do in that sense, but we can, because of our governance arrangements and HEFCW's monitoring arrangements, continue to test with them. I meet regularly with vice-chancellors and separately with the chairs of the institutions and separately again with HEFCW representatives, and the sustainability of the sector and recruitment issues is always something that is on the agenda. julie morgan am: The additional £6.4 million that went to HEFCW in the 2017-18 year, which I think you say is partly because of Brexit and partly because of demographic and recruitment challenges, what do you expect to see as a result of that spending? kirsty williams am: That funding was allocated, as I said, to enable HEFCW to deal with any short-term implications arising out of demographic changes, because we've seen a drop in the number of 18-year-olds, and the initial implications of EU transition. It was allocated as part of HEFCW's overall grant in aid, and therefore the council was given discretion as to how it was to be apportioned to the sector. The money was brought forward a year, because, in conversations with HEFCW and the institutions, they felt that that money would be more useful earlier on. So, it was money that was brought forward into the allocation for 2017-18, as opposed to 2018-19, because they wanted to have that resource earlier rather than later. With regard to additional resources, you'll be aware that we have made an additional resource of £5 million available to mitigate the freeze in tuition fees, and £5 million has been made available to HEFCW to kick-start the work on postgraduate support until we're in a position to fully implement Diamond at the postgraduate level. kirsty williams am: The financial allocation, as I said, was agreed with the funding council and it was there to help universities with any cash flow issues, but if you'd like further details I can provide those as much as I'm able. julie morgan am: I think it would be interesting if we know what the money was spent on and, of course, that money is now not available for the next financial year, so there's no way of carrying on what they were doing with it, presumably. kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, it was part of the overall allocation to HEFCW. With specific regard to dealing with the impact of Brexit, you'll be aware that we have reached an agreement in principle on the funding of £3.5 million to the Global Wales initiative. This was an application that came in from Universities Wales looking at specifically targeting and beefing up international work and international recruitment work to support them at this time, and we're currently working with Universities Wales on the exact details and outcomes they would expect from that investment. julie morgan am: And do you have any estimate of how many students you hope to attract by that? kirsty williams am: That is subject to continuing negotiations with Universities Wales before we let any contracts with them. What's important is that that work is based on research that has been done by Universities Wales to look at the optimum markets that we should be targeting, specifically the United States of America and Vietnam. julie morgan am: And will this money be used equally between all the universities? kirsty williams am: We expect that all institutions—should they have a desire to participate—will be able to be assisted, as well as the overall global branding from Universities Wales and the new Study in Wales initiative. I think we've covered the EU student fees, haven't we? lynne neagle am: Okay. Do you want to ask question 12? julie morgan am: Has the Welsh Government explored the possibility of looking at different immigration rules for international and EU students who may wish to study here? kirsty williams am: Okay. Well, with regard to immigration, clearly, this is something, at the moment, that is out of our hands, and I have to say, it hasn't got off to a great start when initially the post-study work visas were issued just for a number of institutions in the south-east of England, with no consultation with us and I don't believe with the Scottish Government either. So, we have campaigned, pushed, cajoled, lobbied, and I was very glad that in December last year, the Home Office did then make that scheme available to Cardiff and to Trinity Saint David. We continue to press the point that we do not believe that, first of all, international students should be included in any immigration targets. I think all the evidence suggests that the British public don't regard international students as immigrants, and therefore we do need to make sure that they are taken out of the targets and we can continue to press that message with the UK Government. At the moment, you'll be aware that Welsh Government has looked at a specific piece of work on whether there was any scope for specific immigration policy for Wales, although I must say that was mostly in the field of actually the workforce rather than students. You'll be aware that this week the Government's migration advisory committee—there are so many committees these days—have said that they don't believe that there is a case for a separate provision for EU students, as opposed to international students. But we want an immigration system that makes it as easy as possible for those students who want to benefit from education in Wales, and indeed the UK, to be able to do so. llyr gruffydd am: So, what are we doing from now on in then? Are we just waiting to see or are we continuing to push? kirsty williams am: No—gosh—Llyr, we continue to push the case at the official level, and at the moment, I'm trying to convene a quadrilateral, if it can be quadrilateral in the sense that Northern Ireland aren't up and running—but certainly with officials from Northern Ireland. We're trying to arrange another quadrilateral between myself, the HE Minister for England and the new HE Minister for Scotland. If I can speak candidly, I don't believe that there's any difference between our view, with regard to the status of international students, and the views of English Ministers within the department in England. So, I don't think we need to persuade Sam Gyimah about the importance of this. Jo Johnson got, I think the current Minister gets it—it's a question of whether we can persuade the Home Office of that particular case. Firstly, with regard to higher education, we heard that, even without Brexit, higher education is in managed deficit, whilst the funding announcements from Diamond and Reid are awaited. So, is that a concern to Welsh Government, and could Welsh Government take away that uncertainty by outlining a clear funding commitment to the Diamond and Reid reviews? kirsty williams am: Welsh Government is fully committed, John, to implementing the Diamond review proposals. It's a commitment that was an element of the agreement between myself and the First Minister that brought me into the administration, and we have been very clear with HEFCW about our expectations and what the implementation of Diamond will mean for grant going to HEFCW. With regard to Reid, we continue within Government to discuss how we can implement the recommendations of Reid, but one of the whole principles behind Diamond was to move us to a more sustainable funding settlement for the HE sector in the round, that is fair to students, encourages those with the ability to partake in higher education to do so, especially from those from a poorer background, as well as being able to provide our institutions with the resources that they need. john griffiths am: So, you don't accept, then, that there hasn't been a clear funding commitment from Welsh Government to those reviews—the Diamond and Reid reviews? kirsty williams am: With regard to Diamond, I would absolutely refute that. We have been very clear and we have shown HEFCW our analysis of the figures going forward in relation to what is sometimes called within the sector the 'Diamond dividend', although the Diamond dividend is never as big as people imagine the Diamond dividend to be. Now, with regard to Reid, those are ongoing discussions that form part of the normal budgetary process within the Government, but I think we have been as clear as we can be with regard to Diamond. The second question, really, is about HE and FE and it's about European funding, which, of course, has been and is on a multi-year basis, which gives, I think, a lot of security and comfort to the sectors, knowing what the budgets will be over a period of time. So, would you commit to introducing multi-year funding settlements for HE, and indeed for FE, moving forward beyond Brexit? eluned morgan am: Shall I take this and give you a little bit of a break? She's not very well. People can plan, you can get staffing in place, you can have really strategic aims and I think that's really useful for the institutions involved. So, whilst I think we would, in an ideal world, like to see a better view of what's coming our way, it's extremely difficult for us to be able to offer that without having that multi-annual funding commitment from the UK Government. Of course, it's not just about ESF and apprenticeships—it's also about ERDF funding. So, you mustn't forget that, actually, there's been a lot of ERDF funding that's gone into these institutions. Also, FE colleges—we've got Coleg y Cymoedd, the college in Blaenau Gwent. It's because of the multi-annual nature of the fact that we've been able to prepare for them that they have been able to progress. So, that will be a huge loss, but I think it's really important that we don't forget the ERDF aspect in addition to the ESF impact that there will be on these institutions. As far as further education is concerned, in your paper you state that it's a priority to support the FE sector to maintain all the learning opportunities that currently take place under European Union funding. So, would you be able to give the committee an idea of the level of resource you would estimate that the sector requires to achieve that priority, and—? I'll stop there for the moment. What we've said is that we want to maintain that range of learning opportunities that is provided by EU funding. The UK Government have made us some promises and they've made some commitments, and we need to hold them to that, and so let's keep the pressure on. The moment we start saying, 'No, it's all going to be okay, we'll sort ourselves out'—I think that would be a huge mistake. We have been promised that we will not lose a penny as a result of Brexit, and we need to make sure that we keep them to that commitment. I think it was quite interesting to hear what Philip Hammond said yesterday when he was in Wales, saying that the money that we will receive will depend on the future shape of the economy, which implies that he has no idea what's going to happen there, and that that shared prosperity fund will be designed around the deal. I think we have some real concerns about the shared prosperity fund not really following through on the commitments that were made during the Brexit referendum. But, in terms of the replacements, we'd be looking at about £15 million a year, and that would be a huge impact for us, but we're not looking at that—I don't think we should be—because they made some promises. john griffiths am: So, could you say that, if they keep their promises, then at least that level of funding would be maintained? eluned morgan am: I think that would be a minimum, but that's just one aspect of it. suzy davies am: Yes, just very quickly on the multi-annual point, obviously I recognise that we're talking about six or seven-year cycles with Europe, and I completely take the point that you don't really know from year to year what your budget's going to be, but Welsh Government does make multi-annual commitments. How are you able to do that and yet not quite feel confident that you can do that with—well, both your sectors, really? eluned morgan am: I think it's probably easier to do with capital than it is with revenue, so that's what would make the difference. The one thing we all know is that employment opportunities today—the transitional nature of employment and the fact that people are not getting the kind of contracts that we'd like them to get—that makes their lives very precarious and they're less likely, then, to be committed to those institutions. I think it's a really, really concerning thing, because what makes these institutions work well is their staff, so that makes life very, very difficult without that multi-annual commitment. suzy davies am: They also have to raise some of their own money as well—we mustn't forget that. eluned morgan am: No, I think that's right, and I think that there's more that these institutions can do in terms of their own funding and being more responsive to employers and the need for skills in their areas. lynne neagle am: So, given the precarious state of planning for the finances, are you considering letting universities charge EU students international fees? kirsty williams am: We don't regulate the ability for universities to set fees for international students. They would be in a position to—[Inaudible.] They are in a position to set international fees at a rate that, I guess, they feel is appropriate for the provision that they give to those students. I just wanted to pick up on the funding of apprenticeships and the long-term funding, because the ESF—the commitments take us to 2023, which takes us beyond any transition period. So, I just want to hear from you that there are assurances that the apprenticeship programme can be delivered as a whole, come what may. eluned morgan am: Well, we're fine until 2020, because we've had that guarantee from the Government. The issue for us is the n+2 that we would have if we do have some kind of transition deal or an agreement with the EU. So, there is a risk and there is concern, beyond 2020, that that would create problems if they don't agree to fund that, which is the expectation that we have. llyr gruffydd am: But it is a prospect that this wouldn't be achieved as you foresee. eluned morgan am: Well, we do hope, because we've had the pledges and commitments from the Government, that they will respect what we expected and what was expected by these institutions that have had the commitment of the funding. llyr gruffydd am: So, to what extent does that undermine the current work? Because institutions want to enter into agreements with providers and so on. Businesses want to know, if they're starting on some sort of journey, that they are going to get to the end of it some years down the line. eluned morgan am: Well, as I said, because the guarantee is there until 2020, I think that, for now, people are willing to go into those agreements, and I hope that we'll have a better outlook by November of the direction we're moving in. You have to remember that the number of apprenticeships in Wales is rising, while they've collapsed entirely in England. So, it is important that we do continue, and it's important that we don't create an atmosphere here that's going to undermine the confidence of our employers in committing to training in the workplace. llyr gruffydd am: Are you confident that the Government will achieve its targets in this context? eluned morgan am: Yes. But let's be clear: if there is a 'no deal' scenario, that will have an impact on the economy, and who knows what will happen then to some of these companies that are reliant on the EU. llyr gruffydd am: Talking about the impact on the wider economy, on the point you made earlier that it's not just the direct effect on these institutions, but also on the businesses that they engage with, that is a concern in this context, that means, of course, that there is a lot of pressure in this context on the work that other departments in the Government are doing, because perhaps they are the ones dealing with some of this. So, could you tell us a little bit about how you're working with Ministers and Cabinet Secretaries and other departments within the Government to safeguard these interests? eluned morgan am: So, as part of the employability programme, I have started going round every member of the Cabinet to ask what the impact will be on them—for example, in health, and, certainly, the economy, but here are many other areas. What's important for us is that we do collaborate and we do get this analysis, but we hope to do that on the ground through the regional skills partnerships. That's our way of ensuring that we can have an understanding, on the ground, of what's needed by employers. And so ensuring that people feed into that and that we respond to those requirements—that's where we're focusing our work. So, we're asking, for example, health boards to ensure that they feed into the regional skills partnerships. llyr gruffydd am: Is there a danger that we're a little bit behind in this process? Because Brexit could be upon us in no time at all, and, of course, this work is still ongoing. eluned morgan am: Well, I have been pushing and ensuring that in the direct areas facing the greatest risk, and agriculture's one of those, of course—. We have been pushing to see what we can do further, so, for example, I'm in the process of developing a policy on rural skills at present because I do think it's important that we do focus on those sectors that are likely to suffer the worst impact if the worst does happen. So, those preparations are in place as far as they can be, but, of course, it's very difficult without knowing to what extent it's going to impact on us. llyr gruffydd am: And each sector's running on its own timescale, I would presume. But, as you've mentioned rural skills, when do you foresee that that work will appear, and when will plans or schemes or whatever you're intending to put in place see the light of day? eluned morgan am: Well, we hope during this term that that will be published or announced. So, certainly, it is something that we have been discussing with people in rural areas directly, with the colleges, to see what the provision is there and to what extent we need to expand that, and to what extent we will need to change and move really quickly if there is no deal. That's something that I think we have to learn and we need to convince the FE sector about in terms of moving more quickly and to be more responsive to the demand that there is in the workplace. llyr gruffydd am: Yes, because there is the dilemma you touched on earlier about providing the skills that are required for the economy and providing the courses that are easy to fill. That is a live discussion across FE and HE, but you're confident that that discussion is taking place in a constructive and positive way and moving in the right direction. eluned morgan am: Well, it's helped that we've put £10 million on the table, because they do understand now that we are serious about our aim of ensuring that they do respond to what employers are asking for. So that has helped a lot in terms of focus and, of course, we're in the middle of a review now as well in terms of how we fund FE, and that will certainly be a part of that. Can I just go back—? kirsty williams am: Sorry, Chair, could I just clarify something? The last question you asked me about— lynne neagle am: I was just going to go back to that, yes. There could be a scenario where there are reciprocal arrangements, so, if a deal was reached with the European Union that established the principle of reciprocal arrangements, then, obviously, the ability of the HE institutions to charge international fees would be curtailed. lynne neagle am: If there's not that agreement— kirsty williams am: If there's no deal— lynne neagle am: —then it will be open to universities to charge market-driven, international rates. I should have made it very clear that the answer I gave was in the context of no deal, which is what we seem to be talking about mostly this morning, but if there was a deal to have reciprocal arrangements, then that ability, obviously, would be curtailed. Okay, well, can I thank the Cabinet Secretary, the Minister and the officials for attending and for answering all our questions? We very much appreciate your time. Members will see that there are 18 papers to note, so I'd like to suggest that we note them as a block, please, and just to flag that I would like to return to paper to note 18 when we go into private. Item 6, then, can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting and the whole of the meeting next week? Are Members content? Okay, thank you.<doc-sep>We've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies, and I'm very pleased to welcome Angela Burns, who is substituting for Suzy this morning. Can I also welcome Siân Gwenllian to the meeting? Siân is joining us from her constituency office via video-conference. I'm currently registered as an associate lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, although I haven't done any work for them for some time. We'll move on, then, to item 2 this morning, which is our evidence session on the higher education new academic year allocations. I'm very pleased to welcome David Blaney, who is chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and Bethan Owen, who is deputy chief executive of HEFCW. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions from Members, and the first questions are from Angela Burns. I just wanted to talk about, really, the financial sustainability of the higher education sector because, as we know, there's been all sorts of things going on in the press. So, can I just start with, actually, quite a technical question and ask you what the financial indicators look like for the universities here in Wales, and are there particular indicators that are really flashing warning signals to you? dr david blaney: Well, shall I just start with a couple of contextualising comments and Bethan can come in then with some detail? It's undeniably the case there are financial challenges facing our universities. They result from three main causes: one is the impact of the demographic dip of 18-year-olds, which is deeper and longer in Wales than it is elsewhere in the UK. And, of course, we also have current uncertainty as a result of the Augar review in England, and whether that might play into Wales, and also Brexit. These challenges are not unique to Wales; the majority of the UK universities are actually taking out cost one way or another. Before the Diamond review of fees and funding in Wales, there was a pre-existing funding gap in resource between England and Wales, and even now, that's still the case. So, Welsh higher education institutions are approximately £40 million worse off than they would be in the English system. That's a challenge, and that is a result from a political decision to invest in students, and that's fine. We're not seeing a crisis; we are seeing some real challenges, and there is a distinction, I think, between—. We have to understand, though, that taking out cost to balance the books has a detrimental effect on the capacity. Obviously it impacts on the people who lose their jobs immediately, but there's a medium to longer term impact on the capacity of the system to deliver for Wales. They are taking out capacity; they're not cutting at fat now, they're cutting out core capacity. And so, the range of the curriculum, the range of research and innovation, the range of the contribution that universities can make will be diminished by that. And against that backdrop, the introduction of the Diamond reforms is hugely important—delivery of that is going to be really important—and we are really pleased to see the Minister able to meet her commitments in respect of that. This forthcoming year will be the first year we see an increase in the resource, through us, to higher education. There are some very tired staff in universities, and we've seen some stuff in the press recently about some of the impact of stress there as well. angela burns am: Can I bring you back to the financial element of that? Can I just ask a question: what are the university reserves looking like at present? dr david blaney: Here, I refer to my learned friend. There's a difference between the distributable reserves—I don't have those numbers before me, but looking at reserves, what is more important are those reserves that are available as cash or liquid cash. So, universities have reserves, but a large amount of that is tied up in their estates, so they're not immediately realisable. So, one of the key measures that we're looking at, which is even more important than surpluses and deficit, is the operating cash that our universities are generating at the moment. When we look at operating cash in 2017-18, they were generating, as a percentage of income, about 7.6 per cent, which contrasts with nearly 10 per cent for the same year for English institutions. And that represents their capacity to generate surplus cash to meet their costs, which now, increasingly, include the costs of servicing their borrowings. So, again, because capital funding has not been as available to universities as it was, they've invested in their estates and that's largely been funded by borrowings. The costs of those borrowings have to be met on an annual basis, so that's becoming an increasing proportion of the operating cash that universities have. angela burns am: I just asked that question because I know that about four years ago, the universities were sitting on substantial reserves and were less than keen to deploy them back into actually using them for the students—it was more about building up the war chest, if you like, of the universities. And I just really wanted to have an understanding of how that picture might have changed over the last four years and are they actually skinnier cats now, rather than before. bethan owen: We can get you that analysis, but even four years ago, I think the definition of exactly what's meant by reserves, it's really important to look at what are distributable reserves as opposed to the assets that universities have. bethan owen: And, there are also differences in the way that universities have secured funding for investing in their estates. So, for example, Cardiff University have had a bond rather than borrowing, which you draw down as you're spending. So, in the short term, the reserves of Cardiff will appear as though they have significant cash balances, but all of those are restricted for investment in the estate and, over the next two or three years, will be utilised for that. angela burns am: So, overall, you're painting a picture of a sector that's under a significant degree of financial stress, and this is obviously using your key financial indicators. Do you monitor each and every university, or do you wait for them to come back and tell you what their situation is? bethan owen: We monitor, we receive forecasts, five-year forecasts, and we meet frequently with all our universities now. It varies, depending on the risks of the universities, as to how frequently we meet, but we're actually meeting with every university because even the forecast that we received last July, the changes, even in the 12-month period, are significant enough for us to need a better understanding of what the latest position is. Although it had a turnover and income of £1.5 billion, which had increased, nonetheless it had a small deficit of 0.4 per cent of income in 2017-18, which was an improvement on the deficit the year before of 1.7 per cent, but notably, again, the sector in England were looking at surpluses of 3 per cent to 4 per cent in the same period. The forecasts that we had this time last year were indicating that, for 2018-19, we should have a sector that's roughly in a break-even position, but that has to be caveated with waiting for new forecasts in July, where there will have to be a reflection of the pension costs, and there have been significant changes in pension costs, both for the teachers' pension scheme and the universities' superannuation scheme as well, and those will be significant costs that universities have to build into their forecasts at a time when their income, certainly their fee income, is not increasing, and that is the challenge. angela burns am: Are we going to lose any universities in the next couple of years? dr david blaney: I don't think so. As I said earlier on, we're not seeing a crisis, we're seeing really challenging circumstances for institutions to manage. At the moment, our sense is they are managing them, so one of the things we try to do is to make sure that, insofar as we can see it, we are making sure that the institutions are alert to the challenges they're facing, and are actually engaging those challenges properly, and we are seeing that at the moment. So I think what we will see if the pressure continues unabated is more costs being taken out, so more jobs being lost, more capacity being lost, but that's not the same as falling over. There is always the possibility of structural change within the sector, and that might be one of the solutions that institutions think about, but it's not a policy position, and it's not always a good short-term response to crisis anyway, actually. But I think, as I say, we're in a managed situation, but the challenges are quite acute. angela burns am: When you talk about structural change, are you referring to the fact that certain offshoots or divisions might close? I bring this up because I'm the Assembly Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, and I have had multiple representations from students, and their parents, who are about to go to Lampeter and who've been told that courses are being restructured, there's a massive staff loss, and they have concerns about whether the three-year commitment they're about to make to a course is going to be able to be sustained. So I am trying to drill down a little bit, because I think it's only fair for the students to know what they're up against, and also it's a bit like in the great depression—you can start a run on something, can't you? Because if enough people believe it, then suddenly enough people will stop going to what is an excellent little university, really top-quality in medieval literature, in archaeology. And I'm just talking about one, but I know there are problems in other universities around Wales, so I just wondered if you could comment on that and also what processes you as HEFCW might have in place to protect any student who does find themselves in a situation where their course appears to be disappearing before their eyes. So, if we look at the debate that happened in the Senedd last week, from my reading of the transcript, it was actually quite a balanced debate where pretty much every contributor made reference to the contribution that higher education is making. There was reference to the national student survey scores, and in many ways Wales is the best place in the UK to come and be a student, because you are looked after properly in Wales. But there was also a perfectly legitimate exploration of whether or not there's a crisis, and if you look at the way in which that was represented in the media, the crisis bit stuck and the rest of it didn't. At the point where the sector is trying very hard to recruit students, it's really quite unhelpful that you get that sort of representation. So we do need to make sure, I think, all of us, that we try to avoid a situation where there can be media amplification of a problem that's not actually as acute as the media are portraying it, and that is very harsh. I'm not being critical of the political process here, but it has ripples and we do need to be careful that we don't start a run on this. In terms of the specifics at Lampeter, we understand that there are no plans to close any of the departments, and there certainly will not be plans to pull the rug out from under continuing students. So there's an absolute obligation on them to meet their commitments, and that's a contractual obligation anyway, so it's a legal obligation. But we also have a quality machinery that we operate where we would expect institutions to be able to demonstrate that they've put in place appropriate arrangements to ensure that students can finish their programmes of study. So they're not going to be recruiting students to programmes that they're not planning to continue—they just are not going to do that. And if you think about it in a market context, it would be suicidal for a university to treat their students like that. angela burns am: But I have to ask these questions because the auditor was very clear that there was a material uncertainty in Trinity Saint David's financial plans. dr david blaney: Yes, I understand that, so let’s come back to the material uncertainty. What I'm hoping to try and express is that we have absolute confidence that the institutions will not do the dirty on their students. They will look after their students and if they're recruiting to programmes, they are recruiting to programmes that they are planning to run, and run through to completion. And the expectations that we place on them in terms of our quality assurance machinery is precisely that—when they are engaged in portfolio change, they have to look after the interest of the students that they currently have. In terms of our oversight and monitoring, our primary consideration, again, is the interest of the students. They are the people who have, in many ways, least influence over what happens in terms of the way an institution is managed. Although, they do have a voice and, actually, the arrangements for the student voice in Wales are, again, better than elsewhere in the UK. But, nonetheless, we do not wish to see students becoming innocent victims of difficulties of management and financing. Our institutional risk review process is fundamentally designed to make sure that institutions are grappling with their problems before they become a crisis. So, we have machinery, which has 70/80 different factors and hundreds of questions that we ask twice a year, to interrogate the performance of the institutions and to make sure that we are seeing them managing the issues that they're facing. So, it's not the challenges you face, it's the way you face your challenges—it's a cliché—and, at the moment, they are managing them, but if we were in any way concerned that they weren't, the people who are most at risk in that context are the students and we will be intervening to make sure that they were cited, and we do intervene when we have to. angela burns am: Well, following on from what you said, I've just got two really specific technical questions, then, to ask, because you said that you look across the whole scope to make sure that they are meeting all of their correct liquidity ratios and so on. So, considering how much is invested in their estates, are you happy that each university's estates strategy and its financing is prudent and has appropriate governing-body oversight in place? dr david blaney: Yes, so the estates strategies that institutions operate are overseen by either the full governing body or relevant sub-committees in respect of every institution, so there is proper governance oversight. And in all of those instances, there is staff and student engagement as well in the strategic approach on estates. So, the machinery is in place— angela burns am: Because it's the big thing that drives most of university borrowing, isn't it? dr david blaney: Indeed, it is. angela burns am: So, if our universities are on a sticky wicket, we just need to know that the borrowing that they're undertaking is absolutely prudently assessed and is appropriate. So, as long as you're content, if I can hear you say that—[Laughter.] dr david blaney: Okay. We're content on two fronts: one is that the governance machinery within the institutions is structured appropriately to look at that, but also that if the institutions are wanting to engage in anything other than relatively trivial borrowing, they have to get our consent as well. And what we don't do is second-guess everything, but what we do do is make sure that the governing body, or its relevant committees, have been asking the right questions. bethan owen: Can I just add to that, then? angela burns am: Yes, of course. bethan owen: In asking for the forecasts, we have reinforced this year the importance of universities looking at different scenarios. So, to be looking at the demographic and maybe in the past, where there's potentially been growth in the system and universities have built that into their forecast, we have explicitly asked this year that we are provided—not just the governing body—with the scenario where there is no growth in the income. That's not the core forecast, but a scenario, so that it's quite clear how reliant the forecasts are on that growth, and if that growth doesn't come through, what the contingency plans are for ensuring that all the cost commitments can be met. And we should probably just differentiate between—we have a role before borrowings are entered into, but all the best forecasts in the world can never quite predict, certainly what's happened in the last two years, probably, in universities. So, there are significant borrowings that are now committed to and the key measures we are looking at are universities' capacity to meet their covenants and their repayments under those borrowings, because that's essential for maintaining their liquidity. angela burns am: Which actually, neatly, thank you, brings me to my last question, which is: have any universities broken those loan covenants or been close to breaking them, unable to pay their borrowings as and when they fall due? bethan owen: There was a significant change in accounting standards in 2015, financial reporting standard 102, so most universities had to renegotiate their covenants, but it was because the accounts were looking very different. The accounting standards brought about changes in how income was recognised and how some service concession arrangements, largely student accommodation arrangements, and pension costs, significantly, were recognised in the accounts. So, most universities have had to renegotiate covenants, but we're not aware of any who've had to renegotiate due to covenant breaches, other than one which the University of Wales Trinity Saint David disclosed in their financial statements—that they did need to renegotiate their financing arrangements, which they have done earlier this year, and they have now negotiated new covenants. It's a core part of financial management in universities now that you manage your relationship with your lender as well as with us. Breaching covenants in themselves is different to doing that with your lender being unaware and the factors being within your control. So, again, from that perspective, we have the covenants built into our forecasts, we require the forecasts to show how the university are planning to be within their covenants. The nature of those covenants vary, but most of them require a measure of cash flow, a ratio between the cash generated and the cost of debt, so there is close monitoring that is required because of the borrowing in the system, as well as our ongoing monitoring as well. Just before we move on to Hefin David, can I just ask you what your view, then, is on the statement included by auditors in the accounts of Trinity Saint David that there is material uncertainty? bethan owen: Yes, I'll pick up on that. The material uncertainty largely relates—there is a note in the accounts that explains the factors that are being taken into account, but it largely relates to some significant cash receipts that have been subject to timing delays and the fact that the timing of these is essentially outside the control of the institution. The main delay relates to the receipt of funding for the Egin project, which was due to be received from the Swansea city deal. That funding has been delayed, but the sums due to the university are still due to the university—it's the issue of the timing of those receipts that is causing a cash pressure. Just in terms of cash flows, all universities have to ensure that they are maintaining enough cash in their system to meet their payments as they fall due. Most of their costs are incurred on a monthly basis, staff costs in particular, but the income flows into universities are now less regular. In days gone by, that funding would largely flow from us and that would also come on a monthly basis. A quarter of that money comes in in October, a quarter in February, and the majority of it, half of it, doesn't come into the university in cash until May. So, that's quite a different cash management scenario for universities to manage; it requires holding cash balances to do it. Just before I bring Hefin in, we're going to need to have a bit of agility, as Dai Lloyd would call it, in our questioning and our answers if we're going to cover the ground that we need to cover. hefin david am: How can we be assured that governance arrangements across the eight institutions are sufficiently rigorous but also consistent? dr david blaney: So, the first point to make, of course, is that universities are autonomous, as you know— hefin david am: I've just written 'independent and autonomous'. The university governing body obviously is an important part of the machinery, particularly in terms of generating constructive challenge for the executive within universities. The governing bodies all are expected to behave in a way that is consistent with the guidance produced by the Committee of University Chairs, the CUC guide, which identifies good practice. Just in terms of governing bodies, it's also important that governing bodies engage in a process of continual refreshing, because that gives you a greater variety of perspectives, which is important. But it’s also important they have people who understand the higher education business as well as from other contexts. But I think our view would be that when you get an increase in the contextual pressures that we’ve been discussing already this morning, the role of the governing body actually becomes even more significant. So, we have encouraged the sector, both the chairmen of the university councils, but also the vice-chancellors, to engage in a process of an independent review of governance in Wales. And it hasn’t been hard for us to encourage that—they have been keen to take this opportunity to take stock. The Welsh higher education system is part of a UK system—they don’t want to be a million miles away from the rest of the UK in terms of expectations, but there is scope in Wales, given the scale of the sector, to actually construct something that is more challenging, I think, in terms of expectations, than might be the common denominator across the UK, and maybe some more exemplification. It’s going to be quite hard to do this, but I’m very keen that we engage—and the sector are up for this—in governance culture, because, actually, you can do process checks and you’ll have the right structure of committees and have the right sort of papers going, but, in the end, it’s the dynamic within that room and who’s asking which questions and how well informed they are, and whether it's an open culture or is it a defensive culture—these are really what influences the quality of decision making. hefin david am: And how different are those cultures across institutions? dr david blaney: I think it’s very hard to say. Typically, that’s at a point where there are sufficient difficulties going on that we feel that we need to— hefin david am: Do you have the option to observe at any point? dr david blaney: We can't insist, I don't think. But in the main, actually, our presence would change the dynamic of that anyway, so I'm not sure that's necessarily helpful. But we are keen to see what we can achieve with the sector in addressing these issues of what constitutes constructive challenge. Is your aim to see consistency in the same approaches, then? dr david blaney: I think we’d like to see a consistent minimum set of expectations. In the end, it’s about personalities, it’s about people’s background and it’s about their knowledge. And we have a role to play in this as well, so we have a toolkit that we produce for governors, which, essentially, is a set of information that locates their university in the context of the UK, across a number of factors. So, if they had been told something that is not perhaps as true as it might be by the executive, they can see that in the data. Whether that toolkit needs a refresh—I’m sure it probably does, it’s been there for a while now—. So, part of that is what information we can provide to help governing bodies be properly informed as well. This is quite distant from Government—unlike other institutions, where you can prescribe some of these approaches. dr david blaney: Yes, and in the end I don't think there's any pushback from the sector in terms of wanting to operate in accordance with best practice. hefin david am: So, what about risk appetite? Do you feel that any governing bodies are exhibiting what might be considered to be an imprudent risk appetite? dr david blaney: I don't think so, and this manifests itself in two ways. So, we would see this coming through in forecasts, and we would see it coming through in requests for borrowings, predominantly. Our links into institutions are many and various, and we have our formal stuff, but we all have links into institutions that are informal and we—. One of the beauties of the scale of the sector in Wales is we can see the institutions in a way that they can't hope to in England. But we have, in some instances, I think it's fair to say, helped institutions to think again about some of their aspirations. So, where we've seen things and we think, 'That just looks ridiculously optimistic,' we've just asked the questions. We don't say, 'No, you can't do that,' because they are autonomous, they make the decisions, but we try to make sure that they're asking the right questions. hefin david am: So, would you see that governing bodies are falling short in doing that themselves, in that, where they become strategic decisions that require due diligence, are the governing bodies themselves presenting that challenge? Or the fact you've just said that, does that suggest to us that, actually, they are falling short? dr david blaney: I think there's a mixture of things going on. We have a slightly different perspective and we have a perspective that is very intimately informed in terms of how the institution is performing. So, you have a governing body with a range of perspectives, and you will also have people who are very committed and very enthusiastic about the institution, and just occasionally it's helpful to get a slightly external perspective on these things. So, I don't think it's a shortfall as such, but I just think— hefin david am: The kind of honest broker role, kind of. dr david blaney: The machinery depends on having a body like HEFCW doing some of that role, and the people who lend money to institutions are absolutely clear about that. So, we have relationships with the banks; they come and see us every now and again—typically not to talk about individual clients but just to talk about what we do and how we do it. Interestingly, for example, when Michael Barber got up before Christmas and said there will be no bail-outs of universities, we had banks on the phone to us within a couple of days, wanting just to talk about how it is in Wales and is it still how it used to be. So, it's not really a governance failure; it's just that the machinery includes us. And one of the things, from a distance—, I've been involved in different ways in an institution, and looking at the institutions from a distance. Do you find that the relationships between executive teams and governors is effective, and are they sufficiently robust and challenging as well? Those executive permanent staff and the governors—is there challenge there? dr david blaney: I would say, in the main, yes. Occasionally, we help the governors to ask the right questions, so occasionally that external perspective we've just discussed is helpful in that regard. Actually, there are times when there are tensions between the executive and governing bodies, inevitably—that's not something that's remarkable—and we can feel that as well. hefin david am: And that can become apparent from a public point of view as well—you know, media reports and—. dr david blaney: Yes, sometimes these things can spill, and the governing bodies also include student representation, staff representation, who are typically union reps, and so, you know, there are all sorts of—. I'm not in any way saying that people are indiscreet, but there are all sorts of interests that are sitting around that table that have to be managed within a governance context. And these tensions are not all-out war, but there are sometimes differences of view and they have to be worked through, and that's governance working properly, I think. hefin david am: Okay, which is—some of the work you've suggested will help towards that. hefin david am: And a last question: you've identified one university as high risk, five as medium, and two as low in the short to medium term. You're obviously not going to tell us which, but what I'm interested in is the direction of travel, and whether those that are 'medium'—are they at any point at risk of becoming 'high' in the near future? dr david blaney: I think it's fair to say that the direction of travel is that we're seeing an increased risk profile in the sector in Wales, and it's about the financial pressures that we've already discussed this morning. And that is why the efforts that the Minister has gone to to secure the Diamond settlement, and, indeed, other bits of money now and again, are so important. So, she's doing what she can, and that's really good, but we always knew that, between the point of the Diamond recommendations being made and the full implementation, there was going to be a valley to cross. So, the amount of funding was always going to be under pressure; there's a demographic dip, and there are the other contextual factors we've discussed. And the institutions have been working very hard to try not to take cost out now that they really don't have to take out, because they don't want to reduce capacity, which they'll struggle to recover again when the financial position improves. So, they are seeing deficits, which are managed deficits, where they're spending more than their income in order just to keep the capacity in. hefin david am: And, if you're back in a year or two's time, the next few years, are we confident that there won't be more in the high-risk category? You said you don't see collapse, but are we confident there won't be more in the high-risk category? dr david blaney: Well, I think what I would always say about this process is that it doesn't guarantee 100 per cent accuracy. HEFCW is innately cautious as an organisation, so I'm not going to say we're confident, but that doesn't mean to say we're worried either. So, to answer my question: are we likely to see more in the high-risk category or not? dr david blaney: We might. bethan owen: And, just to add, I think the key bit of that is maintaining the attractiveness of Welsh universities to students, because a large proportion are coming not from just Wales, but from England and internationally—so, that's a key part—and also that our research portfolio is invested in, and that also brings economic benefits. So, I think those are the two that we are [correction: need to be] able to maintain: the institutions as attractive options for students, and that our research capacity is invested in. sian gwenllian am: Just in the interest of transparency, are you able to tell us which universities are in which categories of risk? dr david blaney: We don't publish that; we publish numbers. hefin david am: They didn't even try to—[Inaudible.] [Laughter.] lynne neagle am: Okay. Can you explain your overall approach to the 2019-20 allocations and what your priority for allocations has been? bethan owen: We publish our funding allocations, and we published the 2019-20 allocations on 4 June. For 2019-20, we're allocating £149 million, and, as David said, this is the first year that we've been able to start putting funding, additional funding, in from the Diamond recommendations for investment in the sector. So, that means we've been able to increase our recurrent teaching funding by £7 million—not a significant amount, but it's a start. And we have maintained QR, which is our funding for research, quality research, and postgraduate research, at least at the same levels of £76 million, as it's been that in previous years. We've increased part-time funding by £1 million to £26 million, and we've started to increase support for expensive subjects—that's medicine, dentistry and conservatoire provision—and higher cost subjects—those are the sciences and the STEM. So, we made a start on that and increased that support by about £6 million to £20 million in total. And, in addition to that, we have strategic funding that we're maintaining for Reaching Wider projects and the Sêr Cymru project. And then, in addition to our recurrent funding, we have had strategic funding in our remit letters for the last two years. So, we're developing programmes for civic mission, community engagement, collaborations between higher education and further education, and, more recently, we had funding at the end of March to start to implement the recommendations of Graeme Reid's report for research investment, and also for developing mental health and well-being. That strategic funding is very welcome, but to be able to build those activities into our core funding, which we hope Diamond will bring, would be more sustainable for institutions. How do your allocations to the 2019-20 academic year support and incentivise collaboration between HE and FE? dr david blaney: So, there are probably two dimensions to this. First of all, we have provided £3.5 million of separate funding specifically targeted to improve and increase collaboration between HE and FE. So, we put out a circular inviting proposals for that, and it was competitive, so we funded what was the best of the proposals, and we constrained it to be available only to pump-prime new activity or to add value to existing activity, but not just to keep things ticking over. We had seven bids submitted from across the three Welsh regions on a whole range of activities, which we probably haven't got time to go into now. I've got a long list here, but, for example, in south-east Wales, the University of South Wales is leading on a bid partnering with Cardiff University, Cardiff Met, with the Open University and all the FE players in the region. We tried to get it within regions, because that's how you get the biggest impact for learners in the area and also for smaller enterprises in terms of innovation work. And then we direct fund a couple of FE institutions for delivery of higher education for historical reasons, and we also have our funding going through to support franchise activity between HE and FE. There are about 5,000 students who are studying HE programmes under franchise in FE colleges in Wales, and our funding method has, historically for some time now, protected that money. So, we try to prevent universities from taking the money out of franchise and onto campus, because we think it's important to try to encourage local provision within particular localities. And, certainly in areas where public transport infrastructure is perhaps not what it might be, for people to move to universities can be quite a disincentive, so—. Then, finally from me, the council's remit letter for the 2019-20 academic year from the Minister does ask you to consider how you'd increase openness and transparency around the use of fee income. So, what are the issues here, and how will you take this forward? bethan owen: The reporting of the income and expenditure is largely provided, probably more so in narrative form in the accounts and the financial statements and annual reports of institutions. A number of institutions also provide graphs and more easily accessible information to understand the income and expenditure of universities. There are examples of good practice across the sector in presenting as simply as possible what the income sources are for universities and how they spend their money. And we're going to be working with the Welsh universities and sector bodies to improve the accessibility of that information for Welsh institutions. More transparent reporting of income and expenditure, and not just fee income, is actually very important for understanding how income cross-flows work in universities. Some reasonably simplistic analyses can assume that all the student fee just covers the direct costs of academic provision, but there's much more to the student experience than that, so there are costs: there are the infrastructure costs, the student support costs, even the community engagement and all the research activities bring benefits to the teaching and fee provision. So, more transparency of all the universities' income sources and expenditure and a better understanding of the income cross-flows and why you can't look at universities in isolation of student provision and research, you have to look at the whole—so, we'll be working with them to improve that information. We're going to go to Hefin David now for some questions on part-time student funding. hefin david am: Part-time student numbers are bucking the trend in Wales, as I understand it, and we are seeing a bigger increase in Wales of part-time numbers than elsewhere in the UK. How is that going to be sustainable within current arrangements? bethan owen: We've allocated £26.5 million in 2019-20 to support part-time provision, and we have been able in 2019-20 to fund some growth. So, there is growth in that funding to allow those institutions and incentivise those institutions who have recruited more students than last year to continue to do so. That came at an overall additional cost of £1.9 million, and, based on what we're hearing from student support, we're expecting to see that requirement increase. So, it's one of the areas where we'll need to look at how we prioritise Diamond funding. And at the moment, our intention—but subject to knowing the quantum of it—is to continue to support and fund growth in part-time provision. hefin david am: So, is it possible—? With the Welsh Government's policy of developing lifelong learning, is it possible that will be ever spread more thinly? dr david blaney: That is the challenge, and there's a piece of work that we have in our sights to look again at part-time and what it is and what the various drivers are. There's a temptation, I think, at times, to see it solely in terms of skills for an economy, and it is important for reskilling and upskilling, but actually, it's important for other things as well. If we see higher education solely in terms of skilling an economy, we've missed an important part of the contribution that higher education makes. But part-time is really quite difficult, because there's part-time that is about upskilling, part time that's about reskilling, there's part-time for social purposes, there's employer-supported part-time, there's student—. dr david blaney: Well, there is a sense that they are more price sensitive, yes, and so the support regime that the Government is putting in place is important, and that probably has made a difference to the numbers of part-timers entering the system this last year. But I think we need to stake stock of what is important about part-time, what the market will deliver, what the market won't deliver, what we should fund and so on. And there's a complexity around all that, as I've indicated, which we need to do a bit of work on with the sector, with the student body as well, just to take some stock of this over the next year or so. hefin david am: Could we end up seeing significant fee increases for part-time students? dr david blaney: My sense is we won't. The Government wishes us to monitor, so we monitor, and that in itself is not straightforward, actually. There's a limit to how much a fee increase would be acceptable to the part-time market. I don't think we'll see massive fee increases; we might see a bit, but we won't see masses, I don't think. We've got some questions now on funding for research and innovation, and also we'd like to talk a bit about a replacement for European Union funds. If I could turn specifically to research, we know, of course, that both the Diamond and Reid reviews called for QR funding to be maintained in real terms, but the allocation is exactly the same for 2019-20 as it has been for the past nine years. Have you carried out any kind of assessment of the impact of this level of research funding on universities and, indeed, on the Welsh economy? dr david blaney: I'm sorry; I missed the beginning of that because I couldn't hear this headset. I was talking about the Diamond and Reid reviews at the beginning of my question and the fact that they had recommended that QR funding should be maintained in real terms. The reason the sum hasn't increased is because we haven't had enough money to be able to increase it and still meet the obligations we have to other bits of the HE system. Both Ian Diamond and Graeme Reid were very clear about the importance of being able to invest in our QR research funding, for a number of reasons. The capacity of the sector to be able to respond to funding opportunities elsewhere in the UK and across the rest of the world is itself determined by the size and the strength of the research base, which is sustained by QR funding. If they go for UK-based competitive research funding, that is typically constructed on the absolute assumption that QR will be part of that mix. So, they tend to fund to 80 per cent of the actual cost of the research, with the expectation that QR will plug the gap. And we know that, although the Welsh research base is extraordinarily productive, and really is punching above its weight in many ways—and I mentioned earlier the impact of the research base in the last research excellence framework—we know that, actually, it could do so much more, if it just had more scale. So, we fully endorse the reports from both Ian Diamond and Graeme Reid that QR is important, and it's important also to be able to allow institutions to invest in research areas that emerge over time. It's almost impossible for a body like us, far less the Government, to know where these emerging strengths are going to come from, and QR provides the flexibility for institutions, which is absolutely fundamental to keeping the research base dynamic. sian gwenllian am: Therefore, you do have concerns that this isn't increasing—you have that concern of a lack of increase in the level of investment. But has any particular assessment been made of the impact of not increasing that funding? dr david blaney: So, there is—. Graeme Reid's report produced an assessment of the correlation between QR funding and capacity to generate funding from other sources, and there's a very close correlation— sian gwenllian am: Has HEFCW done any assessment to look at the effect of underfunding research, to all intents and purposes? dr david blaney: Not directly. sian gwenllian am: Your remit requires you to encourage universities to continue to develop one particular element of research, which is educational research. How does your allocation for 2019-20 contribute to that in terms of pedagogy and educational research specifically? dr david blaney: Bethan, did you want to say something on this? bethan owen: I was just going to add that, when we look at the funding that comes into our sector in Wales, compared with the rest of the UK, it's easy to see from the figures that our percentage of income that comes from research is smaller than in England, so the figures show that we receive less of the money that's available, which is a factor that results from us having less QR as a percentage, so we're in a situation where we get less of that UK funding that's available as well. sian gwenllian am: So, there's a knock-on to that; that's what you're trying to say. But from the point of view of my question on educational research—? dr david blaney: So, we have provided funding in 2017-18 and 2018-19 to WISERD Education, which is a research collaboration between a number of the Welsh universities, specifically looking at educational issues, and we're providing additional funding to that to add value to the Welsh Government's existing evaluation of the progress of pioneer schools in developing the three-to-15 curriculum in Wales. I won't go into the full detail of it now, but it's a five-partner project feeding into this with researchers from Cardiff, Cardiff Met, Trinity Saint David, Aber, Bangor and the University of South Wales. So, it's a collaborative effort, and we have, in the past, also funded WISERD Education, so it's an important research facility and increasingly being used, I'm delighted to say, by Welsh Government in underpinning its own policy thinking. sian gwenllian am: And likewise, in 2019-20, there will be allocations specifically for this. Well, could you provide the remit letter from—[Inaudible.]—do that? You have to do everything in the remit letters. dr david blaney: We do what we can to pay due regard to the remit letters, as the wording goes. sian gwenllian am: And then turning to the impact of the loss of funds were we to leave the European Union. Of course, this is going to have a far-reaching impact on future research, and the Reid review has made recommendations to mitigate this impact. So, what assessment have you made of how allocations will be able to help universities to transition away from EU funding? dr david blaney: So, again, the Reid review has done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of an impact assessment for us. There has been an additional £6.6 million allocated for research very recently by the Government, which we have put out specifically in line with some of the recommendations from Reid. So, that's a start, but that's not sustainable funding, and it's not enough, really, but it is a good and welcome start. Reid was also not just talking about the money, but also talking about the way in which the Welsh research base both represents itself and also engages with UK-wide developments. And in response to that, we have recently issued our own vision for research and innovation, which was developed over a number of months, following the Reid report closely, working with stakeholders, including the Welsh Government, in order to try and set a vision for how we respond to the challenges facing research in the future, including the reduction, potentially, of access to EU funds. A lot of that requires investment in the Welsh research base in order to be able to go for competitive funding at a UK level. Since it seems possible at least, and possibly even likely, that any money retrieved from not having to invest in the EU will sit in London rather than necessarily being devolved to the devolved administrations—we understand fully the Welsh Government's position on that, and we don't disagree with it. But either way, we need a research base that's able to compete, and that's why the investment recommendations of Reid are so important. I think Reid was saying that there may be pots of money out there that aren't being accessed at the moment by Welsh universities. Are you able to help then within that process? bethan owen: One aspect that we do intend to fund—and this is from Diamond, as well as Reid—is to place funding back into the system for innovation. We're consulting currently, with the intention, if the funding is available to us, clearly, in the year 2020-21, to provide £15 million back into the sector in innovation funding. sian gwenllian am: Is that part of the UKRI funding? There is some £7 billion in the hands of that organisation, as I understand it, and there may be some possibilities there too. bethan owen: That £15 million will be money that comes from us, but the intention is that the money will go in in order to improve universities' ability to access that funding from UKRI. So, Innovate UK would be the part of UKRI—and that we improve our ability to get funding from outside Wales. And, then, Graeme Reid says the same thing in terms of research—that we need more funding to do the same thing there. dr david blaney: And, then, there's also the recommendation from Reid that Wales needs to be better embedded in the conversations that are going on on a UK-wide basis, so the Welsh Government has established a presence in London in respect of research, and we have a colleague in HEFCW who is fractionally embedded in the United Kingdom Research and Innovation specifically to respond to that recommendation. And that is actually paying dividends; we are strengthening our relationship with the UK machinery, which is essential if we're to understand where they're heading and what their funding bids are all about, and even to be able to influence those. lynne neagle am: Okay, Siân? sian gwenllian am: So, as far as research is concerned, it's not all doom and gloom. There is money coming in and if the Government, as it is able to, can find money and can invest in this area, then that will help. Just a couple of questions from me, then, before you close: what is your recent work on the 'basket of goods' show regarding student accommodation costs? And have any institutions used their 2019-20 fee and access plans to make commitments to more affordable accommodation for under-represented groups? dr david blaney: First of all, on the basket of goods, the work we're doing now—we're currently in train in terms of analysing the data in respect of the basket of goods, so this is slightly premature, but our early look at the data indicates that there are no increases in costs, accommodation or other, that would cause us concern. So, it doesn't look like institutions are succumbing to the temptation to up their income streams from other costs. In terms of the fee and access plans, the sector has committed over £28 million of investment in student support-related activities from the fee and access plans, and that includes, in many instances, bursaries that are designed to help students cope with the costs of accommodation and the cost of living more generally. The support is provided for a range of purposes, but a couple of examples, just very quickly: Trinity Saint David, since we've talked about them a lot today, they offer £1,000 bursary to care leavers, which is in addition to local authority support for care leavers. Bangor also offer targeted support for care leavers, and these are often also extended, so they apply not just in term time, but throughout the holiday time as well, because people still need to live during the holidays. And just one final question from me then, going back to Trinity Saint David: are you concerned that the governing body of Trinity Saint David has taken decisions that have led to that material uncertainty, and is that unprecedented in Wales? dr david blaney: My view is that the decisions that the governing body made were, in our view, perfectly rational decisions to have made, given the information they had at the time. So, what's happened is that a number of unforeseen events have arisen, which, actually, I don't think it's reasonable to expect them to have foreseen, and it's just a combination of these that has caused the cash pressure. So, I don't see this as a governance failure, and they are engaging with those challenges. We've come to the end of our time, so can I thank you both for attending and for answering all our questions this morning? You did say that you would give the committee a note on reserves for the last four years, so we'd be grateful if we could receive that. Paper to note 1 is a letter from me to the Deputy Minister requesting further information for our scrutiny of the Children (Abolition of Defence of Reasonable Punishment) (Wales) Bill. Paper to note 2 is a letter from me to the Children's Commissioner for Wales also asking for further information to pursue our scrutiny of the Bill. And paper to note 3 is a letter to the Minister for Education asking for an update on the framework for young people educated other than at school. Item 4, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to propose that we resolve to meet in private for the remainder of this meeting and for the whole meeting on 10 July<doc-sep>anthony rota (nipissingtimiskaming, lib.)): We'll call this meeting to order. Welcome to the fifth meeting of the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic. Pursuant to the order passed on Monday, April20, the committee is meeting today to consider ministerial announcements, to allow members of the committee to present petitions, and to question ministers, including the Prime Minister, about the COVID-19 pandemic. Tomorrow, May8, Dr.AndreaMcCrady, Dominion Carillonneur, will give a special recital to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. Victory in Europe Day, VE Day, commemorates the formal acceptance of Germany's surrender by allied forces at the end of the Second World War. While the pandemic prevents us from gathering to celebrate in person, tomorrow at noon the voice of our nation will ring out in remembrance of this milestone in our history. Just so you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entire committee. I would like to remind members that, as in the House of Commons or committee, they should not take photos of their colleagues or film the proceedings. In order to facilitate the work of the interpreters and to allow the meeting to proceed smoothly, I would ask you to follow some instructions. When you are ready to speak, click on the microphone icon to activate your microphone, or hold the space bar down while you are speaking. If you release the bar, your microphone will revert to mute, just like a walkie-talkie. Honourable members, I would like to remind you that if you want to speak English, you should be on the English channel. Should you wish to alternate between the two languages, you should change the channel to the language that you are speaking each time you switch languages. Should you need to request the floor outside of your designated speaking time, you should activate your mike and state that you have a point of order. If a member of the committee wishes to intervene on a point of order raised by another person, you should use the raised hand function to indicate to the chair that you wish to speak. Should any technical challenges arise, for example, in relation to interpretation, please advise the chair immediately by raising a point of order, and the technical team will work on resolving them. If you get accidentally disconnected, please try to rejoin the meeting with the information you used to join initially. Before we get started, please note that in the top right-hand corner of your screen is a button that you can use to change views. Speaker view allows you to focus on the person currently speaking; gallery view allows you to see a larger number of participants. You can click through the multiple pages in the gallery view to see who is on and how many more participants there are. I would like to remind members that any petition presented during the meeting of the special committee must have already been certified by the clerk of petitions. In addition, to ensure a petition is considered properly presented, the certificate of the petition and each page of the petition for a petition certified in a previous Parliament should be mailed to the committee no later than 6 p.m. Chair, five years ago when Parliament passed Bill C-14, then justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said that it represented a finely tuned balance between access and safeguards. Petitioners on the first petition I'm presenting are very concerned to see Bill C-7 before Parliament, which removes safeguards ahead of that five-year review. Petitioners specifically mention their concerns about the removal of the mandatory 10-day reflection period, which can already be waived in certain circumstances. They are concerned about reducing the number of witnesses required to oversee it and ensure that a request has been properly made. The second and final petition that I will be presenting today is with respect to Senate Bill S-204. This would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ from a person who did not consent. This responds specifically to concerns about organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China involving Falun Gong practitioners and increasing concerns that this is being or about to be applied to Uighurs as well. Petitioners are noting that in the previous Parliament there were bills on this, Bill C-350 and Bill S-240. Now, in this Parliament there is a bill, Bill S-204, and the petitioners hope that this 43rd Parliament will be the one that gets it passed. This is my first occasion to present a petition in our virtual format of the COVID-19 committee. The petition I am presenting today, which was previously approved, is from a number of constituents who are concerned that we pursue the Paris Agreement to hold the global average temperature increase to no more than 1.5C. The Paris Agreement itself embeds in it the concept of Just Transition with a capital J and a capital T, the concept of just transition ensuring fairness and support for all workers in the fossil fuel sector. The petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to move forward with an act to ensure just transition and to ensure adequate funding so that workers and communities dependent on the fossil fuel sector receive meaningful support to ensure security in their lives in the transition to more sustainable energy use. I want to thank the honourable members for their usual collaboration and now we'll go on to mr. james bezan (selkirkinterlakeeastman, cpc): On a point of order, Mr. Chair, on Tuesday, at our COVID-19 committee of the whole meeting, I was asking a question which started at 12:56:06 and was cut off at 1:00:32, so I still have 34 seconds of time remaining in my question time of five minutes. If you believe that my time was unjustly cut off and that it was unfair treatment of the official opposition when we were raising our points of order, I would ask that the 34 seconds be tacked on to the opening round for the opposition and credited to Rosemarie Falk, who will be leading off for the Conservatives. the chair: Normally what happens is the chair uses judgment, and with 35 seconds, there isn't enough time obviously for a full question or answer, most of the time. I want everyone to know that I do have a timer next to me and I am timing the questions, and I will be treating the answers the same way. We've taken a little bit of the chair's ability to give judgment on it, but it will be from now on. I would like to remind the honourable members that no member will be recognized for more than five minutes at a time and that members may split their time with one or more members by so indicating to the chair. Will the Prime Minister stand up for Canada's energy workers, or does he agree with the fringe left and those who want to destroy our country? ms. Chair, I believe that the language that the honourable member just used is unparliamentary mr. It is unacceptable to assert that anyone who wants to make a point about our economy is trying to destroy the country. As I pointed out this morning in my press conference, we cannot move forward on a transformation of our energy sector without supporting the workers in that energy sector. We need their innovation and we need their hard work if we are going to lower our emissions, if we are going to reach our the chair: We'll go to Ms. Chair, it has been 43 days since the finance minister promised Canada's energy sector liquidity through the Business Development Bank of Canada. If the government doesn't step up to support our energy sector, they are in effect doubling down on their support for foreign, unethically sourced oil. Chair, when will the credit options be available to Canada's small and medium energy firms? the chair: I want to remind honourable members that we do have interpreters who are listening and translating. Chair, from the very beginning, our priority through this pandemic and this crisis has been to support workers across the country. We have sent billions of dollars to workers right across the country, including Alberta, Saskatchewan, B.C., and Newfoundland and Labrador in the energy sector for them to be able to support their families through this difficult time. The announcements to date fall well short of what is needed to maintain a steady supply of affordable and healthy food. Instead of responding to specific COVID-19 challenges, our farmers are facing the Liberals' reannounced $125 million that was already budgeted in the AgriRecovery program. Will the Prime Minister finally step up and take our food supply chain seriously, or is agriculture just an afterthought for him? right hon. Chair, we take agriculture and our agricultural sector extremely seriously, which is why we announced hundreds of millions of dollars a couple of days ago to respond to pressing needs. We will continue to make investments to ensure both the safety of workers in our agricultural sector and the safety of our communities, as well as the continued flow of high-quality Canadian food onto our tables right across the country. Our farmers are faced with rising operational costs, a disrupted service industry, labour shortages and a reduced capacity at processing plants. When will the Prime Minister deliver adequate support to address the critical changes facing our ag industry? right hon. Chair, I would suggest respectfully that the honourable member take a look once again at the announcement we made, which actually highlights significant new investments to support our agricultural industry. Every step of the way in this unprecedented situation, we've been moving forward on doing more, on adjusting and on investing more. We need to support our agricultural sector and the people who work so hard to put food on Canadians' tables right across the country and we will continue to. Chair, Canadians expect to find healthy and affordable food at their grocery stores, but if the government does not take action now, that's not a given. It is an enormous hit to their bottom line, and the recent carbon tax hike is taking even more money out of the pockets of farmers at a time when they can afford it the least. Will the Prime Minister exempt all farm operations from the carbon tax and reimburse the money that they have already taken from them? right hon. Chair, it's a shame to hear the member opposite accidentallyunintentionally, I'm certainmislead the House and Canadians. This is the way of creating a better future for our kids and grandkids, which I know people in communities right across the country, including our farm communities, want to see happen. We are moving forward in a responsible way to put a price on pollution and put more money in average Canadians' pockets. marilne gill (manicouagan, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I am thinking about the lobster fishery in the Magdalen Islands, the crab fishery on the Cte-Nord or those fishing for herring in the south of the Gasp. Because imports have ceased, because the domestic market is weak and in decline because of the interruption of the tourism and restaurant industries, the fishing industry and its fishers must be supported. justin trudeau: Our fishers do exceptional work that is extremely important in feeding Canadians and in contributing to our economic success through their exports around the world. I know about the processing industry and the $62.5million to be used essentially for freezing products, but I am talking about the fishers themselves. In addition, they feel that they will be losing money, because of the drop in the price of their resource. They are just as essential as farmers, but they are going to have to work at a loss and they are not going to have workers to assist them. Are you going to do anything else, in addition to the assistance of $62.5million? Time is of the essence. We recognize the challenges that fishers must face in terms of social distancing and of work that is often seasonal. We are going to continue working with the industry, with the fishers, and with the coastal communities in order to ensure that people have confidence in their abilities and in their future. In times of crisis, it is important for the government to be there to support people, and that is exactly what we are going to continue to do. But, given the cyclical nature of the industry, some sectors have had to postpone for several weeks the preparations they need for fishing activities. The current program could be modified in a number of ways, to accommodate the cycle, the dates, and the size of the companies. They would really like to take advantage of the $40,000loan, but they cannot because of their payroll. I can already suggest a number of solutions to the government and to the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, that would bring help to those businesses very quickly. The fishers carry on, because it is a duty for them, because they want to help us and to be part of the effort at this time of crisis. I would really like to hear a guarantee that they will be supported, that they will be able to put food on the table this year, and that they will be able to support the communities that often depend on the fishing industry, a major industry in those communities. justin trudeau: Minister Jordan has been working with the fishers, the fishing industry and the communities affected by the crisis since the crisis began. From the outset, our priority has been to support the millions of Canadians from coast to coast who have lost their jobs. We have been able to do so, but we are going to continue to work for those who must now face difficulties. the chair: Before we move to the next question, I would like to remind members of the committee to speak slowly, and to address their remarks to the chair and not directly to each other. They've seen revenues plummet, and at the same time the cost of delivering municipal services has risen. As the Prime Minister knows, municipalities are unable to run deficits and so they are facing the reality of cutbacks and serious cuts to the services that Canadians depend on. They're going to be even more important during the recovery, especially when it comes to delivering on the infrastructure programs before us. My question for the Prime Minister is, when can they expect federal financial support to arrive? right hon. Chair, no government in Canada's history has done more to work with our municipalities, with our cities, with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to respond to the challenges they're facing and to partner with them. Things from infrastructure to investments have made a huge difference right across the country in the quality of life of Canadians in towns, large and small, from coast to coast to coast. As I'm sure the member well knows, our Constitution requires that most of the funding for municipalities flow through the provinces. We are working with the provinces, as we continue to work with the cities, to ensure that we're able to support this order of government that delivers the vast majority of services to Canadians with very little financial means. Chair, it would seem that the federal government has the fiscal capacity and the responsibility to help municipalities weather this crisis. Transit systems have been hit particularly hard and have seen the bulk of the layoffs in the municipal sector. These transit services carry essential workers to work, whether they are health care workers, grocery store workers, janitors or others. We will see service cutbacks precisely at a time when we want to be expanding transit and improving transit in our communities. Does the Prime Minister acknowledge that the federal government needs to step in to safeguard and protect Canada's transit services? right hon. Chair, this federal government recognizes how important it is to support all Canadians, which is why we put forward unprecedented measures to help millions upon millions of Canadians with the CERB and with the wage subsidy. I'll be having a conversation with all other first ministers tonight to talk about a broad range of issues. We have continued to engage with them, but again, it is important to respect the Constitution and understand that funding for municipalities and cities does go through the provinces. The federal government is happy to be there to support, but it must be the chair: We will go to Mr. Chair, I am wondering how the Prime Minister could explain to a bus driver in Vancouver who has been laid off that as a public sector worker, she can't access the federal wage subsidy, while an equivalent worker in the airline industry gets to keep her job with the federal help of that program. Chair, I'm happy to explain to the member and to all Canadians that our Constitution creates federal areas of jurisdiction and provincial areas of jurisdiction. The airline industry, like banking, like telecommunications, is a federal area of jurisdiction that we have been able to move forward on. More than that, we brought the Canada emergency response benefit and the wage subsidy to all industries across this country, because we knew that as the federal government, it was something that we needed to step up on the chair: We will go back to Mr. Faced with minimal health care capacity, remote indigenous communities in my riding are taking matters into their own hands. The Nuxalk have put up a checkpoint on Highway 20 to protect community members and prevent non-essential travel. In particular, it is to protect the three remaining fluent speakers of the Nuxalk language, these cherished elders in their community. The Haida on Haida Gwaii have set up a similar checkpoint, as have communities throughout British Columbia, yet federal support for indigenous communities amounts to only $39 million for all of the indigenous communities in B.C. Does the Prime Minister not agree that more support is warranted to help indigenous communities in my riding and across the country? right hon. Chair, from the very beginning, we made funds available to Canadians right across the country, particularly people in indigenous remote or northern communities who we knew would be facing more difficult challenges because of the existing vulnerabilities in their health care system and socio-economic circumstances. We have made unprecedented investments and we will continue to make the necessary investments, because we need to make sure that indigenous Canadians, and indeed all Canadians, have the supports they need to make it through this crisis. luc berthold (mganticl'rable, cpc): Thank you very much, Mr.Chair. I am going to keep talking about the area of jurisdiction that the Prime Minister likes to talk about, except that I want to point out the incompetence of the Liberals in keeping their commitments on infrastructure projects. As the provinces gradually restart their economies, can the Prime Minister tell us how many projects that the provinces have submitted are waiting for approval from his government? mr. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, I hope that the length of the pause will not be taken out of my time. catherine mckenna (minister of infrastructure and communities): I'm sorry, Mr.Chair, I was on mute. It is very important to build projects that will create good jobs the chair: We are returning to Mr.Berthold. How many projects are currently awaiting government approval? I know that the minister has been meeting virtually with the provinces over the last few days. Rather than wait for the right political opportunity to approve these files, will the minister commit today to respecting the provinces and approving by next week all the projects that are sitting on her desk? hon. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, I'm pleased with how we are working with the provinces and territories. We will announce the approval of projects because it's very important for our economy, our communities and creating good jobs. luc berthold: Does the minister understand that she hasn't told us how many projects are still pending? The construction season is very short. Approval of a project in July means that work can't begin until next year, which won't help revive our economy. catherine mckenna: I want to make it clear that we have approved hundreds of projects in the last few weeks. These projects are important for the economy and the environment, as well as for jobs the chair: We return now to Mr.Berthold. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, while the minister is calling for a green recovery of the country's economy, public transit is at risk. The Union des municipalits du Qubec estimates that the monthly losses are between $75million and $100million. catherine mckenna: Mr.Chair, we recognize the importance of public transit for our economy, since some essential workers use public transit. As the Prime Minister said, it's the provinces that must help because the money the chair: We return now to Mr.Berthold. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, once again, what we're hearing is that the government is passing the buck to the provinces. Unfortunately, the minister was unable to answer a single question about the number of infrastructure projects still on the federal government's desk, which is very important. In terms of the number of projects that we've approved, I would be happy to inform the hon. member of the exact number of all the approved projects that my department has been working very hard on over the past few months to approve projects to go forward. luc berthold: Mr.Chair, do I have any time left? the chair: No, your time is up. On March 28, the minister personally tweeted out a thank you to the People's Republic of China for donating PPE to Canada. More recently, Taiwan donated half a million surgical masks to Canada, yet here we are, two weeks later, and the minister has yet to personally thank Taiwan for its generosity. I can say, after my COVID foreign ministers call, that the world community has come together to make sure that supply chains will remain intact and that we will have transit hubs and air bridges. Chair, I didn't hear a thank you there, so I'm going to try again. On May 4, the Government of Taiwan delivered 25,000 surgical masks to the Government of British Columbia. Minister of Citizens' Services Anne Kang and Minister of State for Child Care Katrina Chen, who, as ministers, officially thanked the Government of Taiwan for its donation. Again, will the minister now do the right thing and, on behalf of Canadians, recognize the generosity of Taiwan and thank its government for that timely donation? hon. Chair, as I said to you before, Canada is grateful to all who have given supplies to Canada. As I said, when it comes to global health, when it comes to helping each other, I think it is a duty for all to come together. We are grateful and thankful for all those who have agreed to help Canada and Canadians from coast to coast to coast in times of need. I've repeated that and have said many times in many forums that we are grateful and thankful to all of those who are helping Canada. The Government of Taiwan has been the world leader in successfully fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Sadly, the People's Republic of China continues to oppose Taiwan's membership in the World Health Organization. Will the minister now do the right thing and assure Canadians that he will fully support efforts to grant Taiwan membership in the World Health Organization? hon. That said, we support Taiwan to continue meaningful participation in international multilateral forums, particularly when it comes to health. We also believe that Taiwan's role as an observer in the World Health Assembly meeting is of interest to the international health community and we have been supportive of that. Can he tell us exactly how many Canadians remain abroad who have expressed a desire to be repatriated? hon. As of today, we have repatriated more than 20,000 Canadians on 232 flights from 87 countries. As the Prime Minister and I have said from the beginning, we will make our best effort to repatriate everyone who wants to come back home during the crisis. My office has received correspondence from Canadians concerned that trial delays due to COVID-19 may result in criminals walking free. As this government has been working overtime to criminalize law-abiding citizens with new and useless gun laws, will the Minister of Justice ensure that real criminals will not walk free as a result of delays in the justice system? hon. We have been working with my provincial counterparts across Canada, as well as with the various federal courts and also, through my provincial counterparts, with the superior courts and courts of appeal across Canada. Each particular jurisdiction has taken measures to ensure that basic essential services within the court system are maintained, through a variety of means, and we believe that we will be able to solve these various challenges. Chair, the regional relief and recovery fund was announced weeks ago as a way to help small and medium-sized businesses in rural communities, like those in my riding. Can the minister clarify whether we are days away or weeks away from this support flowing to the businesses that need it so desperately? hon. Chair, I had the chance to talk with many of the chambers of commerce and business owners throughout Atlantic Canada, and we hear their anxiety. That's why ACOA's doing great work on the ground to make sure we can help them through this very difficult period. We have increased the budget of ACOAgood newsand I'll be coming up with the details very soon. It will be a pleasure to collaborate with him to make sure that we can help many businesses and business owners across the Atlantic region. In particular, they are unable to access the emergency business account, because they do not have a payroll. There are hundreds and thousands of small businesses in this very situation, vital small businesses in our communities, but they do not meet this requirement. What does the Minister of Finance have to say to these small businesses that are suffering right now? hon. I want all the businesses that he is talking about and all of them throughout the country to know that we continue to work very hard to make sure they're supported through this difficult period. We know that businesses are being supported through getting access to the wage subsidy to keep their employees together, and they're getting help, whether it's with rent or to defray costs by deferring GST and HST or customs duty payments. Some have a personal account that they've dealt with over the years rather than a business account, and that makes them ineligible. Chair, small businesses are concerned about their ability to survive, and no amount of deferrals, loans or subsidies can substitute for their need to be open and servicing their customers. Can the government confirm that a sectoral risk analysis has taken place to assist the provinces in reopening the economy? hon. Chair, I can assure the member that we've been very clear in terms of our strategy around reopening the economy. We need to make sure that we follow the advice of the experts and the health authorities to do so in a manner that does not compromise the health and well-being of Canadians. We of course will have a sectoral lens, and as you can see by some of the initiatives and the support packages we've put forward the chair: We'll go back to Mr. Can the government confirm that the programs currently in place will be expanded to these hard-working Canadians? hon. Chair, I want to assure the honourable member that we continue to work with all of our small businesses and I want to thank him for raising this very important issue. I want to assure our Canadian small businesses that we are going to continue to do this work to make sure they are supported. james cumming: Can the minister give me a date when she will be able to announce to these businesses that they will be eligible? hon. mary ng: I want to assure our Canadian small businesses of their importance and of the importance of their contributions to all of our communities. I want them to know that we continue to listen and that we will ensure that they are supported and continue to be supported during this difficult time. Can you give me a date when I can tell these thousands of businesses they will be supported if they pay dividends or if they use contractors within their businesses? hon. The landlord says that he doesn't have the 25% needed to be eligible for the program because he's already paying for common area costs and deferrals on utilities, which he will have to pay on his mortgage. Will the government reform the rent relief program to focus on tenants and not just the landlords? hon. Chair, I want to let the member know that we are working to make sure that the details of the emergency program for rent are out there so that both tenants and landlords can understand the situation. We're seeing a significant number of both landlords and tenants coming forward to register for this program, and we are convinced that it will be in the best interests of landlords to move forward and give tenants this relief. Chair, we've been hearing, however, from small business owners that their landlords don't find the government's rent relief program appealing enough. Can the government confirm, given the program's low eligibility rate, that the program will be expanded and be more efficient in helping tenants? hon. Chair, we recognize that it's critically important that all of the details of this program be out there for landlords and tenants to understand. This is a program that we've put out within the last week, and we are confident that it's in the best interests of tenants and landlords. One easy way to do that would be to expand the Canada summer jobs program to businesses with over 50 employees. Will the government consider doing so to allow students to gain that very valuable work experience over the coming months? hon. The second uptake provided employers across the country with the ability to add their needs for students to the mix. During this pandemic, the government has consistently called for a team Canada, non-partisan approach, and I was glad to hear that said a little earlier today. However, at the same time, the current government has used a parliamentary back door to launch a poorly thought out gun ban. We have a government that didn't win the popular vote, and I'm just wondering how I explain to my residents, because I'm getting so many calls, that this is not a bloated response because, quite frankly, it is. Chair, I think the honourable member can explain to his constituents that the forming of regulations through order in council is actually the process prescribed in law in Canada under section 117.15 of the Criminal Code. I would also invite the member to advise his constituents that way back in 1991, when there were some Conservatives who called themselves Progressive, the Mulroney government brought forward, in Bill C-17, the authority under that section for an order in council to prescribe specific makes, models and variants of military firearms as prohibited or restricted. terry dowdall: I'm not sure, but I'm hoping, that I'll get an honest answer on this question from the minister, who has everything from rocket launchers to basically toy guns on the ban list. When will we get the cost of this buyback program? the chair: I want to remind the honourable members to please be careful in their language when they are referring to others. I won't comment on this one particularly, but I want all of you to be very, very careful when referring to other members. Chair, to respond to some of the obfuscations and deceptions that have been put out there. I think it's very clear, and I invite the member to look at the list of weapons that are the chair: We'll go back to Mr. bill blair: Actually, I'm very much looking forward to bringing forward legislation as soon as the House resumes. We will have a vigorous debate in Parliament about the form a buyback will take and we will bring forward a budget at that time. bill blair: If people are illegally in possession of the weapons and they're committing a crime, they will be dealt with for the crimes they commit. Canadians in my riding who suffer from cystic fibrosis are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 infection. While these Canadians with existing lung conditions are incredibly worried about a virus that attacks the ability to breathe, the good news is that there are life-saving medicines for those with CF. I am wondering if and when the government will correct these guidelines and give access to life-saving medicines for our most vulnerable. Chair, as you know, the government has been very committed to improving access and affordability for prescription medications for all Canadians. The PMPRB regulatory amendments will help Canadians be able to afford their prescriptions, and Canada will continue to be an important market for new medicines. In fact, many countries with much lower medicine prices gained access to new medicines in the same time frame as Canada frame, or even faster, so we are excited to do this work. Chair, our seniors are being particularly hard hit right now during this pandemic, yet seniors have not been given any direct support. Funding to charities like the United Way is being labelled as support for seniors, but most won't see any of this support. Seniors in my riding have asked for an increase in their CPP and OAS, and to be able to make untaxed bulk withdrawals from their RRSPs while they still have some value. deb schulte (minister of seniors): I want to assure the honourable member and Canadians that our government has been working extremely hard on how best to support and serve seniors during this pandemic. the chair: You might want to try your space bar and keep it down while you're speaking. I want to assure the honourable member and Canadians that our government has been working extremely hard on how best to support and serve seniors during this pandemic. We've reduced the minimum RRIF withdrawal by 25%, and we've made the CERB available to working seniors who have lost their jobs due to the COVID pandemic. We know there's more work to do, and we'll have more to say in the future. the chair: I want to remind honourable members that if there are issues, we are taking note of them, and we'll hopefully resolve them by the next meeting. marie-hlne gaudreau (laurentideslabelle, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. In fact, we have been looking at a number of ways to support increased contact tracing across the country, including working with provinces and territories to boost their capacity through human resources and volunteer organizations. Anything we put forward as a digital tool to assist with contact tracing would be thoroughly considerate of Canadians' privacy rights. But you know as well as I do that the Privacy Commissioner has been calling us to task for a very long time now, because there is also a crisis of confidence. You know as well as I do that for 90%of Canadians, the misuse of their personal data is a cause for concern, whether it be for profiling or business development purposes. I'd like to know whether this commitment will be implemented quickly so that legislation can be passed on this issue, in this case the Privacy Act. We're talking about what is going on in Quebec, among other places, and I would like to make sure that the federal government commits to respecting the proposals regarding geolocation and contact tracing possibilities, with full respect for the right to privacy. We have worked very closely with provinces and territories for a long time before the outbreak, but certainly ever since the outbreak. We respect the rights of jurisdictional authorities to use tools that have been properly vetted through their own provincial and territorial legislation. marie-hlne gaudreau: Concerning privacy, there are 30million Quebeckers and Canadians who have had their personal data leaked. Why is it that our laws don't allow us to apply financial penalties so that we can then go further? The very basis is to be concerned about our fundamental rights. As the critic for access to information and privacy, I'd like a commitment that the federal government will deal not with what the provinces are doing, but with the Privacy Act. the chair: Your time is up, but I'll give the floor to the minister for 30seconds. Our government will ensure the privacy of Canadians is respected, support responsible innovation and take reasonable steps to strengthen enforcement powers. yvan baker (etobicoke centre, lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Minister, in my riding of Etobicoke Centre, we are mourning the loss of 40 residents to COVID-19 at the Eatonville long-term care centre. Of all Canadians who have died from COVID-19, 79% were living in long-term care homes. I understand that long-term care homes fall within the jurisdiction of provincial governments in Canada, but this is a crisis. What is the federal government doing right now to help protect our seniors who are living in long-term care homes from COVID-19? What will we do to reform our long-term care homes in the future to ensure that our seniors in Etobicoke Centre and across Canada get the care they deserve? hon. We are deeply concerned by the outbreaks of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities, and our thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one. As my colleague mentioned, while these facilities are regulated by provinces and territories, we have been focused on protecting the health and safety of long-term care residents and staff while working with our partners in a team Canada approach. We're working with the provinces and territories to cost-share a temporary salary top-up for long-term care workers. We are working through investing $2 billion to secure personal protective equipment for the health of workers, including those in the long-term care homes, and we've deployed the Canadian Armed Forces to assist 25 long-term care homes in Quebec and Ontario. We all have a role to play to stop the spread of COVID-19 and to protect our seniors and caregivers. At the finance committee, we've heard a lot of concerns from all sectors of the economy as a result of COVID-19 and we've been presented with quite a number of possible solutions as well, several of which the government has acted upon. It is very welcome support, but I sincerely believe the farm sector will be taking the Prime Minister up on the suggestion that $250 million should be seen as an initial investment. However, as a result of reduced processor contracts for next year, plus cancelled seed contracts, millions of dollars of seed and process potatoes have no home. How does the minister see Tuesday's announcement addressing potato farmers' concerns? Second, in 2013, long-term financial safety nets were gutted by the Harper government. We know the importance of our potato farmers, and that's why we are launching a first-ever surplus food purchase program, a $50-million fund designed to help redistribute existing inventories, such as potatoes, to local food organizations. On the financial safety net that we have in place for our farmers, called the business risk management program, we announced up to $125 million in funding through AgriRecovery and made changes to AgriStability that will help producers quickly. In the meantime, I want to reiterate that BRM programs, including AgriInvest, are there to help farmers in difficult times. Robyn, who has owned Arbutus Health in Tofino for over 13 years, can't apply for the Canada emergency business account loan, simply because she doesn't have a payroll of over $20,000. With no business income and without emergency financing, it is virtually impossible for her to pay her bills or come up with the 25% needed for the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance program. The government promised to be flexible and willing to adjust its COVID response rollout so that nobody falls through the cracks, but Robyn, like tens of thousands of proprietors who are the economic job creators of our communities, urgently needs the government's help now. Will the government amend its programs to help more business owners so that people like Robyn don't lose their businesses? hon. I know he and I have talked about this, and I appreciate the input and the feedback that he is providing from business directly. I want to assure Robyn and her businesses, and many businesses across the country, that we are absolutely listening, and we will continue to make sure we are supporting those businesses during this period. We also know that more has to be done, and we will continue to work with you and businesses across the country so that we can indeed give them that necessary support to weather this difficult period of COVID-19. I was talking to Heather last night, who also owns a business in Tofino, Basic Goodness Pizzeria, with her partner Marco. Like many proprietors of family businesses who aren't on payroll, they don't qualify for the business loans. Now with the new rollout of the rent support, they're not sure if their landlord is willing to play ball and even apply. Heather was in tears last night as she told me that they have done nothing wrong to deserve being excluded from these emergency programs. Will the government fix the rent support program so that tenants can apply, instead of leaving it up to landlords, and so businesses can get the help they desperately need? hon. We've been working on offering a response for small businesses and charities and non-profit organizations, and we are continuing to listen on the ground to how we can better assist the businesses that fall through the cracks. Chair, when the government rolled out its commercial rent support program, why didn't it negotiate an eviction moratorium with the provinces, as Australia and other countries did, to protect business owners? hon. We've recognized it and we've been working with the provinces and territories to implement the Canada emergency commercial rent the chair: We'll go back to Mr. gord johns: To qualify for the Canada emergency wage subsidy, a 30% drop in revenue has to be shown. Anyone who's owned a business knows that even with this program, it's going to be hard to survive. Why is the government using a 70% measurement drop to qualify for the rent support program, but a 30% drop for the wage subsidy? hon. We've been working with provinces and territories to provide forgivable loans to commercial property owners, who in turn lower the rents for their tenants by 75%. We're hoping that tenants and landlords will be working together so we can support businesses during this very difficult crisis. the chair: Before we move on to the next question, Mr.Berthold, did you have a question or a point of order? mr. I checked the clock from the first round of five minutes, and as you may recall, it took a very long time for me to get an answer from the government. During my first turn, it took 50seconds before a government minister deigned to answer my questions. After checking my time, I realized that the discussion between Ms.McKenna and I went on for four minutes and 14seconds, so I wasn't able to ask the minister one final question, a very important one. I would ask you to take that into account and allow me to ask MinisterMcKenna one last question, please. the chair: The person chairing the meeting uses their judgment and does their best to keep an eye on what's going on. I think it's more or less equal for all the members, but I apologize if the honourable member feels that he was denied a few seconds. bill blair: The decision to close the border was made in Canada by Canadians in the best interest of Canadians. todd doherty: When will the government be in a position to inform Canadians of any changes to the agreement? hon. bill blair: I'm pleased to advise the member that we're continuing to monitor the situation, but I'm strongly of the opinion that the circumstances on both sides of our border do not indicate that this is the right time to make a change in the restrictions. todd doherty: Can the government confirm whether there are any discussions about reopening the border to certain modes of transportation and restricting others? the chair: Before I go to the minister, I want to remind the honourable members that we do have translators, and they are trying to translate. With respect to them, I know we're trying to get as many questions in as possible, but they do have to translate them, so please be considerate of our interpreters. chrystia freeland (deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs): Let me please inform the honourable member that we are, of course, aware that the current agreement expires. navdeep bains: We are engaged with the industry, and we are working with them on a solution, Mr. Chair, will this relief package include funding for airline ticket refunds similar to what other countries around the world have done? Yes or no? hon. Chair, I can confirm that Air Canada has now adopted a policy of checking temperatures for passengers boarding Air Canada flights. Last week I asked the Minister of Labour if they were aware of a letter written on April 6 by CUPE to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Labour. Minister, were you aware of that letter? the chair: I want to remind the honourable members to place their questions through the Chair and not directly. todd doherty: On April 6, CUPE wrote a letter to the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Labour. Before that I had conversations with CUPE with respect to flight attendants and the use of personal protective equipment. todd doherty: Can the minister confirm whether or not they have provided PPE to the flight attendants and/or training for front-line staff for airlines and airports? hon. This has become a policy to ensure the safety not only of passengers on board but also of the flight attendants and flight crew. He stated that he couldn't give his small business tenants a break on rent because the government is penalizing him for paying off his mortgage. Chair, as you know, we laid out the CECRA program just last week, and we are encouraging landlords to take that opportunity to support the renters. Is the minister aware of this, and are they trying to revise the CECRA program? hon. mona fortier: As you know, we've been working with provinces and territories to present that program. We are asking, actually encouraging, landlords to do their part and help tenants, like the one you mentioned, go through this. It's been heartbreaking, frankly, to hear that everything they've built and sacrificed for is in serious jeopardy, and through no fault of their own. Your government has created programs that are supposed to help them, but many legitimate businesses aren't able to apply. I'm hoping to hear specifics, not just nice words, on what you're going to do to help them. First, businesses that recently incorporatedfor example, in late 2019are unable to apply their entire 2019 payroll. As a result, many are falling short of the $20,000 payroll threshold required to qualify for this loan. What is your government going to do about these three scenarios? the chair: I just want to remind honourable members to place their questions through the Chair and not directly to the minister. As well, please take into consideration the interpreters, who have to listen and translate, so that we can have this conversation. Right from the very beginning, we've always said that we will listen and that we will work to make sure that measures go out to help our Canadian small businesses. She's absolutely right: 98% of all our businesses in this country are small businesses, so they absolutely contribute enormously to our communities and are job creators. For the Canada emergency business account, over 550,000 small businesses have been approved and are getting that support. I can assure the honourable member that we will continue to do this work so that businesses, all businesses, are supported, whether it is helping keep your employees together, helping with rent support, helping to keep your business's expenses low, or of course helping with the capital that is needed so that you can pay your operating expenses and your bills through this difficult time. Moving on, there are two issues regarding the 50% commercial rent assistance subsidy, where landlords pay 25%, the government pays 50%, and the tenant is responsible for 25%. First, many of the small landlords aren't able to take a 25% hit to their income, and are unable to provide the subsidy to their tenants. Second, with the 70% decline in revenue threshold for small businesses to even be eligible for the rent assist, many restaurants are at 65% or 67% decline. What is the government planning to do to streamline this program for small businesses that can't access but desperately need the rent subsidy? hon. Chair, as the Minister of Official Languages, I just want to raise the fact that interpretation is very complicated right now. In order to make sure that we can continue to uphold bilingualism within the House, I would love it if my colleagues could take down the pace a bit. I just want to remind everyone again that when you're asking a question, make sure you are doing it at a pace at which you're considering the people who are interpreting ms. mona fortier: As you know, we've been working with the provinces and territories to provide this forgivable loan to commercial property owners, who in turn lower the rent of their tenants by 75%. It will be very important that we understand what happens across the country, and we will monitor and adapt the program as we ms. Chair, it has been in the media quite a bit that this rent subsidy is not helping many, many, many small business owners. It's falling short of everything that was announced, so I think it needs to be taken a bit more seriously than that. We know that some still fall through the cracks and we will look at how we can continue to support businesses across the country. alexandra mends (brossardsaint-lambert, lib.)): We are now going to Mr. Three weeks ago, on April 17, the Minister of Canadian Heritage announced funding of $500 million to assist Canada's arts, sports and cultural sectors. steven guilbeault (minister of canadian heritage): Madam Chair, we will be releasing the details of that announcement, and how the money is going to be spent, in the coming days. kevin waugh: We all know that many media organizations, large and small, in Canada are struggling right now. Allegations have arisen that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC, is currently engaging in predatory behaviour and taking advantage of the current situation to harm its competitors using rate cuts. kevin waugh: Local community and ethnic media outlets and papers have strong ties to their communities that often go much deeper than the major media outlets. Is the government currently using any local or ethnic media outlets to provide crucial coronavirus information through advertising? hon. We need to get the information to Canadians on COVID-19, which is why we have started an ad-buy campaign of $30 million, which is being distributed in more than 900 local, regional and national newspapers across the country and 500 radio and TV stations in 12 different languages, including Farsi, Mandarin, Spanish, Italian and many more. It has received two ads from an ad agency in connection with the $30 million the government is doling out to help media outlets. Is this the kind of money you're attempting to dole out to help media: two ads in eight weeks? hon. steven guilbeault: Madam Chair, we have been doing a number of things for our media in Canada over the last few months and will continue to do so. On top of that $30 million ad-buy campaign, we have been investing $50 million in local journalism. Just this year, it means that 200 journalists will be hired in areas across the country where journalism is more poorly defined. kevin waugh: Madam Chair, last week, as the minister would know, 15 community newspapers, including eight in Manitoba and seven in the province of Ontario, closed their doors for good. Is the government currently planning any further measures aimed at assisting community or ethnic media organizations? We understand that many more will close their doors within the next 30 to 60 days. steven guilbeault: We are planning a number of other measures, some of which will be included in the $500 million. Of the $595 million that the media will receive, we have a tax credit that has now entered into force, and the cheques should be in the mail by the end of the summer. So there are a number of things we've done and a number of things we will be doing in the coming months as well. kevin waugh: Well, finally, you have the five members associated with that committee to dole out the $595 million. colleague that in order for us to provide tax breaks for the 2019 period, media outlets had to file their tax returns so we could go ahead. jol godin (portneufjacques-cartier, cpc): Thank you, MadamChair. This being the first time I've had the floor during a virtual sitting of Parliament, I'd like to take this opportunity to greet my fellow members, all 259participants. I'd like to talk about the Prime Minister's appearance on the show Tout le monde en parle. This is what he had to say about his economic recovery plan: We are going to remain focused on the economy as a wholeinnovationresearch and science, the green economy and a fairer economyThere are things we are all reflecting on right now that reflection is going to continue. Can the government assure Canadians that it is being proactive and working on a plan to get the economy moving again? It must act now. Our government is wholly committed to restarting the economy, and we are working closely with the provinces to do just that. Last week, our government, together with the provincial and territorial premiers, released the principles that will guide efforts to restore economic activity across the country. jol godin: MadamChair, before we go any further, since it took a while for the minister, or the government, to answer the question, can I have that time back to ask questions? the acting chair (mrs. The Prime Minister's answer during his appearance on Tout le monde en parle didn't inspire much confidence and doesn't line up with the Deputy Prime Minister's comments. How can the government be proud of announcing $252million in assistance for the agri-food sector, when that is less than 1% of all the program funding the government has committed to help Canadians get through the COVID-19 crisis? Clearly, the government doesn't see the food supply chain as a priority and has no regard for farmers and pork and beef producers. Does the government realize that eating is vital to Canadians? When is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food going to adjust the program and show respect for Canadian farmers? hon. This week, we focused on beef and pork producers and processors, as well as sectors with product surpluses that can be redirected to food banks. I can assure my fellow member that this is an additional step and that more supports are on the way in the weeks ahead. PortneufJacques-Cartier is home to a company that is already licensed by Health Canada and that, for 20years, has been manufacturing medical equipment including masks, face shields and thermometers. In mid-March, Health Canada reached out to the company to find out how much equipment it could manufacture to help fight COVID-19. The company confirmed that it could immediately start producing 200,000masks a week, ramping up to a million masks over the next few weeks. Can the health minister tell us why, 45days later, this company licensed by Health Canada hasn't received an order? hon. Industry and suppliers have enthusiastically answered our call to equip Canada with products and goods during the crisis. Seniors living alone are most at risk of economic insecurity, particularly single senior women, as gender inequality in the job market has translated all too often into inadequate retirement income. Madam Chair, can the minister commit to implementing a poverty reduction plan that addresses the unique challenges faced by older women? hon. deb schulte: Madam Chair, I want to assure the member that we are quite aware that this pandemic has typically affected single seniors, and many of those, given that they live longer, are single senior women. I want to assure her that we are working on this issue, and we have provided some supports already through measures such as the GST supplementary payment. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, older women represent a high proportion of residents in long-term care facilities. Having spent their lives caring for parents, children and often their partners, they find themselves needing care in nursing homes. Multiple outbreaks of COVID-19 in long-term care homes in Canada have highlighted systemic gaps that senior and elderly women may face in such facilities, as well as the working conditions of the female-dominated ranks of nurses and personal support workers. Madam Chair, can the minister commit to implementing a federal strategy for long-term care homes that recognizes quality of life for residents and working conditions for the employees, ideally one that goes hand in hand with a poverty reduction plan and enhanced home and community care investments across the country? hon. We are obviously deeply saddened by the outbreaks that have been going on in long-term care facilities and those who have lost their lives. We do recognize that the administration of long-term care and palliative care is the responsibility of provinces and territories; however, we have been taking a team Canada approach, and as you already know, we've been doing tremendous work with them to try to ensure that those who live in those facilities can be well cared for and safe. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, from May 4 to May 10, we are observing Mental Health Week. We know that our essential workers right now are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety, on top of putting their own physical safety and health on the line. Most of these workers work in precarious jobs with no access to paid sick leave or vacation, and without any benefits to access mental health services. Apart from the very welcome investments in online resources, can the minister explain how the government will support these workers now and once the crisis is behind us? hon. I'm so glad that she's raising the issue of mental health and in particular how poor mental health is oftentimes connected to our socio-economic status. We do have new resources that are available to all Canadians free of charge through the Wellness Together portal, but there is more to do. I think the announcement of top-up wages, for example, which the Prime Minister spoke about today, is another example of how we're taking the health and wellness of all low-income Canadians very seriously. We know that mental health is not divorced from socio-economic status, and I look forward to working with her more on other measures that we can take together. jenica atwin: Madam Chair, we're all very aware of the importance of temporary foreign workers and their role in ensuring our food sovereignty across this country. How are we protecting them? Madam Chair, will the government take action to strengthen legislation and ensure Canadians have access to the food they need while the workers who help bring it to our tables have safe working conditions, regardless of where they are working in this country? hon. We are very concerned, as are countries around the world, that we support and create the environment for the health and safety of our temporary foreign workers and we value their contribution to our food supply chain here in Canada. We have issued guidelines to employers and are working very closely with local public health authorities in the provinces and territories to make sure workers are protected, that physical distancing and other recommendations are adhered to and that there are severe consequences if employers don't take care of their workers. alistair macgregor (cowichanmalahatlangford, ndp): Thank you, Madam Chair. My first question is this: Will the Liberal government prevent federal bailout funds from going to companies that use tax havens and avoid paying their fair share here in Canada, yes or no? hon. diane lebouthillier (minister of national revenue): We are working to make sure that anyone who tries to circumvent the rules faces serious consequences. Anyone who abuses the program could face fines of up to 225% of the subsidy amount as well as five years in prison. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, I didn't really hear a yes to that question, so I'll repeat it. Does the government really think it's appropriate for tax-avoiding corporations to receive funding provided for by taxpayers? hon. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, the agriculture funding announced by the government earlier this week amounts to less than 10% of what the Canadian Federation of Agriculture estimates will be required to help farmers weather this crisis. I have to remind my colleague that we have put in $5 billion through FCC, $50 million for the temporary foreign workers, two times $50 million for pork and beef producers this week, and $77 million for food processing. This is only the beginning, and we should not forget that the business risk management programs are still there to offer support. alistair macgregor: Yes, Madam Chair, but we're nearly two months into this pandemic and this announcement only came this week. marie-claude bibeau: Madam Chair, we are working closely with the farmers and their representatives to identify where the gaps are, but once again, we have made improvements to the AgriStability program. They can get, depending on the province, either 50% or 75% in advance payments, and they can also, right now, access their AgriInvest program. There is more than $2 billion ready to access today, if they have the acting chair (mrs. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, federal disability recipients and seniors on fixed incomes have been hardest hit by cost of living increases from COVID-19. If we acknowledge that $2,000 per month is the minimum needed to get through this time, why are they being asked to survive on far less? When can they expect assistance, and how much will they receive? hon. deb schulte: Madam Chair, I want to make sure people realize that we have provided some assistance through the GST supplementary benefit. We are also providing support to those who are still working, and we have done that by allowing them to access the CERB. alistair macgregor: Madam Chair, as I think we've heard through today's question period, there are countless example of this government designing programs to exclude many small businesses that desperately need help. Whether it's the payroll requirements or other eligibility, we still, to this day, almost two months into the pandemic, have too many small businesses falling through the cracks. Madam Chair, why has the government taken this approach and when can we finally expect fixes to the whole system? hon. mary ng: Madam Chair, right from the get-go, we have been committed to making sure that Canadians are helped through this crisis, and that small businesses get the support that they need, so that we are saving businesses and jobs in this country. yves perron (berthiermaskinong, bq): Thank you, Mr.Chair. I hear the questions my fellow members are asking, and to be frank, I don't find the answers satisfactory. It is well and good to talk about existing programs, but they aren't working, so enough with that refrain. This morning, both farmers and processors came together for a press conference at the Union des producteurs agricoles's head office in Longueuil. Can the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food therefore tell us when she will announce significant supports for the industry? hon. marie-claude bibeau: We have already announced significant amounts of support, and more is on the way. It's not that the programs aren't working; it's that they aren't generous enough in farmers' eyes. That's why I'm working with my provincial counterparts to make improvements to programming, including AgriStability. After using the online AgriStability benefit estimator, a pork producer found out that he would get $11 per head, as they say in the industry. Pork producers are calling for $20 per head, so it's a good start, even though it's not enough and it isn't what they are asking for. We want to keep working together, but farmers have to access the money available to them through AgriStability. Even before the crisis, we were hearing from people in the industry that the programs were neither suitable nor sufficient. A few days ago, the government announced $50million in funding for pork producers, even though they are asking for $20per hog for 27million hogs. When is the government going to announce a whole lot more in funding support? What's been announced so far is only 10% of what farmers are asking for. However, I would point out to the member that, when it comes to AgriRecovery, we made an exception to the rule. That's two funding envelopes of $50million each to help cover the additional costs from the decrease in plant processing capacity. As the Prime Minister said, we are going to do more, and we are moving forward step by step. yves perron: What we concluded in committee this week is that the $125million is not new money. The government can't say that programs already exist and, at the same time, claim that they are new programs. Everyone knows that the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement came into force a month earlier than planned, despite the promises that had been made. An easy way to make money available without committing new spending is to provide compensation and announce programs for supply-managed sectors that got nothing. It seems to me that a time of crisis is a time for the government to practise some judo and announce measures. I am reaching out to the government, as I always do, but it has to come forward with announcements. marie-claude bibeau: Our commitment to farmers in supply-managed sectorsmeaning, egg, poultry and dairy farmersis as strong as it always was. Support for poultry and egg farmers is in the form of investment programs, which aligns well with the recovery. At this time, we are focusing on emergency programs to help farmers hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. As you know, legislative changes are needed to grant the Canadian Dairy Commission's request and increase its borrowing limit by $200million so it can buy more butter and cheese. Chair, we're all inundated, as we've heard during this entire question period, with Canadians' concerns about the economic restrictions and the social restrictions that they're under. Over the last couple of months, the WHO has given one very consistent message in terms of coming out of those economic and social restrictions. Tedros said in his briefing, We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test. On March 25, 44 days ago, he said, Aggressive measures to find, isolate, test, treat and trace are not only the best and fastest way out of extreme social and economic restrictionstheyre also the best way to prevent them. Does the minister agree with the WHO that relentless testing and tracing are critical to a successful economic and social relaunch strategy in Canada? hon. Absolutely, we agree that testing and contact tracing will form an important part of our response to living with COVID. We've been investing heavily in ensuring that we have the lab capacity, the collaboration across provinces and territories, and the variety of testing options to help us increase our capacity to test. We are aiming right now for a high volume of tests, but I will also say that in Canada we have one of the highest testing rates in the world. Although we're doing well, I can assure him that I am with him and I believe we need to do more. Chair, as I mentioned to his colleagues yesterday, we have currently the capacity to do approximately 60,000 tests per day across the country. Chair, it's hard for me to get that exact number, but I will get back to him with the exact number. She said, As a first tranche, roughly close to 60,000 is where the provinces can potentially expand to as a target already. Does the minister happen to know, ballpark, what the average number of daily tests in Canada has been since that statement? hon. patty hajdu: Your estimate was slightly higher than what my estimate was going to be, so that's a great piece of news. Listen, I will just say that I think if the premise here is that we could be doing more testing. I would agree, but I will also say that the provinces and territories are working incredibly hard on testing strategies that meet their own specific needs. Tam works with all the chief public health officers across the country to ensure that their testing strategy is going to be applicable and appropriate for their particular jurisdictions. mike lake: Following up on that, is there a jurisdiction in Canada where relentless testing is not the appropriate strategy as provinces consider relaunching? hon. For example, in British Columbia, where there are relatively fewer cases in general and less disease activity, they may have a different testing strategy than a province like Ontario, which is currently struggling with more outbreaks. mike lake: Given your comment that our current testing capability is 60,000, and acknowledging that only at one point in the entire history of our COVID response, over several months, has our weekly average been over 30,000it was about 31,000 for one day on a rolling basisMinister, are you satisfied with our current testing amounts right now, given that we're testing 50% of what the public health officer advises would be best? hon. patty hajdu: I'm so amazed by the work the provinces and territories have done in a very short time to increase their capacity. We are supporting them with the tools that they need to get more testing done, but also to have other components in place that will allow them to do the rapid tracing of positive cases. I think it's very important to remember that testing strategies will be different across the provinces, based on the outbreak disease epidemiology. Having said that, I know that we can all do better, and I'm certain that my counterparts feel the same<doc-sep>I've received apologies for absence from Siân Gwenllian, and I'm very pleased to welcome Helen Mary Jones, who is substituting for Siân today. Can I ask whether Members want to declare any interests, please? Can I just, then, place on record that I have got a son who was about to do A-levels, so is affected by the exam decision? We'll move on, then, to our substantive item today, which is an evidence session with the Welsh Government around the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on education in Wales. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Minister for Education; Steve Davies, who is director of the education directorate; Huw Morris, who is the group director, skills, higher education and lifelong learning; and Rob Orford, who is the chief scientific adviser for health. We know that this is a really difficult and pressurised time for everyone, and we appreciate your attendance. As you know, it's not usually my practice to do that, but I think it is important today. COVID-19 coronavirus is one of the most significant issues that the Welsh Government and the people of Wales have dealt with in recent times. But I would like to assure you that our aim, and my aim, and my main concern as the education Minister is to protect all staff and pupils in our schools and other educational settings. Public health is clearly the priority here, but that does not change our belief that no child should miss out on any education, unless absolutely necessary. So, the decision to close all schools from tomorrow for statutory education provision was not taken lightly, but I believe it was necessary, given the advice and recommendations that we had received from a public health perspective and the situation that was developing on the ground. They will help support those most in need, including people involved in the immediate response to the coronavirus outbreak, and I'm working with my colleagues in the Cabinet, with Government officials and our partners in local government to develop and finalise these plans. The key areas that we're looking at are supporting and safeguarding the vulnerable and ensuring continuity of learning. I can confirm that all maintained schools in Wales already have access to a range of digital tools that can support distance learning through the world-class Hwb digital learning platform, including virtual classrooms and video-conferencing facilities. A guide on what tools are available and how schools can use them has been developed and is being promoted widely. Yesterday, I announced that, whilst there are no easy choices, we have agreed that the best way forward is not to proceed with the summer exam series. Learners due to sit these exams will be awarded a fair grade to recognise their work, drawing on a range of information that is available, and I will announce further details shortly, but I felt it necessary to give early certainty to students and to staff. I would like to put on record my thanks to everyone working in education settings for the hard work that they have put in over the last few months in dealing with the virus and ensuring that pupils have been able to continue to learn. We need to continue to do this work together, as we face the continuing challenges posed by the coronavirus. We'll go to questions from Members now, and I've got some questions from Dawn Bowden. Can I thank you, Kirsty, for your statement and the really difficult decisions that you've been having to make? You've already indicated in your statement this morning that these decisions are not taken lightly, and we understand that that is the case across Government. You've outlined a little bit further there in your statement to us this morning about the new purpose. I take from what you're saying that you haven't really developed that yet in terms of exactly what that is going to look like. Is there anything else you can tell us about that at the moment and how you might staff the schools in those particular areas? kirsty williams am: Thank you, Dawn. So, you're absolutely right, our priority now is to operationalise, with colleagues in local government and schools, a practical response. And I have to say, we're working to timescales that I would have hoped to have avoided, but given the fact that we're having to make these decisions quite quickly, I hope that you will understand that perhaps where we start on Monday might change when we have more time and more opportunities to develop programmes going forward. Steve will be able to give you more details of the practical work that has already been going on, but our expectation will be that schools will be playing an important part in providing safe and secure places for children of those on the front-line response to dealing with the coronavirus to attend, and work is already under way with local authorities and individual schools on what that will look like for the emergency situation on Monday. Our other priority is indeed free school meals, and, again, where we eventually end up might be a different place to where we are on Monday. Again, we're responding to the emergency situation that there will be families that were expecting a free school meal on Monday, and, again, individual schools and local authorities are developing those plans at pace to be able to provide an emergency response as we work out a longer term plan to deal with the situation. The same thing also goes for additional learning needs, and attending to the needs of that particular group of learners. I had the opportunity to meet with the First Minister and Andrew Morgan, the leader of the Welsh Local Government Association, yesterday to talk about what local government could do, and what they were already doing. Those plans in some places are already quite developed, and are now working at pace, but I hope you will understand that where we start on Monday is the emergency response, and that work will develop as we go forward. But, Steve, perhaps you could—? Because Steve was the one making all those phone calls and doing the practical operational stuff, rather than me. steve davies: In short, the new purpose is to meet the needs of particular groups of children and young people. In some cases, some of the response to supporting free school meals, in the short term in particular, we may use the schools as part of that, and I'm certain that will happen in some cases. Now, there is still work to be done on identifying exactly the categories of key workers, but I think it's really encouraging that in my discussions yesterday—I spoke with all 22 directors of education, and the examples we're picking up in their work with schools is they're already ahead of the curve in working with schools. They're vulnerable sometimes in terms of education other than at school, vulnerable in terms of mental health, and for those children, as well as having an experience that we want to be planned, some have compared it to a snow day, particularly on Monday, when you're putting something together in the short term, but it will not be a formal curriculum that those children would normally go through. So, the range of activities—some will be focused on educational activities, some will be cultural, some will be sporting, and that plan will be developed on the basis of the age range of children, which in some cases may go from extremely young children up to those at the age of 16 in our all-through schools, but there will be a planned set of activities to cater for those children. What we are doing currently—I have staff back at Cathays Park who are in touch and working with directors of education to ensure that schools over the next two days will have been able to identify, at least at the earlier stage, in terms of health workers, the type and numbers of people. There are already schools who have informed us, and local authorities, of their plans for these activities to be starting next week, which is quite amazing, actually, given where we are. But we are expecting, and we're writing to schools today, that during the course of next week, headteachers to be in schools, and with their staff, taking into consideration the health guidance as to which staff should or should not be in, and in that period from next Monday through the two-week period, to Easter, we expect staff to be both planning for delivery post Easter, but also, as I said, building on and reflecting the good practice that's already in place for schools that have engaged in activities, and I'm sure a number of them will be inviting and enabling those children to come in on Monday. So, Monday will be a challenge for some, and not all will be delivering it, but we will be working so that we can get as much as possible delivered for those groups over the next two weeks, and particularly to have resilient programmes post Easter for the groups of children in those three categories that I said. Can I just clarify one thing? One of the identified vulnerable groups would clearly be children on the at-risk register. kirsty williams am: In our discussions, we have asked local government to be working with the social services departments and individual schools to identify those children who may be in that situation. We know that, for some children, being at school is part of their safeguarding arrangements, and obviously we will need to be able to respond to those needs. steve davies: I wrote specifically yesterday to all directors of education to be assured that, for those children, the register is up to date and the plans are in place. I'm working with Albert Heaney my colleague, the director for social services, who is meeting with the 22 directors of social services today to look to ensure that we are joined up in ensuring none of these children fall through the gap. hefin david am: A very quick and simple question: how are you going to communicate this to parents? There's a bigger picture and it's changing all the time, as you said. The most helpful thing I've seen is that Public Health Wales have a single website with information regarding the wider issue of the virus. How will this then be cascaded to schools, because there's obviously a time lag? So, have you considered how this is going to be communicated directly to parents? kirsty williams am: We're using all of our platforms of communication to get these messages across. So, we're using the more informal methods of communication, but are relying on a systematic approach via individual directors and through to individual schools. We're looking, as quickly as we can, to have a frequently asked education questions page that we can update. It is impossible for the communications team here to be able to respond individually to every single person that is sending Facebook messages and sending tweets, so the best way we can do that is to collate the types of questions people are asking and then to be able to have a frequently updated question and answer page to try to respond to that. With regard to parents, for instance, we're aware of schools that have already sent a questionnaire out last night to parents saying, 'Do you consider yourself to be a key worker? Do you work in the NHS? Please let us know by tomorrow so we can put arrangements in place for your children.' So, schools are already taking the initiative and having those conversations with parents about what their needs will be. It won't be perfect by Monday, because we're working to such constrained timescales. We also have to think about systems that look at what might the epidemic do and have systems of resilience that may work next week, given the situation we find ourselves in with public health advice at the moment. Therefore, have we got a system that will be resilient in those circumstances? These are some of the challenges that we're having to grapple with. So, as I said, what happens on Monday might look very different to where we are if schools are still off in May. suzy davies am: Yes, just on this question of vulnerable children, I'm just wondering how much discretion teachers are going to have in including individual children who may not be obviously under social services' care or on a risk register or whatever. Teachers know their pupils and, very sensitively, they could include people who may not be obviously in need. kirsty williams am: We would absolutely respect the professional judgment of individual headteachers to be able to have those conversations with their directors. As you said, quite rightly, they are the individuals who know their children best and know which children, perhaps, will need this extra support. The second part of my question is: there were going to be Easter holidays anyway, weren't there? What was going to happen about free-school-meal children during that period? Has that gone out of the window now, the normal holiday provision for children? Because that's not there normally, is it, except in separate— kirsty williams am: We do find ourselves in a strange situation. My understanding is what we're trying to work to is that we would have ongoing provision and not to make some strange, 'You get this for two weeks, then you don't get it for two weeks, and then you're back in.' My understanding is, in England, that is what they're going to do. We're trying to create a system where it will be seamless and it will not necessarily matter that two of those weeks were formally holidays. It won't matter to those nurses and doctors who will need to be in work during those weeks. helen mary jones am: Just briefly, building on Suzy's question, one particular group of children and young people that I hope will be eligible to be included in the potentially vulnerable category is young carers. For some of them, they may not be able to come into school because the people they're caring for may have to be excluded because of their conditions. But I think that, for other young carers, coming to school is an absolute lifeline, because they're working at home. So, I don't know if it's appropriate for you to specifically mention those in discussions with local authorities, but it's a group of young people who, again, may not be vulnerable in other ways, but because of their caring responsibilities they may need school. And the other group—and this, I suppose, goes back to Suzy's point about teachers knowing their young people—is the children who may be living in situations where they're at risk of witnessing domestic abuse. Again, these may very well not be children who are in any formal contact with social services, but being at home may be really not a good place for them to be. So, again, I'd put in an appeal for that to be something that perhaps can be raised with schools. If a teacher is worried about what a child's circumstances are like at home, whether they can be, as you said, Kirsty, included as one of the—. They may not be formally identified, but if the teacher knows that they're at risk, or there is an instinct that they're at risk, they might be able to be included in children who are allowed to take advantage of this special provision you're making at this difficult time. We have to do that in the context of what is deliverable, and we also have to do that in the context of the public health advice that we are receiving as well. We know that the ability for school closures to make a contribution to that diminishes if we have significant children in school still. So, we will take these issues into consideration, but remembering this is part of an epidemic mitigation plan. This is a rapidly-evolving problem and the scale is something that we haven't seen in 100 years, and so we're having to evolve and iterate things as we go. We've all got a role to play, and schools certainly have a significant role to play in breaking those chains of transmission. We need to send a really clear message that you're all part of the solution, and the things that you do by distancing yourselves from your friends and your family are really important for us to get on top of this outbreak. helen mary jones am: I'm sure that that's true, but I'm sure that we wouldn't be wanting a child who's in a very pressured environment with perhaps a very difficult relationship between mum and dad—. janet finch-saunders am: Thank you, Chair, and good morning, Minister, and your team. Can I just put on record my thanks for all that you're having to endure at this moment? I think it's fair to say you have the support of Assembly Members and, indeed, our communities. Now, the question I have: if Cylch Meithrin have to close, where will they get money from to pay their staff? Because, currently, thankfully, there's support for businesses. lynne neagle am: Janet, we're not doing Cylch Meithrin at the moment; we are sticking with schools, as we discussed in advance. dawn bowden am: Can I just get some clarity, Steve, around what you were saying in terms of next week? Because I think the practical applications of this—and I understand that you don't know all of this yet, I understand that—the practical applications are what is coming to us, obviously, with constituents saying, 'Well, what's going to happen to that?' Just so that I can be clear, are you saying that, at this stage, every headteacher will be in school on Monday, as will all their staff? steve davies: Within the scope of the guidance in terms of their health, the expectation—and this will be conveyed in letters by the Minister today, to be made clear—is that they are closing for the majority of pupils, but our expectation within the guidance is that the headteacher with their staff will be coming in; for some to start the delivery of what we just described, but that will probably be small numbers, but more importantly to plan to ensure that, after the formal Easter period, which is school holidays, the schools are geared to cater for the range of pupils that we've been discussing. dawn bowden am: So, would you anticipate—again, I know this is all a bit 'if and when', and it depends on the changing nature of the advice, but from what you're saying, I think we can probably anticipate that, as we go forward, there will probably be fewer schools opening and operable—that we may be moving those children on to fewer sites. So, we already know that one of our local authorities already has identified a strategic pattern of schools that they will want to operate in this way. That local authority has already chosen those locations, and is already having communications with how they will then staff those centres. That, I expect, in the longer term, will be the nature of the provision that we will get to. The local authorities are best placed to understand what is the best, pragmatic use of the resources that they have available; and of course those resources, primarily, are human beings. So, we've talked a lot this morning in the context of teaching staff, teaching assistants, but we're also having discussions with local authorities, and I met with the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services this week, to look at deploying youth workers, to look to be deploying other staff that the local authority may employ, like sports development officers. Welsh Government will be talking with a range of our partners who perhaps their normal activities can't continue at the moment, but actually have personnel who want to add to this effort, who want to be able to be part of a provision going forward in the longer term, to be able to provide a great place for children to be. Let's think about it, in these worst of times, we're asking parents to leave their children so that they can go and do essential work, and some of that essential work is putting themselves at risk, potentially. And we want to give those parents confidence that, when they leave their child with us, that child will receive something really worthwhile, and they can direct all of their attention to doing their job. Janet, have you got a supplementary on schools now, not on early years settings? janet finch-saunders am: I lost the signal before, so it's a little bit confusing at this end, so bear with me. Just in terms of the closure of schools, I have been asked by teachers what does new purpose—you may have covered it, but bear in mind [Inaudible.]—mean in practice. And also, they're already asking what will next—? I know you said earlier that next week could look and probably will look significantly different than this week, but what can they expect to be happening next week in terms of this new purpose work? lynne neagle am: We've covered that, Janet. kirsty williams am: First of all, Janet, I just want to say thank you very much for your kind comments. lynne neagle am: I think you're having trouble hearing us, aren't you, so I think—? janet finch-saunders am: No, I heard that loud and clear. lynne neagle am: But I think you missed the earlier comments, when we went into some detail on the new purpose of schools. dawn bowden am: Just in relation to special schools and how they will fit into this new purpose arrangement. We know, again, that some of these children are our most vulnerable and they are some of our most pressurised families. We'll be having discussions about what arrangements can be made for those children within their own usual settings. Can I give a shout out to the work of Rhondda Cynon Taf in this regard, who are already doing some excellent work with regard to how they can keep in touch with their children who usually would attend their special schools. steve davies: I think special schools have already been hit by this challenge, because a significant proportion of their children, because of their conditions, have not been coming to school, they've been isolated. But the principle we've used there is, actually, even if it's a minority of children who go to those schools and are vulnerable, they deserve and need that support through the school. But similarly, even in special schools, there will be children whose parents will be key workers, so we would expect them to apply that same principle. Just quickly in response to the earlier question, while we may bring some groups of children into separate schools, we’ll have to continue with the principle of keeping social distance and any provision for a child in a special school in a different setting would be unlikely, given the nature of the special school, so we would look to cater for that within the original school. It’s likely, because I know it has already happened, that some schools might actually close before Monday. Are you quite happy that headteachers still have the discretion to do that, if they feel that’s the right thing to do? kirsty williams am: In this situation, the discretion of the head still remains. As I said, we will be communicating with all schools today about our expectations, if at all possible, to have schools open for staff to do some of this planning and to be able to respond to these priority needs that we've just talked about. steve davies: The rationale of headteachers for closing schools up to now has been that they can't cope with the safety of the children. I think, moving forward, it's unlikely that that would be a rationale that headteachers would want to use for not engaging and planning for the future. dawn bowden am: We're only talking about one more day, now, anyway, aren't we? So, just in terms of confirmed cases in schools, is your view at this stage that, if there is a confirmed case in a school, once that school has been deep-cleaned, it can reopen again? kirsty williams am: If we had a confirmed case in a school, then all the usual mechanisms arranged by Public Health Wales would kick in at that point. I know that kind of crosses over into somebody else's portfolio as well, but I think we know that. Certainly what I've seen, and I'm sure this is true elsewhere as well, we've seen nurseries closing down because the parents are actually taking the children out of those nurseries. I've got one in particular, there are kids from the ages of 6 to 12 years in there, and the parents are taking them out. They've got 30 staff there, catering for 200 children and no children to care for and the organisation, at this stage, is unable to claim on their insurance for the ongoing payment of those staff wages. Is there any advice that we can give to people in that situation at this stage? kirsty williams am: Sure. As you say, many of these settings are businesses—people's businesses and they play a hugely important role and it's a very worrying time for them. We have said that we will continue to pay for childcare, delivered under the childcare offer even when a child is unable, or a parent is unwilling, to take up that place. So, if that setting is receiving a childcare payment from the Welsh Government as part of our childcare offer, that will be paid, regardless of whether that child attends or not. And I know that we're also working with local authorities to ensure a similar position on Flying Start childcare and early education. It's also important that childcare settings will be able to apply for the various packages of support that are being made available by my colleague, Ken Skates. hefin david am: Yes, I'd just like to turn that around from the parents' point of view. With schools closing, there are a lot of parents then losing 10 hours of free childcare, but from a settings point of view, they'll continue to be able to receive, for the time being, the nursery care. kirsty williams am: Yes, so the decision that has been taken by my colleague, Julie Morgan, is that settings should stay open at the moment unless public health changes. Again, the issue is that we know that that childcare is vital to many families, especially—and we're particularly concerned about those individuals who are trying to help us overcome and solve these problems. If you have any specific questions about that, we'll be happy to take them back to Julie Morgan. janet finch-saunders am: Is this the Cylch question? lynne neagle am: Yes, please. Yes, just basically, Cylch Meithrin, there are concerns—[Interruption.] lynne neagle am: We've lost Janet. kirsty williams am: I think if the issue is about funding for Cylch Meithrin, these are not normal circumstances. As a Welsh Government, we will take every step to provide continuity of funding, if at all possible. We will overcome this, and when we overcome this situation we find ourselves in, we will need those childcare settings, we will need those private businesses and we will need our Cylch Meithrin to be there to respond and to be able to go on doing the job that they usually do for us. And if there is any way that we can, as a Government, ensure that that happens by carrying on funding things, even if they are not able to run, all usual—[Inaudible.]— around service-level agreements are off. [Laughter.] But, you know, we will not undermine businesses and voluntary provision like Cylch by withdrawing Welsh Government funding. lynne neagle am: If we can move on to talk about exams, obviously you made the announcement yesterday. I completely understand that everything is a very fast-moving situation, but, as you know, there are a lot of questions that people have about young people who've put a lot of work in. Are you able to tell us any more today? In particular, have you got any idea about timescales now for setting out what the approach will be to handling the lack of summer exams? kirsty williams am: Yes, it is a devastating decision to have to have been taken, but I have done so on the very, very clear and unambiguous advice from Qualifications Wales. What was most important to them was that I made an early decision and I did not equivocate on what would happen for the exams. I was able to make an informal decision at that meeting, and then, of course, there is a formal process that we have to go through. That, now, allows Qualifications Wales and the exam board to operationalise that decision, and they will be communicating with schools as quickly as possible about what schools will need to do to ensure that the systems that they will now put in place can work. We are trying, as far as we can, as I understand it, to be able to mirror as closely as possible the usual results day, for instance. It might not be possible, because, of course, we're dealing with a situation that requires human beings to be involved in it, and those human beings could find themselves unwell. So, our best attempts will be to maintain the normal rhythm of an exams day in August, but that has to be caveated by the fact that we're dealing with difficult circumstances. But, the WJEC and Qualifications Wales will be making urgent communications to exam centres to explain what will need to happen next. janet finch-saunders am: Yes, I think I raised it yesterday, Kirsty, but you were receiving loads of questions. I'd just ask for some further clarification about coursework, because only 30 per cent of that is done. Years 11 and 13, typically, in my case they're what's been raised with me—do you have any advice for them? kirsty williams am: Okay, so, all exams are cancelled, but year 11 and year 13 will be given a grade—I think that's a distinction that people need to be aware of. That is because those years and those grades are gateway qualifications, and they are points of movement in the education system. So, it's really important for those students that they are not disadvantaged in any way by not being able to receive a grade that helps them to make a decision as a qualifying step into what they will do next, whether that be university, whether that be a degree apprenticeship or whether that be going into sixth form, into a college, into an apprenticeship or into some work-based learning opportunities. That's why we have to focus on those children, because for them, it is absolutely critical that we do. We are at an advantage in Wales, can I say? Because of the nature of our examination system, those students already have a lot of externally assessed work that we can use as a basis to move forward on. Our year 11s, if they're doing triple science, they've already done 40 per cent of their paper, so we're very fortunate. Because of the structures that we have got in our qualification system, there is already lots and lots of externally-verified work that we can use, alongside, potentially, teacher evaluation of students as well. What will also be important is that these children have confidence in those qualifications, and so we will be looking at a modulated arrangement within Wales, and I know that Qualifications Wales are discussing with their counterparts across the UK a modulated system across the UK. So, actually, we can make sure that our standards are maintained by actually having that modulation across the UK. So, we know that those children never have to worry about the rigour that has gone into determining that grade. You'll know that the National Union of Students has suggested that black and minority ethnic children and children from the working class, on the whole, don't do as well, in terms of their assessment by their own teachers. We also know, of course, that boys tend to do better in exams, and girls tend to do better at coursework, for whatever reason that is. So, just to ask you at this early stage to build in those considerations around potential unconscious bias into that overall system that you're talking about. And, of course, you are right to say that, because we have got some elements of external moderation here, those factors may be less for us in Wales than they might for colleagues in England. kirsty williams am: Yes, I think we are starting at a different base, thank goodness. As I said, students will have done unit 1 papers last year if they're GCSE students. I have every confidence that they and the WJEC will come up with a very comprehensive way of establishing those grades, but I have to say, in some ways, I have to step back now, because you would not expect me, in normal circumstances, to dictate to the WJEC how much percentage goes for that, and how much percentage is allocated for that; that would not be appropriate for a Minister. My job is to make the decision on the examinations on the basis of having confidence that what can be put in place is fair and is equitable, and I have confidence that that will be the case. One is, obviously, pupils are being asked to work at home as well now, some of whom will be doing GCSE and A-level courses. So, there's just a question, generally, from me— because we're encouraging these kids to carry on working—how that will be accommodated by Qualifications Wales, I guess, in this modulation process. It may be that your at-home work will be of a higher standard or a lower standard than a teacher would be expecting. Secondly, you mentioned the AS-levels, of course, as being of value at the moment, but we've got people in Year 12 who now won't be doing their ASs. Is there any steer at this stage about what they will be expected to do? Will they be doing two sets of exams next year, for example? Or is AS just off the table? In which case, how are the A2s going to be calculated in due course? And then, finally from me, we do have some vocational qualifications that are up for examination as well—your BTECs, and I think it's the Association of Accounting Technicians, which is a lot of computer-based learning—which is due to be examined within three weeks. I appreciate that you may not have the answer just at the moment, but are they off as well is the question, I guess? kirsty williams am: With regard to AS-levels—no final decision has been made for exactly how those students will be treated. There are a range of options that could be used, but again, we will want to be thinking about student well-being, fairness and equity in that regard, and I will update Members as soon as I have received definitive advice from Qualifications Wales around that, and that hasn't happened yet. With regard to other types of qualifications, as you will be aware, the vast majority of BTECs is a modular, continually-assessed piece of work, and we would have every expectation that BTECs will be able to be awarded, but clearly, those conversations are with awarding bodies—they tend to be UK awarding bodies, rather then necessarily our WJEC exam board—and those conversations are ongoing. But I have every expectation that those qualifications will be awarded and, of course, because of their nature there's even more evidence of continued assessment. Huw, I don't know if there's anything else that you would like to add about those types of qualifications. I don't have a definitive answer for the ATT qualification, but we can look into that and come back to you. suzy davies am: Well, I've just had a constituent ask, so that would be very helpful. suzy davies am: —is that going to count towards the assessments, overall assessments? kirsty williams am: Well, potentially, as I said. What will be absolutely necessary is that Qualifications Wales and the WJEC will be able to give absolute clarity and simplicity around how those grades will be arrived at, because parents, teachers and students will want to know that, and my expectation is on them to be able to clearly communicate what elements will and will not be taken into consideration when awarding those grades. lynne neagle am: And, just before we move on, have the universities across the UK indicated that they are content with this approach going forward—content to accept students on this basis? kirsty williams am: Certainly. There have been discussions with universities and UCAS, of course, that this also has a bearing on. And the views of university and how university terms might be impacted is one of the ways and one of the reasons that we've factored in to making these decisions. Those discussions with universities are ongoing, aren't they, Huw? huw morris: Yes. So, we've been in regular conversation with Universities Wales and through them with Universities UK and we've received every indication that the approach that's been adopted here has been welcomed by the institutions. Those conversations will continue as we work through the practicalities of how the gradings that are awarded are going to feed through into university admissions decisions and enrolment. Well, we've got some questions now from Suzy on the potential closures of colleges and universities. I appreciate you've already indicated there are lots of ongoing conversations, but my understanding is whether colleges or universities close is pretty much still at their own discretion. We're going to be asking some questions on emergency legislation shortly, which may impact on the answer you can give today, but what sort of conversations are you having with FE and HE at the moment about how they decide? kirsty williams am: Well, you're absolutely right. As we often say in this committee, universities are autonomous institutions—a status that they guard jealously and we would never want to question. Universities have been making the decision to move as much of their learning online as they possibly can and we continue to have conversations with them. Colleges are in a similar position, looking to do as much as they can to be able to provide continuity of learning via distance learning methods, and the Bill, potentially, does give us more powers of intervention in both the FE and the HE sector. suzy davies am: I might ask you about that in a minute, because I don't even know what the Bill says yet. kirsty williams am: Huw, I don't know if there's anything you want to add. huw morris: No—just to confirm what's been said and also to add in that independent training providers, similarly autonomous, like colleges and universities, have been moving in the same direction. We've been very impressed with the maturity and forward-planning that's been adopted by all of those institutions and their representative bodies. We've got consistency in the approach and a common desire, and investment in moving towards online support for students. Certainly, colleges have indicated, as with schools, that, for the most vulnerable learners, they'll have something in place that might permit attendance on an individual basis. huw morris: That's my understanding, yes, and, again, we've been in regular conversation with them about that. My understanding is that they're going to spend the next week working through the detail of how that will work for the institutions. You indicated that any Welsh Government support's going to stay, whatever the circumstances are—in your portfolio. helen mary jones am: Just further to EMA, of course, at the moment, that has an attendance qualification, doesn't it? And you don't get your EMA if you don't turn up. Should we take from your last answer that that attendance qualification doesn't apply anymore? kirsty williams am: Yes. They can't turn up if the institution is not open, and that's not their fault. helen mary jones am: No, but that is something that's been a worry, so that's really encouraging to hear. Thinking about students in higher education, can you give an assurance that student maintenance payments will continue as normal? Is that the intention? kirsty williams am: Yes. And have you given any special ministerial instruction to Student Finance Wales on processing applications for support or changes of circumstances, or is that something that's kind of ongoing at the moment? kirsty williams am: Those conversations are ongoing with the Student Loans Company. Individual student circumstances could well change and our expectation would be that the Student Loans Company would respond to that. All I would say is, just to remind people: people who work for the Student Loans Company are no more able to resist this disease than anybody else. There will undoubtedly in some cases be really practical challenges to service delivery, simply because organisations could be losing staff because of illness or the need to self-isolate or because they are reacting to social-distancing messages from the Government. So, I think we just need to bear that in mind: that these organisations are doing their best, but, if they are badly affected by staff numbers being off because of the virus, then I hope people will give them due consideration. helen mary jones am: Yes, that makes sense, of course, because we've been told that universities won't be able to entirely close, because there will be students who can't go home— kirsty williams am: It is their home. What discussions have you been having with the sector to make sure that those students' basic needs are met, that there's still food, shelter, whatever they need? kirsty williams am: Well, obviously, universities have a duty of care to those students that find themselves in those circumstances, and every conversation that Huw's been having would suggest that universities are well aware of their need to do that. huw morris: We instituted a monitoring process very early on in the onset of the disease, not least because a number of institutions have campuses and activities in China and other parts of south-east Asia. And so, as the disease has progressed, we've seen lessons being learned from the support for students who are in isolation coming from there to the UK, and I am assured that the universities here in Wales have got processes in place that support those learners. And on this specifically—last question from me— have you considered whether students might need to be refunded some of their tuition fees, should the academic year not be completed? huw morris: So, as the institutions move more and more of their material and some of their assessment online, clearly, there are lessons that will need to be taken on board. There are established quality assurance and enhancement procedures in institutions to enable the tutors and other supporters to make sure that that material meets their needs. There are appeals mechanisms and feedback mechanisms through the students union and through course committees and other things within institutions to make sure that any concerns or incomplete work are addressed. Failing those institutional mechanisms, there is a UK-wide system through the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for students to take forward any concerns that they have. So, we're confident that that system will be robust and will make sure that the students are getting a course of learning that meets their needs. But thinking just a little bit more broadly about the mental health and well-being of staff and learners across a range of educational settings, or, indeed, young people who can't access educational settings, what considerations are you giving to how that mental health and well-being might be supported through what is an incredibly difficult time for everyone? kirsty williams am: Yes, that is correct. So, our expectation would be that during a prolonged period of closure—which I think, if we're honest, we have to acknowledge is what we're looking at—we would expect school staff—well-being staff, for instance in school—to be doing check-ins—phone check-ins, potentially, or FaceTime check-ins, with students, just to keep in touch with them as we go forward. We'll be looking to promote amongst young people a range of online facilities that are available—so, for instance, Meic website—so, looking to use a variety of platforms. I'm concerned, of course, that for some children their access to their counsellor is via their school. We know that, and we're just double checking the capacity of online counselling that already exists—online counselling tools that children already use because they don't want to go to the counsellor in the school and be seen in the school corridor going to the counsellor. They're already using those online methods and we expect to be able to continue, as far as possible, those kinds of mechanisms where children can have their mental health needs and their questions answered, and their worries. One of the reasons, again, that we wanted to keep schools going as long as possible—and teachers have been working so hard to do that—is because that routine of going into school and that normality is one that we've needed and wanted to maintain. Children will have worries about their own health; they'll have worries about the health of their parents and their grandparents; they will be consuming potentially media and news stories that have empty supermarket shelves. So, we need to understand, and I think we will also have to recognise, that this support will have to be ongoing once we're back to normal, and we will have to continue to look to support children in the longer term who will have lived through this experience. They are incredibly resilient, and they have been the champions of some of our public health messages. They are so much better and so much more compliant on the whole 'washing your hands' and things like that than even adults have been. So, they are incredibly resilient, but we also have to recognise that it can be a really worrying time for them. helen mary jones am: Can I just—? Just a supplementary to that—you've mentioned already, Kirsty, the importance of youth services, and, particularly thinking voluntarily youth services, you've given the commitment, when were talking about Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin earlier, that services that are part-funded by grants through the Welsh Government, for example, thinking of the national youth voluntary service—will those be able to be maintained even if settings have had to be shut as well? Obviously, local authorities will have to make their own decisions about whether youth settings are kept open, but, in terms of the direct support from Welsh Government, can organisations that receive it rely on that through this time? kirsty williams am: No formal decision has been made, but if people are in receipt of a Government grant from my department to run a service and that service can no longer run because of the public— helen mary jones am: Because it's not safe. kirsty williams am: —because it's not safe to do so, I do not foresee that we will be turning around and saying, 'We'll have our money back, thank you very much.' lynne neagle am: Okay, thank you. The normal rules of engagement have to change and, those organisations, we'll need them to be providing youth services for children when we are back to normal, and we wouldn't want to do anything that would undermine their ability to do that. When we're trying to maintain services for vulnerable children and for front-line staff children, they have a valuable role to play and I know that local government and the Council for Wales of Voluntary Youth Services are already in discussion about how youth services—. Those traditional youth clubs, because of austerity, are not necessarily there anymore, so they are well used to being out and about and doing outreach work, and they will have an important part to play in the services that we talked about earlier. Hefin, briefly, and then we're going to take one final question from Suzy on emergency legislation. I'll declare an interest as a parent of a child with additional learning needs, although the question I'm about to ask doesn't reflect her interests. Additional learning needs pupils who are waiting outcomes of referrals—if they're currently waiting an outcome of a referral, will that process will be suspended or will it continue as normal? And, if it is suspended, will it pick up where it left off from this point? kirsty williams am: I think we have to recognise that the ability to deliver business as usual has been massively compromised. I'm sure people will try and continue to do their normal activities and their normal jobs, but that might not be possible. I don't want to give you any false assurance if, actually, the intelligence on the ground is that that simply will not be able to happen. But we don't— hefin david am: Can we have a clear line on that? kirsty williams am: We don't want to jeopardise anybody, but as I said, some of the normal services are simply not available as everybody turns their attention to trying to respond to the pandemic. Final question—because I know that the Minister's got a lot of things that she needs to get on with—from Suzy on emergency legislation. suzy davies am: I'm not going to ask you if you'll use any powers you get under the emergency legislation, but are you able to give us some indication of what they might be? kirsty williams am: Sure. For instance, the Bill will provide Welsh Ministers with powers to temporarily close schools or other educational institutions, childcare premises; powers to give temporary continuity direction—so, actually, the other way around, force things to be open—and to be able to direct resources. So, that includes, as I said, I could direct something to stay open if that institution was trying to close down. The powers also give flexibility to maybe be able to direct staff to other institutions that they would not normally work in, if that was part of our resilience needs. We'd also be looking at, for instance, relaxing requirements around ratios in childcare settings, or we might be wanting to do things around food. If there is a continuing role for schools in providing food, we might have to be a bit more flexible about what that might look like. So, those kinds of flexibilities—to be able to suspend things, direct things—that we would not normally have in normal circumstances. And just to finish this one off—you may not be able to answer this one, in all fairness—in those situations where it's the Government who says 'no' to various things, does that then help people in the situation of Dawn's nursery, and insurance claims suddenly become more likely? kirsty williams am: I'm not an expert on insurance, and I don't know if anybody here can help me. But what my understanding is, is that even where Government has given a direction that does not necessarily mean that you will be covered by your insurance. What we're finding in the private sector is that insurance companies are not paying out, because even when a Government has directed it, they do not regard this as a disruption to business. kirsty williams am: It's not my area of expertise, but from what I understand from discussions around the Cabinet table, this is particularly problematic. Let me give you an example about how we've been trying to overcome some of this—it feels like an awfully long time ago now— you'll be aware that we gave directions earlier around cancellation of school trips abroad. Trying to make sure that that direction came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, rather than the Department for Education was a real battle, because again there were fears that, unless that advice came from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, insurance would not kick in, and that was a two-day discussion. kirsty williams am: So, these are the kinds of things that we're grappling with. But, as I said, thinking about it, that was only last week, but it feels like an aeon ago. suzy davies am: I'm not holding you to that, but it helps us manage the questions we get asked. kirsty williams am: Yes, but as I said, insurance is not my area of expertise. Can I thank you for attending this morning, and your officials? We do recognise what an incredibly challenging time this is, and we'd like to place on record our thanks to all of you for the work that you're doing to try and see us through this crisis. Item 3, then, is a motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting

The recommendation to maintain QR funding in real terms was highlighted by Sian Gwenllian AM, who pointed out that the funding had not increased in nine years. Dr David Blaney explained that the lack of increase was due to financial constraints and obligations to other parts of the higher education system. While the importance of investing in QR research funding was acknowledged, the current capacity did not allow for this ambition. Kirsty mentioned the potential for local authorities to staff and choose locations for centers, with a focus on providing valuable services for children. No formal decision had been made, as the organizations needed to adapt to unprecedented circumstances without undermining their ability to provide youth services in the future. The government had been working with provinces and territories to provide a forgivable loan to commercial property owners, who would then lower rent for their tenants. The group emphasized the need for additional funding for universities, a new immigration policy, and seeking the minister's help to address the problem at an official level. Adequate funding would support research needs, a robust immigration policy would attract individuals to Wales, and raising awareness with the minister would bring the problem to national discussions.

Question: What were the opinions of Sharon Davies and Kirsty Williams AM on the role of local authorities in quality assurance of individual institutions? How did Sian Gwenllian AM inquire about quality assurance and how did Kirsty Williams AM respond to her question? Article: Item 2, then, this morning is a post-legislative scrutiny session on the Higher Education (Wales) Act 2015. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, and Huw Morris, who is director of the skills, higher education and lifelong learning group in Welsh Government. I will just start the questioning by asking whether you are planning to repeal the 2015 higher education Act, or will it be amended by the post-compulsory education and training Bill? kirsty williams am: Thank you very much, Chair. I'm very pleased to be with the committee again this morning, although it's in slightly unusual circumstances. As a piece of post-legislative scrutiny, this was a Bill that was taken forward by a different Minister in a different administration, but I think it is really valuable work in the context of the question you just set out: what can we learn from the implementation of this piece of legislation as we move forward with our reform journey and with this Government and my proposals to introduce a new commission for tertiary education? There is much, at the moment, that lies within the 2015 Act that we will look to bring forward into the new legislation, but there are certainly experiences—and I'm sure we'll come on to some of the evidence that has been received about what's worked, what perhaps hasn't worked—that we all want to reflect on and be mindful of as we take forward the new Bill, including the report of this committee as part of it. So, it is our intention that this Bill will be superceded by the new PCETR Bill. Do you believe that the Act has fulfilled all the Government's objectives? Where are the weaknesses? kirsty williams am: Diolch yn fawr, Siân. As I've said, it's a bit difficult to place myself in the mind of the previous Minister when this legislation was first envisaged and then taken through. You'll be aware that there were four main reasons for the introduction of the Bill: around regulation of institutions in Wales; safeguarding the contribution made to public good arising from Welsh Government's financial support for the sector; maintaining a focus on fair access; and preserving and protecting the principle of institutional autonomy. I think the evidence that has been received by the committee to date shows that there are different views about the effectiveness of whether all four strategic aims have been achieved. I think those strategic aims are still really, really important and certainly will underpin our thought process going forward, but we have to recognise the higher education and research Bill across the border in England, the implementation of new student support measures in Wales, as well as the report that was done by Ellen Hazelkorn, I think, means it is appropriate that we move forward with different proposals, not just regulation of the HE sector but the post-compulsory sector as a whole. We will look to see what we can do to strengthen or whether there is more that we need to do to achieve those four objectives, because I think those four objectives are still very, very relevant. But we have to have legislation now that is fit for the circumstances we currently find ourselves in and, hopefully, futureproofs us for how we want to see the sector develop in the future. sian gwenllian am: Do you feel perhaps that the legislation itself hasn't been strong enough, and that you then have had to drive some of these objectives through the annual remit letter, rather than through legislation, and that's why the strengthening is required? kirsty williams am: Certainly, I see the remit letter as a really, really important way in which national priorities and the priorities of an elected Government can be clearly stated, communicated to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and then HEFCW use their powers to ensure that that happens. So, certainly, I see the remit letter as being a very important mechanism for ensuring, as I said, that those national priorities are clearly articulated, and then change happens. sian gwenllian am: Has the current legislation been framed around institutional autonomy so that it's not possible for institutions to fulfil any national outcomes, and is that going to be an element of the new Bill? kirsty williams am: Well, certainly, the 2015 Act contains numerous provisions that protect universities' privileges and autonomy. And that's really important, and those are principles that I am committed to in any legislation that I bring forward. We'll certainly be looking to see how we can carry those protections into the forthcoming Bill, but, at the same time, we do have to ensure appropriate regulation and accountability of institutions for their public funding and the privileges that they enjoy. We have a very positive working relationship with the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and I am very fortunate to have a very positive working relationship with the sector. I don't think there's anything in the legislation per se that prevents those national priorities being articulated and being acted upon. sian gwenllian am: I don't think that's what HEFCW has said in their evidence. They've said that the Bill has been framed in a way where it's not possible for institutions to fulfil any requirements. You're talking about the remit letter; maybe you need to have that discussion there, but, in terms of the Bill itself, you can't make them fulfil any national outcomes. Shouldn't there be a discussion looking to move in a direction where there are national outcomes being set through legislation, because there is public money going into that? kirsty williams am: Well, I don't know whether we need national outcomes through legislation, because those national priorities, potentially, will change over time. What is really important, and what we will be seeking to do in the new legislation, is look to move to a system of outcome agreements. So, there is a very clear expectation that the commission will have, in regulating the sector, and co-ordinating and funding the sector, to create a system of outcome agreements, where those outputs will reflect national priorities, and that's one of the things that we've consulted on, and will look to take forward in the new legislation. What about private providers? The Act, or the Act as it stands, makes it a requirement for a regulated institution to be a charity, and that means it's not possible to regulate alternative private providers under the Act, even though they can provide higher education in Wales. What is your view on this, and will the new legislation continue with the requirement of being a charity? kirsty williams am: Okay. So, I think, first of all, it's important to make the distinction between the scale of private providers, and what could be termed as 'unregulated providers' in the Welsh system, as opposed to the English system. So, currently, under the current legislation, unregulated providers can only access Welsh Government student support if they're designated on a case-by-case basis. Only six organisations were designated on a case-by-case basis in the 2018-19 academic year, so the scale here is small. So, when we talk about a private provider, perhaps people would have a view of a private university, but, actually, three of those were FE colleges, which we would all be familiar with. And the three private providers were the Centre for Alternative Technology, the training arm of the Church in Wales and the Newport and District Group Training Association. So, in order for their courses to be specifically designated, the three crucial questions that those providers have to answer are: quality—is what they’re providing to students of a good quality; the financial viability of the institution, again, to try to protect the interests of the students who may find themselves embarking on a course in an institution that isn’t viable; as well as their contribution to private—sorry, not to private good—public good. But, Huw, I don't know if there's anything else to add? huw morris: Well, just to say that there are a very small number of private providers, as the Minister has outlined, and, in comparison with England, where I think the last figures said that there were between 300 and 400 private providers in England, you get a sense of the differences that exist there. And, if you look at what happened over recent years, it has been those small private providers across the UK who have been most financially challenged and a number of them have stopped their operations, with consequences for the students. So, we’ve been keen to put students at the front of things to make sure that the institutions that they’re enrolling with are strong and have good quality. So, what you're saying is that you will continue with a charitable status, or not— kirsty williams am: At this stage— sian gwenllian am: —or are you still thinking about it? kirsty williams am: Well, at this stage, I think the charitable status will continue to be an important part of what we will take forward. sian gwenllian am: Just turning finally to part-time fees and postgraduate fees, do you have an intention to regulate this part in the new legislation? kirsty williams am: I have to say that, at present, we've not identified an urgent reason to designate these courses as qualifying courses for the purposes of a fee limit. Actually, the current Act—the 2015 Act—does not permit the fee regulation of postgraduate courses, other than PGCE courses for IT purposes. In the case of part-time courses, I'm currently content that fee levels are not exceeding the amount of student support made available by the Welsh Government. So, I think we are, at this moment, relaxed about that, and there are some difficulties around deciding and introducing fee limits on postgraduate courses. I think what's really important to me is the success at the moment of attracting people to postgraduate and part-time study in Wales, as a result of our reforms to student finance. But, at this current moment, the Act precludes fee regulation in some areas and there's not a pressing policy need that we've identified to date. Okay, we're going to move on now to some questions about the level of ambition in the higher education Act and any lessons for the PCET Bill, from Janet Finch-Saunders. To what extent has the 2012 university funding system limited Welsh Government’s policy leverage over the sector, and how has the HE Act addressed this beyond the levers offered by fee and access plans? kirsty williams am: Of course, the Act was introduced as a direct result of the changing scenario around finance and the different ways in which, because of the reduction in HEFCW's budget, the level of influence that HEFCW would be able to exert over institutions through the imposition of terms and conditions of funding—. So, the Act was introduced in part to address that shift in influence and the Act also has provided HEFCW with a range of new powers of intervention and sanctions in the case of non-compliance by institutions. Personally, I wholeheartedly believe that tertiary education providers should contribute to national goals and outcomes as part of what I'd describe as a civic mission. I'm determined that any legislation that I bring forward and any commission that I establish will be empowered to enable that to happen through its regulatory and funding powers. Of course, the funding situation has shifted again now because of the introduction of what is commonly known as the Diamond reforms, but our new system of student finance does again shift the parameters of influence that HEFCW or any new tertiary commission could have. But, as I said earlier, it's not to say that institutions have had a free reign. We have been able to use the remit letter and our relationship with HEFCW to progress agendas that we would want to see. So, for instance, you'll be aware, in my remit letter, I am concerned about issues around how people working in the sector are paid. We've been able to successfully see all institutions sign up to becoming living wage employers, all institutions sign up to the Welsh Government's code of ethical procurement. So, it's not to say that the Act has meant that we've had no influence, but there are opportunities now, because of the change in financial circumstances once again, to look at that in any forthcoming legislation. Do you share HEFCW's views on the benefits of having national targets to get institutions to address national priorities? Is this something you wish you could do? kirsty williams am: Well, it's not something I wish I could do; I think that we're doing it. Self-praise is no recommendation, but, because of the working relationship that we have, I think we're seeing some success in using the remit letter to influence national outcomes. So, I've just talked about living wage; we're also using our remit letter to drive transparency over senior leaders' pay, the gender pay gap within institutions. For instance, as part of this Government's commitment to improving mental health, we've been able to use the remit letter and some funding to be able to drive change and some improvements in mental health in the higher education sector. These are national priorities and we're acting upon them and we're using the multiple levers we have at the moment to engage in universities. And, I have to say, universities have risen to that challenge, and I'm very grateful to them for doing that. Are there plans to give the proposed new PCET funding body more effective policy levers to align the sector to the social, economic and civic needs of Wales? And, if so, how will this be done? kirsty williams am: Well, as I said in answer earlier, I'm determined that we ensure a sense of civic mission for the entirety of the sector, including our institutes of higher education. You'll be aware, Janet, that, in the consultation exercises that have been undertaken by the Government so far on PCET reform, we will be introducing more formal outcome agreements, whereby institutions might be given by the commission very clear expectations of how they're expected to contribute to national priorities. We've heard that the HE Act, by focusing on individual institutions, did not encourage collaboration, even for widening access activity. Was this a missed opportunity and how will this be taken forward in the PCET Bill? kirsty williams am: I think we can strengthen our sector by closer collaboration. I think what sets us apart in Wales is that this Government is determined to create a legislative regime and a regulation regime that encourages collaboration and co-operation, which is in stark contrast to the marketisation and the competition that we see being regulated for and legislated for across the border in England. That's one of the reasons why we are going to introduce the new PCET reforms—to create collaboration, not just between different higher education institutes but actually across the sector. So, this is a prime opportunity where we can create a framework that demands and encourages collaboration, not just, as I said, in between individual institutions but across the entirety of the sector. We're doing that because that means we can avoid duplication, we can fill gaps that there currently are and we can create a system that allows for a seamless passage for students to move between the different parts of post-compulsory education that are currently available, where, sometimes, those students find barriers. lynne neagle am: Okay, Janet? janet finch-saunders am: Thank you—that's great, thank you. lynne neagle am: We've got some questions now around HEFCW's powers of intervention from Dawn Bowden. We received substantial evidence from HEFCW suggesting that powers were inflexible and hard to use—I think HEFCW called them 'threatening'—saying that they make sanctions difficult to use and so on. Are you satisfied that HEFCW's powers are useful on a preventative day-to-day basis? kirsty williams am: If I may disagree slightly, I don't think their powers are frightening. It's very clear what powers are available to HEFCW, and they're certainly more than just the ability to, maybe, lean on an institution. Clearly, there is a system by which there is the ability to, you know, ramp up and escalate levels of intervention in the sector by HEFCW, but I certainly wouldn't describe them as inflexible or not having weight. dawn bowden am: I think they were saying it was difficult to use for swift interventions—they found it a bit cumbersome. They explained to us that they often take informal measures or actions in their role as regulator, and they've explained that the small size of the sector enables good relationships to be developed. How can such measures work in the tertiary education body when there clearly will be many more than the 10 providers? kirsty williams am: Well, looking ahead to the new Bill, I would want to see and be very keen to ensure that there are sufficiently flexible—did you use the word soft—and soft regulatory powers that the commission could exercise. Those powers, for instance, could include the ability to offer advice and guidance, rather than, maybe, punitive interventions, and powers to undertake enhanced monitoring of institutions to ensure compliance with regulatory conditions. So, I would expect the commission to be able to have a series of abilities to intervene, from the soft, flexible type, which is non-punitive but actually allows people to go in and support institutions, through to something that would be, as I said, more punitive, if they felt that an institution was in danger of not providing quality or financial failure. hefin david am: Can I just come in there, on the point that was made? The issue that seemed to me to come from HEFCW and from the universities is that the dial seems to have only three steps. So, rather than having a graduated series of actions that they can take, it seems to step from—what did he call it—a 'meeting without coffee' to— kirsty williams am: That's a very HEFCW thing to say. hefin david am: —potentially institutions going bankrupt, and there don't seem to be many steps in between that. kirsty williams am: I think, as I said at the beginning of the session, this is why this post-legislative scrutiny is useful, because we can reflect on that feedback. As I said, I would expect to be able to ensure that the commission had a range of powers that could address—from that soft power and those early conversations to being able to, as I said, issue, perhaps, advice and guidance to an institution, so there would be a more graduated escalation. Huw, is there anything else that I've missed out? huw morris: Just to build on what the Minister has said, there's a range of ways in which we interact with all institutions that are going to be in the tertiary sector, and some of that is about providing information. So, HEFCW provides information—it sends around circulars, it produces reports and it holds events. There's staff, management and leadership development activity, which can create a culture amongst the leaders of institutions, but also amongst their governing bodies, to help them move in a particular direction. We use those mechanisms and informal interactions with FE college principals, with the work-based learning provider network, with sixth forms and others, and we would want to see, I hope, in the tertiary sector some alignment of those things. I think what stands behind HEFCW's comments is that before we had a loan-based system of student finance, there was a system of block grant allocations and conditions could be attached to those grant allocations by HEFCW. I don't think we're going to be going back to that system in the foreseeable future because of the pressures on public finances— hefin david am: That wasn't how I understood it. I understood it to be the fact that you use these informal powers and then the next step up is quite a severe sanction and there's not much in between those. huw morris: In the Hazelkorn review, there's quite a lot of focus on that and looking to learn from other national systems where outcome agreements provide a broader measure of the range of things the institutions do and a mechanism for tracking how things are done through the provision of information back to the institution to help them know how they're doing. What we have to strike the balance of as well is at what point those powers seem to be—and the ability to direct—interfering with the principle of autonomy within an institution. So, there's that balance to be struck, isn't there, about creating a regulatory regime, which I'm very keen and the Act attempted to do, which was to enshrine institutional autonomy, and that's really, really important, but also a regulatory regime, the ability to influence and to develop and to deliver national outcomes and the power to intervene in that sector, which you know, better than probably anybody else in this room, guards that institutional autonomy very, very, very dear indeed. And that's the balance that we need to try and strike as we go forward with the new commission proposals. I think, in terms of the levels of measures—and I understand what you're saying—but I think what HEFCW were saying was that they try as far as possible to use informal measures and they are able to do that because of the size of the sector—just 10 institutions to work with. The post-16 sector, however many we're talking—50 plus providers—it's probably going to be less likely that they would be able to have that sort of relationship with the leaders in those institutions. kirsty williams am: Yes, but also, what's incumbent upon me as the Minister is to ensure that the commission is set up in a way where it can have that relationship with the sector, because what's really important to remember is that HEFCW will be replaced. We're not asking HEFCW suddenly to go from regulating a small number of institutions to suddenly regulating 50. We'll be creating a commission that will be structured in such a way that it can have those relationships. Because, of course, whilst HEFCW will face changes, our relationship with and how we manage the FE sector and the apprenticeship sector will also shift. So, the point is that we need to create a commission that will still be able to be close to the sector, close enough to be able to provide that soft regulation, those really important relationships in a way—. So, it has to be created in such a way and resourced in such a way that it allows that to happen, and that's my intention. Well, then, of course, the University of Wales said to us that they felt that there was the potential for HEFCW to issue directions enforceable by injunction to remedy minor matters. So, I think, from what you're saying, you wouldn't be expecting that to happen. Just the fact that they've got the power doesn't necessarily mean that that's what they're going to do. kirsty williams am: Well, I think it's important to recognise when HEFCW can enforce its directions by way of an injunction. If they were to do that because a university was breaking fee limits or because there were real questions about the quality of the provision or whether a university was not complying with the financial management code—personally, I wouldn't describe those as minor matters, as a Minister, if we had an institution that was significantly falling down on quality and HEFCW were using these powers to intervene. And, actually, on that point, we've had some recent high-profile issues in Swansea and Trinity St David, and HEFCW still haven't yet used their powers of intervention. Do you find that surprising? kirsty williams am: I think what they have done in these circumstances is, perhaps, used their ability to support those institutions through what, undoubtedly, have been challenging times. Given the fact that there are ongoing legal processes attached to Swansea University, I think it would not be appropriate for me to comment any further, because there are still matters in train with regard to that institution. But clearly, our expectation on HEFCW is to ensure that they are using their powers to support those universities, and I would expect them, if they felt necessary, to use the full remit of their powers if they felt that that was what they needed to do. Now, I have to trust their professional judgment that that has not been necessary to date, but our expectation is that they would do that if they felt it was necessary. hefin david am: Are you concerned that neither the regulator nor the sector seem to have any confidence in fee and access plans? kirsty williams am: I think the concept of a fee and access plan is an important concept. Whether we can do them better, whether we can reflect on what's happened to date and create a better system of what's included in a fee and access plan and how those fee and access plans can be monitored, there's an opportunity to do that in forthcoming legislation. hefin david am: So, have you been aware of specific issues yourself? Have they brought them to you? kirsty williams am: Well, no, not in the sense that they've brought them to me to talk about specifically. From my perspective, fee and access plans are focused very much on inputs, and, really, I'd like to think about outputs and outcomes, more importantly—what are the outcomes of the fee and access plan, not necessarily just how much money has been spent on them. I think, certainly, to really understand the success of the fee and access plan, you have to question whether an annual basis is an appropriate timescale for a university to be working to, and whether we could have something that was focused over a longer period of time. Because, when you think about it, you write the plan and then you're into it, and then, the next thing you know, you're writing your next year's plan. So, do I see a place for fee and access plans going forward, as part of our outcome agreements? Yes, I do. hefin david am: So, why would introducing outcome agreements make them work any better? kirsty williams am: Well, I think they're going to be a part of an outcome agreement—part of that wider expectation. So, fee and access plans are there to address an issue around, primarily, changing the nature of people who go to university and making sure that nobody is put off from pursuing that. So, that's part of a wider piece of work that I'd want to see as an outcome agreement. But, as I said, I think looking at outcomes for students and outcomes of that activity, rather than the inputs of the activity, over a longer period of time, is probably a more effective way of doing it. In a way, it's difficult to make a final judgment on whether fee and access plans in their current format have worked, because we need to know what'll happen to those students in the future. But undoubtedly, despite the limitations of them, I do think we're making progress in terms of access, but I don't think we can necessarily point to the fee and access plans as being the driver for some of those improvements. hefin david am: No, I appreciate that, and some of the things you're saying reflect some of the discussions we've had, but what was clear is that the process and bureaucratic nature of the way you present fee and access plans doesn't work, particularly given the fact that, four years on, early fee and access plans are still being evaluated. So, what you're saying—can I just pin down what you're saying—is that we may be moving away from yearly fee and access plans to something that's longer term and outcome focused. kirsty williams am: That's my preference. So, I think the principle—I'd like to think we can all agree around the principle of what a fee and access plan is hoping to achieve, but I think there are better ways of doing it, and I think we should take the opportunity of reform to look at how we can do it better. hefin david am: So, with that in mind, I think we're talking about the future of the Bill, the consultation on the PCET reforms closed in summer 2018—with these important issues in mind and things that are currently ongoing, have you had further dialogue since then with key stakeholders like, for example, Universities Wales and others? kirsty williams am: On the Bill or on fee and access plans in particular? hefin david am: I'm thinking about fee and access plans as an issue that suggests that there is a need for deep consultation, so with that in mind, with things like that, have you had further discussion? kirsty williams am: Oh my goodness me, civil servants in the department are constantly in discussion with a range of stakeholders as we continue to develop legislative proposals. I meet on a regular basis with both HEFCW—I meet separately with the vice-chancellors, and I've been very keen to develop a stronger working relationship with chairs, and perhaps we'll come on to issues of governance later. So, we are constantly discussing with stakeholders all options for change— hefin david am: I suppose the message I'm getting as chair of the cross-party group on higher education is that there could still be more direct consultation with stakeholders. Now, I've got no evidence to say it has or hasn't happened, but that's the message I've received. huw morris: If I could just chip in for a moment, the Minister's outlined that there is very extensive, ongoing communication both ways with the sector, but the challenge of preparing a Bill is the balancing act between gathering in information—and there's been a general consultation process and a technical consultation process—and wanting to make sure that the Bill that's laid next year hasn't been discussed with anybody else before it comes to be considered by the Senedd. So, the broad principles have been discussed, but specific details of what goes into a Bill or policy instructions that inform a Bill haven't been the subject of consultation— hefin david am: Because that happens at Stage 1. Sorry, can I move on to the next item? lynne neagle am: Oh, you're going on to the next section. hefin david am: Yes, unless there's anything specific— lynne neagle am: Yes, I just wanted to clarify, if we're moving to a longer term approach to this, how will the new body be able to establish that things are actually working, that the powers are working, if we're working on a five-year time frame? kirsty williams am: As we've heard, we can't really properly assess fee and access plans in the current arrangements, because it takes time for those cohorts of students to go through and activities to go through. Being able to move to a system where fee and access plans, for instance, could be over a three-year period I think allows universities to be more strategic in some of their investments and some of their activities around fee and access. In a single-year plan, it's almost knee-jerk, it's the need to demonstrate that you're doing something, and doing that within that period of time, rather than a more strategic view—. Can I just say, I know it's not quite subject to this, but we're really moving forward in terms of access and broadening access into the HE sector. For me, student financial support is one aspect of it, but if we're really thinking about social mobility and attracting people into higher education that have never been part of higher education before, our early figures would suggest—they're early figures, and they're subject to change, but in terms of our change to our student support regime, we have seen a 58 per cent increase in the number of postgraduates applying for student support in Wales. When you think about it, when many of us went to university, a degree was the thing that set you apart. Now that more and more students are going to university, it is that postgraduate qualification that sets you apart, but your ability to carry on studying is often limited by access to financial support, so a 58 per cent increase in postgraduate I think is great for those individuals, but it's also great for our economy. We've seen a 35 per cent increase in part-time undergraduates that have been supported by the Student Loans Company; the Open University have reported a 67 per cent increase in students from Wales's most economically disadvantaged areas registering with them; a 57 per cent increase in disabled students; and a 30 per cent increase in black, minority ethnic learners. So, I think that's a really, really positive basis for our sector to continue to work on broadening access. The feedback from Universities Wales suggests that, with the outcome of the 2015 Act, institutions with the strongest track records are more highly regulated than the riskier private alternative providers. Do you think that Act has struck the right balance? kirsty williams am: I think the Act has created a system where the level of regulation is proportional to the amount and the nature of public moneys received by institutions. Those were the words used by Universities Wales— kirsty williams am: No, no, I'm not disagreeing. When you look at public moneys going into institutions, I think that the Act is proportionate, myself. hefin david am: So, do you think it's in the interests of students, then, to be at private institutions—? I've seen those private institutions and how they operate; I've seen them at first-hand—they don't operate to the same rigour as public institutions, and they're less regulated. huw morris: Can I just chip in? I think that the category 'private' covers quite a wide range of things, and many private institutions are also charities. We don't have the presence of some of the large private charities that are present in other countries, but Stanford and Harvard would count as private universities. I think there has been attention drawn to some private providers, particularly in England, but I wouldn't tar them all with the same brush, necessarily. hefin david am: But they fall outwith—if they're not charitable providers running validated courses, for example, they fall outwith the strength of regulation that is currently in place on the universities in Wales. kirsty williams am: So, we would regulate them on a course-by-course basis, so it's back to the issue of proportionality, isn't it? So, you are automatically regulated for all your courses, if you're one of our main universities, but there is a process that is run by HEFCW on a course-by-course basis to validate alternative providers. And as Huw said, I think we should recognise the nature of that is very, very, very small in Wales, and there is a process to ensure quality provision. hefin david am: And I'm aware that there are a small number of private institutions in Wales, but are you concerned that in the future the landscape may change, particularly with the opportunity to recruit more part-time students? Do you think the landscape may change in future and that the 2015 Act, as designed, wasn't equipped for that, and will the next Act, then, be equipped? kirsty williams am: I think it's right to say that maybe the previous legislation didn't futureproof for changes. I'm not anticipating a mass influx of alternative providers, in the sense that we've seen across the border, but we will need to ensure that the new commission has powers to regulate and to futureproof. We had some evidence from the University and College Union that were concerned about the governance of universities, actually, as being a bigger problem than the regulatory framework in many ways. Can you tell us, perhaps, how the HE Act addresses the issue of poor governance, or is it really just limited to responding to the symptoms rather than the poor governance itself? kirsty williams am: Well, I think it's true and fair to say that the Bill does not directly address issues around governance in the sector. HEFCW do have well-established assurance practices in relation to governance that would predate the 2015 legislation. But governance—we've talked briefly about some recent history within the sector that I think has certainly brought the issue of governance to the fore once again, and I think there are two important things that we're trying to do about that in the current time, prior to any legislative changes. The first is, as I just said to Hefin, I have sought to have a more direct relationship with chairs of universities and have that one-to-one relationship with them, not in the presence of their vice-chancellors. I challenge them, they challenge me, and I think we've deliberately tried to establish a regular routine of that since I took office. And you'll be aware that, collaboratively—and I'm glad that this has been done in this way because I think if you do it this way, we're more likely to get some success and change—Universities Wales and HEFCW have worked together to undertake an independent review of governance. And I think it's really important that parties have come together to recognise the issues and to agree to take action, because I think if we'd have tried to impose something, we'd have more resistance. So, there is an independent review going on at the moment— dawn bowden am: Is that the risk review process in—? kirsty williams am: That's the Gillian Camm review. This is a review that, as I said, Universities Wales and HEFCW have agreed to do together. It's chaired by Gillian Camm, who is the chair of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, and she is doing an independent review to advise on changes to governance. And I welcome that, I'm very supportive of that, and that's happening at the moment. As I said, I'm glad that there's been recognition from within the sector themselves that they need to make sure, and they need to give confidence, that governance arrangements are what they should be. dawn bowden am: So, is that something that you're going to be taking into the PCET Bill, do you think? kirsty williams am: Yes, absolutely. We're exploring how the Bill could introduce a regulatory condition in respect of good governance, and a commission would be able to set expectations with regard to good governance. I think one of the concerns for me—and I know that this is a concern that is shared by the UCU—is the diversity of governance and who finds themselves in these really important positions. HEFCW don't hold figures on it, but from an approximation that I've asked officials to do for me, currently in the universities that we have, I would say that men make up around 56 per cent of membership of universities' governing bodies; women—44 per cent; BME—as low as 4 per cent. Of course, in individual institutions, it does vary, but I think there is some way to go to making sure that our governing bodies are diverse and that there's an opportunity to look at the student voice in governance going forward, the staff voice in governance going forward, and these are things that we hope to have discussions on whilst we bring the legislation forward. dawn bowden am: But also, I guess—sorry, Chair—a greater understanding, that anybody going in to become a governor of one of these institutions has a greater understanding of what is expected of them. Do you think that that's a gap that needs to be plugged? huw morris: One of the things that HEFCW have led on with AdvanceHE, the body that encompasses the leadership foundation, is a development programme for governing bodies, and that started earlier—well, it's been going on for some time, but it was recommenced earlier this year, with a session for all of the chairs of universities in Wales. And I believe—I'll need to check this—that there are plans to engage with each of the governing bodies, because, as you rightly say, and this lies behind a lot of what we've been discussing, the activities of these institutions have become much more complex over recent years, and so there is a need for that training and development and understanding also of the fast-changing nature of that activity. lynne neagle am: Okay, just before we move on, can I ask whether it's your plan to legislate on that, as they've done in Scotland? kirsty williams am: As I said, I don't want to pre-empt scrutiny of the Bill, because we need to be able to come to the committee and do that in the entirety, rather than picking off individual bits of it, but we are absolutely exploring how the Bill could introduce a regulatory condition with regard to governance. We've heard evidence regarding the difficulties caused by HEFCW having a legal duty to quality-assure all the provision in two further education colleges. Could you clarify that and explain the situation in that instance? kirsty williams am: Thank you. My understanding—and as I said, it's a bit difficult, because I can't put myself into the thought process of the Minister at the time and what his expectation was. But, certainly, my understanding is that it was not an unintended consequence, it was an expectation built into the Act that HEFCW and Estyn would work together on these matters. The Act built on what were the quality assessment arrangements in the 1992 Act, which required HEFCW to secure arrangements for the assessment of the quality of education provided by funding institutions. So, as a consequence of that approach, HEFCW's quality assessment duty currently encompasses all the education provided by or on behalf of a regulated institution. So, it is complicated, and Huw can help me out here if I get it wrong, but my understanding is that it was not an unintended consequence, that was the expectation of what would happen when the legislation was passed. That was a theme in the general and technical consultation exercises that we've engaged in over the last couple of years. sian gwenllian am: So, you're happy, therefore, that that partnership has worked. Are you happy with that? kirsty williams am: Certainly, in our consultation for the upcoming Act, we've generally heard, certainly from our further education colleges, that they've been quite content with the arrangements. huw morris: There are differences in the systems of quality assurance as they've historically applied to FE and HE, but I understand that that has meant that, as FE colleges become more interested in HE, they've had to learn new ways, and that's taken a little bit of time. sian gwenllian am: Okay, which moves us on to this idea of having one quality assurance body or one quality assurance framework. Is that your intention and how will that work in practice? kirsty williams am: I am aware, and we've listened to stakeholders' concerns regarding proposals to introduce a single quality assessment body. As I said, we recognise that stakeholders are broadly content with the current situation with regard to Estyn and QAA. So, we've been listening to that, following the technical consultation, and policy officials are working through options in regard to ensuring what quality assurance will look like in the commission. As I said, I don't want to pre-empt bringing forward the legislation, but the principles underlying any assurance regime would need to be coherent, need to be effective and need to be comprehensive. What we're also very clear about, and I think it is important to say, is that any quality framework covering higher education will be compatible with ENQA, which I think is really, really important going forward. sian gwenllian am: But, you have touched on this, there is substantial concern in the sector about this offer to move to one assurance body for the tertiary sector. One vice-chancellor has told us: kirsty williams am: Well, sometimes, I think it is necessary, maybe, to cause a stir. If we don't change things, it does beg the point of, 'Why are any of us here if we're not here to sometimes move things forward?' And change is challenging always, but I would like to reassure all of our vice-chancellors and our sector as a whole that we're not going to do anything in the quality assurance regime that would risk what is the very high reputation and standards that Welsh universities currently comply with or would set them apart from institutions across the border or in a European context. I think the fear is misplaced, but coming back to another theme in the conversation so far about futureproofing, what we're seeing in the figures that the Minister outlined to you earlier about the growth in postgraduate and the growth in part-time is the desire of a greater number of people at different ages to engage in higher and tertiary education, and quite often that will be in a workplace or it will be in a non-conventional institutional setting. Historically, the quality assurance regimes for work-based learning have tended to sit with Estyn; the assurance regimes for the universities have sat with the QAA. There's quite a lot of learning that all sides have got to engage in if we're going to be able to have continued high quality in these new areas that are being explored. The Augar report, which was published earlier this year in England, drew attention to this as being a major problem in the relationship over the border between Ofsted and the QAA. So, I think we're not looking to impose one institution on anybody, but we are looking to encourage greater synergy in the ways in which quality assurance and enhancement is undertaken in those different areas of activity. Will the new Bill address these issues? kirsty williams am: Well, certainly transnational education does present real opportunities for Welsh institutions, but if not managed appropriately and regulated appropriately can cause real risks to reputation to our sector. When I meet with vice-chancellors in universities in different parts of the world, and when I am visiting different countries, one of the great things that I'm able to say is that we have a sector that provides fantastic quality of teaching, excellence in research and a wonderful student experience, and that is undermined if institutions find themselves undertaking TNE activities that put that at risk. So, it's an important consideration for the health of the whole sector that any TNE undertaken by a Welsh institution has the appropriate quality guarantees built into that because it's a problem not just for an individual institution, but it could undermine the very strong reputation that the Welsh sector has as a whole. Huw, was there anything further about TNE? huw morris: Well, just to say that we are live to that, as I know HEFCW and the QAA are. When they visit institutions with their reviews they will look at a selection of those overseas activities and there are periodic thematic reviews of the activity in particular countries. I think we would hope and believe that HEFCW, in its conversations with the QAA, would be keeping that under review to minimise the risk and maximise the opportunities. sian gwenllian am: So, you're not actually looking to use the new legislation to strengthen the regulation around this. huw morris: The arrangements at the moment are that HEFCW uses the QAA to do the reviews and the inspections. The system at the moment works through co-operation between the institutions and the regulator to make sure the quality assurance system is improving and enhancing things. Well, can I thank you both for attending this morning and answering all our questions? As usual, you will be sent a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you both for your attendance this morning. Paper to note 1 is a letter from the Minister for Education regarding the revised additional learning needs implementation plan. Paper to note 2 is additional information from HEFCW, following the meeting on 18 July, in relation to our post-legislative scrutiny of the Higher Education (Wales) Act. And paper to note 3 is a letter from us to the Welsh Local Government Association on the Childcare Funding (Wales) Act 2019. Can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting and for item 1 on 2 October? Are Members content? Thank you.<doc-sep>I've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies and Hefin David, and we've got no substitutions. Can I ask if Members have any declarations of interest? Can I just, then, declare for the record that I chair the cross-party group on suicide prevention and that Samaritans Cymru, who are appearing before us later, provide the secretariat for that group, just for that to be on the record? Item 2, then, is an evidence session for our inquiry on education otherwise than at school, and I'm very pleased to welcome our panel of witnesses this morning: Sharon Davies, head of learning, Torfaen County Borough Council and representing the Association of Directors of Education in Wales; Nick Williams, director of education, Swansea city and county council, and representing the Association of Directors of Education in Wales; and David Hopkins, interim head of education at the Welsh Local Government Association. We've got a lot of ground we'd like to cover, so we'll go straight into questions, if that's okay. And if I can just start by asking you what you believe the main reasons are for the increase in the number of exclusions from school. I think one of the things we're experiencing across the system in Wales is more examples of very challenging behaviour. I think the prevalence of ASD—autism spectrum disorder—and trying to get the learners the right provision is sometimes a challenge. Obviously, I can speak more about my own local authority in Swansea: the numbers have increased about fourfold over the last five, six years, so what's presenting as difficult behaviour can also sometimes be additional learning needs as well, and the system's struggling a little bit to catch up to have enough capacity to do that, so that is placing pressure on schools and then, in turn, pressure on the EOTAS, including our pupil referral units, because, obviously, we just probably haven't got enough capacity at the moment in the system. Anybody got anything to add to that, or—? sharon davies: No, I think that's what we're seeing in Torfaen as well. So, to what extent, then, do local authorities have clear strategies for support and reintegration, and a continuum of provision to meet the needs of learners who are either at risk of exclusion, or disengagement? nick williams: Well, we've just developed a behaviour and well-being strategy, which, with our schools—and I'm aware, because I work in the south-west and mid Wales region, and I know some of the other local authorities have something similar, and, similarly, I chair the EOTAS network across Wales, and I know many local authorities are going in that direction, so that has a tiered approach, or staged approach, or whichever, so that there's universal provision. I think it's something that—you know, we need to make sure that our staff and our schools are well-equipped to meet these needs, but there will always, unfortunately, be some learners who need more specialist provision. But there's a little bit of lag in the system, trying to bring everybody up to the same, consistent level. But I think work is afoot in nearly all local authorities, as far as I'm aware. In terms of school accountability measures, do you think that they have had an impact on the rise in exclusions? sharon davies: When we're looking at the accountabilities, there's a huge amount of pressures on schools to perform, and I think the whole culture that the schools are within does play an element of it to some—. We are seeing a change with the interim measures coming on board, but I think there's going to be a lag in the system before we see that having a knock-on effect on our learners, because, undoubtedly, there are pressures on schools. lynne neagle am: So, you've seen an improvement since the capped 9 has been brought in? sharon davies: I think it's early to say, but certainly we're working towards that improvement. I can only speak for Torfaen—we've been working really hard on our exclusions and working with our schools to ensure that the curriculum is broad and balanced, and accounts for every learner within the system. nick williams: May I answer this in Welsh? lynne neagle am: Of course, yes. nick williams: The messages that the Government is conveying to us and the messages we convey as directors and councils are important as well. So, we always tell them that it's the progression of the children in the future that's important, not just reaching up to the level. So, messages such as those are being conveyed now, and I think that the schools do understand now the expectation and what's expected of them. In terms of parents, what are local authorities doing to actually engage parents of children and young people who are either EOTAS or at risk of becoming EOTAS? nick williams: I'll answer this in English. Again, I know perhaps Swansea and Neath Port Talbot—we have a team-around-the-family approach. So, as you say, it's more complicated than just the child behaving in a certain way, or being school-anxious, whatever the issue is. So, it's sort of bringing all of the agencies together to try and look at how we can proactively solve problems and support the families. Because nearly always, the behaviours that are demonstrated, or come out in schools, or whatever provision, is obviously probably greater in the home environment, so there's a whole—. lynne neagle am: And do you think that all local authorities have got that understanding across Wales? sharon davies: I would say the majority have. As Nick mentioned, it is about that multi-agency approach—it is working with social care, working with health colleagues, to look at the whole package that goes into these families and to our learners. nick williams: Certainly with schools, I know across Wales we've done a lot of training on adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed practice, so at least people can perhaps better understand some of the reasons why this behaviour is coming through, whereas in the past—I'm thinking myself, now, as a teacher—they were just difficult behaviours. sian gwenllian am: May I begin, maybe, with a question, generally speaking—? We're all aware of the funding issues and the challenges of funding that face schools in general. So, can this lead to more exclusions, because additional learning needs have been hit in light of these challenges, and then that the side-effects of that creates more exclusions? sharon davies: In particular now with the new Act coming into force, that's going to place more pressure on the system. In Torfaen, we know that we have schools that are looking at their funding—they are behind, and they have to make these hard choices. And sometimes, they have to look at every aspect within the school in terms of their learners, then, and that does place additional pressure on the schools. sian gwenllian am: Is the additional learning needs sector being adversely affected, worse than—? sharon davies: I'm not sure whether it's being worse affected, but certainly there's pressure, in particular with the new Act coming in, and that's going to place more pressure on the system. sian gwenllian am: But maybe we need to spend more in light of the new Act? sharon davies: Yes. But just sometimes, the Government doesn't think about the staff in the pupil referral units, because we've gone back to the Government to tell them, 'Right, you've provided money to school staff, but what about staff that need training—perhaps more than staff in the school sector?' And in fairness, they have addressed that, but perhaps it's not at the forefront of their minds when they're thinking of providing funding to the schools. sian gwenllian am: And maybe I can ask the WLGA: are the difficulties that can arise between the money that is kept back by local authorities and the funding that goes directly to schools—can that therefore affect the kind of provision that's happening from authority to authority? david hopkins: Yes, sure. The delegation levels are already very high in most authority areas, and we've got agreements in place with the Government to make sure that more money, or as much money as possible, is devolved to schools. I think the factors that really affect exclusions, which is where I think the question came from: you've got the very narrow measure at the end of key stage 4 attainment, which I think has put pressure on some schools, certainly, and headteachers have felt that—sometimes excluded, or otherwise put into another school as a consequence, which is regrettable, but that's what's happened. And on the additional learning needs side, whilst the Minister has currently made some more money available, if we look at experiences that have happened in England, in particular, because there are direct parallels there with legislation, we know from those experiences that ALN funding has become increasingly under pressure—there have been big issues around tribunals, to the point where local authorities at one point almost gave up going to tribunals, because they were losing them time and time again. So, there are financial pressures there, but I don't think the levels of delegation have any impact on that. If they're under pressure financially or in terms of performance measures, they will react in a particular way. Culturally, we've got to get to the point, I think, particularly with the new curriculum coming in, where we say, 'Look, forget the narrow measures that you're being judged by. We're trying to agree with partners, including Estyn and the Welsh Government, a broader range of measures.' That, in a sense, may provide opportunities for schools, and local authorities, to look more constructively at this whole area. So, that's one area, but you're right, I think the ALN legislation will put pressures on, not just local authorities and schools, but also on the post-16 sector, because we're talking now about a wider age range—doing up to 25 as well. So, we've got a host of issues, I think, there to consider and work our way through. sian gwenllian am: And is the fact that there's variation from term to term, from week to week sometimes, in the level of provision that a school is going to have to provide for trying to retain those pupils in mainstream schools—is the fact that there is so much variation creating a specific challenge, and maybe that that leads to more exclusions? sharon davies: As you say, because it changes, it's difficult then to plan ahead, and from year to year and also, as you've said, within the term. Perhaps you have provision for more learners coming in or moving, and then that causes the pressure within the system, then, because you haven't planned for them, and therefore there's no spare funding there to draw on. nick williams: Also, in fairness to PRUs, we've been trying to work on the fact that, if children move out of school, the funding follows them. We don't want a lag in the system, because they have to meet the challenge of the pupils, but the money is still in the schools, because it's once a year that they have that funding. What more can be done, and by whom, to support collaborative working between schools, PRUs and local authorities to ensure that there is a continuum of provision and support for learners? nick williams: Well, one of the things I think that has improved a lot is the networking within the PRU sector. And we're talking about professional learning for any teacher or provider, or it's sometimes the more informal training they receive by making visits, joint visits, to provision and also using the expertise that we do have within the sector to work more closely with our schools, and vice versa, particularly around the curriculum. And I think this is the opportunity the new curriculum provides, providing our staff have the funding to do that and the opportunities we need to be creating around that as well. But in the past, there might well have been some staff who perhaps hadn't had those school experiences and vice versa. janet finch-saunders am: Can I just ask you about transition arrangements, because I know some of the issues that have arisen in my own constituency is when a pupil is in a PRU and then trying to get back into mainstream education? It isn't a clear, sort of, going from one to the other—sometimes a child can find themselves at home because they're not able to get back into the school setting, the main school setting. We've had a big investment of time, and there will be money and through band B, we're building a brand-new PRU provision in Swansea, which will be open in January 2021. So, we've recognised that, so that we have our staff working very closely with the schools. There's an integration through a part-time timetable back into school, and we continue to support them during that process. But then, when they're back in school, that support doesn't stop—that support continues, and then there's a managed reduction in that support. nick williams: But I'll be honest with you, the more challenging your learners are the ones who are coming to the end of their statutory education, your key stage 4. It is far, far more difficult when they're 15, 16 to get them back into mainstream. So, then you're looking more at how you transit, then, into further education and colleges and so on. In your view— lynne neagle am: Just before we move on, have you got anything to add, Sharon, in terms of—? Because, obviously, we've had the Swansea perspective. , how effective are Torfaen at reintegrating young people into mainstream education? sharon davies: As Nick said, it does get more difficult at key stage 4, and it's working, then, with—. It comes back to that team-around-the-family approach, to ensure what is needed for that learner to go back into school, what can the school provide. It's looking at the whole package of support, then, that surrounds not just the learner but the family, whether it's transport—it's looking at the whole agenda, then, to ensure that everything is in place for that learner to go back to school, where it's possible. david hopkins: I think, Chair, at least one authority is looking at how they can best retain all pupils in the school setting, but it's early days yet for looking at that. , that's an ideal, obviously, but it does mean looking at your funding constructively and carefully, and it brings—. The principle is fine, but it does bring a host of other issues with it, if you see what . It's been tried elsewhere, and we keep an eye on that, but we don't really know what the outcomes have been long term with that. lynne neagle am: And which authority is that? david hopkins: I don't think I'm allowed to say at this point. sharon davies: A few years ago, I used to be a primary headteacher in England, so we were looking at different models, then, at various conferences, and I believe Oxford, as a local authority—they had a PRU, and they had discussions with their secondary schools, then, whether to get rid of the PRU, as such, and give the money back into schools. But they looked at a partnership within the schools, then, to say, 'Okay, you can have the money, but there's got to be terms of reference'—not quite a service level agreement, but the schools worked together as a partnership, then, so that they couldn't keep moving the children around, the learners around. It started off really well, but that was a few years ago, so I don't know whether it's continued now. But that was a model that, at the time, that local authority looked at to get more money into schools and to get schools, then, to have that responsibility—that they didn't offload the learners elsewhere. We've operated this now for almost three years, where we devolve—the word is 'devolve', as opposed to 'delegate'—the money to secondary schools to try and give them some extra resource to manage the process, and they have to produce an action plan, which we monitor, about how they're using that funding. But, obviously, we recognise that—and it's back to your original question, the first question—we still have learners, unfortunately, despite pretty effective support and provision in nearly all our schools, because of the very, very challenging behaviour we're experiencing, who do need additional and bespoke support, which in fairness the school can't provide. So, in your view, though, what are the reasons for the delays that some children experience in accessing EOTAS provision? nick williams: Capacity— janet finch-saunders am: What? Sorry, I missed that. Capacity: we just haven't got enough spaces in some cases, some year groups and so on. Obviously, given what I've said as well, and I'm sure it'd be the same for all local authorities, we've got to have robust systems and panels and so on to make sure that everything possible has been done to meet the needs of the learner in their home provision, if you like, the home school. So, there might be a time period when the learners are on a part-time timetable, which isn't ideal, I accept, but again, it's working with the families and the youngsters. We have somebody who oversees that and works very closely with our secondary schools so that we give almost a second chance to learners. Sometimes, it works really well; sometimes, the learner turns around and says, 'Actually, I preferred it in my old school.' So, there's a cooling-off period as well. What would be the advantages or disadvantages, then, of local authorities having commissioning frameworks for providers, and for EOTAS providers to have approved status? nick williams: Obviously, we do do that, but we're struggling sometimes for additional provision—very important around safeguarding. However, we don't want to make it too difficult, so that we haven't got any providers coming forward either. But I think, then, we need to perhaps think about how the staff in that sort of additional provision—what sort of training and support they have. At the moment, that is a struggle for us, because we're managing those pressures in our own provision whilst we go out and observe through a provision framework to make sure that the provision is—. To what extent do local authorities know about the level of EOTAS provision that is organised by individual schools, whether in an FE college or otherwise off the school site? nick williams: I can only speak for Swansea. We know, as part of that plan that we ask our schools to send in, they have to put down where that provision is. And obviously, as part of the visits, as well, to the schools by the challenge advisers, the school should be monitoring that provision and quality assuring that provision. janet finch-saunders am: And how is safeguarding monitored in terms of privately run EOTAS? Independent. nick williams: The schools would have to make sure that— janet finch-saunders am: But is that happening, do you know? nick williams: Yes, because schools do take safeguarding very, very seriously. And is there a role for local authorities in quality assuring, monitoring or evaluating the EOTAS provision organised by individual schools? nick williams: Yes, but a lot of the additional provision is provision we also use, in our experience. So, if it's MTP or something through the college, like a mechanics course or something like that, we're probably using it ourselves. sharon davies: In Torfaen, our secondary schools have set out their own TCP—Torfaen curriculum panel—which looks at alternative provision. The meetings are facilitated and they're currently undergoing a review of the alternate provisions each school is doing because, sometimes, it's worked in the past, but what they're seeing now is that it's not quite working now, and it's understanding why. Is it due to the complexity of the learners coming through? Or is it that the providers are not offering what the learners are seeking any more? So, it's looking as well at, coming back to that curriculum offer, is it the right curriculum offer for those learners? And the training of the staff, do we have the right staff? It's capacity, then. And should local authorities take a greater role in quality assuring individual tuition? sharon davies: Can I just ask what you mean by individual tuition? janet finch-saunders am: I suppose individual tuition in terms of each individual, I would assume that means. janet finch-saunders am: I wouldn't like to think anyone was falling through— lynne neagle am: I think the purpose of the question is around home tuition, yes. Individual tuition in terms of we wouldn't want any child, if they're away from a main-school setting, to slip through the net in terms of tuition, or safeguarding even. sharon davies: I suppose the difficulty with home tuition is, as a local authority, we're restricted on how much access we get into the home. janet finch-saunders am: Well, I appreciate that, and that's the—[Inaudible.] sharon davies: Therefore, it's really difficult then to quality assure, because unless the families invite us in there's very little—. janet finch-saunders am: What about if they're in a private setting? nick williams: If they're following a restricted timetable or whatever, because maybe they're school anxious and so on, and we're trying to get them into our provision like that, the home-tuition staff work for us. We don't use agency staff, for instance, to go in and provide a few hours of provision, or to go to the local library. So, for whatever reason their needs at the moment can't be met in a school or in approved provision, then the staff who do provide some education, or if it's for medical reasons, they work for us in the local authority. So, we're not using— janet finch-saunders am: Is that widespread around Wales? nick williams: I don't really know the answer to that, I'm sorry. david hopkins: Historically, there has been a general pattern, and if you're making a provision you will quality assure it, clearly. lynne neagle am: What we were driving at was home tuition that is commissioned by the local authority, but I think Nick has answered that now, really, if that's a consistent answer for local authorities. Can I just ask, before we move on, in the WLGA paper, you say you're concerned about the 'potential impact of changes to the registration of pupils who are EOTAS and the implications for the management of data/funding/joint working'. Can you expand on those concerns for the committee? nick williams: I think it's, you know— lynne neagle am: It was the WLGA paper, actually. nick williams: It's about getting that money following the learner and so on, and that shared ownership of the learner that the schools need to keep, because we want them reintegrated back into schools—that's the aim of any provision that we put in. It's not permanent—except, for certain learners, that might be the case—so they're still, if you like, part and parcel of the school. I think one of your other colleagues asked about the off-rolling, if you like—another term that's used—of students when they get to GCSEs so they don't count in schools' data. We're trying to very much move away from that, through the messages that we all give our schools. They're the most vulnerable learners we've got.' And for the individuals, for the families, and for society, if we can't support these learners—we know the links then to crime, and the cost to us as a society as well. I just want to discuss a little about the curriculum as it stands, and thinking about transferring to a new curriculum, of course. What are the challenges? I'll begin with the WLGA, in general, and ask you, in both your areas, what are the challenges to ensure that EOTAS learners have access to a broad and balanced curriculum, and that there are learning opportunities that are appropriate for them? What are the challenges associated with that? david hopkins: In general terms—. PRUs: clearly, we know that they are following a set curriculum; they are inspected; they are under the control of the local authorities. Where home tuition is provided through the local authority, as has been discussed, again, there should be safeguards there to make sure that that quality assurance takes into account what the pupil is receiving. It's more difficult where, I suspect, it's being provided by a third party that's been commissioned. The commissioning arrangements should ask for those things to be put into place; it's all about the monitoring then. But in general: PRUs, yes, we'd be satisfied; home tuition that is commissioned and managed through the local authority, yes, we would be satisfied; other areas, we would not be able to give a definitive answer on, is my guess. sian gwenllian am: And does that worry you? david hopkins: Me? sian gwenllian am: The WLGA. If you can't guarantee quality in any shape or form for a young person, it is a concern. sian gwenllian am: In terms of the how curriculum is at present, are you happy that it's being delivered? nick williams: To be honest, we are— sian gwenllian am: In the PRUs? nick williams: To be honest, they are broad and balanced. But there's working together now in terms of the new curriculum, and using the opportunity that exists now to collaborate with school staff as well. I can see how collaborative working with the units can work—because they're under your control—the problem is the other parts of the system, in a way. nick williams: They're not with other people all the time; they just go for something So, they would still have literacy and numeracy and Welsh—that would still be provided in the PRU. sian gwenllian am: No, it's beyond the PRUs I'm talking about. But for those who are in homes, or in private provision, perhaps who are not in your experience—. Maybe, this morning, we're getting a picture of the best practice, and we're not going under the surface to where things aren't as good in some areas. Do you agree that there is that inconsistency? What we're hearing about now are the best elements. sian gwenllian am: With the curriculum? nick williams: Yes, and in terms of collaboration. Can I also just refer back to the point that David was making earlier on about ALN and the extent to which ALN support is available to learners in EOTAS? The information that we've had is that it's difficult enough in mainstream schools, but in an EOTAS setting, it's particularly challenging. So, how can that be improved? What can we do to address that? The reason I'm saying that is there are particular needs of learners in an EOTAS setting—that's why they're there, quite often. david hopkins: If a child has additional needs, of course they should be met, whatever the setting. Again, going back to the previous question, we would know within, say a PRU or any local authority commissioned or delivered tuition—whatever form that took—then those needs definitely should be being met. I can't tell you hand on heart whether they all are or not—I don’t know—but they should be. Once you get out of that very tightly regulated part of the system, then, again, if a child has a particular need, of course that need should be met, but it becomes increasingly difficult. So, I think there possibly is an issue there, but I don't know whether my colleagues have a greater understanding of that. dawn bowden am: There is a disconnect between what should be happening and what actually is happening, isn't there? Even in some local authority PRUs where we expect all of this to be happening, we know that it’s not; we know that the full curriculum is not being provided either. The basic numeracy, literacy and well-being stuff is taking place, but there is discrepancy of provision, even in local authority commissioned EOTAS provision. david hopkins: I think there will be variations in provision, but I would say that, within the local authority maintained sector, that provision should be being made. If it's not, the local authority concerned should be aware of that and should be dealing with that. nick williams: We've probably—[Inaudible.]—in Swansea if you look at the inspections of the provision. However, the most recent inspection is very positive, and not that we recognise that there's no work to be done; we're not being complacent. So, I suppose that comes down to additional funding, because I'd like a dedicated educational psychologist spending their time possibly only with our PRU youngsters and EOTAS provision, but we haven't got the capacity because of the demands on us from the wider system. sharon davies: It's kind of what Nick said about capacity, but it's also ensuring the right staff as well, because sometimes, you may have them, but if they move on, or retire, or whatever, there's not a bus load, if you like, of people with that expertise. Because sometimes it takes years to build up on that expertise, and therefore, it's quite niche, and once that person has moved on, it's really difficult to start all over again. It's more than just one person—it's the whole training package that goes around that capacity as well. Because that's not just down to money, it's making sure that we perhaps offer, through our teacher training colleges, the opportunity for them to spend some time. At the moment, a newly qualified teacher can't work in this type of provision, which you can argue, that's fine, they need to perhaps get mainstream first. So, that should be built in to their teacher training, and even through their ongoing professional development, both ways—staff actually coming out to schools, going into our provision and vise versa—because you can also get very isolated if you've worked in PRUs for—. So, we could be doing more there, and I think that's probably, the group I chair, a discussion we need to have. dawn bowden am: And on that point, actually, we did hear from Estyn the point you were making about the staff leaving and there are very small numbers of staff working in that provision. Is that your experience? And if so, what can we do about that? sharon davies: I think it's limited. So, is there any way that local authorities can encourage specialist teachers and educational psychologists to actually share expertise with independent providers of EOTAS? nick williams: Yes, but again, it's a capacity issue, because if we take them out of the provision, it's difficult for perhaps a supply teacher to come in and manage that class because of the demands. But you're saying, really, take it back to teacher training and start at that point so that every teacher has at least some basic awareness of dealing with education in that setting. sharon davies: Or whether there's an opportunity, if somebody wants to lead into that more, that there's an opportunity to do it; that there's an offer there, if they want to specialise more into that area. What about access to mental health services? What's your experience of EOTAS learners' access to mental health support? nick williams: Again, even in the region there's variation there because we've got three health boards over the footprint of the south-west and mid Wales region. And that's one of the positive steps, that health boards have to have a DECLO now—don't ask me, I can't remember what the exact abbreviation is—but we've met with the designated education clinical lead officer, and I think those partnerships will be strong in the future. So, there's counselling and so on to make sure that the learners are going through, if you like—. Not that we're trying to stop them going through, but we're trying to deal with them appropriately at the different stages so that they're not inundated either. But is your experience also that a lack of mental health support in mainstream schools could potentially be leading to more learners ending up in an EOTAS provision. david hopkins: I was going to say, about the question, I think there's a general deficit in child and adolescent mental health services, for example. I'm not criticising the services, I'm just saying the capacity isn't there, as we would like. So, I think there's probably a more general issue there that would, in turn, translate into pupils who've got additional needs, whether they're in EOTAS, PRU or wherever. I suspect—I've not got an evidence base to offer you, but there's a very long-standing problem there. Just to return to teacher training, and you say that new teachers can't go straight into a unit, and maybe more emphasis is needed on that aspect. But generally speaking, if there's an increase in challenging behaviour, are new teachers able—? They don't have the experience, but are they equipped well enough to deal with that? Because we hear of so many people leaving the profession because of this challenging behaviour, and again, I wonder if the system has adequately caught up with that. And we need—not just in this aspect—but we need to look at the system holistically to be more prepared to deal with challenging behaviour. If people decide not to go into teaching after having training, it's not just because of challenging behaviour. You need the theory, but also the practice—that's important to have somebody who can mentor you in the school and that shows good practice. sian gwenllian am: But if we're facing a situation where there are fewer wanting to go into the profession and we are losing those most experienced people, then it creates a great big challenge, doesn't it? We're looking at something very limited here, but we need to look at it in the bigger picture of what's happening. lynne neagle am: Sharon, the CAMHS in-reach project is operational in Gwent, but my understanding is that they don't include PRUs. I just wanted to ask, then, the Gwent attachment team has been working with PRUs in Gwent, and the committee is familiar with the work of the Gwent attachment team, can you just tell us what you think the impact of that has been in terms of support for staff and embedding that awareness of attachment and early trauma in the PRUs? sharon davies: I think any form of professional learning, it's positive, and, therefore, as we alluded to earlier, it's that expertise training for the PRU then and for the staff there. Is there anything you want to pick up from the—? janet finch-saunders am: Yes, I think the rural aspect—are you aware that there are any issues relating to transport for EOTAS learners, particularly in more rural parts or areas of Wales? nick williams: Certainly, in our region, in Powys, from north Powys, when you're almost in Oswestry, down to Ystradgynlais, which is not far from me. I think they've got provision in the north and south of the county, but you're still talking— janet finch-saunders am: What provision in the north? nick williams: I think there's a PRU provision in the north of Powys and one in the south— janet finch-saunders am: Oh, sorry, north of Powys. nick williams: For myself, and I'd hazard a guess, Torfaen, we're relatively compact, aren't we, so it's not such an issue. lynne neagle am: Has the WLGA got any comment on the transport issue? david hopkins: I'm not aware of issues, if I'm honest, but then again, it may be something we've not investigated. We have probably got a few areas that we'll write to you about, if that's okay. Can I thank you for your attendance this morning? We will send you a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you again for attending. The committee will break until 10:20, but can Members not shoot off for a sec, please? Okay, can I welcome everybody back to our next evidence session, which is our sixth evidence session for our inquiry on education otherwise than at school? I'm very pleased to welcome Sarah Stone, executive director for Wales of Samaritans; Liz Williams, policy and communications officer at Samaritans; and Dr Ian Johnson, who is the manager of children and young people's mental health at Mind Cymru. If I can just start by asking you what you think the main reasons are why we are seeing this increase in the numbers of children and young people being excluded from school. dr ian johnson: I think it's a very difficult subject, because, in many cases, we're not really sure what the data looks like. We get these things from quite a broad perspective, and we don't actually see the extent of the reasons why. If you look at, for example, the statistical release, then you get a sense of why people are being excluded, but they tend to be—. It's a very reductionist discussion, so you see reasons like persistent disruptive behaviour, verbal abuse or physical assaults, but you don't actually get the underlying factors that are influencing that. Now, we know that that information exists, because, obviously, schools don't exclude anybody lightly, and I speak as someone who's been until this academic year a governor on secondary and primary schools. So, there's a great deal of paper trail, but that doesn't seem to really find its way up to a higher level. And how concerned are you about the trend that we're seeing of an increase in younger children being excluded, and what do you think the reasons might be for that? dr ian johnson: I think it's very concerning that we're seeing increases amongst younger children in particular. Those have gone up quite substantially in the past few years, and a lot of the evidence that we're hearing is quite anecdotal, so it tends to be around the behavioural issues or underlying issues, and there's a lot of discussion about the adverse childhood experiences agenda and how that's—. So, there's a better understanding of that, but I'm not in a position at the moment, really, to be able to explain why primary schools maybe are actually taking that position and excluding more than they used to. sarah stone: What I would say is that the reason that Samaritans did our report on exclusions from school rested with—. They began with anecdotal information coming through to us around individual distress and from projects working with young people who'd been excluded. So, this is enough to ask us some serious questions, to which we don't know the answer, unless we actually do some serious work on this. So, I would reiterate what we say in our report: that we need to examine this. It's a really important issue, and the life trajectory of those young people is being impacted by their exclusion. You may not be able to answer this, but to what extent do you think school accountability measures are having an impact on the numbers of exclusions? dr ian johnson: Well, I think it's very interesting, looking at Estyn's pupil registration practices report from October last year, which looks at off-rolling, and I think that you see, specifically at year 10 to 11, a strong impact: around 4 per cent of pupils are off-rolled between year 10 and 11, but you're also seeing a number between 1.5 and 2 per cent that are off-rolled in any given year between year 8/year 9, year 9/year 10. So, I think it's clear that there's been a substantial increase in the numbers off-rolled in that year 10 to 11, but what I think is concerning for me is the normalisation, throughout the system, at secondary school level, where there's off-rolling between year 7/8, year 8/9. Based around there being around 30,000 to 32,000 in each cohort, then you're looking at 500 to 600 children in any given year, and I think we need to understand why that is the norm, what could be done around that, as well as looking into the obvious impact of that at year 10 to 11. I think we need to dig a bit deeper and understand the story behind that and whether there's a specific reason why schools are doing that, related to the accountability measures. It'll be interesting to see the impact of changes towards capped 9 et cetera, but I think we need a bit more qualitative work on that rather than just the quantitative work that's currently available. liz williams: I think there's also a problem with schools only being measured on academic outcomes rather than the journey travelled by the child and the efforts put in by the school to nurture the well-being of children who are particularly vulnerable. So, I suppose, if you consider that, this is something that definitely needs to be looked at further so that there's incentive for schools to keep children who are perhaps demonstrating challenging behaviour or perhaps aren't attaining brilliant grades. sarah stone: And, just finally, if that's okay, just to cross-refer the committee to the loneliness and isolation strategy, to which we made extensive representations on this issue. A part of the strategy talks about using our approach to accountability to recognise inclusive schools and reduce incentives to remove pupils from schools. It's a really important commitment to make a reality of that, because, actually, what is happening, I think, is that there are incentives that are perverse around this issue. dr ian johnson: Could I just come in on that? I think there's an interesting, again, qualitative, quantitative, element to what happens to those children who move into PRU, EOTAS provision in their earlier years in school and those as they reach a later point in their school career. So, I think there's a question, then, about—I was talking earlier about those children who move in in years 7/8, 8/9, et cetera, and how they loop back into the mainstream education system, what happens to them, but then what happens to those who may be reaching the end of their formal education career and move into EOTAS, PRU provision, and what happens to those young people afterwards? I'm sure we'll pick up some of that as we go through. We've got some questions now from Janet Finch-Saunders around the support for learners who are at risk of becoming EOTAS. To what extent is adequate support provided to pupils who are at risk of becoming EOTAS? sarah stone: Okay. So, this was a major focus around the piece of work that we did, and we came up with a range of suggestions. I think the quick answer is that what we've seen is a strong indication that it isn't, and that it's—. But also that it's not simply a question of the young person, that it's a question of the whole school environment and how that interacts with the challenges that a young person might be facing. One is that we want to promote a compassionate response and an informed response by everybody in the school to distressed young people—and that distress may show in a number of ways, not necessarily just as obvious distress. So, I think it's understanding that, having a confident response and, obviously, this links with expressing suicidal thoughts and distress as well, which may not come out in exactly that way—but being able to respond where young people are expressing suicidal thoughts. And I think if we connect this with the agenda around adverse childhood experiences, and if you see the young person—. I think what we as Samaritans really wanted to do was to focus on the distressed individual—that's what we do, it's what we're majorly about. So, a young person who is experiencing a whole range of adversity in their own life may be presenting at school in a very challenging way, perhaps. That school may also be their only safe place, and I think that's just a really simple thing just to keep remembering. Hearing headteachers and teachers talk about this, a lot of them are very aware of that, and there are some great examples of schools working to reduce exclusions and understanding the fork in the road that exclusion or not exclusion represents in the life of that young person. There are restorative justice-type approaches being used by schools in Cardiff that seem extraordinarily inspiring. There's been so much interest in this piece of work that we've done, and I've spoken to many educators since, and so it's doing what we needed to do, which is to get people talking about it. Because I think it's not about providing a simplistic answer to this question of support, it is understanding that it's a whole-school question. It's building on the excellent work that is being done by schools in different parts of Wales, joining that up and making that much more general. So, I think that's the opportunity: is to really recognise that this is a big issue, and that, if you don't hold young people within an educational setting, the lifetime consequences for them, including their elevated risk of suicide—it's very hard to reverse that. So, I think we want to focus on a distressed young person and how we respond to that, and it's amazing to move someone on from where they started, and loads of teachers will tell you examples of how they've done that and how they've felt that's not sufficiently recognised by the measures that they're subjected to. dr ian johnson: I think it's an issue where it's very important both to focus on the individual, but also on the macro situation, and, as Sarah mentioned, I think the whole-school approach, which is something that's been discussed within this committee, as part of the 'Mind over matter' work, is something that is hugely important. And that's why that should be—there should be statutory provision regarding a whole-school approach. That prevention operating all the way through the whole-school community will, hopefully, be very effective in providing support levels, ensuring that that support is in place from the very beginning, all the way through primary school, all the way through secondary school, to ensure that learners are being supported and that that is something that's at the forefront of people's considerations whenever they're considering what a pupil is doing, and why they might be doing it. But, generally, just that thinking about the behaviour and the emotional response first, I think, is hugely important in this context. And what do you think could be done more, and by whom, to help schools to support pupils to remain in mainstream education? sarah stone: So, this is where we set out nine recommendations in our report and I think the major message is, as I said before, that we don't have a simple answer to this one. However, there are a number of things that we need to do: we need to recognise the impact of adverse childhood experiences; we need to train teachers so that they have an understanding response and are much more confident in that; we need to learn from what works; we need to listen to the voices of young people themselves. I know this committee is very well aware of that, because you've done very good work listening to the direct voices of young people, but they are very often able to articulate quite a lot about what is needed. I would also add to that that we would want young people themselves to be skilled up in understanding and recognising their own emotions, because this is about putting in place that awareness, that consciousness, if you like, about being able to name and recognise feelings. There's great international evidence on the importance of that and the benefit of it, which was carried out when the new curriculum was being developed, and the health aspect of that. What we would like to see is that new curriculum around health and well-being and mental health and awareness being in the curriculum, so that young people, on a statutory basis—. Otherwise, you're entrenching the differences and the inequalities between teaching across Wales, because the good will do it, and perhaps others will find it much harder. So, I think there's a menu, if you like, and some of it is very much about respecting the experience of teachers and of schools and working with them, because this is about working with their will to do things well. dr ian johnson: I think what's important, and maybe it's implicit within the question about helping to support pupils remain in mainstream schools, is working out what is the best support at this point in time for the young person. Obviously, the schools provide whatever support they can, but what is the best for the young person at this time? And that answer will differ from individual to individual. I think it is important to have the learner voice playing a role within this, and it's important to get more of a child-centred voice around this. One of the projects that Mind will be working on in Wales in the next year is regarding an inclusive education inquiry, where we'll be forefronting the voices of young people within the evidence, because at the moment a lot of the evidence that we have is data-driven or anecdotal, and I think we want to get to the bottom of how young people feel, and how they find this. I think there's a lot to be done, still, with regard to PRU and EOTAS with the new curriculum, and, hopefully, we'll be able to outline some of that in terms of questions later on. And what are your views on the balance between funding being used for diagnosis and support, because I know that the Samaritans report suggested that funding tends to go into diagnosis rather than support? How can the balance be addressed? liz williams: I think it's a really difficult balance, but it was something that was brought up in the research stages of our report. So, we held a round table during the research period, and participants said that they were particularly concerned about the lack of awareness and knowledge of children who had additional learning needs. And, obviously, this is quite serious because these children are at risk of being excluded and are over-represented in excluded groups. And they were particularly concerned about children who were sort of on the cusp, or not properly diagnosed, and a lot of these children would have things like attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and, again, these made up the cohort of pupils who were excluded. So, when you consider that, you tend to think, actually, diagnosis could be really useful, so that staff are aware of the pupil's needs, and maybe aware of why the child might be demonstrating challenging behaviour. However, what participants did say was that unless there was a proper understanding of the child's condition or additional learning needs, and that the proper support was there, then diagnosis alone wasn't of value. So, I think one of the participants said that up to 50 per cent of learners in a classroom could have an additional learning need, so, again, if the support isn't there, that child isn't going to benefit from diagnosis. And what was really highlighted is the importance of the school being inclusive, and for that child, regardless of whether they had an additional learning need or not, to have proper opportunity to progress. And, then, to what extent are schools aware of the impact of early trauma ACEs, and how are schools adapting their practices to take account of them? dr ian johnson: I don't think we're really capable of saying that on an individual level. We're aware, as you've heard from previous evidence from heads of education, et cetera, directors of education, that work is going on on an all-Wales basis, and there's obviously an awful lot of work that's going on on the ACEs agenda. I referred to being a previous school governor, and that's somewhere that's become a trauma-informed school, and they have established that and are widening that base. I think that what the school does though is something that has to loop back, as I said, with the curriculum changes as we're going forward. There's a concern that I have at the moment regarding the progress on EOTAS and PRU within the new curriculum, and there's work that I think will still need to be done, and something that I'm sure will be considered by this committee when it deals with the curriculum assessment Bill when it comes forward later on in the year, because there were comments made by the education Minister, I think, in response to Suzy Davies, in the statement in January, that we're talking about disallowing areas of the curriculum on the basis of the individual learner, to which I have no concern in itself. However, the emotional and mental health well-being needs of this particularly vulnerable group of people needs to be centre stage. So, the role of the health and well-being area of learning and experience, and the role of mental health and emotional well-being within the curriculum, is hugely important. sarah stone: And I think, just to add to that around the impact of early trauma, I think one of the things that we at Samaritans are particularly aware of is the impact of loneliness and isolation on individuals and how that can help to drive distress and suicidal ideation. That sense of belongingness is recognised by the research as being critical to functioning well as a human being. And one of the ways in which early trauma and adversity, if that leads to exclusion from a range of groups, is to lead to lifelong isolation. You look at a trajectory that goes back towards their early years, very often, and Samaritans is about to release some research on that very point. There's also, if we look at the numbers of exclusions around boys, and we're looking at much higher suicide rates and numbers of other issues around men—. Again, I think it's important to see this whole picture— janet finch-saunders am: It's very bad in north Wales. I would say that we want to do something to mitigate the impact of adverse childhood experiences, and we have this great opportunity to release the potential of those young people whose, often, strength and resilience is quite extraordinary in circumstances that many of us would find hard to imagine. So, we need to look at the assets that young people have as well, which you can work with. So, I think if there's a real opportunity to create a change, this is one of them. liz williams: Just to reiterate what Sarah said, looking at our research, which, obviously, isn't yet published but will be soon, it really is quite shocking how these men fell through the net so many times when they were young, and, actually, how many missed opportunities there were to intervene in the cycles of inequality. It is quite clear from that research that these stages where children are demonstrating challenging behaviour are the first signs of distress. So, I think like Sarah said, it is really important to see this as a preventative agenda. You've set out very clearly what you think needs to happen in your report, your nine points and so on, but what's your view on the support currently provided, both in a school setting and EOTAS settings for mental health support? Have you been able to get that sort of information? Have you got a sense of—? dr ian johnson: I don't think we're really in a position to answer fully as to what's going on. I think that part of the problem is there's not really a national picture that we can pick up in terms of data or information regarding this, and I think that's really why there's been such a push towards seeing this in the curriculum. So much of your evidence is anecdotal, is it? It's people that have been referred to you, come to you for help, and you just—or your own research. What—? dr ian johnson: The research that we're going to do is really where we're at, and that's because we feel that there is a gap there regarding how young people are experiencing this within the school environment and in general. I think, in particular, we're aware of increases—quite substantial increases in some cases—regarding self-harm, and concern that manifests itself slightly differently between girls and boys. Specifically, I think there's now an increasing focus on self-harm behaviour amongst girls in the 15 to 19 age range, but we're not entirely sure of how good the support is at schools. My experience of projects that I've been involved in—I was previously in front of this committee as part of the Time to Change Wales project—was that, overall, it depends quite strongly on the senior management team and their commitment. Where the SMT are, perhaps, a bit more laissez-faire regarding this, then it feels that maybe schools are not making such a step forward. And to come back to the point, that's why we feel that whole-school approach guidance needs to be statutory, because we'll otherwise reach some quite uneven outcomes, because those who are doing it well will really push ahead and those that are not so engaged will not be helping their pupils in the way that they should be. dawn bowden am: I guess the EOTAS or PRU provision is going to be much more challenging then, isn't it, then main school provision. I suppose that was what I was trying to get at as well, whether you get a sense that there may be some progress being made in mainstream schools, is that following through in PRUs and EOTAS provision? dr ian johnson: I'll just be honest: right now, I couldn't give you an answer on that. I think that is something that, perhaps, slightly concerns me about the whole field is not being able to get a national feel for these issues. I've heard discussions about things being done regionally and nationally, but I think it would be good to be able to see what that best practice looks like and how well it's done. dawn bowden am: I appreciate you're not educationalists and you wouldn't necessarily have all of that information, but have you got any sense of—again, whether this is anecdotal or from cases that are referred to you—evidence of schools off-rolling pupils with mental health problems? If you've got any evidence of that, what might the impact of that be on the individuals? liz williams: Yes, I think that certainly does happen. I suppose we know this anecdotally from Samaritans research, but also I have experience of working in pupil referral units and working with some really vulnerable children, and I think there is a sense sometimes that these children are labelled as naughty and disruptive. So, children who have additional learning needs or a communication problem that potentially is undiagnosed or not really properly understood. I think when children have mental health problems and additional learning needs, often they can find the school environment really difficult. I've worked with children who have told me that they just don't enjoy being in the classroom because they feel incredibly anxious. They don't feel they can contribute to the school environment, they don't feel like they're keeping up with their classmates and, as a result, they demonstrate challenging behaviour so that they can leave the classroom. But, like Sarah said earlier, there are certainly examples of really good practice, and I suppose this links in to what approaches schools, pupil referral units and EOTAS should take to vulnerable children with mental health problems. One example I can give you is that, at one pupil referral unit, the children would get really distressed and really disruptive towards the end of the day on a Friday. I suppose that, in some schools, the teachers would have thought, 'This is ridiculous, they're disrupting the lessons', but what the teachers knew is that these children would go home, they would face such adversity, wouldn't always get a meal, would be exposed to things they shouldn't be exposed to, and the teachers were able to respond to that with compassion and empathy. But, obviously, seeing behind behaviour is really, really difficult, and I don't think teachers should have to do this alone, they should be properly trained and properly equipped. Ideally, as Samaritans, we would want suicide prevention plans to be embedded in schools and to be part of the culture of schools, but obviously this can't happen if teachers aren't properly equipped and don't have the confidence to go up to a student and ask them if they're struggling. In our compassion in education toolkit, we highlight the importance of asking a child, 'Are you self-harming?', if there are signs; 'Have you tried to take your own life?', if there are signs. So, yes, there are certainly examples of best practice, but I do believe that, if school staff aren't properly equipped and trained, off-rolling pupils, especially at key stage 4, where obviously you will hold those grades, is definitely something that they don't necessarily have the incentive to prevent. dawn bowden am: You touched, in the beginning of that response, on children being labelled as naughty. To what extent have you come across that? Is that quite prevalent? Is that quite common? liz williams: Absolutely, yes. Lots of children with communication difficulties especially, if they haven't been formally diagnosed, they are certainly the ones that are deemed naughty, because I suppose people think, 'Well, you should be doing well, you're bright. Children can be incredibly anxious, have mental health problems, obviously, are exposed to ACEs and things that go on at home that not necessarily every teacher would know about. So, I think there are definitely children who are labelled 'naughty', and I think children also play up to that as well. Like I said, if children are very anxious in the school environment and in the classroom, if they know they can get out of the classroom and get into a safe space, they will do that. dawn bowden am: And then that labelling of a 'naughty' child is actually the impediment to getting that child the support that they need. So, yes, I think it is down to how the school approach it, and it goes back to the whole-school approach and having emotional and mental health on a statutory basis in the curriculum. It embeds emotional well-being into the culture of the school, and it means that students might know when they need help, how to be more resilient and helping themselves, and when and how to ask for help from the teachers. dr ian johnson: If I can just pick up on one of those points, Mind Cymru conducted a series of focus groups around Wales to inform our response to the new curriculum. One of the comments that I think struck home most strongly with me was a young boy saying that, because the same teacher was responsible for pastoral and behaviour, because he had been labelled as naughty or a troublemaker, he felt uncomfortable in terms of going to that same person within the school in order to disclose the problems he was having, because there was a fear of not being believed or accepted, or it being considered as an excuse for poor behaviour, rather than them being taken seriously. I wouldn't want to over-egg that point, but I think it is an important consideration from a learners' perspective. 'If I disclose a problem, if I want to talk to somebody, are there appropriate considerations within the school setting where I can turn to somebody who maybe I might not have the greatest relationship with in other contexts?' I'd also just like to come back to the off-rolling question if I may, just quite briefly. As I said at the outset of the evidence here, Estyn conducted a piece of work on pupil registration practices that showed a substantially higher amount of off-rolling between year 10 and 11, but also a consistent level—1.5 per cent to 2 per cent—in other secondary school years. But we don't have the qualitative material to understand how much of that is related to mental health factors, and how much—because we're in discussion about school accountability—might drive some of that at year 10/11. But we don't know why that baseline of 500/600 young people every year is there within our schools. Can I just ask you a couple of other questions about the impact of particular circumstances, and whether you've come across any issues relating to Welsh-medium provision to support the mental health and well-being of learners as an issue—that it's not been available, Welsh-medium support, for those learners? Have you come across that at all? dr ian johnson: We haven't necessarily come across it, but we haven't been looking for it either. The Estyn report notes that there are generally fewer off-rollings from Welsh-medium education to EOTAS. It could be the socio-economic profile, because exclusions, et cetera, are substantially higher amongst those who are eligible for free school meals, and in many parts of Wales the socio-economic profile of a Welsh-medium education school is slightly different. We are not aware of any particular work that's been done to examine the needs and the provision of Welsh-medium EOTAS. Therefore, my suspicion, without any particular evidence, would be that it happens on a local authority basis, possibly on an incidental basis, depending on the quality and the ability of staff, and possibly more prevalent therefore in west and north-west Wales. Do you know whether there's any impact on learners where there are actually delays in accessing EOTAS, again in terms of mental health conditions, if there's a delay in getting them to the appropriate provision? Have you got any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, of the impact on that? sarah stone: Not specifically researched on that situation. I think, again, there is so much that we don't actually know and that we should know a lot more about, but I think there are some things that we can say about delays for young people who are not either in education or in anything else, and they're connected with the issues anyway. So, if you understand that there's a strong link between inequality and exclusion, and that the most likely young people to be excluded have other disadvantages as well, that's a really important issue to understand. So, being out of school or out of education for any time is going to exacerbate those pre-existing inequalities, and I can't emphasis that enough. It makes you vulnerable, and I guess the longer that continues I would expect the worse that impact and that uncertainty would be. So, there's the impact on loneliness and young people seeking an alternative community to the school one. Since the publication of our report, we have had an extraordinary level of interest from people concerned about crime. So, we've talked to the youth justice board, we've met with the police, there's a huge level of concern about county lines and about home-growing drug gangs, and the fodder that those young people are for people who will engage them in all sorts of activities, which are hugely damaging both to themselves and also to the wider society. So, I think we need to understand there's a lot at stake here for wider society in holding young people, and not allowing gaps to grow where they are not held. I would just refer you to the child death review on suicide and suspected suicide by young people, which came out very recently from Public Health Wales and Swansea University, and that looked at 33 young people who died by suicide over the past few years. One thing that came through that and was reflected in one of their suggestions for action was that those young people had not been held in education or training or employment, had slipped through all sorts of systems, and were extremely vulnerable. So, I think that's a really big message: that we need to try to hold people and not allow those gaps—where they're not held within their society—to lengthen and become really, really difficult. dawn bowden am: Can I just ask, as a follow on from that, whether you've got any views on the potential impact of individual tuition on learners' well-being? So, home tuition, for instance: are pupils going to be on their own doing that? That might be in their best interest, or do you have any concerns that it might not be? liz williams: I suppose we don't have actual evidence to show the impact home schooling has on pupils, but what we do know and something that is of huge concern, I suppose, to most people is that there's no central data on how many young people are home schooled. So, it's quite likely that these children are hidden or invisible and could be at a huge risk of the adverse problems that are related to exclusion more generally. Also, it is a concern, if children aren't registered with any school, how they get back into school, how they reintroduce back into the schooling environment, if that's what people think is best for them. And just to reiterate Sarah's point, I suppose, home schooling could tackle the more academic side of things, so it would mean that that child is still receiving an education, but it might not necessarily help with the adverse effects of exclusion, like loneliness and isolation. These men, who are now middle aged and are at the highest risk of dying by suicide, weren't always interacting with children their own age, and that did cause problems in later life. So, I think it's definitely something we don't know enough about, but I think we need to know more about. dr ian johnson: There are two questions within there, regarding the delay in entering provision and the effect of long term individual teaching. I think there are occasions on which individual tuition will be beneficial, because there may be a reason why somebody is uncomfortable and unable to operate within an educational setting. What concerns me, I think, is the idea of there being a gap between mainstream education and entering any form of EOTAS provision due to capacity or otherwise, because that is a period in time—. We don't know whether there's the causation of or exacerbation of mental health issues amongst those in EOTAS, but it's clear that—well, it seems intuitive that a gap between being in mainstream education and EOTAS is unhelpful, not least their rights to an education, but also the feelings that young people who are probably in quite a confused and troubled state may have during that gap and how long that gap can endure. I will refer back: there was a recommendation by Estyn in their 2016 report on EOTAS regarding CAMHS support for children within those settings, I don't know whether there's been any particular progress within that—and especially the mixture of issues that may be related to both mental health and also neurodevelopmental issues and whether those are more or less likely amongst this vulnerable part of the population. sarah stone: Just to draw your attention to it, I think there's an acknowledgment that there's a lot we don't know about this. Again, in the loneliness and isolation strategy, there's a commitment to analyse existing education and health data to explore correlations between exclusions or being educated other than at school and mental well-being, including loneliness and isolation. So, I think that's a very welcome commitment to try to expand our understanding in this area, because there may be some pluses as well as minuses, but actually there is so much that we don't know about this. I think some of them have been covered, but— sian gwenllian am: Just in general, once a young person or a child has been excluded, is there enough support for them, not just on the educational side, but in general? Are we supporting these young people, these most vulnerable young people, once they're in the position of having been excluded? dr ian johnson: I'd say that that's something that's possibly happening locally, but we don't have a national picture. One of the things we have already noted is the time between being excluded and entering some kind of EOTAS provision. So, that in itself—and I've heard people talking about the capacity issues—shows what's happening to these children, at a time when they are most vulnerable because they are outside of the system. sian gwenllian am: And who should be supporting them? Are we being clear enough with regard to who should be giving them the support? They've been excluded, so obviously the education system has a responsibility, but are we clear enough in terms of who else's responsibility this is, and who should be co-ordinating that support? dr ian johnson: The truth is, the responsibility lies on the local education authority in that context, I would say. So, it's incredibly important that any service is interweaved into that setting around the child or the children who are in this situation. When I was talking earlier about inclusive education, or some kind of investigation into this, that's the kind of thing I'd look at: how to bridge that gap and what kind of support will be available. I'm concerned, of course, in terms of education, whether there is enough funding available to ensure this. But because this is a very vulnerable group, we need to take responsibility in exactly the same way, perhaps, as corporate parenting plays a role there. I know there are figures available on local authorities, but I can't remember them off the top of my head, but maybe that's something to look at. liz williams: And as Ian just said, although there's a lot of responsibility by the school and the local authority, I suppose some responsibility also sits with the parent as well. But for the parents to support their child, either if they're at risk of being excluded or if the child is already in EOTAS, and that parent wants to make sure that the child is having the best education possible, the parent has to have the right amount of information. They must know where to go for support themselves, and I think that a parent can't necessarily know the rights of their child to education and what their child is supposed to be having if they're not provided with all of the information. And I'm sure this is dependent on the school or dependent on the local authority, but that's something worth thinking about as well. Any other questions? sian gwenllian am: Well, unless you want to sum up—? dr ian johnson: Just a comment, really, on the new curriculum and ensuring that EOTAS provision includes this, and how the whole-school approach will work within EOTAS, and how we ensure that the provision is available through the medium of Welsh, as we were referring to earlier, on a national level. Is it possible that it can be worked out within the local consortia, for example? How do we ensure that the teachers—? If it's initial teacher training, or if they're newly qualified teachers, or if they're more experienced, how will this be implemented through the system? Because I think that children in EOTAS situations are usually more vulnerable than others, and therefore there is a need to prioritise their well-being and their mental health. We talk a lot about certificates and so forth, and qualifications, but ensuring everybody's well-being is important, and an important outcome of the work. So, we're thinking of this whole-school approach and how it works within the new curriculum, and this is a vital point for the years to come. lynne neagle am: Just before we finish, then, is there anything you wanted to add in terms of what the committee could recommend about professional development for staff that would enhance this provision in this area? liz williams: Yes, absolutely. I think it's so important for teachers to be equipped with the training and to understand the link between inequality and all the things that come under that term, and challenging behaviour, and I think if teachers are aware of that, and trained properly to deal with that, the risk of exclusion will ultimately lessen. And I think with regard to how that can happen, I think, in some cases, mental health training and mental health awareness training is supplementary at times, with just teacher's training, but I think it should be embedded in the initial teacher's training, so that, more than anything, as well as being equipped with the skills, teachers have the confidence to deal with those really challenging situations. Ian? dr ian johnson: I think that's the importance of a whole-school approach, and that being statutory, because that will ensure that everybody within the school community has that knowledge and awareness and knows what to do and where to signpost people. It means foregrounding and having that in the heart of the school ethos, and I think that turning the school into somewhere that considers mental health and emotional well-being first, rather than waiting for a problem—I think that's the key to improving the well-being of our future generations. sarah stone: I just think it would be great if the community would recognise the link between inequality, adverse childhood experiences, and the opportunity that there is in avoiding a young person falling out of school, and out of anything, and out of sight. So, I think, the other side of this is that this is a real moment of opportunity to intervene positively. As usual, we will send you a transcript to check for accuracy following the meeting, but thank you very much. Just one paper today, which is the Welsh Government's response to the committee's report on the scrutiny of the Welsh Government's draft budget 2020-1. Item 5, then: can I propose in accordance with Standing Order 17.42 that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting? Are Members content? Okay, thank you.

Sharon Davies expressed strong objection to the limitations imposed by home tuition, as it restricted the access of local authorities to families and made it difficult to ensure the quality of education. The role of local authorities in this aspect was therefore limited. Hefin David AM raised concerns about finding the right balance between highly regulated institutions with strong track records and riskier private alternative providers. Kirsty Williams AM argued that more attention should be given to the quality of charitable status as a reference point for operation, while differentiating between private providers in England. The government would regulate private providers on a course-by-course basis, with a focus on quality provision. Sian Gwenllian AM highlighted the difficulties caused by HEFCW's legal duty to quality-assure all provisions in two further education colleges, and sought clarification from Kirsty Williams AM on the situation and additional methods to ensure governing qualities. Kirsty Williams AM explained that the Act was based on the quality assessment arrangements in the 1992 Act, which required HEFCW to assess the quality of education provided by funding institutions. As a result, HEFCW's quality assessment duty currently covered all education provided by regulated institutions. Huw Morris added that joint operation was necessary during the process, and the new Bill aimed to clarify this.

Question: What are the advantages of technology innovation in marketing when presenting market trends, and why did the marketing team believe that having an LCD and a spongy remote would be beneficial for presenting the market trend? Article: Anyway , it's the meeting's gonna follow more or less the same structure as last time , so we'll go round each of you in turn and you can give your presentations on what you've been up to . and at the end of that we need to discuss what you've come up with , so that we can make a decision on the key remote control concepts , so that's we need to know about the components' properties , materials , the user interface and any trends that the Marketing Expert has been watching . industrial designer: so I haven't made a PowerPoint presentation , project manager: You haven't made a PowerPoint , okay . marketing: industrial designer: okay , so basically I'll start off by I thought I'll use the whiteboard because we have so many different options and what we can do is that we can start rubbing off the options that we do not require and putting in the options that are m or highlighting or underlining them or something like that . industrial designer: Okay , so I'll start again with a brief introduction to connect that anyway brief introduction to the insides of a remote control project manager: Yeah . Okay , so w what you see here is so this is the outside of the remote , right ? If you open it , you have a circuit board here , right , project manager: This basically sends information to a tr transistor here , which then sends the information to an L_E_D_ device here . If you flip the printed circuit board , and this is th the most important point here , project manager: industrial designer: everything else is kind of Okay , so if you flip the circuit board , this is what it looks like . So you see for example a particular button attaches to a particular place on the P_C_B_ and project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: on pressing this button I a circuit completes , the information goes to the chip , which is somewhere here and the chip that tra then translates the code into an infra infrared radiation , which goes goes out through there . So the important point that I read over the website was that the configurations of these printed circuit circuit boards are quite cheap to make , you can ge get them printed as you want to , project manager: industrial designer: so w we can have a configuration irrespective of the cost , the way we want to have . industrial designer: So they can be simple which is like the normal batteries in our the cells , yeah ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: thes these are the kind different kind of batteries that the company makes , right ? So . industrial designer: So I don't know if even if you want to consider this , user interface: industrial designer: but these are the different things that the company makes , so th they'll they'll project manager: Okay . industrial designer: since they'll come internally from the company , they'll be eas cheaper , all these options . marketing: You could make the hand dynamo into an exercise bike , and then people could exercise whilst watching T_V_ . project manager: And charging their remote , marketing: Yeah , and stop worrying about the whole R_S_I_ from the remote thing , 'cause that's just project manager: yeah . project manager: user interface: So what was what was this k ka industrial designer: The the kinetic energy one is that e they are usually modern watches , since our hand keeps moving , it keeps the watch ticking . industrial designer: But I dunno i if it is a good idea for a remote control , because it'll just lie there for a long while sometimes . industrial designer: But as soon as you pick it up it moves and then again it re recharges or something . Okay so I'll list things and then we can come back and discuss what what we think from everybody's perspective . They can be basically the shape of the cases , they can be flat , they can be curved with one-sided curved and one side flat , project manager: industrial designer: These are the three options , right ? user interface: you mean this would be like the the overall shape of the remote control , yeah , industrial designer: Yeah , would it be flat on both the sides , would be curved from one side , or whatever user interface: industrial designer: there were different kind of supplements available , like it can be in plastic , rubber , wood , or titanium , right ? project manager: industrial designer: so we can use even a certain titanium is also used in the company to make some space design equipment , so it's kind of it'll be probably nicer to use , because it relates to the overall image of the company , but it cannot be used on a double curved surface . So we can have push-buttons , like most remotes do and our company is an expert in making push-buttons . industrial designer: So , and they have they can even have an an integrated push-button inside the scrolling thing . So this is something that has been recently developed by the company , in the last decade , so not too recent . industrial designer: The various electronic options are so th this concerns firs first of all the the chips I I showed you at so there's there's a chip behind this one , right ? The P_C_B_ is inexpensive , so we can put put in whatever we want , but the various integrated circuit options are , we have either a simple one project manager: industrial designer: okay , so the good thing about wh wh why why we would want to use advanced u why we might want to use advanced is that L_C_D_s can only come with the advanced chip . besides this in electr under electronics also the company has started making a sample sender , which is did not explained what i what it was , but I'm guessing that so they have a sample sender and a sample speaker . So I'm guessing that the sample speaker is probably something like you know , as soon as you press a button , it it give gives you feedback , one five or whatever . industrial designer: and I dunno whether sample sender sender has to do something with voice recognition or not , but anyway . Okay , so th that's that's basically now now I think that we can integrate you know , the user interface and the marketing things in that , keep taking out things from this and underlining things that are important , yeah . project manager: What are you , PowerPoint , or user interface: I have some PowerPoint , yeah . marketing: project manager: Do you think these pens can give you cancer of the hand ? user interface: 'Kay . project manager: Some sort of radiation ? industrial designer: marketing: No it's got its little camera in there , plug it in . to be honest actually , I mentioned some some of the things which which could fit on the on the this talk this time , I m I mentioned them already in the previous talk . user interface: So yeah , this time I might not have them on the slides but I I can just mention them aw again . So I thought I would also include the definition of user interface so it's the aspects of a of of a computer system or programme which can be seen by the user and and which the mechanisms that the user uses to control its operation and input data . So this would p includes things like shape and size and buttons and voice recognition as well , and colour , and so on . user interface: the method I employed this time was a again having a look to related products and mainly on the internet and then analyse them from the point of view of user fen friendliness and also whether their appearance was was pleasant . So in in the case of many user interfaces , they're just so full of buttons that it's actually hard to find the ones you you really want to use and and it's just confusing , it takes y know time to learn . project manager: user interface: well the picture is not very clear , but as you can see , there are actu oi , oh oh oh , project manager: user interface: sorry for that . Actually of the of all these I personally p prefer this one , because it's it's the smallest and and with with least with the smallest number of buttons as well . Okay , there is a we can include voice recognition and it allows i it's possible to record eighty different voice samples on it . And our own manufacturing division ha has designed a new programmable speech sorry speaker unit I guess it's it should be . user interface: and this means that once it it it comes together with a voice recognition , but it's once once the gadget recognises the voice of the speaker , there can be a pre-programmed answer , for example , you can pick up the remote control and say something to it like hello and it says some hello and your name or whatever . user interface: So this is also one of the n dev new developments which we might consider if we wanted to include . industrial designer: sorry , can you go back for a second ? are you sure wha what this means , a spinning wheel with the L_C_ display ? oh yeah are th project manager: It's like the like you said , no ? The scroll scroll wheel . marketing: Yeah , you can't user interface: No no , the scroll button is a different thing . I wasn't completely sure myself , but I think it's just like it's it's a wheel , it's like not separate buttons . user interface: But I'm I'm not really sure whether whether you can really turn it round , marketing: G yeah , no , you can . user interface: it's like you press this or this or industrial designer: it's the iPod kind of marketing: It's like it's like where you you know how you have your your mouse , and y you go round and i it's kind of like that and you spin round project manager: -huh . marketing: I like the the wheels that click on the side you you get 'em much slower , project manager: marketing: Do you know , if you're lookin if you're th scrolling through the A_ to Z_ of your music and you're looking for something at T_ , then it's a lot faster than the wheel , project manager: Okay , we decided to include voice recognition , so to have the standard major buttons like on , off , ch the channels and and then volume and then the rest would be a menu on the screen . and I I also thought if we want to keep it small and nice and actually I I quite like the idea of a scroll a scrolling button , I thought it could be for for voice like , I dunno , it like on a i like it used to be on Walkmans or something . There is I think there is no reason why we couldn't use something like this for for the remote control . marketing: Okay , I've put the copy of the presentation in the project manager: The project documents . so what I did was to search the internet to come up with market trends and you know what users are gonna be wanting in the the near future . Now , the first aspect is apparently twice as important as the second aspect , which is twice as important as the third a aspect . marketing: you know , people want something new , something technologically innovative and different , so the whole idea with the L_C_D_s and the spinning and the colours and the voice recognition is quite like , quite the thing to go for . industrial designer: So maybe as you're discussing things , is it okay if we just keep highlighting things here ? marketing: So project manager: Yeah , yeah , sure . So so it project manager: That's over on the interface , industrial designer: yeah , project manager: if if you could put industrial designer: so probably voice recognition is is kind of important , right ? project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: and an project manager: And maybe the L_C_D_ and spinning industrial designer: yeah . Okay , I I have a point about L_C_D_ , project manager: so that means we need an advanced thing . W L_C_D_s are basically for feedback , right , to the user who's pressing buttons , project manager: industrial designer: and the feedback can come through television itself , so do we need an L_C_D_ on the remote ? marketing: Depends how fast your television runs , really , don't don't you think ? we've got one of those Telewest boxes industrial designer: . marketing: and you put the number in the remote and then you wait and then it goes to the T_V_ and then you wait , and then it comes , so i it actually takes quite a long time . And if you get the number in wrong , then it's a bit of a pain , project manager: . marketing: so I think , you know , a screen on the remote would probably cut down your time on that . project manager: It it is also quite nice though to to have something here so you don't interrupt the picture on the screen , marketing: You know ? Yeah . project manager: so if you're watching something industrial designer: That's true , yeah , that's also marketing: And i it would be like if you could make it integrate with the T_V_ then it could come up with new information about what's on , and you could just see that on the remote rather than project manager: Yeah . marketing: But I think maybe a way to do it would be a similar way to how you have your mobile phone , you know , like you have the slidey ones and you have the flippy ones and then the screen's protected so it doesn't actually get scratched . marketing: So you can have like what looks like a normal remote control , you know or like a minimalist remote control . marketing: So you got your buttons one to nine , your on and off and your volume on that industrial designer: right . marketing: and then if you want to mess about with it , you flip it open and , project manager: And then you can flip it open . industrial designer: So now we seem to have a consensus that L_C_D_s are definitely the way to go because of style and project manager: Yeah , I think so . marketing: But that would be a good way to to get in the whole R_S_I_ issue in there , industrial designer: Right . marketing: because if you think most people use the remote control with their right hand ha right hands project manager: marketing: so you wanna you curve it so that it's suitable for use with the right hand . project manager: Something a bit squishy and marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah , we we have marketing: but y you have to user interface: So it could be like a rubbery industrial designer: we have rubber , user interface: yeah , -huh . industrial designer: but there is a problem that I forgot to discuss with the with using marketing: Well I suppose you wouldn't get a remote an electric shock off your remote control if it was made of rubber . project manager: Yeah , and it'd help if you drop it , it protects it as well . industrial designer: So if if we use latex cases , they won't allow us to use solar cells , as an energy source that is the constraint , project manager: -huh . industrial designer: so we could use titanium , wood or plastic or project manager: Or if we want to use the the latex , then we have to go with one of the other power things . marketing: If it's made of rubber you could get the kinetic energy fairly easily there , project manager: From from bouncing it . industrial designer: Or or curved at one end and flat on the top , because I I'm not sure if it is flat on both both the sides , then ho how much easy would it be to reach for buttons , etcetera . marketing: It it depends on the whole ergonomics of it , you know , it's like how you put your hands so y it's the least movement basically . Yeah , singe single side curved or double side curved does not say too much , does it ? project manager: -huh . industrial designer: It marketing: No , I d I don't think it makes a lot of difference . I I have one of those s slidey phones and the back is essentially straight , project manager: . industrial designer: I think project manager: Yeah , 'cause the marketing: Besides , you have four sides to a thing , so does curved one side mean one side is straight project manager: Yeah . marketing: and , you know curved two sides means the whole thing is just a big curvy p thing ? industrial designer: Right . industrial designer: because according to the information that I have , I think the onl only options that we have with the case is are these three . industrial designer: It does not say anything about whether technically , you know , this this stuff is available at all . it's it's more about the protecting the L_C_D_ , which I think is where it came from . marketing: But no , my research didn't tell me anything , which is why we have all the pictures , industrial designer: marketing: 'cause I had nothing better to do with my time . project manager: Anything else ? What've we got ? marketing: combine style with a level of functionality , beauty and practicality and a thing of beauty and p function . marketing: Okay ? user interface: Thanks project manager: Looking at what we've got , we we want an L_C_D_ display with a spinning wheel . Let's let's try to r rub off things and project manager: Yeah , rub off some of those . industrial designer: yeah , so user interface: industrial designer: hand dynamos are definitely out , right ? You you got a wind dynamo , yeah . project manager: it's not that's not streamlined and sexy , having a having a wind up . kinetic energy does seem to have some kind of appeal , project manager: I think tha industrial designer: but it's marketing: It's about the practicality of it really , isn't it ? You know ? industrial designer: Yeah . As against a watch , which constantly keeps moving , marketing: if industrial designer: this this thing will have to be tapped every time , which which might be very frustrating for the user . industrial designer: Kinetic energy it needs I don't have too much technical information on that , project manager: Pr presumably if they're suggesting it , then we could use it . Okay , let's keep it option keep an option , project manager: I'd I'd keep it on . the flat co completely flat case is definitely out , right ? It has to be at least curved from one side , yeah . project manager: We don't want that user interface: Yeah project manager: it's no it's not not vegetable . Wood , do you think wood will be a good idea ? project manager: user interface: N wood is I can't n how do you you can't keep it really small industrial designer: . Because you need to you n you need to put all the technology in , so if the case you add the case and it it becomes a bit bulky industrial designer: Yeah if if it is really thin if it is really thin it it's likely to break , user interface: wi - yeah . project manager: Yeah , and given that we're we're looking at more spongy material preferences , I ha would think maybe rubber or plastic is more user interface: Yeah . marketing: It's it's not a practical it's it's alright for a table , but for a remote control , you know . industrial designer: Right , so the the push-buttons is is our expertise in the industry , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: but it seems to be out of trend , you know , nobody seems to be marketing: You have to have some push-buttons , don't you ? user interface: Yeah , but you I think for for the channel numb channel numbers you still need them , wouldn't you ? project manager: user interface: Yeah , so for channel numbers but industrial designer: Oh , if if we have L_C_D_ displays , that opens up a whole world , you know , if you have an L_C_D_ display , then you can select almost everything on the L_C_D_ display . user interface: But I th yeah but I think the L_C_D_ display is kind of yeah , it's faster project manager: Just for fast user interface: with a m yeah and w if we dis and when we s discussed that we might like this flipping open thing , then y you can use it as a normal remote control , marketing: industrial designer: Right . user interface: but if you do want to use L_C_D_ , then you flip it open , marketing: user interface: but it's it it's more time-consuming . marketing: I think this is going back to the the graph at the beginning that I made , where , you know , the buttons that people use all the time , you want buttons for them and everything else menu-driven . Do you do we enumerate everything from zero to nine ? Or do we have just channel plus , channel minus , just to just to scroll ? user interface: No , no , we we definitely need the the numbers , industrial designer: The numbers . project manager: Do we need them on as buttons or do we need them as L_C_D_ ? industrial designer: Or on the L_C_D_ we can , you know marketing: G yeah , user interface: Yeah , I would say buttons , marketing: I would think buttons , yeah . marketing: It's it's the industrial designer: So marketing: I think the thing is , so if someone just wants to turn on their T_V_ and put on a channel , then it should be easier to use than any other remote , user interface: I project manager: . marketing: and then if someone wants to , you know , change the contrast on their T_V_ and they should be able to do that and it should be accessible , industrial designer: Alright . marketing: there's a limit to how much the biggest techno geek can spend fiddling with the T_V_ , I think is the the the issue there . industrial designer: Okay , so buttons definitely in but oh shall we try to draw a prec project manager: I think that's what you guys are gonna do next , industrial designer: okay . industrial designer: Right , so what about the the scrolling ? user interface: Yeah but n I I'm not completely completely clear I yeah , about the spinning wheel . So I think it it doesn't make sense to have both like a scrolling and spinning thing , marketing: E either or user interface: it's you can al include everything in the spinning if you marketing: G yeah . user interface: yeah , yeah , marketing: I would say the s the s the spinning goes at a high speed to th to the scrolling wheel , user interface: in that case . marketing: so you have to decide whether you you know , you want to be going so fast or not . But the the thing with this whole if y you're planning on making it out of rubber , on the basis that it's spongy , then I'm not sure how well a scrolling wheel would work . industrial designer: project manager: But if you've got a if if you've got a flipped thing , effectively it's something that's curved on one side and flat on the other side , but you folded it in half . user interface: Ah , but you can marketing: Yeah , but y your spinning wheel tends to go to one side . industrial designer: I'm not sure it'll be a good idea to construct the whole thing out of rubber . i it project manager: No , I think it's just the casing rubber on the outside . user interface: Yeah , I I think so too , the case would be marketing: You want an outside of rubber user interface: yeah the case would be rubber and the the buttons , marketing: and then open it up and industrial designer: Or or at the corners , edges , just the edges covered by rubber or something like that . marketing: 'Cause I know like we're going back to iPods again n the whole spinning wheel , but I have like a you know , obviously my iPod's not made of rubber , but then I have a little rubber case that goes over the top of it industrial designer: Right , right . industrial designer: Right , project manager: user interface: industrial designer: okay , so so that gives us a more trendy look as well . Yeah , and we're going more for the trends than for the usability anyway , right ? project manager: And colours can be provided with the case rather than but we still need to te think about the colour of our remote as such , you know , just keep it black , or project manager: user interface: Yeah I think we it was a a requirement that we use our th the colours of our company , so would it be like yellow , grey and black or something , or marketing: That doesn't fit in with the whole vegetable theme though . marketing: Yeah , but do you think we could incorporate the colours of the company into the buttons and then make the colour of the main remote the colour like vegetable colours , do you know ? So you could have like project manager: marketing: I suppose vegetable colours would be orange and green and some reds and maybe purple project manager: Green . marketing: and that and then you'd pick the buttons in company colours to to match with it . since we're having L_C_D_s there there's no way that we're will be able to project manager: We need the advanced yeah . industrial designer: what we do need to consider , however , is that the price is going up for the ever every such thing that we are considering , but since L_C_D_s seems to be a definite yes , project manager: Yeah . marketing: So are we discounting solar energy because rubber's gonna be used in there somewhere or project manager: That was the industrial designer: Oh is oh the constraint was marketing: If project manager: We can't have solar panels with rubber , so . project manager: Shall we go for if we're going for rubber , we think on as our case , and then user interface: industrial designer: we'll have using the simple battery will be a safer option as compared to the kinetic energy one , a although it does seem interesting . okay , so r we understand this better now that the the speaker is for the feedback , right ? It it says the things that you type in or something like that , so project manager: I think if we can if we can include them at not too much extra cost , then I'd put them in , industrial designer: Ye yeah , we we don't have too much information about it , project manager: but if it's Yeah . user interface: Yeah , but it it I think it should be quite cheap because it's from our own company , yeah . project manager: It's from the company , so industrial designer: Yeah , okay , so so th this is in as well then , the sample speaker . And the case is curved on one side , but then flat flat , so it's flipped into each other . project manager: Can I pull the thing out the back of your computer ? marketing: Yeah , sure j project manager: Just so we can marketing: Sorry , do you want me to project manager: Nothing , it's right , I'm just There we go . marketing: What does I_C_S_ mean ? industrial designer: I_C_s ? integrated circuits . industrial designer: we we're definitely going in for voice recognition as well as L_C_D_s , . So we've basically worked out that we're going with a simple battery , the advanced chip industrial designer: Right . project manager: and a curved on one side case which is folded in on itself , made out of rubber industrial designer: Yep . We're having push-buttons on the outside and then on the inside an L_C_D_ with spinning wheel , and we're incorporating voice recognition . That's our overall concept , user interface: project manager: and it's gonna look sort of vegetable , marketing: user interface: industrial designer: project manager: and be in bright vegetable colours . So w w would with have the spinning wheel inside with the L_C_D_ , or would it be on the outer marketing: Imagine it would be inside . marketing: so you've got your outside , which is like minimalist , and then you open it up and you've got a screen and a spinning wheel , which you can incorporate buttons into . marketing: so you've still not got like a lot of stuff in the project manager: marketing: You've maybe got , you know like if you're modelling on iPod you've got five buttons and a wheel , project manager: On the marketing: and four of the buttons are in the wheel , and the other one's the little bit inside the wheel , project manager: In the centre , marketing: yeah . In the meantime , the Industrial Designer over here is gonna work on the look and feel design , industrial designer: the User Interface Designer will work on the user interface design and the Marketing Expert is going to work on product evaluation . And as well as that , the two designers are going to work together on our prototype following those instructions that we've just come up with using modelling clay and you will get extra instructions from your personal coach . project manager: Is that all okay ? And anyone who hasn't put their their presentation in the project documents folder , it would be good just so in case we have to refer to it . marketing: I've got a bit tangled up in all this user interface: So but shall I move away first or shall I stay here with project manager: I dunno , maybe I would car user interface: we need to {disfmarker}<doc-sep>I just thought marketing: What was it , problem ? user interface: it didn't work anymore . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: Welcome to the conceptual design meeting industrial designer: marketing: project manager: for Real Reaction . , and at the end , I , when I finish it off I have some input from a master class I visited . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: The the the the the concepts on we where we must reach a decision on . , the first one is really about the the the the the total package with Well , we have decided to do a do the with a touch-screen that must be a case around it so it won't be as breakable . how how about the energy ? Can you can you reload it or just have batteries which you must exchange ? , the user interface concept . marketing: project manager: At the end , I will take notes and at the end of the minutes will be at the shared folder . marketing: industrial designer: what I did was I reviewed previously used items by two two different age groups . And I just watch what the differences are and I checked , well , what what d do we want , and how can we d aim a at the target group . Well what I found was that a senior project manager: industrial designer: senior citizens marketing: I'm sorry . industrial designer: They , well , they like more the they like the traditional materials , like wood and and such more . , they they they they like luxurious styles , where whereas the young and dynamic , they like a more soft materials . project manager: industrial designer: soft and fluffy and colourful and marketing: industrial designer: Well , shapes are curved and round . project manager: a soft material for a remote control ? industrial designer: No , I'll I'll get to that . industrial designer: But the two basic sources that I found were the best possible were the battery versus kinetic . I figured , well that's ki kinda high-tech , when when you have a remote control that well , when you pick it up , it has power . industrial designer: Well , we could also use a battery , that's a bit marketing: Yeah but when the power gets low , you have to shake it or something ? project manager: user interface: industrial designer: Yeah . Or you can go for both ? user interface: Oh , have you considered the option of using a solar panel ? industrial designer: Yeah , I actually did . industrial designer: and you you could you could use normal light , but you wouldn't get the same amount of energy that you would from a battery or something . industrial designer: for ultimate b n use of solar panels , you could actually use you could use solar panels , but you ha you'd have to implement them into the remote control , leaving you a bit less space for the interface . industrial designer: So so i i it it wo what's actually I I c just in f I've figured it out that well , seeing that you'll always be within the l distance of T_V_ , and the from T_V_ there comes a a a whole bunch of light . industrial designer: But , well you just take up all the space , and you wouldn't have the full amount of power actually used . project manager: But you prefer kinetic ? industrial designer: So I I prefer kinetic because it's well , the costs aren't that much higher , and , ju just a bit more high-tech than than a normal battery . industrial designer: if No , but d Well , you pick it up and you press buttons and y well , you project manager: And that's enough to to keep the energy level industrial designer: Yeah , well actually it is . industrial designer: And it it if it isn't , you just shake it a bit and and add add with power up again . industrial designer: But , what l what Jarek said , you could you could use a battery that you'd just keep it on the recharging whenever it moves . industrial designer: And so that well , user interface: industrial designer: f furthermore , you you we checked the cases . You ha I you sim you simply add a basic standard model it was kind of square and I figured that's a bit boring . , single curve , it's just a well , you know , it's just a nice curve . industrial designer: That gives you an whole new effec project manager: Dynamic dynamic look ? marketing: . industrial designer: Yeah , that gives you a younger and more high-tech look , I f I figured . marketing: But , are you going to draw it ? industrial designer: What ? user interface: Th th yeah . industrial designer: And then in three-D_ effect you could go user interface: marketing: project manager: industrial designer: So y you you just Yeah , this is a this bit difficulty in marketing: user interface: industrial designer: I didn't take a major in art . So But but you could have a whole new the back back the the the depth , you could you could just play around a bit with . industrial designer: but just a Well , furthermore , well , plastic versus rubber ? You We could choose what what's better , plastic or rubber . project manager: That's the material the younger people want , ain't it ? user interface: industrial designer: Yeah , yeah plastic is Plastic also has that cheap feeling to it , like plastic Your your I usually associate plastic with something that's cheap . Well , we discussed it in a previous meeting , so I figured I'll just leave it at the L_C_D_ . And chip set , well if we are going to use traditional buttons , we could go with a simple chip set . But if we decide to go on a n L_C_D_ screen , we would use an we have to use an a advanced chip set . If it isn't manageable budget-wise , we'd have to go over to to sim to simple buttons . So I bet a big company in Korea or Taiwan , like Samsung , can give us a big discount on the chips , so industrial designer: user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , probably , but But yeah , that's that's marketing: So That that shouldn't be a real issue , I think . I'll I'll I'll just add , I put a big summary here , so we could discuss it a bit . what i what are your ideas concerning battery versus kinetic ? marketing: user interface: I think you should use kinetic as a back-up . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah , well Fifty cent user interface: industrial designer: why doesn't And then we have single-curved versus double-curved . industrial designer: rubber ? user interface: isn't possible to make combination with kind of rubber is or bendable remotes where you've got a . industrial designer: You user interface: Or do you think it industrial designer: I figured it will be m rather than hard user interface: Rubber casing , yeah . industrial designer: because well if you use an d a touch-screen , it's just a casing around it . user interface: is it possible of is it necessary to make a touch-screen square ? It isn't , I think , yeah ? industrial designer: Well , m I don't know . user interface: We're We put fashion in electronics , industrial designer: That isn't user interface: so maybe we can marketing: ? Yeah okay , but if you have a square L_C_D_ screen , and you put a case around it that has like bulbs or that that covers part of the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: So so so what are the opinions ? rubber or plastic ? I I I prefer rubber . project manager: Yeah ? industrial designer: Yeah , you too ? user interface: That's good . user interface: Well , as long a as long as it's it's it's firm , and you don't it's not bendable or something , project manager: marketing: yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , it it shouldn't it shouldn't flop over when you hold it in your hand project manager: Okay . industrial designer: No , that that that that's gonna The the chip set will hold it firm in place , marketing: user interface: Okay . industrial designer: and and and and a L_C_D_ screen also user interface: It might even bounce back when you drop it on the floor . marketing: industrial designer: tra traditional versus L_C_D_ , well I figured we we all set on that . Well I figure if we go for L_ L_C_D_ , we we should have the advanced . user interface: industrial designer: marketing: Okay Last week project manager: marketing: I went to Paris and Milan for some trend-watching . In Paris and Milan , we asked different people , differing in age and in income , the amount of money to spend , what they like in design and material nowadays . industrial designer: Well , the Teletubbies sh project manager: marketing: You wer you weren't in Paris ? Okay . Okay , our secondary audience , people above forty a forty years in age , they like the dark traditional colours . Yeah , materials like wood that project manager: Yeah , but wood is not a not a material you which you build a a remote control of . industrial designer: marketing: The that isn't wood anyway , but Okay ? But , that's our secondary audience . project manager: Would you prefer that you can choose the colour of your remote control or marketing: I'll I'll come to that in a second point . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: Here , think about removable covers , as seen in mobile telephon telephone market . industrial designer: marketing: Like the Nokia the removable covers , just put a red on it and go to the shop and buy a green one . So to come back to your question , I think and the people in Milan and Paris also think that the rubber should be pretty hard . The phones and the project manager: industrial designer: Well , I actually saw a phone that you could use as a remote , so Yeah . project manager: marketing: in my second sheet of personal preferences , we have to reconsider the speech function recognition . project manager: So that you say S_P_S_S_ , and it goes to marketing: Yeah , like something . marketing: You you can see that the market is just screaming for new technologies , like speak speech recognition and stuff . But , we have to keep the cost in in mind , but it user interface: Twelve fifty marketing: Yeah , it it can be very expensive . project manager: Yeah , but you don't use that th games when you watching television , I think . But you don't use games when you're d when you're making a telephone call . user interface: When your parents are watching some boring program , you can take the remote and do something else . Well , I do that , but Okay , and project manager: industrial designer: marketing: And third , I stick with it , the log-in functionality with the slogan , take parental control to a new dimension . Well that's a just simple PowerPoint mock-up I want to m make it more as dynamic for you so I'll draw there . So if you press system , that's marketing: user interface: Yeah , well m multiple system options can , maybe five or ten or or one , can fit in . Or maybe even a step further when you want to t have some other options that are not programmable with one horizontal button . And well , how do do we want to look at f Yeah Does a remote look Well , it's you've gotta hold it in one hand . So the middle like all remotes have to be in a little bit small , so you can put it in inside your hands . One thing you've gotta keep in mind , keep the remote clear of too much functions at the same time . project manager: user interface: know that if you are changing the menu structure here , And well , I still believe you should keep displaying the buttons . But if you're programming the colour of the T_V_ , do not display twenty other options that are possible . Do not have to select a screen first and then brightness and then colour and un-plus , and push plus twenty times . And when you get to n to to ten , ye and want to go back , well you have a problem . Just m most most modern T_V_s , you you press one zero , and it goes to ten . , what do you think about a back-and-forth come-up button ? project manager: user interface: Yeah , yeah w Yeah , I I find I must trying to tell it . marketing: But if you go from two to eight , and you want user interface: Or if you're watching Studio Sports on on seventeen , and your wife is watching some soap on two marketing: Yeah , and on two . user interface: And if you're using that button a lot of times , well of course the menu will still be displayed on the screen . But if you're really switching between two channels , you won't have time to d use the other options . project manager: I think we can discuss a little about the the three kind of revolutionary things Tim came with . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: industrial designer: project manager: There's n not too much decision on that one so I think that parental control is a good function to to put in the remote . marketing: Yeah but What I see How I see it is you put it on the the remote and then you have like a Windows log-on screen with parents , children . marketing: And w when you want to use the parents option , you have to user interface: It it has to be fast . You don't want to to go down and watch the news at eight o'clock and turn it on and wait twenty seconds for for the log-on screen and then remember your code and all kinds of settings . marketing: Yeah , ok project manager: No but I think most people find it much more important that their children don't watch sex or violence on the television , and wait ten or fifteen seconds longer , so they can finally watch it because of that . You c may use like when there's X_P_ , a simple log-on , d you just push one or two or three . user interface: And if you push parents , then marketing: That then then then you have to go to three-digit log-in . user interface: And if you w you push p children , you don't have to log in , but you can only watch children's channels or marketing: It automatically goes Yeah . Well industrial designer: I don't know if it's worth the time and effort we are going to spend on it . Because well it's a simple function , but it's gonna take a lot of resources and a lot of time to programming it . And I'm not sure if it's actually worth investing that much time and effort into it . project manager: Well I think that's a b there's a big market for it , industrial designer: I don't know what project manager: because you Yeah , you read many times in magazines same kind of stuff , and you heard on the news that that he Yeah , they believe that children are influenced by the television , industrial designer: marketing: yeah . But there are a lot of people will below forty who have children in young age who who want to not watch violent or user interface: Yeah . user interface: Just make through a remote as it is , but make an option to insert profiles , project manager: Yeah . user interface: 'cause if my grandad would buy this remote , he wouldn't want to bother with all all the all the things to do . project manager: That's a that's a better idea ? marketing: Yeah , w It just has to be w when it's deliver out of the store , it has to be just simple and plain . marketing: But if you want to install it personally If I got kids , and I could choose between two remote controls . user interface: You're thinking about some channels they cannot see , but well , I I when I think , oh yeah , for the f for all the standard channels , and only for maybe after ten o'clock in the evening violent films and movies will come industrial designer: marketing: user interface: and maybe maybe some some timing will be needed instead of of channels , marketing: Yeah . user interface: because if you're watching , I don't know , you're in the at day , cartoons will come up m on maybe Friday night . But maybe there's some option that that t the kind of show view numbers are violent , and that they are blocked out . user interface: Yeah , the disadvantage vantage is that someone will has to send all the show-view numbers of the programs that they remotes and edit it all , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: But , well , if you want to I i i if we in incorporate the parental control , let's say we do , and and well whatever , cho child just goes up to the T_V_ and presses up for instance . user interface: Well , yeah you could say if parental control is only it it'll go from fourteen to sixteen with the page-up then , but industrial designer: But that Well , I'm not sure because for that to happen , you d you will have to receive a signal from the remote control , so it would , yeah , have to be constant constant signalling . industrial designer: What m what may be better is to incorporate an a separate device that that you can program with the remote control . So there's n that's there's besides the remote control , you'll have a separate project manager: I wouldn't put it in an optional device . industrial designer: Yeah ? project manager: If we do it , we we must do it in a kind of ways that like a profile , a parent profile , and a family profile , and otherwise . marketing: And and you know w when you install another device , children can still go up to the T_V_ , p pop open the thing and and and g project manager: Yeah . But industrial designer: But , only difference is the the people buying the remote control will now get the f added feature of parental control , project manager: industrial designer: and those people wouldn't necessary want it . And what do you guys think of the games in the voice recognition ? I personally think that that becomes too much . user interface: Yeah , well yeah , I project manager: It's more like it gets you to the functionality , but user interface: A mail too from management that it's very popular to use voice recon recognition . user interface: But I don't think when you're watching T_V_ , hearing loud noises from the T_V_ , someone screaming one , and you f the channel switches , Yeah . project manager: That would user interface: As long as it's isn't a primary feature of the remote , marketing: That that doesn't c that doesn't co user interface: but marketing: Yeah , that that doesn't cost a lot of extra resources , I think . So that will that that that must be in it , you think ? industrial designer: Yeah , that will be nice . And the parental control are user interface: Optional in project manager: optional ? marketing: Yeah , it's it's in it . But too ma I I think so , but user interface: But how we do it ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: Well , I think also it's a good idea , buts very difficult to incorporate . user interface: Is t some menu function , you choose parental control , and maybe four files will emerge from menu where put it on . , but will there Like the first idea from You can buy it without and with parental contr control ? Or are we going to put it in and just user interface: marketing: To put user interface: You can put on marketing: Yeah , to put it in always . And you can just s when you buy it , you can select personal preference , parental control on , and the password or something . I I figure if you had two different remotes , you could bo choose one with well a receiver in it . marketing: Yeah ? I thought they were just project manager: Yeah , you yo industrial designer: Yeah , you you have some T_V_s any marketing: a able to receive . user interface: Well , maybe you just have to restrict it to what programs , where the parent says , you cannot watch channel seven , nine , and ten , and you cannot watch all channels after ten o'clock . industrial designer: Well yeah , you could you could easily you could easily you could easily to the mote control . But , on the T_V_ user interface: Yeah ? marketing: at least my T_V_ , is a is a compartment which you can press . marketing: And there are buttons behind it which you can use , if you d if you don't if you don't have a industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , you could you could you could go like user interface: or make it ourselves very diffic industrial designer: that that would actually make things a lot more easy . industrial designer: I'm not sure what marketing thinks about it , but marketing: Or j Yeah . user interface: marketing: Ah project manager: marketing: I have to consult my legal advisor about it . So I think we have decided on the things that from Janus , the energy , the combination between battery and kinetic . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: The case will be double-curved and rubber , in a fr flashy fruity colour that with cover is removable . project manager: Yeah , but you have that in the user interface: What I was thinking about is just a menu structure , when you don't use it is simple . You use the user interface: And when you push system properties , entire list pops up with e ev all kind of f stuff you can program . industrial designer: Well yeah , you you could actually build in a function that you can program it yourself , for the more advanced users . Because you can you can like build in a back-forward button , and some po somebody would just want to watch two channels . project manager: We take it to the other meeting , okay ? I have a little w little chat to do marketing: Okay . project manager: I went to a master class and two things are are can come in handy for us . Knowledge engineering and the fact that that that the idea of knowledge , sharing and learning knowledge from other companies is like that . marketing: project manager: It's it's very hot at the moment , marketing: project manager: so it's it's mostly for the management expert to to look what other marketing: Marketing . marketing: Yeah , that's my function , to industrial designer: project manager: W user interface: marketing: Okay . project manager: What other companies had to also with the the the the marketing campaign when they put on a newer remote , just some Yeah . project manager: they're a ha they're at Yeah , benchmarking , that's the word I saw . marketing: project manager: I couldn't Okay , another thing is there were there there was a survey , and it came out that people like to buy things from a single large provider , instead of those who are partnering with us . So , we must we must bring it as if Real Reaction is is big company , a trustful company , and it has m marketing: How I know a marketing name for our product . project manager: I had a I had another idea to put the whole the whole idea of Real Reaction and a single brand and that kind of thing . marketing: - ? project manager: When you put on remote , you see a kind of a just like when you telephone , you see a little animation . user interface: marketing: Yeah , okay , but it has to be like a split second , because you have to put in a code also and project manager: The user interface: Yeah . But w th the idea from this thing is that we must present it as a as we are a a single large provider who will stand on our own . industrial designer: Well , if you if you have the l L_C_D_ screen , you can you can have a small logo i at the bottom . user interface: Yeah , I It's ok For f project manager: That's what they said in the master class . user interface: Oh , for the next meeting , right ? industrial designer: marketing: project manager: N , next meeting starts in thirty minutes . marketing: Who who gave you the master class ? project manager: The master class ? marketing: Ronald Betenberg ? project manager: Franz Mehler's . industrial designer: project manager: idea that you the the industrial development centre and user interface will work together on a prototype . user interface: industrial designer: So we're going to work together right now ? user interface: Stay here and project manager: Yeah , the well , dids this what I what I heard . project manager: But keep an eye on your laptops for a real industrial designer: Yeah , I'm not sure if we we Because I saw something about individual actions . project manager: Yeah , but th there's there's still the my instructions that you will work together <doc-sep>industrial designer: 'S to do now is to decide how to fulfil what your stuff is , marketing: Yeah . project manager: Okay , well marketing: It kinda does make sense , doesn't it , because when we get into the end of meeting we're kind of talking about action and design as opposed to background . project manager: Well how on the in this meeting then if we I'll just just recap on the minutes from the last meeting . project manager: and we decided that it was gonna be non-rechargeable battery-powered , that we're gonna group our audio-visual and other functions into into those categories , . And I told you guys about the three new requirements about ignoring teletext , ignoring everything except the T_V_ , and trying to incorporate the the corporate colour and slogan . so if we have the three presentations , and then if you have anything to kind of that you know you're gonna want to discuss , maybe just make a note of it , and we'll have all the discussion at the end . project manager: And so if we start off with Andrew and then Craig and then David , marketing: Okay . what did how did we leave it with speech recognition now ? We did we say we were gonna try maybe incorporate it but we hadn't made a definite decision on that ? industrial designer: Oh I should also point out that the you know the kind of final objective of this meeting is to reach a decision on the concepts of the product . basically what I wanna do here , before we get into it too far , is I want to show you all the background information I have that I think we need to acknowledge if we want this to be successful . marketing: And and then sorta g go through some of the way that I've dealt with that information , and then sort of bring us all together into it to see sorta see how this fits in with the overall vision . so I've tried to take a whole lot of market research and summarise it for us , and then ide identify trends that are are sort of in sync and are important to our our p project plan that we have so far , and then initiate a kind of discussion on design options so that it sorta helps us to to narrow in on on aspects that will inform other other elements of the of the project . marketing: I thought that that will impact on the rest of what we do , so that's why I suggested we get in this . marketing: Okay so out of different figures and ratings ob of people in general , consumers in general , the number one thing that was found was that the br t television remote control , a fancy look and feel , okay , and not , it specified , not a functional look or or feel , b f f fancy . marketing: however , this is where we kinda have to be very , I think , creative about it . Okay so that tells me that we have to find a way to be innovative without a adding just unnecessary sort of functional bits to it . and third priority for ease of use , so again that kind of gives us a general picture of how it has to be , quite user friendly while still having technology . So it I'll just say right away as a bit of a foreshadowing into how we proceed with this in terms of m marketing , is that I think what we should think about is how the about how the innovation contributes to the look and feel , and not so much to the functionality of it . marketing: For example like when you pick it up and push it like it all lights up or something , you know what , like , or it's got something else to it that just seems innovative project manager: -huh . So how do you make innovation make something more more easy to use ? Well that's I guess where we're gonna go with this . marketing: Okay then there's the other aspect of the back the the market research I have here is on fashion style , okay , which as we've agreed is a priority . top European fashion trend that I read about says there's this emerging theme of fruit and vegetables , okay , industrial designer: project manager: marketing: especially in clothes and furniture . And when I first saw that I thought , well do we want to actually try and think about this trend and how we add something to it , or we get right into it , or we completely steer away from it , project manager: Okay okay . marketing: do you know what ? So my my feeling is that we w do want to observe this trend , but we want to think also about the fact that it sort of has to fit in with something which is not specifically electronics . 'cause I think what we're in what we're in is partly sort of home decor , partly something like a computer , so I think we might wanna be careful about how you know how quickly we create like a remote control in the shape of an apple or something , project manager: marketing: I think that would be pushing it . industrial designer: marketing: And then in terms of m material trends are for things to be soft and spongy and sort of , you might say ergonomic or or friendly to handle , which is which also in indicated that last year this was this was not the case . So probably a lot of the competition on the market will be still in last year's mode , so if we try and really capitalise on that , I think that'll be in our favour . innovative design technology's also a must in that it's seen it'd be seen to be cutting edge , but ease of use t has to be insured throughout . And then at the end there are vibrant natural colours that's the way I interpreted it anyway , softness in materials , shape , and function , and so I've written at written at the bottom to give us sort of a context of discussion , Mac iPods , project manager: marketing: something which is , I'd have to say very high-tech , ten gigabytes , whatever , but when you hold it in your hand there's like no buttons . marketing: You know what a Mac iPod is ? I'm thinking however Mac iPod is sort of last year's because it's very hard and sort of glassy and glossy , so I'm thinking if we imagine that we're taking some of the features of a Mac iPod and we're then making it s more of like a more of like a comfortable type of or more of like a maybe more vibrant to friendly thing to have . and then so this is w with all that information what I'm what I'm suggesting in this slide here is that we we take these ideas , and as we get into more the more techni like sort of production side of things , that we think about shape , materials , and themes or series that go throughout . Sort of like a I dunno like we think of some kind of a thin theme that unifies it all , that we agree on , sorta like a marketing identity . So so like I threw out a few ideas there just to kinda get us thinking along those lines like lemon , lime , I dunno , green colours , pe whatever , it's just an idea , 'cause I'm thinking that some of these ideas will seem quite coherent if we use them in terms of their what people associate this them with in terms of texture , shape , colours , things like that . marketing: Like the ones the ones which I'm most fond of in terms of giving like a theme to it would be like like lemon or something like that , you know something which is , like you see a lot in in other areas . Like I see lots of websites and things that seem to associate with like lemon and lime and project manager: Okay . marketing: I'm thinking maybe we could incorporate some of these features into a fairly into something which is which seems to have something to it which is almost gimmicky because like like something to do with like lighting within it . Like you know just within the simple sense , when you pick up a phone and touch a button it lights up , q usually the buttons light up . marketing: How can we build on that ? Maybe like it could light up in different colours or something or or people could buy the buy the control and then it comes with different like covers or something so . marketing: but hopefully we can we can revisit those ideas when we get into project manager: -huh . there's a wee bit of discussion about the other existing ones there , so I've taken the suggestions from them and tried to incorporate them into this So then this we're looking for suggestions on size th size of control and the buttons , the shape of the control , and whereabout the buttons should be located on the control . user interface: what I found from the research is that most the current controls are just basically big bricks with loads of buttons all over them . they're not very attractive to look at , and they're not very comfortable to hold , they're I just hold 'em like big bricks , and they're very easily lost . they tend to be very dark colours , so if there are shadowy places down the side of couches you can't really see them . I'm not sure if there's any other examples of that , but something to look out for . there's a problem that I've I've got couple of preferences for the the end control I get 'em with the the red colour button for stand-by and s the other examples of that The buttons should be large . one of the examples given on the homepage was there's an up and down volume button but both of them have a V_ on them , project manager: user interface: so the up volume button looks like it should be a down volume button , that's kinda confusing . if the the corporate colour scheme allows it we should have a very bright colour so that it can be easily identified anywhere . user interface: obviously trying trying to avoid being tacky there , but it could tie-in very easily with your your lime and lemon idea . Okay , do we have a corporate colour scheme ? project manager: I think it's yellow marketing: I didn't know . project manager: because like the website is yellow and there's a band at the bottom is yellow , marketing: Okay . user interface: any extra features we add beyond the basic ones should be m hidden , they shouldn't be on the shouldn't be visible without something be opened or some sort of special extra effort . user interface: if we did decide to go for voice activation there sh should always be a button as alternative , possibly hidden in the the opened up section making that something is wrong with it or with somebody's voice , maybe they got a cold or we should definitely avoid the big square block look . user interface: And we got an email from I think it's the the research department , and they've said th the voice control can now talk back if you ask it a question . user interface: So it sh it could be good to have them confirm any action you take project manager: Aye that's a good idea , yeah . you say you wanted the the corporate colours , but they don't say you know if we can use any other colours at all or marketing: . marketing: It's a shame the cable wasn't just in the middle of the table , project manager: I know it'd be handy , wouldn't it . project manager: Do y do you wanna sit in the the line of sight of this industrial designer: Yeah okay . project manager: marketing: It takes a second , doesn't it ? industrial designer: 'Kay , that should be it . marketing: industrial designer: So just so you guys have some idea of what's involved in my process , and then you can just work through it marketing: industrial designer: and we 'll either modify it or start from scratch depending on what your needs are . industrial designer: I think , like what you guys said , the most input that's needed is basically in the user interface . like you said time to market was a problem , and how many components are physically in there in cost . and the lower components , the power , the logic , the transmitter , and the infrared , they affect you in terms of the size of your device , and that would have some inte impact on how y I think more how you hold rather than the actual use using the the remote control because like we've said we've defined , like we only want the basic things that to be visible , and the rest of them we try to hide . these are the options that are available to you , I'm not very sure about the voice thing 'cause I got another email and it was in fact quite sketchy on what n the voice options are . industrial designer: it said it could talk to you , but it never said anything about being able to listen . industrial designer: well I could see the other email that they sent you , 'cause they got back to me with like different requirements , or different offerings of what components availa Okay so your basic components are buttons , user interface: Right . industrial designer: okay and you have a wheel available , like a mouse scroll wheel , project manager: . industrial designer: okay there's an L_C_D_ display , marketing: industrial designer: I think these are quite standard things . marketing: They're standard , aren't they ? industrial designer: No they're well in the sense that these are all the options available for you . It can actually be flat or it can be curved , and then the different types of materials that you can use , I don't think you can use them in a combination , but project manager: industrial designer: I could check back for you , but I don't think you can actually use them in a combination . project manager: We you couldn't have like plastic and rubber ? industrial designer: I think plastic and rubber would be fine , but plastic , rubber , and wood , I wasn't I'm not very sure about the titanium . industrial designer: the rubber was a restriction on the kind of power source you could use , project manager: 'kay . industrial designer: but the titanium had a different kind of things on the shape of the thing , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so I think that there is some restriction on I think you could probably group plastic and rubber together , wood and titanium , project manager: industrial designer: but you know it might be easier from a cost perspective and a complexity just to use one . industrial designer: and the other components are logic chips , again I'll I'll go back to the component chips . The com how complex or how easy the logic is , it depends on how many functions you have on the on the unit and that impacts cost . I don't think the logic chip has a issue about size 'cause they should be about the same size . Okay the second one I think is more of a gimmick then actually a useable thing , it's a wind-up you know , a crank . industrial designer: Yeah but that that might be something I think that's more of a look and feel decision because I don't think you can have one power source if you're using the alternative power sources . I think whatever it is you still need a battery 'cause I don't think anybody wants to keep doing one thing . industrial designer: which may not be a great idea in Europe or any country that has seasons 'cause half the year you'd be dead . user interface: industrial designer: So like what I said , you probably need like a battery and something else . industrial designer: and the kinetic one I guess for me is the most interesting one project manager: industrial designer: because it's movement and people like to fiddle with their and it's a nice sales gimmick I think . industrial designer: From a marketing gimmick it it's a technology thing , marketing: industrial designer: it's a shake it it doesn't work , shake it , knock it or something . industrial designer: you have you had those balls , you know those stress balls where you bounce the ball and it and it lights up and it goes , project manager: yeah yeah , I see . project manager: marketing: industrial designer: you know that might be a gimmick combined with rubber . industrial designer: You know just to if you get frustrated wi remote control you can throw it , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: my from my role , I don't think that personal preferences but role preferences , I think something comfortable to hold , small and slim marketing: industrial designer: I guess that's more in the sense of small and slim in terms of comfortable not so small you can't , you know like a phone or something , too small phone . industrial designer: and the other thing is from a production point of view the less components we use and the simpler the components means you reduce your cost and you increase your profit . industrial designer: The user interface restrictions basically means that if you use more complicated features , like the buttons are standard okay , the L_C_D_ panel and the scroll wheel you need more complicated logic . industrial designer: Okay with the titanium case , let me just check that , marketing: industrial designer: titanium case can't be curved , it has to be square . industrial designer: Okay there's no restriction on the plastic , and marketing: It can't be curved . industrial designer: So that's again , I don't think you can use them in a combination , especially the titanium project manager: Okay . Right can I marketing: question on can I ask a question ? project manager: Yeah well yeah it's just I'm quite keen to get the discussion going with the time we've left so but yeah you c ask away . Can we power a light in this ? Can we get a strong enough battery to power a light ? industrial designer: I think we could because the L_C_D_ panel requires power , and the L_C_D_ is a form of a light project manager: . industrial designer: so that marketing: So maybe one of the things we can just try and include is a really good battery . project manager: Why what kind of light do you want are you thinking of ? marketing: Well I'm thinking it might be That for this to be a high-tech thing it's gonna have to have something high-tech about it project manager: -huh . marketing: and that's gonna take battery power , and to make that to make that a realistic goal I think one of the issues that will come up later is , can the battery power it ? industrial designer: Are you thinking are you thinking of of a light in the sense of a light light , or a light in the sense of it glows kind of you know Frankenstein , it's alive . Well m I'm thinking along the lines of you're you're in the dark watching a D_V_D_ and you you find the thing in the dark and you go like this , industrial designer: Okay . marketing: and y you just touch it , or you just pick it up , and it lights up or something . marketing: We're gonna need to put in a really good battery so people don't have to charge their r remote control every few days . industrial designer: that's why I think the option of the the kinetic thing which basically means as long as you shake it like a watch , like an automatic watch project manager: . marketing: But are people gonna wanna shake their movie controller ? industrial designer: it's probably sensitive enough when you fiddle it . industrial designer: like I said the bouncing ball thing , or you could trigger that to use that to power the light project manager: Okay . industrial designer: so when they pick it up , right , and then that that sorta triggers the marketing: Right . project manager: let's just go right back to the marketing ideas for a start , and just giving an id idea on the time , we've got about fifteen minutes to play with at most . So yeah so just t to bear in mind that the ultimate goal of this meeting is to reach an decision on the the the concepts of the product . project manager: So back to your idea about incorporating the idea of like fruit and veg , and the corporate colour , and things like that . project manager: Does anybody have any ideas of about how we can fit all that in together ? that's kind of the user interface type of thing , what are your thoughts on that ? user interface: I think we could go for like maybe not a p a fruit shape but a very sort of curvy type shape . project manager: So maybe do y are we thinking something that like s could sit in your hand comfortably , or do you th you'd hold onto comfortably or user interface: probably something that s sits in your hand comfortably , sort of feels right in your hand . Colour-wise you made a re was it you or I can't remember who made the point about how if you've a nice bright colour you'll not lose it , was that industrial designer: I think he made that . project manager: Whose user interface: marketing: What's that ? project manager: about how if you have a bright colour you'll not lose it so much . project manager: and when the corporate colour is yellow , maybe we could think about about the colour of the whole product being yellow I don't know . project manager: And then obviously the the materials when it has anybody got like an overall picture in their mind about what what might work ? That's all . marketing: Well I'm thinking that what we need to do is have something that kind of unifies a lot of the different concepts , project manager: marketing: and if we think that what we are w our number one marketing motive is the look and feel . marketing: So for the look and feel to seem coherent and not just sorta bits and bits and pieces of of concept and technology or or whatever or fashion , then we should have it kind of come back to one thing that we kind of all sorta can visualize . maybe what we could do is t th think about a concept which touches b back to the on the the colour , project manager: if we think of something , like I was saying also lime and lemon you know , project manager: marketing: what can we come up with something where we we try and associate it with with like the series . We just come up with something like that we kind of use it as a theme to inspire the project manager: Okay . industrial designer: Is there a particular shape that you're interested in ? Like does marketing have any research on does it need to be long ? marketing: industrial designer: Does it need with a square thing wha project manager: Oh you know like in circular in shape or industrial designer: Yeah 'cause that will n help narrow down the choice of marketing: Yeah . project manager: 'Cause I I I was kinda thinking about as well you know how you get these shock resistant mobile phones , user interface: See I'm project manager: and they're plastic but then also have like rubber on the outside , and it kinda feels it feels kind of warmer to the touch . And then then we could have curved shapes , 'cause wood or titanium , yeah , it's gonna have to be boxy and rectangular and I think we might be moving away from that you know so Well I'm do we really want it in like the shape of a lemon or marketing: No no no not at all . marketing: It's more more just that we we think about like what it is we're trying to achieve , so and then we have one one sorta theme that we stick with . project manager: Okay right well marketing: Do you know what ? project manager: so thoughts about the actual shape of the thing . project manager: A snowman shape ? user interface: so a p sort of larger bit sits in your hand , and then you got maybe another bubble at the top for just any other function you need . That's quite a distinctive shape , marketing: Right , project manager: that would be good marketing: sure . project manager: so yeah should we go with that ? marketing: can we yeah like to and wha like do you have a project manager: Do you wanna draw it on the board ? user interface: marketing: Can you like yeah just t we can visualize it . user interface: something like that you got two groups there maybe it could fold up and you get a third group inside project manager: Ooh that'd be good . and colour-wise what does everybody think ? I think it is quite important to get yellow in there somewhere . user interface: So I reckon it'd look quite nice if we just had this here , had a sorta background yellow , marketing: project manager: -huh . and also how are we going to incorporate the slogan in ? The fact that it talks to you , it might be quite cool if when you first start using it it says , what is it , putting fashion into electronics or something , I dunno . Or when you like or if you turn it off or something if it can speak if it could actually say the slogan it might be a bit more powerful than just having it written on it somewhere . project manager: I d I d any thoughts on that at all ? user interface: I think that'd probably scare me . unless an a if you also would that work if we wanted to incorporate an L_C_D_ display , where would we put that ? Would we put that on the inside or industrial designer: Do we need an L_C_D_ display ? user interface: industrial designer: What what's the functionality of that ? project manager: It's bound to increase the cost of it a lot , I would've thought . industrial designer: Yeah but the question is what are we using it marketing: What would it achieve ? industrial designer: what would we what would we achieve from it ? Putting in lights is cheap but putting in an L_C_D_ panel just to make it glow is a bit of a marketing: Well L_C_ well I'd when you used to mention the L_C_D_ I'd think I wonder what that would be about . And the th the thing I could see it helping with would be if it was somehow connected with listings . marketing: So as you scroll through , 'cause we said we might have a jog dial , so as you scroll through your stations you can y it actually tells you what it is . I think that will be a problem because we don't have an input device to get the listings into it , marketing: Right , okay . industrial designer: I I'm not saying there's no need for an L_C_D_ display , but it's what's what what would it tell the user , project manager: I think that would make it very complex . industrial designer: 'cause the L_C_D_ tends to be an output as as opposed to an input so does the remote control need to talk back to the user ? project manager: Yeah . marketing: not real industrial designer: We have the option of the speaker as well the sa the same thing goes for the speaker , is there a need for the remote control to to talk back ? marketing: project manager: I don't know if there is really , marketing: project manager: no industrial designer: project manager: I would say no need for a talk-back . project manager: so you're gonna have the three different sets of of functionalities , do you wanna group them into s head of the snowman , body of the snowman , inside of the snowman , is that what you're thinking ? user interface: well I think the advanced ones the the ones you don't usually use could be hid inside . user interface: B I think the we had were fairly basic ones , they'd have to go on the the front somewhere . project manager: Okay right what else do you need to talk about ? marketing: Well i I was just industrial designer: Where would you physically position the buttons ? I think that that has some impact on on on many things . project manager: So I'm just gonna pop this in here 'cause I have a slide about decision making which I'd forgotten about . energy what do you think that's suggesting we're how we're powering the thing ? I really like the idea of this kinetic thing where you'd have the back-up of the battery , but have have kinetic power , marketing: Yeah , sure . project manager: what does anybody think about that ? marketing: I've had kinetic things before , and the the the one issue we need to keep in mind with them is that you're committing the user to moving it , industrial designer: No , like I said we have a h hybrid kind of thing , so it's not gonna charge the battery , it's just marketing: and watches yeah Sure , okay , right , okay . marketing: just it's just worth pointing out because like I've I've known I've known people to have kinetic watches that they wear all the time , project manager: marketing: and it's just like magic because it's always powered and there's no battery . I've also known people to have things like like a jewellery watch they wear from time to time , and they eventually just say it's just too much of a nuisance because I don't wear it all the time . marketing: Like remote control is similar , you're away on vacation , I dunno whatever , you something , and it just starts to get worn down . Well I suppose that if you're if you're away and you're not using it , then you're not using any power either . marketing: So we should think about project manager: So you'd have the battery as the kind of to keep it ticking over idea marketing: Yeah . project manager: I'm really sorry we're gonna have to wrap up quite quickly , we don't have as much time as I thought . project manager: Chip on print , is that that's an industrial design thing , is it David ? industrial designer: Yes yes . project manager: Okay as for the case , kind of discussed that marketing: And this size here , I'd suggest this be small , like quite small . marketing: just a a lot of the one of the things running through my mind right now , I realise we're being efficient to wrap up the meeting and have lots of decisions made , project manager: marketing: but we are leaning quite a bit to the side of being low-tech , rubber buttons plastic frame , it's almost like we're reproducing the same old remote control that's out there . marketing: Should we think about how we are actually getting this high-tech user friendly theme like what is it that we're u we're using to to achieve those goals ? project manager: Could have things like backlighting the buttons and stuff like that . you know a a glowing a a glowing yellow type case where the yellow is showable , marketing: Yeah clear , project manager: Aye that would be a good idea . project manager: S so like cur slightly transparent case , so it's yellow , like tinted yellow , but you can maybe see through it . project manager: Is that what you mean ? industrial designer: You know you have cordless mice and they don't eat that much power right . industrial designer: but because the case is transparent so it gives it a little bit of a glow , doesn't make it freaky . and then the other thing that we we're s we've committed ourselves to achieving is simplicity , and so I'm thinking maybe should we try and think about having something like some kind of an innovative concept about how the the volume and the channels are controlled , 'cause that's the main thing people will f wanna do . marketing: Could we use like a jog dial , like a nice just sort of round , somewhere on it where you just roll it ? industrial designer: The question is when you're rolling it , how do you wanna roll it ? marketing: Or industrial designer: Do you want 'em to roll it like that ? Do you want 'em to roll it like that ? 'Cause in a mouse your hand's in a position to roll it , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: whereas the other thing about having it jog dial this way , it tends to get moved accidentally . project manager: Yeah if you are holding it in your hand you could you could do that , couldn't you ? marketing: Well why don't we do it like a mouse then ? project manager: If you're holding it in your hand you could industrial designer: That's a very unnatural motion to project manager: Do you think ? industrial designer: yeah . it might work for volume , and maybe some of the brightness controls and stuff like that , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: If you have a Telewest box you've got like , you don't have to buy all the channels , marketing: project manager: okay okay industrial designer: and I don't think having that you know too quick too slow kin it's confusing to the marketing: Yeah , sure . project manager: user interface: Well , but then for for skipping a large amount of channels you do have to to skip the channel button , the number part . industrial designer: and once they lose out on the user experience they're like Because that's becomes the most accessible thing in front of project manager: Okay . marketing: But that's not a bad thing is it ? project manager: Just marketing: Because when you think about it , the alternative is to go push the button . project manager: we do need to make a decision on whether we want to incorporate a jog dial in nice and quickly . I'm all for them actually , I think they're quite you know th very quick to m to use . project manager: So does anybody oppose the idea of of incorporating one into the design at all ? No . And the other thing was can we think of any way of getting the slogan into this thing ? marketing: Yeah like if we if if we keep coming back to this board here , project manager: -huh . marketing: I wouldn't be surprised if we could take this idea , imagine that , I dunno , that it's within the shape of the hand , it's quite small project manager: -huh ooh okay , we really gotta wrap up marketing: I dunno . It's small , and that we've got like the the l slogan somewhere like on the casing at the side , project manager: Okay well if we can do that , great . marketing: well isn't that what we just h said said we s just have to decide now ? project manager: Yeah let's let's try and get the slogan on there , and marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: So you wanna expand the shape of the marketing: And then like a jo And then like a jog dial somewhere that fits in with the shape of it like I dunno like here , in with the industrial designer: That that might have one problem in terms of in terms of whether you're left handed or you're right handed you might be locking yourself in . industrial designer: Could I just could I just jump in and suggest something quickly ? project manager: Okay . Right I'm gonna have to user interface: marketing: A jog di project manager: I'm really gonna have to hurry you on here 'cause we're we're actually over time . It's kind of yeah project manager: Just for in closing just the next meeting's gonna be in thirty minutes , and so you can see in the screen here what each of you are gonna hopefully be doing , I know that the designers are gonna be working with Play-doh on that . Anything at all you think we haven't discussed that we need to ? Is everybody kind of happy about what they're gonna be doing ? marketing: industrial designer: I think one thing would be the jog dial 'cause that's gonna have quite a big impact on the thing marketing: Yeah I think the jog dial , you know it just after you drew that , what if it was flat and you just spun it , industrial designer: Yeah that's what I was thinking the marketing: that'd be great . industrial designer: There's lots of space for it project manager: That's kind of a design thing that you guys can can discuss , yeah . industrial designer: Yeah but it's also a a marketing and a function user interface: marketing: Sure , yeah , project manager: Okay . marketing: yeah and materials we sorta said we'd do plastic and rubber , didn't we , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: and I think maybe we should try and stay away from just the big protruding rubber buttons , 'cause that'd just be so standard . project manager: To make something flush with the case ? marketing: Something a bit more flush , yeah , project manager: Okay right . marketing: so that it has and also t plastic I've seen can get really textured , so you can get plastics that actually feel soft in your hand . user interface: marketing: They feel kind of like , you get pens now and then that you'd think that they were rubber but they're not , industrial designer: No like Yeah yeah . marketing: they're actually just plastic that's textured , industrial designer: Yeah yeah kinda like that yeah . marketing: kind of a little bit like project manager: Okay I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to call this to a close 'cause we're way over time . So that's really good , like we've s had much to talk about that pretty much run out of time to do so . marketing: industrial designer: Okay , can I just swipe your power cable , I don't think it matters . Okay lemme okay , I'm gonna pull everybody out first and then put in whoever needs to be left . I'm gonna take the microphones , 'cause it's too lazy t take them off again <doc-sep>user interface: Why won't it wake up ? Is it on ? marketing: The power light doesn't work . Okay , so I just show you the m the no the the the the the the minutes , minute . project manager: Okay , so we just talked about Oh you want me to show that there or user interface: No , industrial designer: no . And the functions are volume , channel to choose channels , an on-off , a mute button , and a text T_V_ button . project manager: So I just want to give you Mike again , the first presentation of your marketing: Shall I start ? project manager: Yeah . I searched the web , and I searched on this d document , recent investigation of the remote control market . but they found out the most important aspect for remote controls happens to be a fancy look-and-feel , instead of the current functional look and feel . And then that This is a point of discussion , because we just decided that we don't make use of L_C_D_ or speech recognition . marketing: But this is the second important aspect , and I think we must use some of the new technology , to be innovative . And it says fashion-watchers of Pari France and Italy , yeah , have detected the following trends . marketing: But the the next aspect also in contrast to last year , the feel of material is expe is expected to be spongy . marketing: But spongy , what what does spongy says ? industrial designer: Spongy . project manager: because you've you're you drop y your remote control very often on the ground . project manager: Is it a bit like like the the the the remote control ? user interface: How are you gonna make it ? project manager: R_ soft . industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: industrial designer: I've some material information , but I'll give you it later in my presentation . marketing: Okay ? project manager: marketing: What do I think ? because a fancy look is the most important thing for remote control control , I think about changeable fronts . Yeah , how do we do that ? Maybe speech ? We ma must have some kind of gadget . marketing: Intro project manager: Because it's only twelve and a half Euros you have to spend on every remote control . user interface: So industrial designer: Yeah , well actually we have don't have an idea how much it's gonna cost . But maybe it's cheap user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: and it's easy to implement . I d They don't say how much it will cost , so but marketing: user interface: if we implement speech recognition , I think it would be better to implement L_C_D_ as well . So you can say , you can user interface: Since you have to configure speech thing . project manager: But that's definitely more expensive than user interface: Yeah , that's that's something I dunno . But a telephone also have a L_C_D_ and and it's about t two hundred Euros . user interface: Yeah , so we gotta de project manager: So user interface: We have to decide on that . That was this ? user interface: industrial designer: Oh I got an email And it says the chip can be simple , regular or advanced . So user interface: L_D_C_ doesn't require industrial designer: it's m the most expensive . industrial designer: I I haven't got anything about speech recognition , but user interface: I'll I'll give you my design . 'Cause remote con control , you can see it here , you have to bo reach both out both sides . project manager: Yeah , maybe the teletext tel user interface: Yeah , text button , maybe there and there . user interface: but it's marketing: No , I don't I don't like it . And you can't use them now with your thumb , because the thing is not , it's not easy to control . industrial designer: Yeah okay , m maybe we cho should put that on top , and buttons we we don't use on , in the bottom . user interface: They're on top ? project manager: Yeah , just th th th other buttons like text T_V_ . industrial designer: But I I think w you'll use the switch channels buttons more often than the normal channel buttons , like one two three . I dunno , but yeah we'll industrial designer: Like zapping is just switching one channel at a time . user interface: And if you don't light 'em up , they don't you don't see 'em very good . industrial designer: That's that's good , but user interface: I think it's modern to light this area up , and to light this area up . It's s We have to look what's easy to use , and how it's easier to use . user interface: I dunno if it l will look good , if you put those on t on the bottom half . Yeah , maybe industrial designer: But we we can switch those two , user interface: Those two , yeah . user interface: And , yeah , you have to make sure it's easy to Yes , it has to be big enough so you can hold it , right . And well if we want to put in speech rec recognition or something , we I don't think we should put it on top then . I think that , if we're gonna put in more technology , that you need to be able to switch it open . project manager: We have to decide this this lecture , or this this this fifty minutes , yeah , how it is gonna look . If you aim at a young public , you should use materials that are soft with primary colours like green , blue , red . I don't know exactly what that means , but it should be , well yeah , popular kind of project manager: Yeah , we have to put our Real Reaction logo as well on the on the remote control . user interface: Yeah , it's project manager: So we have ha to ma make it in black , black , yellow . industrial designer: Yeah , n Not that weird , because we definitely want to make it kind of flashy , to attract a young public . user interface: Yeah , but I don't think the the colours black and yellow go well together . But project manager: We make i Maybe you can put yellow on the side and black on the on the front . That's a that's a sen That's just a matter of tastes , but user interface: Yeah , okay . user interface: can't we use different fron fronts , with all with the the logo on it ? Can we do that ? So project manager: Yeah , it's cool . industrial designer: S user interface: You can Just like a mobile phone , you can make different fronts on it . user interface: A more Yeah , just marketing: project manager: That's better prob industrial designer: With the hard hard buttons . The the the new new modern remote controls , the buttons are part of the the style , I think is part of the remote control itself . it's n doesn't Is a button How do you say it ? industrial designer: Yeah , it's it's all on one level . marketing: It it didn't it i it don't come out of the on the background . project manager: basic remote control from normal plastic , marketing: project manager: and industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: But I think we have to make the case transparent , otherwise the back light won't work . industrial designer: So if you put project manager: Y i if you The numbers could be can be user interface: you can just make them around the buttons project manager: Yeah , that's right . user interface: Or it runs the whole industrial designer: Yeah , but we can still make it transparent . user interface: Yeah , you can halfs transparent , industrial designer: Or no user interface: or just that it's comes out a bit . user interface: depends on the colour of the project manager: Yeah , but you can't choo You can't choose it when you buy it . Is marketing: but can you change it if you already bought the the remote control ? user interface: Yeah , it can . project manager: industrial designer: I don't know what it is , but it should be there I think . marketing: project manager: user interface: industrial designer: this is the normal circuit board , like a chip board in in a lot of things . project manager: Yeah , we have to hurry up a bit , so industrial designer: W So we d we just need this and this transistors and resonators . user interface: industrial designer: they they basically said that that's almost the same on any remote controls . project manager: We still want to have a recharger , don't we ? industrial designer: Yeah but project manager: Is that still the user interface: Yes . industrial designer: Yeah , but it i We don't wanna have a ar an How do you call it ? Accu . user interface: project manager: It's just batteries , industrial designer: so marketing: project manager: that's cheaper . So we need the expensive , most expensive chip , if we use an L_C_D_ . industrial designer: are are we using a a rubber case , or project manager: Oh just sk industrial designer: We haven't decided yet . It's user interface: I don't think a rubber case looks industrial designer: L marketing: but we have to do something about the trend . Or should we do it in the next meeting ? user interface: I_D_ and U_I_D_ work together on prototype drawing on smart board . industrial designer: So we should did it here ? project manager: That's for th user interface: So we're staying here ? project manager: that I think that's the next next meeting . user interface: Okay , so now we're ka thirty minutes alone again ? industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Just a bit cur Okay , I'll see if I can see any of those . You see what ? industrial designer: What ? project manager: If I draw here It draws about four centimetres lower than industrial designer: Oh . industrial designer: I think you'll get a a lot of volume changing when it's not wanted . project manager: And industrial designer: Yeah , but maybe we can make a a plastic , so that you i if you like drop it , it won't change the volume . user interface: Yeah , maybe you just have to make it That's not scrollable too easy . And what's the channel choose ? Where do we put that ? Still on the bottom industrial designer: I think in middle . project manager: or user interface: wh what is the middle part ? project manager: That's the numbers . industrial designer: I think th the numbers should be in the bottom , and and the switch channel in the middle . project manager: It doesn't make a difference , if you put the s the switch channels on side of each other or on top of each other . user interface: Use the dz project manager: Because you already have the volume here , so You can also put it here one butt and the other one there . project manager: So you can also can put it all on the top , and this , you keep this empty . industrial designer: Or you could do the switch channel up button above the the numbers and switch channel down button below . project manager: But that's not want to zap very quick , so user interface: Yeah , I think zapping is the highest priority . project manager: Yeah ? Is this a opportunity , user interface: And then you use those project manager: or you don't want a different user interface: Yeah , of course . industrial designer: but I think we we should bu put 'em on top of each other , so project manager: Why ? industrial designer: Because then it's it's easy to know m if I push the the the up project manager: But still the next It's still the next one . Doesn't make industrial designer: Yeah , but the top the top button is is like you switch channel up , and down button is If you put them project manager: Yeah , but fo from left to right is exactly the same . industrial designer: But but I I think left to right is more often associated with volume , and top down is more with channel changing . user interface: Yeah , I think industrial designer: So so if we use that , they will probably have a long learning time . I You already have the volume on the side , user interface: No , I think project manager: so you can't make it you can't ma make a mistake . project manager: So it's user interface: I think it's s so simple industrial designer: I dunno . user interface: you just project manager: So but that's for that's for you , industrial designer: Okay . project manager: 'cause it's user interface: Yeah , okay I'll d I'll take a look at it . user interface: Think we need to work thirty minutes again ? marketing: Yeah , we have to care that it r looks really new . marketing: 'Cause wha what I see the only difference i i i in fact is that we use a scroll-wheel on the outside . user interface: No , you have It is industrial designer: Yeah , but i i it should be round in in shape . marketing: Some some kind of bling bling can we have industrial designer: user interface: Where you can put a ve we have If we do it like that we have below have we a lot of room to put a nice logo . marketing: and how many fronts fronts do we put on the market then ? five or something ? project manager: Yeah , five . user interface: marketing: Or more or user interface: Maybe you can buy separate ones and marketing: And buy the product . industrial designer: No , tha that will be project manager: So y you can put the bottom of the remote control in recharger ? Is that is that a good good opportunity ? user interface: Yes . marketing: Yeah , we can b It c it could be just just a square , just a packet . industrial designer: But we have to make contacts on the on the remote control and the recharger as well . user interface: I think i marketing: user interface: Yeah okay , tho those are al already a bit cornered . industrial designer: Yeah , but we can we can do all kinds of As long as it isn is in two D_ we can use all kind of round shapes . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: It's a bit annoying , isn't it ? marketing: Yeah . I know we can do a lot more , but marketing: Yeah , it project manager: industrial designer: Like in this kind of shape or marketing: it's very annoying . project manager: So we have to make a decision , what kind of form it's gonna have t going to have . project manager: But why do we have to round it on the t bottom then ? Of Skip that one as well . user interface: and marketing: It's not not a lot of trends I I found project manager: Okay , so we have s still one minute left . So just marketing: project manager: I think it's okay if you just keep it a bit square . Yeah , marketing: It The th th industrial designer: I d I don't know n something about ergonomic kind of fits-in-the-hand stuff . It's only annoying if it if it's like that f formed like that , like f Whatever . Just you have a normal industrial designer: Yeah , but we're we're aiming at a young public . marketing: There is one There's just one overall important aspect is that we must make it fancy and it looks original , and I hope we can make it look not like the iPod itself . But you're If you look at the way remote controls are now project manager: But i it is it is it is already fancy . user interface: And if you make it look like the iPod marketing: Yeah , they're all the same . So that's already a very big change project manager: maybe maybe make the the the wha what's it called scroll wheel . Maybe we have to ask to the the to her if it has if it can work better than this . project manager: We just we just skip the the the voca or was it the the speech recognition . Yeah , do we s keep that ? Yeah , I think project manager: Or keep that ? It's okay . But you'd definitely need a industrial designer: S user interface: Well project manager: advanced chip . marketing: industrial designer: And we we have to build in a microphone and user interface: Well that's very easy . We already have the beeping of the home station , industrial designer: Yeah , and I do I don't know anything about that . user interface: so industrial designer: I d I didn't receive any information on speech recognition , marketing: No . Becau project manager: Can we just put it speech recognition in it as well , marketing: Yeah . But project manager: okay ? user interface: So marketing: Ma user interface: shall we it open then ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: Oh yeah , I marketing: But we don't have any f information about the cost . marketing: We started with information about the cost was now th user interface: I just I just received the industrial designer: Yeah , I have I have some some information about the cost . marketing: And how much is the chip ? The the the industrial designer: I don't know how much , but user interface: Yeah , our division has developed a new speech recognition feature , the integrated programmable sample sensor simple speaker u unit . industrial designer: Just in inexpensive or user interface: This is a very small electronic unit , will give a standard answer after it recognise a question . user interface: Yeah th that's just It's a marketing: Does it say does it say something back ? project manager: Okay , we have to stop it now . Yeah , it Well that's integrated in the chip , so if you use the speech recognition , that's in it . project manager: Okay , that's a r That's that's a advanced industrial designer: But i it's a separate chip . user interface: I dunno , but if we use speech recognition , that will be in it as well . industrial designer: Yeah , I don't know anything about this , marketing: project manager: Yeah , we just decide not to put it in , industrial designer: but Nah . project manager: Okay , just user interface: And there's a chip in it that will project manager: We have to stop it now

Marketing suggested incorporating technology innovation into the remote, such as speech recognition and mobile phone integration, to meet the market trend. This would allow users to use the remote for other purposes, like gaming, while their parents watched boring programs. The Industrial Designer questioned the necessity of an LCD screen, but Marketing proposed integrating it with the television to provide new information about what was on without interrupting the viewing experience. They also suggested a minimalist design that could be flipped open for customization. Market research emphasized the importance of ease of use and functionality, so Marketing suggested fitting in with fruit and vegetable themes and creating a remote in the shape of a fruit. User Interface asked about making the remote spongy, and Marketing proposed changeable fronts in basic colors to achieve a fancy look. They also mentioned the possibility of a round shape, different from a normal remote control.

Question: What were the opinions on the length of silence before declaring an utterance, detecting smaller units of sound, detecting speech/non-speech options, and the "where is X" construction? Article: professor g: Alright ! grad a: So , sorry about not professor g: We 're not crashing . postdoc f: I don't know if you 're professor g: Yeah , that 's right . postdoc f: maybe raise the issue of microphone , procedures with reference to the cleanliness of the recordings . professor g: OK , transcription , microphone issues postdoc f: And then maybe ask , th , these guys . The we have great great , p steps forward in terms of the nonspeech - speech pre - segmenting of the signal . phd d: use grad a: but I 'm not sure if that 's of general interest or not . professor g: phd b: Since , since I have to leave as usual at three - thirty , can we do the interesting stuff first ? postdoc f: I beg your pardon ? professor g: Well phd c: Which is ? grad a: What 's the interesting stuff ? postdoc f: I beg your pardon ? phd d: Yeah . professor g: But phd b: Well , I guess the work that 's been done on segmentation would be most phd c: Yeah . , and , the other thing , which I 'll just say very briefly that maybe relates to that a little bit , which is that , one of the suggestions that came up in a brief meeting I had the other day when I was in Spain with , Manolo Pardo and Javier , Ferreiros , who was here before , was , why not start with what they had before but add in the non - silence boundaries . So , in what Javier did before when they were doing , h he was looking for , speaker change points . As a simplification , he originally did this only using silence as , a putative , speaker change point . professor g: And , he did not , say , look at points where you were changing broad sp , phonetic class , for instance . professor g: And , so one of the things that they were pushing in d in discussing with me is , w why are you spending so much time , on the , feature issue , when perhaps if you sort of deal with what you were using before phd d: - huh . professor g: and then just broadened it a bit , instead of just ta using silence as putative change point also ? phd d: Nnn , yeah . professor g: So then you 've got you already have the super - structure with Gaussians and H - you know , simple H M Ms and so forth . And you you might So there was a there was a little bit of a a a a difference of opinion because I I thought that it was it 's interesting to look at what features are useful . professor g: But , on the other hand I saw that the they had a good point that , if we had something that worked for many cases before , maybe starting from there a little bit Because ultimately we 're gonna end up with some s su kind of structure like that , phd d: Yeah . professor g: where you have some kind of simple and you 're testing the hypothesis that , there is a change . Yeah , why don't we do the speech - nonspeech discussion ? postdoc f: Yeah . Do I I hear you you didn't phd c: Speech - nonspeech ? OK . phd c: so , what we basically did so far was using the mixed file to to detect s speech or nonspeech portions in that . phd c: And what I did so far is I just used our old Munich system , which is an - ba based system with Gaussian mixtures for s speech and nonspeech . And it was a system which used only one Gaussian for silence and one Gaussian for speech . phd c: Adam , Dave , and I , we did , for that dialogue and I trained it on that . They they can use it or ? postdoc f: they they think it 's a terrific improvement . postdoc f: And , y you also did some something in addition which was , for those in which there was , quiet speakers in the mix . phd c: And so I did two mixtures , one for the loud speakers and one for the quiet speakers . grad a: And did you hand - label who was loud and who was quiet , or did you just ? phd c: I did that for for five minutes of one dialogue grad a: Right . phd c: It 's just our our old Munich , loudness - based spectrum on mel scale twenty twenty critical bands and then loudness . phd c: And four additional features , which is energy , loudness , modified loudness , and zero crossing rate . And so I did some some modifications in those parameters , basically changing the minimum minimum length for s for silence to have , er to have , yeah to have more or less , silence portions in inserted . grad a: But for overlap I imagine that doesn't work at all , phd c: Yeah . But it it saves so much time the the transcribers professor g: grad a: Yep . W w we originally we did that professor g: Just phd c: but we saw , when we used it , f for our close - talking microphone , which yeah , for our for our recognizer in Munich we saw that w it 's it 's not it 's not so necessary . professor g: Yeah , I don't think it 's a big deal for this application , phd c: Yeah . But then there 's another thing that also Thilo 's involved with , which is , OK , and and also Da - Dave Gelbart . we , regarding the representation of overlaps , because at present , because of the limitations of th the interface we 're using , overlaps are , not being encoded by the transcribers in as complete and , detailed a way as it might be , and as might be desired I think would be desired in the corpus ultimately . postdoc f: So we don't have start and end points at each point where there 's an overlap . So @ @ the limits of the over of of the interface are such that we were at this meeting we were entertaining how we might either expand the the interface or find other tools which already do what would be useful . Because what would ultimately be , ideal in my my view and I think , I had the sense that it was consensus , is that , a thorough - going musical score notation would be the best way to go . Because you can have multiple channels , there 's a single time - line , it 's very clear , flexible , and all those nice things . So , I spoke I had a meeting with Dave Gelbart on on and he had , excellent ideas on how the interface could be modified to to do this kind of representation . But , he in the meantime you were checking into the existence of already , existing interfaces which might already have these properties . , I talked with , Munich guys from from Ludwi - Ludwig Maximilians University , who do a lot of transcribing and transliterations . phd c: And they basically said they have they have , a tool they developed themselves and they can't give away , f it 's too error - prone , and had it 's not supported , a a a and professor g: Yeah . phd c: But , Susanne Bur - Burger , who is at se CMU , he wa who was formally at in Munich and w and is now at with CMU , she said she has something which she uses to do eight channels , trans transliterations , eight channels simultaneously , professor g: Excuse me . grad a: Well , maybe we should get it and if it 's good enough we 'll arrange Windows machines to be available . postdoc f: I also wanted to be sure , I 've I 've seen the this this is called Praat , PRAAT , which I guess means spee speech in Dutch or something . phd c: Yeah , but then I 'm not sure that 's the right thing for us . professor g: The other thing , to keep in mind , we 've been very concerned to get all this rolling so that we would actually have data , postdoc f: Mmm , yeah . professor g: but , I think our outside sponsor is actually gonna kick in postdoc f: So I don't know if we have a long - term need to do lots and lots of transcribing . I think we had a very quick need to get something out and we 'd like to be able to do some later because just it 's inter it 's interesting . But as far a you know , with with any luck we 'll be able to wind down the larger project . phd b: But you s grad a: What our decision was is that we 'll go ahead with what we have with a not very fine time scale on the overlaps . postdoc f: And and I was just thinking that , if it were possible to bring that in , like , you know , this week , then when they 're encoding the overlaps it would be nice for them to be able to specify when you know , the start points and end points of overlaps . postdoc f: And , so my my goal was w m my charge was to get eleven hours by the end of the month . And it 'll be I 'm I 'm I 'm clear that we 'll be able to do that . postdoc f: I sent it to , who did I send that to ? I sent it to a list and I thought I sent it to the e to the local list . postdoc f: You saw that ? So Brian did tell me that in fact what you said , that , that our that they are making progress and that he 's going that they 're going he 's gonna check the f the output of the first transcription and and professor g: basically it 's it 's all the difference in the world . , basically it 's just saying that one of our one of our best people is on it , postdoc f: Yeah . So phd b: But about the need for transcription , postdoc f: Isn't that great ? phd b: don't we didn't we previously decide that the IBM transcripts would have to be checked anyway and possibly augmented ? professor g: So . grad a: Yeah , and Dave Gelbart did volunteer , postdoc f: Good . grad a: and since he 's not here , I 'll repeat it to at least modify Transcriber , which , if we don't have something else that works , I think that 's a pretty good way of going . My approach originally , and I 've already hacked on it a little bit it was too slow because I was trying to display all the waveforms . grad a: That if you just display the mix waveform and then have a user interface for editing the different channels , that 's perfectly sufficient . And and , Dan Ellis 's hack already allows them to be able to display different waveforms to clarify overlaps and things , grad a: No . They can only display one , postdoc f: so that 's already grad a: but they can listen to different ones . postdoc f: Oh , yes , but Well , yes , but what is that , from the transcriber 's perspective , those two functions are separate . And Dan Ellis 's hack handles the , choice the ability to choose different waveforms from moment to moment . postdoc f: grad a: The waveform you 're looking at doesn't change . postdoc f: Yeah , but that 's that 's OK , cuz they 're they 're , you know , they 're focused on the ear anyway . postdoc f: the hack to preserve the overlaps better would be one which creates different output files for each channel , grad a: Right . postdoc f: which then would also serve Liz 's request of having , you know , a single channel , separable , cleanly , easily separable , professor g: Well , holidays may have interrupted things , cuz in in in They seem to want to get absolutely clear on standards for transcription standards and so forth with with us . I just think I told them to contact Jane that , if they had a grad a: Oh , OK . So is it cuz with any luck there 'll actually be a a there 'll be collections at Columbia , collections at at UW Dan Dan is very interested in doing some other things , grad a: Right . grad a: Well , I think it 's important both for the notation and the machine representation to be the same . postdoc f: N there was also this , email from Dan regarding the speech - non nonspeech segmentation thing . postdoc f: I don't know if , we wanna , and Dan Gel - and Dave Gelbart is interested in pursuing the aspect of using amplitude as a a a as a basis for the separation . He was talking he was talking , we he had postdoc f: Cross professor g: Yeah , cross - correlation . phd c: Cross professor g: I had mentioned this a couple times before , the c the commercial devices that do , voice , you know , active miking , postdoc f: - huh . professor g: So , by doing that , you know , rather than setting any , absolute threshold , you actually can do pretty good , selection of who who 's talking . professor g: And those those systems work very well , by the way , so people use them in panel discussions and so forth with sound reinforcement differing in in sort of , phd d: - huh . professor g: and , those if Boy , the guy I knew who built them , built them like twenty twenty years ago , grad a: . Cuz there is one thing that we don't have right now and that is the automatic , channel identifier . postdoc f: That that , you know , that would g help in terms of encoding of overlaps . postdoc f: The the transcribers would have less , disentangling to do if that were available . So I think , you know , basically you can look at some p you have to play around a little bit , to figure out what the right statistic is , postdoc f: But . professor g: but you compare each microphone to some statistic based on the on the overall phd c: Yeah . So that , you cou yo grad a: Yeah , although the the using the close - talking I think would be much better . professor g: I just it 'd be If I was actually working on it , I 'd sit there and and play around with it , and and get a feeling for it . , the the the , But , you certainly wanna use the close - talking , as a at least . professor g: I don't know if the other would would add some other helpful dimension or not . What what are the different , classes to to code , the the overlap , you will use ? postdoc f: to code d phd d: What you you postdoc f: so types of overlap ? phd d: Yeah . postdoc f: so at a meeting that wasn't transcribed , we worked up a a typology . postdoc f: And , phd d: Look like , you t you explaining in the blackboard ? The ? Yeah ? Yeah . So it i the it 's basically a two - tiered structure where the first one is whether the person who 's interrupted continues or not . And then below that there 're subcategories , that have more to do with , you know , is it , simply backchannel phd d: postdoc f: or is it , someone completing someone else 's thought , or is it someone in introducing a new thought . And I hope that if we do a forced alignment with the close - talking mike , that will be enough to recover at least some of the time the time information of when the overlap occurred . , I I I I 've phd b: So who 's gonna do that ? Who 's gonna do forced alignment ? grad a: Well , u , IBM was going to . grad a: and I imagine they still plan to but but , you know , I haven't spoken with them about that recently . postdoc f: It occurs to me one of my transcribers t told me today that she 'll be finished with one meeting , by professor g: postdoc f: well , she said tomorrow but then she said you know , but the , you know let 's let 's just , say professor g: I know these are er , I could send him that if it would be possible , or a good idea or not , to try to do a s forced alignment on what we 're on the way we 're encoding overlaps now . professor g: you know , basically he 's he just studies , he 's a colleague , a friend , and , postdoc f: Yeah ! professor g: they and and , you know , the the organization always did wanna help us . professor g: It was just a question of getting , you know , the right people connected in , who had the time . professor g: So , eh grad a: Is he on the mailing list ? The Meeting Recorder mailing li ? postdoc f: Oh ! grad a: We should add him . phd e: Did something happen , Morgan , that he got put on this , or was he already on it , grad a: Add him . phd e: or ? professor g: No , I , eh , eh , p It it oc I h it 's Yeah , something happened . So , where are we ? Maybe , brief Well , let 's why don't we talk about microphone issues ? postdoc f: Yeah . professor g: That was that was a grad a: so one thing is that I did look on Sony 's for a replacement for the mikes for the head m head - worn ones cuz they 're so uncomfortable . But I think I need someone who knows more about mikes than I do , because I couldn't find a single other model that seemed like it would fit the connector , which seems really unlikely to me . Does anyone , like , know stores or know about mikes who who would know the right questions to ask ? professor g: Oh , I probably would . phd e: You couldn't you couldn't find the right connector to go into these things ? grad a: Yep . When I looked , i they listed one microphone and that 's it phd e: Huh ! grad a: as having that type of connector . Well , let 's look at it together grad a: it seems it seems really unlikely to me that there 's only one . professor g: and postdoc f: And there 's no adaptor for it ? phd c: Yeah . professor g: Who who are we buying these from ? grad a: professor g: That 'd be grad a: I have it downstairs . grad a: And then , just in terms of how you wear them , I had thought about this before . , when when when you use a product like DragonDictate , they have a very extensive description about how to wear the microphone and so on . grad a: But I felt that in a real situation we were very seldom gonna get people to really do it and maybe it wasn't worth concentrating on . But professor g: Well , I think that that 's that 's a good back - off position . That 's what I was saying earlier , th that , you know , we are gonna get some recordings that are imperfect and , hey , that 's life . But I I think that it it doesn't hurt , the naturalness of the situation to try to have people wear the microphones properly , if possible , grad a: professor g: because , the natural situation is really what we have with the microphones on the table . professor g: I think , you know , in the target applications that we 're talking about , people aren't gonna be wearing head - mounted mikes anyway . professor g: So this is just for u these head - mounted mikes are just for use with research . professor g: And , it 's gonna make You know , if if An - Andreas plays around with language modeling , he 's not gonna be m wanna be messed up by people breathing into the microphone . professor g: So it 's it 's , grad a: Well , I 'll dig through the documentation to DragonDictate and ste s see if they still have the little form . professor g: Right ? , and any phd b: It 's interesting , I talked to some IBM guys , last January , I think , I was there . phd b: And they said , the breathing is really a a terrible problem for them , to to not recognize breathing as speech . grad a: Well , that 's the It seemed to me when I was using Dragon that it was really microphone placement helped an in , an enormous amount . grad a: So you want it enough to the side so that when you exhale through your nose , it doesn't the wind doesn't hit the mike . professor g: I remember when I was when I I I I used , a prominent laboratory 's , speech recognizer about , This was , boy , this was a while ago , this was about twelve twelve years ago or something . And , they were they were perturbed with me because I was breathing in instead of breathing out . And they had models for they they had Markov models for br breathing out but they didn't have them for breathing in . Well , what I wondered is whether it 's possible to have to maybe use the display at the beginning grad a: Yeah . postdoc f: to be able to to judge how how correctly , have someone do some routine whatever , and and then see if when they 're breathing it 's showing . postdoc f: I don't know if the if it 's professor g: I grad a: You can definitely see it . grad a: And so , you know , I 've I 've sat here and watched sometimes the breathing , professor g: I grad a: and the bar going up and down , and I 'm thinking , I could say something , but professor g: I think grad a: I don't want to make people self - conscious . And you can do some , you know , first - order thing about it , which is to have people move it , a away from being just directly in front of the middle phd d: Yeah . postdoc f: Yeah , i professor g: And then , you know , I think there 's not much Because you can't al you know , interfere w you can't fine tune the meeting that much , I think . It just seems like i if something l simple like that can be tweaked and the quality goes , you know , dramatically up , then it might be worth doing . My my feedback from the transcribers is he is always close to crystal clear and and just fan fantastic to phd c: Yeah . postdoc f: I could say something about about the Well , I don't know what you wanna do . professor g: About what ? postdoc f: About the transcribers or anything or ? I don't know . professor g: Well , the other phd b: But , just to to , professor g: why don't we do that ? phd b: One more remark , concerning the SRI recognizer . It is useful to transcribe and then ultimately train models for things like breath , and also laughter is very , very frequent and important to to model . phd b: So , grad a: So , phd b: if you can in your transcripts mark grad a: mark them ? phd b: mark very audible breaths and laughter especially , phd c: Mmm . postdoc f: They 're putting Eh , so in curly brackets they put " inhale " or " breath " . Now they 're they 're not being awfully precise , m So they 're two types of laughter that are not being distinguished . postdoc f: One is when sometimes s someone will start laughing when they 're in the middle of a sentence . postdoc f: And and then the other one is when they finish the sentence and then they laugh . So , I I did s I did some double checking to look through , you 'd need to have extra e extra complications , like time tags indicating the beginning and ending of of the laughing through the utterance . phd b: It 's not so I don't think it 's , postdoc f: And that and what they 're doing is in both cases just saying " curly brackets laughing " a after the unit . phd b: As as long as there is an indication that there was laughter somewhere between two words I think that 's sufficient , phd c: Yeah . phd b: So as long as you can stick a you know , a t a tag in there that that indicates that there was laughter , grad a: Oh , I didn't know that . grad a: That would be a really interesting prosodic feature , postdoc f: Then phd d: Yeah . postdoc f: So , if they laugh between two words , you you 'd get it in between the two words . postdoc f: But if they laugh across three or four words you you get it after those four words . phd b: Well , the thing that you is hard to deal with is whe when they speak while laughing . phd b: But , that 's not as frequent as just laughing between speaking , postdoc f: OK . grad a: So are do you treat breath and laughter as phonetically , or as word models , or what ? phd b: so professor g: is it ? phd d: Huh . There was a there 's actually a word for , it 's not just breathing but all kinds of mouth grad a: grad a: So train a phone in the neural net ? phd b: Same thing ? Yeah . professor g: No grad a: Oh , it does ? phd b: So the so the the mouth noise , word has just a single phone , that is for that . professor g: Right ? , you could you could say well , let we now think that laughter should have three sub sub sub - units in the the three states , different states . professor g: And then you would have three , you know , eh , eh , it 's u grad a: Do whatever you want . phd b: And the the pronun the pronunciations the pronunciations are l are somewhat non - standard . phd b: They actually are , it 's just a single , s , you know , a single phone in the pronunciation , but it has a self - loop on it , so it can grad a: To go on forever ? phd b: r can go on forever . grad a: And how do you handle it in the language model ? phd b: It 's just a it 's just a word . We also tried , absorbing these , both laughter and and actually also noise , and , phd d: Yeah . We also tried absorbing that into the pause model , the the the model that that matches the stuff between words . You you did get me to thinking about I I 'm not really sure which is more frequent , whether f f laughing I think it may be an individual thing . grad a: I was noticing that with Dan in the one that we , we hand tran hand - segmented , professor g: Yeah . And and one thing that c that we 're not doing , of course , is we 're not claiming to , get be getting a representation of mankind in these recordings . Why don why don't we just since we 're on this vein , why don't we just continue with , what you were gonna say about the transcriptions postdoc f: OK . professor g: and ? postdoc f: the I I 'm really very for I 'm extremely fortunate with the people who , applied and who are transcribing for us . They are , really perceptive and very , and I 'm not just saying that cuz they might be hearing this . grad a: Cuz they 're gonna be transcribing it in a few days . So I , e you know , I I brought them in and , trained them in pairs because I think people can raise questions grad a: That 's a good idea . postdoc f: you know , i i the they think about different things and they think of different and , I trained them to , f on about a minute or two of the one that was already transcribed . This also gives me a sense of You know , I can I can use that later , with reference to inter - coder reliability kind of issues . But the main thing was to get them used to the conventions and , you know , the idea of the th th the size of the unit versus how long it takes to play it back so these th sort of calibration issues . And then , I just set them loose and they 're they all have e a already background in using computers . postdoc f: Well , they they 're very perce they 'll So one of them said " well , you know , he really said " n " , not really " and " , phd d: Yeah . postdoc f: so what what should I do with that ? " grad a: Yeah . If it 's an a noncanonical p " That one , I think we you know , with Eric 's work , I sort of figure we we can just treat that as a variant . But I told them if if there 's an obvious speech error , like I said in one thing , professor g: OK . postdoc f: and I gave my my example , like I said , " microfon " in instead of " microphone " . But it but I thought it 's not worth fixing cuz often when you 're speaking everybody knows what what you mean . postdoc f: But I have a convention that if it 's obviously a noncanonical pronunciation a speech error with you know , wi within the realm of resolution that you can tell in this native English American English speaker , you know that I didn't mean to say " microfon . " Then you 'd put a little tick at the beginning of the word , professor g: Yeah . postdoc f: and that just signals that , this is not standard , and then in curly brackets " pron error " . Well Well , you know , it might be something we 'd wanna do with some , s small subset of the whole thing . Where were they when we needed them ? postdoc f: I think professor g: We certainly wouldn't wanna do it with everything . , if , so I I told them that , we don't know if this will continue past the end of the month professor g: - huh . postdoc f: and I also m I think they know that the data p source is limited and I may not be able to keep them employed till the end of the month even , although I hope to . professor g: The other thing we could do , actually , is , use them for a more detailed analysis of the overlaps . professor g: Right ? grad a: We could get a very detailed overlap if they were willing to transcribe each meeting four or five times . professor g: But I 've been saying the other thing is just go through it for the overlaps . professor g: Right ? postdoc f: And with the right in interface professor g: Given that y and and do so instead of doing phonetic , transcription for the whole thing , phd d: Yeah . professor g: which we know from the Steve 's experience with the Switchboard transcription is , you know , very , very time - consuming . And and you know , it took them I don't know how many months to do to get four hours . But , the other thing is since we 've been spending so much time thinking about overlaps is is maybe get a much more detailed analysis of the overlaps . professor g: I 'm open to every consideration of what are some other kinds of detailed analysis that would be most useful . professor g: It 's a we have we have due to @ @ variations in funding we have we seem to be doing , very well on m money for this this year , and next year we may have have much less . grad a: Is you mean two thousand one ? professor g: So I don't wanna hire a grad a: Calendar year or ? professor g: calendar year two thousand one . So it 's , it 's we don't wanna hire a bunch of people , a long - term staff , grad a: Full - time . professor g: because the the funding that we 've gotten is sort of a big chunk for this year . But having temporary people doing some specific thing that we need is actually a perfect match to that kind of , funding . phd e: Are they working full - time now , or ? postdoc f: But Some of them are . But what is Oh , I shouldn't say it that way because that does sound like forty - hour weeks . I th I I would say they 're probably they don't have o they don't have other things that are taking away their time . professor g: I postdoc f: I I I haven't checked them all , but just spot - checking . grad a: I think it would be professor g: I remember when we were transcribing BeRP , Ron Kay , volunteered to to do some of that . Well , you know , and I also thought , y Liz has this , eh , you know , and I do also , this this interest in the types of overlaps that are involved . These people would be great choices for doing coding of that type if we wanted , grad a: We 'd have to mark them . grad a: I think it would also be interesting to have , a couple of the meetings have more than one transcriber do , professor g: Yeah . postdoc f: You know , there 's also , the e In my mind , I think A An - Andreas was leading to this topic , the idea that , we haven't yet seen the the type of transcript that we get from IBM , and it may just be , you know , pristine . But on the other hand , given the lesser interface Cuz this is , you know we 've got a good interface , we 've got great headphones , m professor g: It could be that they will theirs will end up being a kind of fir first pass or something . professor g: Maybe an elaborate one , cuz again they probably are gonna do these alignments , which will also clear things up . Al - although you have to s Don't you have to start with a close enough approximation of the of the verbal part to be able to ? professor g: Well , tha that 's that 's debatable . professor g: Right ? , so the so the argument is that if your statistical system is good it will in fact , clean things up . professor g: And , so in principle you could start up with something that was kind of rough , to give an example of , something we used to do , at one point , back back when Chuck was here in early times , is we would take , da take a word and , have a canonical pronunciation and , if there was five phones in a word , you 'd break up the word , into five equal - length pieces which is completely gross . professor g: Right ? , th the timing is off all over the place in just about any word . You start off with that and the statistical system then aligns things , and eventually you get something that doesn't really look too bad . professor g: So so I think using a a good aligner , actually can can help a lot . If you have a good alignment , it helps the , th the human in in taking less time to correct things . I guess there 's another aspect , too , and I don't know , this this is very possibly a different , topic . So like in a you know , the topics that are covered during a meeting with reference to the other , uses of the data , professor g: postdoc f: so being able to find where so - and - so talked about such - and - such , then , e , I I I did sort of a a rough pass on encoding , like , episode - like level things on the , transcribed meeting professor g: postdoc f: where that i if that 's something that we wanna do with each meeting , sort of like a , it 's like a manifest , when you get a box full of stuff , or or if that 's , professor g: postdoc f: i I I don't know what , level of detail would be most useful . I don't know i if that 's something that I should do when I look over it , or if we want someone else to do , or whatever . professor g: eh , was p Well , you know , the thing I 'm concerned about is we wanted to do these digits postdoc f: Oh , yeah . But I think , do you , maybe , eh ? Did you prepare some whole thing you wanted us just to see ? phd d: Yeah . professor g: how long a ? phd d: I I think it 's it 's fast , because , I have the results , eh , of the study of different energy without the law length . Eh , eh , in the in the measurement , the average , dividing by the by the , variance . phd d: the other , the the last w , meeting eh , I don't know if you remain we have problem to with the with with the parameter with the representations of parameter , because the the valleys and the peaks in the signal , eh , look like , eh , it doesn't follow to the to the energy in the signal . professor g: No , that there 's no point in going through all of that if that 's the bottom line , really . professor g: So , I I think we have to start , there there 's two suggestions , really , which is , what we said before is that , phd d: Mmm , yeah . professor g: it looks like , at least that you haven't found an obvious way to normalize so that the energy is anything like a reliable , indicator of the overlap . professor g: I I 'm I 'm still a little f think that 's a little funny . professor g: but but you don't want to keep , keep knocking at it if it 's if you 're not getting any any result with that . But , the other things that we talked about is , pitch - related things and harmonicity - related things , phd d: Yeah . But , a completely different tack on it wou is the one that was suggested , by your colleagues in Spain , phd d: Yeah . professor g: That is to say , use , you know , as as you 're doing with the speech , nonspeech , use some very general features . professor g: You know , have a have a couple Markov models and and , try to indi try to determine , you know , w when is th when are you in an overlap , when are you not in an overlap . professor g: And let the , statistical system determine what 's the right way to look at the data . professor g: I I , I think it would be interesting to find individual features and put them together . professor g: But given the limitation in time and given the fact that Javier 's system already exists doing this sort of thing , phd d: Yeah . professor g: but , its main limitation is that , again , it 's only looking at silences which would phd d: Yeah . phd d: I I I think that , eh , the possibility , eh , can be that , eh , Thilo , eh , working , eh , with a new class , not only , eh , nonspeech and speech , but , eh , in in in the speech class , professor g: phd d: dividing , eh , speech , eh , of from a speaker and overlapping , to try to to do , eh , eh , a fast a fast , eh , experiment to to prove that , nnn , this fea eh , general feature , eh , can solve the the the problem , professor g: Yeah . phd d: And I hope the the next week I will have , eh , some results and we we will show we will see , eh , the the parameter the pitch , eh , tracking in with the program . phd d: And , nnn , nnn professor g: Ha - h have you ever looked at the , Javier 's , speech segmenter ? phd c: No . professor g: Cuz again the idea is there the limitation there again was that he was he was only using it to look at silence as a as a as a as a p putative split point between speakers . professor g: But if you included , broadened classes then in principle maybe you can cover the overlap cases . phd c: Yeah , but I 'm not too sure if if we can really represent overlap with with the s detector I I I used up to now , phd d: Mmm , yeah . grad a: I think with phd c: the to speech - nonspeech as grad a: That 's right . But I think Javier 's phd c: it 's only speech or it 's it 's it 's nonspeech . professor g: N n grad a: It doesn't have the same Gaus - , H M M modeling , phd c: Yeah . grad a: But , professor g: Well , it 's sort of has a simple one . grad a: Does it ? professor g: Right ? It 's it 's just it 's just a isn't it just a Gaussian phd d: Yeah . Oh , it doesn't have it doesn't have any temporal , ? grad a: Maybe I 'm misremembering , but I did not think it had a Markov professor g: I thought it Yeah . phd d: No , Javier di doesn't worked with , a Markov grad a: Yeah , I didn't think so . So he 's just he just computes a Gaussian over potential grad a: Yep . professor g: And and grad a: It 's just , that i it he has the two - pass issue that What he does is , as a first pass he he p he does , a guess at where the divisions might be and he overestimates . And that 's just a data reduction step , so that you 're not trying at every time interval . grad a: And right now he 's doing that with silence and that doesn't work with the Meeting Recorder . professor g: The other thing one could do is Couldn't , it 's So you have two categories phd c: Yeah . Couldn't you have a third category ? So you have , you have , nonspeech , single - person speech , and multiple - person speech ? postdoc f: He has this on his board actually . Don't you have , like those those several different categories on the board ? professor g: Right ? And then you have a Markov model for each ? phd c: I 'm not sure . But it 's not too easy , I think , the the transition between the different class , to model them in in the system I have now . professor g: the th the reason why , I was suggesting originally that we look at features is because I thought , well , we 're doing something we haven't done before , phd c: Yeah . professor g: It seems like if two people two or more people talk at once , it should get louder , phd c: Yeah . professor g: and , there should be some discontinuity in pitch contours , phd c: I had the impression . professor g: and , there should overall be a , smaller proportion of the total energy that is explained by any particular harmonic sequence in the spectrum . professor g: So far , Jose has has been By the way , I was told I should be calling you Pepe , but phd d: Yeah . professor g: the has has , been exploring , e largely the energy issue and , as with a lot of things , it is not , like this , it 's not as simple as it sounds . professor g: And then there 's , you know Is it energy ? Is it log energy ? Is it LPC residual energy ? Is it is it is it , delta of those things ? , what is it no Obviously , just a simple number absolute number isn't gonna work . So it should be with compared to what ? Should there be a long window for the normalizing factor and a short window for what you 're looking at ? phd c: Yeah . professor g: Or , you know , how b short should they be ? So , phd d: . professor g: th he 's been playing around with a lot of these different things and and so far at least has not come up with any combination that really gave you an indicator . professor g: So I I still have a hunch that there 's it 's in there some place , but it may be given that you have a limited time here , it it just may not be the best thing to to to focus on for the remaining of it . professor g: So pitch - related and harmonic - related , I 'm I 'm somewhat more hopeful for it . professor g: But it seems like if we just wanna get something to work , phd c: Yeah . professor g: that , their suggestion of of Th - they were suggesting going to Markov models , but in addition there 's an expansion of what Javier did . professor g: even if the features that you give it are maybe not ideal for it , it 's just sort of this general filter bank phd c: Yeah . professor g: or or cepstrum or something , Eee it 's in there somewhere probably . phd d: But , eh , what did you think about the possibility of using the Javier software ? Eh , the , the , the BIC criterion , the the t to train the the Gaussian , eh , using the the mark , eh , by hand , eh , eh , to distinguish be mmm , to train overlapping zone and speech zone . , eh , I I I think that an interesting , eh , experiment , eh , could be , th eh , to prove that , mmm , if s we suppose that , eh , the the first step , the the classifier what were the classifier from Javier or classifier from Thilo ? W What happen with the second step ? I , what what happen with the , eh the , clu the , the clu the clustering process ? grad a: grad a: What do you mean ? phd d: I , that is is enough is enough , eh , to work well , eh , to , eh , separate or to distinguish , eh , between overlapping zone and , eh , speaker zone ? Because th if if we if we , eh , nnn , develop an classifier and the second step doesn't work well , eh , we have another problem . I had tried doing it by hand at one point with a very short sample , phd d: N grad a: and it worked pretty well , but I haven't worked with it a lot . So what I d I d I took a hand - segmented sample phd d: Nnn , yeah . grad a: and I added ten times the amount of numbers at random , phd d: Yeah . But is is if grad a: But this was just very anecdotal sort of thing . phd d: But it 's possible with my segmentation by hand that we have information about the the overlapping , grad a: Right . So if we if we fed the hand - segmentation to Javier 's and it doesn't work , then we know something 's wrong . phd d: this kind o emph emphasises parameter and Gaussian grad a: Yeah . Y do you know where his software is ? Have you used it at all ? phd d: I yeah have <doc-sep>grad d: grad e: What does your thing say on the back ? grad d: Testing . grad f: Yeah , well , I g guess it 's coming up then , or grad d: Cuz it 's That starts counting from zero and these start counting from one . grad d: Your mike number is what we 're t grad e: Look at the back . grad d: Ho ! grad b: So grad d: I 've bested you again , Nancy . Damn ! Foiled again ! grad d: So is Keith showing up ? He 's talking with George right now . , is he gonna get a rip rip himself away from from that ? grad b: He 'll probably come later . grad d: Oh , then it 's just gonna be the five of us ? professor c: Yeah . grad e: Well , he he was very affirmative in his way of saying he will be here at four . So , Eva just reported she 's really happy about the CBT 's being in the same order in the XML as in the be Java declaration format grad f: Yeah . The e grad e: so you don't have to do too much in the style sheet transversion . grad e: The , Java the embedded Bayes wants to take input , a Bayes - net in in some Java notation and Eva is using the Xalan style sheet processor to convert the XML that 's output by the Java Bayes for the into the , E Bayes input . grad f: Actually , maybe I could try , like , emailing the guy and see if he has any something already . grad f: That 'd be weird , that he has both the Java Bayes and the embedded Bayes in grad d: But that 's some sort of conversion program ? grad f: Yeah . grad e: And , well pretty mu pretty much on t on the top of my list , I would have asked Keith how the " where is X ? " hand parse is standing . grad d: So the trees for the XML trees for the for the gene for the synthesizer are written . Just gonna be you know professor c: Oh ! You were gonna send me a note about hiring grad e: Yes . grad e: OK , so natural language generation produces not a just a surface string that is fed into a text - to - speech but , a surface string with a syntax tree that 's fed into a concept - to - speech . grad e: Now and this concept - to - speech module has certain rules on how if you get the following syntactic structure , how to map this onto prosodic rules . grad e: And Fey has foolheartedly agreed to rewrite , the German concept syntax - to - prosody rules grad b: I didn't know she spoke German . And therefore the , if it 's OK that we give her a couple of more hours per week , then she 'll do that . grad d: What language is that written i Is that that Scheme thing that you showed me ? grad e: Yeah . grad d: She knows how to program in Scheme ? I hope ? grad e: No , I My guess is I I asked for a commented version of that file ? If we get that , then it 's doable , even without getting into it , even though the Scheme li , stuff is really well documented in the Festival . grad d: Well , I guess if you 're not used to functional programming , Scheme can be completely incomprehensible . But anyway , send me the note and then I 'll - I 'll check with , Morgan on the money . Oh , so this was You know , on the generation thing , if sh y she 's really going to do that , then we should be able to get prosody as well . grad d: Are we gonna Can we change the voice of the of the thing , because right now the voice sounds like a murderer . grad b: Wh - Which one ? grad d: The the little Smarticus Smarticus sounds like a murderer . grad e: It is , we have the choice between the , usual Festival voices , which I already told the SmartKom people we aren't gonna use because they 're really bad . grad b: Festival ? professor c: It 's the name of some program , grad b: Oh , oh . grad e: OGI has , crafted a couple of diphone type voices that are really nice and we 're going to use that . grad d: Does OGI stand for ? Original German Institute ? professor c: Orego grad b: So . grad b: Oregon Graduate Insti professor c: Oregon @ @ Graduate Institute grad d: Oh . professor c: It turns out there 's the long - standing links with these guys in the speech group . professor c: In fact , there 's this guy who 's basically got a joint appointment , Hynek Hermansky . And it 's probably also absolutely uninteresting for all of you to , learn that as of twenty minutes ago , David and I , per accident , managed to get the whole SmartKom system running on the , ICSI Linux machines with the ICSI NT machines thereby increasing the number of running SmartKom systems in this house from one on my laptop to three . grad e: I suggested to try something that was really kind of even though against better knowledge shouldn't have worked , but it worked . grad b: Will it work again , grad e: Maybe maybe maybe a bit for the AI i intuition thing . It - it 's just like why why the generation ma the presentation manager is now working ? grad a: ! This is something you ha you get used to as a programmer , right ? grad e: Which grad a: You know , and it 's cool , it works out that way . So , the the people at Saarbruecken and I decided not to touch it ever again . grad a: What what thing is this ? grad e: Where is X ? grad a: OK . grad e: Oh , but by , we can ask , did you get to read all four hundred words ? professor c: I did . That professor c: You know , i Yeah , it grad d: Each paragraph is good , though . grad b: Yeah , I didn't know about it until Robert told me , like , professor c: Yeah , I I ra I ran across it in I don't even know where , you know some just some weird place . And , yeah , I I 'm surprised I didn't know about it grad b: Y yeah . I was like , why didn't Dan tell me ? professor c: since we know all the invited speakers , an grad a: Right . Before we get started on this st so I also had a nice email correspondence with Daphne Kohler , who said yes indeed she would love to work with us on the , you know , using these structured belief - nets and stuff but starting in August , that she 's also got a new student working on this and that we should get in touch with them again in August and then we 'll figure out a way for you you to get seriously connected with , their group . So , And it looks to me like we 're now at a good point to do something start working on something really hard . grad a: Oh ! professor c: w Which is mental spaces and and - or grad a: ! grad b: It 's hard . But the other part of it is the way they connect to these , probabilistic relational models . So there 's all the problems that the linguists know about , about mental spaces , and the cognitive linguists know about , but then there 's this problem of the belief - net people have only done a moderately good job of dealing with temporal belief - nets . professor c: So there 's a term " dynamic belief - net " , doesn't mean that . But one of the things I w would like to do over the next , month , it may take more , is to st understand to what extent we can not only figure out the constructions for them for multiple worlds and sort of what the formalism will look like and where the slots and fillers will be , but also what that would translate into in terms of belief - net and the inferences . So the story is that if you have these probabilistic relational models , they 're set up , in principle , so that you can make new instances and instances connect to each other , and all that sort of stuff , so it should be feasible to set them up in such a way that if you 've got the past tense and the present tense and each of those is a separate , belief structure that they do their inferences with just the couplings that are appropriate . But that 's g that 's , as far as I can tell , it 's it 's putting together two real hard problems . One is the linguistic part of what are the couplings and and when you have a certain , construction , that implies certain couplings and other couplings , you know , between let 's say between the past and the present , or any other one of these things and then we have this inference problem of exactly technically how does the belief - net work if it 's got , let 's say one in in , you know , different tenses or my beliefs and your beliefs , or any of these other ones of of multiple models . So you know , in the long run we need to solve both of those and my suggestion is that we start digging into them both , in a way we that , you know , th hopefully turns out to be consistent , so that the . But anyway , so that 's , grad a: Oh yeah , like , I solved the the problem of we were talking about how do you various issues of how come a plural noun gets to quote " count as a noun phrase " , you know , occur as an argument of a higher construction , but a bare singular stem doesn't get to act that way . grad a: and it would take a really long time to explain it now , but I 'm about to write it up this evening . I solved that at the same time as " how do we keep adjectives from floating to the left of determiners and how do we keep all of that from floating outside the noun phrase " to get something like " I the kicked dog " . No , I know , I th I I think that is gonna be sort of the key to this wh to th the big project of the summer of of getting the constructions right is that people do manage to do this so there probably are some , relatively clean rules , they 're just not context - free trees . professor c: And if we if the formalism is is good , then we should be able to have , you know , sort of moderate scale thing . And that by the way is is , Keith , what I encouraged George to be talking with you about . professor c: The p And Oh , another thing , there was this , thing that Nancy agreed to in a in a weak moment this morning that grad a: ! grad b: I was really strong . professor c: Anyway , that we were that we 're gonna try to get a , first cut at the revised formalism by the end of next week . professor c: just trying to write up essentially what what you guys have worked out so that everybody has something to look at . We 've talked about it , but only the innermost inner group currently , grad a: grad a: There 's The group as a whole knows but no individual member kno professor c: Well that that yeah th there 's one of the advantages of a document , right ? , grad a: Yeah . Anyway , so , with a little luck l let 's , let 's have that as a goal anyway . grad a: So , what was the date there ? professor c: And grad a: Monday or ? It 's a Friday . grad b: But , but but the two of us will probably talk to you at well before th grad a: I thought you said beginning of n Yeah . Anyway , w let 's talk separately about how t grad a: Yeah , I have a busy weekend but after that Yeah , gung - ho . grad a: Great , professor c: Now if it turns out that that effort leads us into some big hole that 's fine . There 's a really hard problem we haven't solved yet that , that 's just fine . grad a: But at at least sort of try and work out what the state of the art is right now . professor c: Right , t t if to the extent that we have it , let 's write it grad a: OK . professor c: and to the extent we don't , let 's find out what we need to do . professor c: So , grad e: Can we ? Is it worth thinking of an example out of our tourism thing domain , that involves a a a decent mental space shift or setting up professor c: I think it is , but but I interrupted before Keith got to tell us what happened with " where is the Powder - Tower ? " or whatever grad b: Right . , what was supposed to happen ? I 've sort of been actually caught up in some other ones , so , you know , I don't have a write - up of or I haven't elaborated on the ideas that we were already talking about which were grad e: yeah . I think I think we already came to the conclusion that we have two alternative paths that we two alternative ways of representing it . grad e: grad a: The question of whether the polysemy is sort of like in the construction or pragmatic . grad a: so d ' you Is it clear what we 're talking about here ? grad b: I agree . grad a: The question is whether the construction is semantic or like ambiguous between asking for location and asking for path . grad e: It 's grad a: or or whether the construction semantically , is clearly only asking for location grad e: Should we have a a a grad b: grad a: but pragmatically that 's construed as meaning " tell me how to get there " . grad e: So assume these are two , nodes we can observe in the Bayes - net . grad e: So these are either true or false and it 's also just true or false . If we encounter a phrase such as " where is X ? " , should that set this to true and this to true , and the Bayes - net figures out which under the c situation in general is more likely ? , or should it just activate this , have this be false , and the Bayes - net figures out whether this actually now means ? professor c: w that 's a s grad b: Slightly different . professor c: So I a I I th I agree with you that , it 's a disaster to try to make separate constructions for every , pragmatic reading , grad a: professor c: there there 's some that grad b: Or have every construction list all the possible pragmatic implications of the same one . But , you know , c almost certainly " can you pass the salt " is a construction worth noting that there is this th this this this grad a: Yeah . Is it is it like that or is it just sort of obvious from world knowledge that no one you wouldn't want to know the location without wanting to know how to get there or whatever . grad e: One Or in some cases , it 's it 's quite definitely professor c: Yeah . Well the question is basically , is this conventional or conversational implicature ? professor c: Exactly . professor c: And I guess , see , the more important thing at this stage is that we should be able to know how we would handle it in ei f in the short run it 's more important to know how we would treat technically what we would do if we decided A and what we would do if we decided B , than it is t to decide A or B r right now . professor c: So I guess In the short run , let 's let 's be real clear on h what the two alternatives would be . grad e: And then the we had another idea floating around , which we wanted to , get your input on , and that concerns the But the nice thing is w we would have a person that would like to work on it , and that 's Ir - Irina Gurevich from EML who is going to be visiting us , the week before , August and a little bit into August . , and one of the reas one of the those ideas was , so , back to the old Johno observation that if y if you have a dialogue history and it said the word " admission fee " was , mentioned , it 's more likely that the person actually wants to enter than just take a picture of it from the outside . Now what could imagine to , you know , have a list for each construction of things that one should look up in the discourse history , yeah ? That 's the really stupid way . Then there is the really clever way that was suggested by Keith and then there is the , middle way that I 'm suggesting and that is you you get X , which is whatever , the castle . The ontology will tell us that castles have opening hours , that they have admission fees , they have whatever . And then , this is We go via a thesaurus and look up certain linguistic surface structures that are related to these concepts and feed those through the dialogue history and check dynamically for each e entity . We look it up check whether any of these were mentioned and then activate the corresponding nodes on the discourse side . But Keith suggested that a a much cleaner way would be is , you know , to keep track of the discourse in such a way that you if you know that something like that ha has been mentioned before , this just a continues to add up , you know , in th in a grad a: So if someone mentions admission f fees , that activates an Enter schema which sticks around for a little while in your rep in the representation of what 's being talked about . And then when someone asks " where is X ? " you 've already got the the Enter schema activated grad b: Kind of a priming professor c: professor c: grad d: Well , is it doesn't it seem like if you just managed the dialogue history with a a thread , that you know , kept track of ho of the activity of , cuz it would the the thread would know what nodes like , needed to be activated , so it could just keep track of how long it 's been since something 's been mentioned , and automatically load it in . But here 's here 's a way in th in the bl Bayes - net you could you could think about it this way , that if at the time " admissions fee " was mentioned you could increase the probability that someone wanted to enter . grad d: We - yeah th th that 's what I wa I wasn't I was I wasn't thinking in terms of Enter schemas . I was just professor c: Fair enough , OK , but , but , in terms of the c c the current implementation right ? so that grad b: It would already be higher in the context . professor c: th that th the the the conditional probability that someone So at the time you mentioned it This is this is essentially the Bayes - net equivalent of the spreading activation . professor c: It 's In some ways it 's not as good but it 's the implementation we got . Now Now my guess is that it 's not a question of time but it is a question of whether another intervening object has been mentioned . professor c: we could look at dialo this is Of course the other thing we ha we do is , is we have this data coming grad a: Yeah . professor c: but but skipping that so so but my guess is what what 'll probably will happen , Here 's a here 's a proposed design . is that there 're certain constructions which , for our purposes do change the probabilities of EVA decisions and various other kinds and th that the , standard way that that the these contexts work is sort of stack - like or whatever , but that 's sort of the most recent thing . And so it could be that when another , en tourist entity gets mentioned , you grad b: Renew professor c: re re essentially re - initiali you know , re - i essentially re - initialize the state . professor c: And of course i if we had a fancier one with multiple worlds you could have , you could keep track of what someone was saying about this and that . professor c: You know , " I wanna go in the morning grad a: " Here 's my plan for today . " professor c: Yeah , or Yeah , in the morning morning I I 'm planning t to go shopping , grad a: hypothetically . professor c: tal so I 'm talking about shopping and then you say , you know , well , " What 's it cost ? " or something . professor c: But I do th think that the It 'll turn out that it 's gonna be depend pretty much on whether there 's been an override . grad e: Yeah , if if you ask " how much does a train ride and and cinema around the vineyards cost ? " and then somebody tells you it 's sixty dollars and then you say " OK How much is , I would like to visit the " whatever , something completely different , " then I go to , you know , Point Reyes " , professor c: Yeah . grad e: it it 's not more likely that you want to enter anything , but it 's , as a matter of fact , a complete rejection of entering by doing that . grad b: So when you admit have admission fee and it changes something , it 's only for that particular It 's relational , right ? It 's only for that particular object . Well , and and and the simple idea is that it 's on it 's only for m for the current , tourist e entity of instre interest . But that 's this this function , so , has the current object been mentioned in in with a question about concerning its professor c: No , no . Is When th When the this is mentioned , the probability of of , let 's say , entering changes grad b: Of that object . grad d: You could just hav , just basically , ob it It observes an er , it sets the a node for " entered " or " true " or something , professor c: Yeah . Now , But I think Ro - Robert 's right , that to determine that , OK ? you may well want to go through a th thesaurus grad d: " discourse enter " . professor c: and and So , if the issue is , if so now th this construction has been matched and you say " OK . Does this actually have any implications for our decisions ? " Then there 's another piece of code that presumably does that computation . professor c: But but what 's Robert 's saying is is , and I think he 's right , is you don't want to try to build into the construction itself all the synonyms and all you know , all the wo maybe . Well , it 's just another , sort of , construction side is how to get at the possible inferences we can draw from the discourse history or changing of the probabilities , and - or grad b: Guess it 's like I g The other thing is , whether you have a m m user model that has , you know , whatever , a current plan , whatever , plans that had been discussed , and I don't know , grad d: What , what 's the argument for putting it in the construction ? Is it just that the s synonym selection is better , or ? professor c: Oh , wel Well , the ar the The argument is that you 're gonna have the If you 've recognized the word , you 've recognized the word , which means you have a lexical construction for it , so you could just as well tag the lexical construction with the fact that it 's a , you know , thirty percent increase in probability of entering . You So you could you could you could invert invert the whole thing , so you s you tag that information on to the lexicon grad d: Mmm . at at Yeah , and this is grad e: Even though the lexical construction itself out out of context , won't do it . grad e: " But I but I 'm not interested in the opening times " is sort of a more a V type . But , we 'll , we have time to This is a s just a sidetrack , but I think it 's also something that people have not done before , is , sort of abuse an ontology for these kinds of , inferences , on whether anything relevant to the current something has been , has crept up in the dialogue history already , or not . And , I have the , If we wanted to have that function in the dialogue hi dialogue module of SmartKom , I have the written consent of Jan to put it in there . professor c: So the point is , it 's very likely that Robert 's thesis is going to be along these lines , grad b: Oh , s professor c: and the local rules are if it 's your thesis , you get to decide how it 's done . So if , you know if this is seriously , if this becomes part of your thesis , you can say , hey we 're gonna do it this way , that 's the way it 's done . So h he 's got a th he 's got a meet meeting in Germany with his thesis advisor . , this is this is , speaking of hard problems , this is a very good time , to start trying to make explicit where construal comes in and you know , where c where the construction per - se ends and where construal comes in , grad a: But that 's part of what the f grad b: We have many jobs for you , Ro - Robert . professor c: is is because th it is gonna have implicit in it grad e: Was I ? In the room ? grad b: No , you weren't there on purpose . professor c: Yeah , that That 's the point , is is th grad a: Yeah . grad d: Yeah , but it he the decisions I made wer had to do with my thesis . So consequently don't I get to decide then that it 's Robert 's job ? professor c: No . grad b: Well , I 'll just pick a piece of the problem and then just push the hard stuff into the center and say it 's Robert 's . grad e: I 've always been completely in favor of consensus decisions , grad b: I can professor c: Right . professor c: not grad e: It it might even be interesting then to say that I should be forced to , sort of pull some of the ideas that have been floating in my head out of the , out of the top hat professor c: Yes . grad e: Yes , and , it 's Ha - None of that is basically still around , grad b: I didn't get professor c: And a another draft OK . grad e: but it 's professor c: D i grad a: That 's normal . professor c: I i grad b: Oh , I guess it 's good I didn't read it . professor c: and grad e: Yeah , and I would like to d discuss it and , you know , get you guys 's input professor c: Right . professor c: So that , so th thi this , so this is the point , is we we 're going to have to cycle through this , grad a: Yeah . professor c: but th the draft of the p proposal on the constructions is is going to tell us a lot about what we think needs to be done by construal . grad b: grad e: Meeting regular meeting time for the summer , we really haven't found one . It 's - it 's a coincidence that he can't do couldn't do it today here . professor c: And the NTL meeting moved to Wednesday , grad e: So professor c: cuz of of , grad e: Yeah , it was just an exception . professor c: Yeah , you weren't here , but but but s , And so , if that 's OK with you , grad a: It 's i Is it staying basically at the Wednesday noon ? professor c: you would grad a: OK . How do we feel about doing it Wednesdays ? Because it seems to me that this is sort of a time where when we have things to discuss with other people , there they seem to be s tons of people around . professor c: The only disadvantage is that it may interfere with other grad e: Or subgroup meetings professor c: s you know , other other No , you , people in this group connecting with with grad b: Those people who happen to be around . I I you know I have no fixed grad a: To tell you the truth , I 'd rath I 'd , I 'd would like to avoid more than one ICSI meeting per day , if possible . that grad e: The I 'd like to have them all in one day , grad a: Yeah , I can understand that . professor c: Well p grad e: so package them up and then professor c: people people differ in their tastes in this matter . I 'm always here anyway , grad e: It 's OK , that grad b: so It doesn't matter . grad e: Well , if one sort of thing is , this room is taken at after three - thirty pr pretty much every day by the data collection . grad e: So we just knew i grad b: So did you just say that Ami can't make one o ' grad e: No , he can . About the c the th grad b: Could we do Thursday at one - thirty ? Would that that be horrible ? grad e: No . grad b: Oh really ? grad e: Because , this room is again taken at two - thirty by Morgan . grad e: And the s meeting recorder meeting meeting meeting recording on meeting meetings grad b: OK , OK , OK . professor c: I I could grad b: we usually meet Tuesday or l like , linguists , at two . Do you want to meet again here bef grad d: And the s Is the Speech - Gen meeting still at on Tuesdays ? grad e: w Well , actually we w we we did scrap our Monday time just because Bhaskara couldn't come Monday . grad a: That doesn't apply to a grad d: Although I thought you wanted to go camping on Monday er , take off Mondays a lot so you could go camping . ! grad b: Well , the linguists ' meeting i happens to be at two , but I think that 's . grad a: And , you know , of course Nancy and I are just sort of always talking anyway and sometimes we do it in that room . grad e: Monday ? professor c: OK , whate What I think Robert 's saying is that grad a: Earlier in the week professor c: earlier we At least for next week , there 's a lot of stuff we want to get done , grad a: grad b: At o o o o one , two , three ? grad e: One , two , three ? Three 's too late . professor c: Oh , I i Yeah , I actually Two is the earliest I can meet on Monday . professor c: Here I 'm blissfully agreeing to things and realizing that I actually do have some stuff scheduled on Monday . grad b: You guys will still remind me , right ? grad d: No way ! grad b: Y you 'll come and take all the the headph the good headphones first and then remind me . grad e: And grad b: Why do I have this unless I 'm gonna write ? grad e: do I get to see th , your formalism before that ? grad b: Fine . grad e: I wo I would like I would sort of get a get a notion of what what you guys have in store for me . professor c: Well m @ @ you know , w maybe Mond - Maybe we can put This is part of what we can do Monday , if we want . grad b: Yeah , so there was like , you know , m m in my head the goal to have like an intermediate version , like , everything I know . grad b: And then , w I would talk to you and figure out everything you know , that you know , see if they 're consistent . Why don't w Maybe you and I should meet sort of more or less first thing Monday morning and then we can work on this . I might I might , grad e: You - y grad b: s You said you 're busy over th until the weekend , right ? grad a: Yeah , sort of through the weekend because Kate has a photography show . So , maybe I 'll send you some grad a: if you have time after this I 'll show you the noun phrase thing . OK , and we 'll You wanna m grad e: So the idea is on Monday at two we 'll we 'll see an intermediate version of the formalism for the constructions , grad a: Yeah . grad b: So that 's OK for you grad e: and do an on - line merging with my construal ideas . grad e: So it won't be , like , a for semi - formal presentation of my proposal . grad b: Cuz then you 'll find out more of what we 're making you do . Can you also write it up ? grad b: It 's like , " this is what we 're doing . " grad e: I 'll I 'll send you I 'll I 'll send you a style file , right ? grad b: OK . grad e: You just grad b: I already sent you my fi my bib file . grad a: Someday we also have to we should probably talk about the other side of the " where is X " construction , which is the issue of , how do you simulate questions ? What does the simspec look like for a question ? grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , now , we we w grad a: We had to we had an idea for this which seemed like it would probably work . I professor c: OK ? So let 's think of a name for for whatever the this intermediate structure is . Oh , we talked about semspec , for " semantic spec specification " grad a: Mmm . grad a: It 's more general professor c: You know , so it 's a m minimal change . professor c: Right , a little substi substi You know , that 's what text substitution macros are for . professor c: Anyway , so let 's let 's for the moment call it that until we think of something better . professor c: And , yeah , we absolutely need to find Part of what was missing were markings of all sorts that weren't in there , incl including the questions grad a: professor c: We didn't we never did figure out how we were gonna do emphasis in in , the semspec . grad b: Yeah , we 've talked a little bit about that , too , which , it 's hard for me to figure out with sort of our general linguistic issues , how they map onto this particular one , grad a: Yeah . professor c: But that 's part of the formalism is got to be , how things like that get marked . grad b: W do you have data , like the the You have preliminary data ? Cuz I know , you know , we 've been using this one easy sentence and I 'm sure you guys have , maybe you are the one who 've been looking at the rest of it grad a: I grad b: it 'd it 'd be useful for me , if we want to have it a little bit more data oriented . grad a: To tell you the truth , what I 've been looking at has not been the data so far , grad b: Yeah . grad a: I just sort of said " alright let 's see if I can get noun phrases and , major verb co , constructions out of the way first . grad a: So , I have not really approached a lot of the data , but obviously like these the the question one , since we have this idea about the indefinite pronoun thing and all that , you know , I ca can try and , run with that , you know , try and do some of the sentence constructions now . grad a: Oh yeah , the basic idea is that , you know , let 's see if I can formulate this . grad e: So you perform the mental sum and then , you know , " who fixed the car with a wrench ? " You basically are told , to to do this In the in analogously to the way you would do " someone fixed the car with a wrench " . And then you hand it back to your hippocampus and find out what that , you know , grad a: Means . grad a: The WH question has this as sort of extra thing which says " and when you 're done , tell me who fills that slot " or w you know . And , you know , this is sort of a nice way to do it , the idea of sort of saying that you treat from the simulation point of view or whatever you treat , WH constructions similarly to , indefinite pronouns like " someone fixed the car " because lots of languages , have WH questions with an indefinite pronoun in situ or whatever , grad b: Use actually the same one . So it makes sense professor c: Alright , which is grad a: professor c: Skolemization . professor c: In in logic , it 's it 's @ @ it 's actual Huh ? grad b: Right . professor c: That - that 's not that 's not saying it 's bad , grad a: Right . Anyway , but just that kind of thing and we 'll figure out exactly how to write that up and so on , but professor c: Good . We sort of just dropped that cuz it was too weird and we didn't even know , like , what we were talking about exactly , what the object of study was . Well , if if , i part of of what the exercise is , t by the end of next week , is to say what are the things that we just don't have answers for yet . grad e: Well , if you if you do wanna discuss focus background and then get me into that because , I wo I w scientifically worked on that for for almost two years . grad b: Yeah , you should definitely , be on on that maybe maybe by after Monday we 'll y you can see what things we are and aren't grad a: Yeah . grad b: I would say that tha that those discussions have been primarily , Keith and Keith and me , but like in th the meeting , he sort of I thin like the last meeting we had , I think we were all very much part of it grad a: Yeah . grad b: but grad a: Sometimes Hans has been sort of coming in there as sort of like a devil 's advocate type role or something , grad b: but different perspec Yeah . grad a: like " This make you know , I 'm going to pretend I 'm a linguist who has nothing to do with this . " And he 'll just go off on parts of it which definitely need fixing grad b: Right . grad a: but aren't where we 're at right now , so it 's grad b: Like like what you call certain things , grad a: Yeah . grad b: But in a sense , it 's good to know that he of all people professor c: OK . grad b: you know , like maybe a lot of people would have m much stronger reactions , so , you know , he 's like a relatively friendly linguist grad a: Yeah . professor c: OK , which was that o one of the things I would like to see happen is a paper that was tentatively called " Towards a formal cognitive semantics " which was addressed to these linguists who haven't been following this stuff at all . professor c: So it could be that he 's actually , at some level , thinking about how am I going to communicate this story grad a: Yeah . professor c: But if he g if he turns is is really gonna turn around and help t to write this version that does connect with as many as possible of the other linguists in the world then then it becomes important to use terminology that doesn't make it hard grad a: professor c: it 's gonna be plenty hard for for people to understand it as it is , grad a: Yeah . I just wanted t to I have to catch up with him , and I wanted t to get a feeling for that . grad a: So I don't know what his take will be on these meetings exactly , you know . grad a: Cuz sometimes he sort of sounds like we 're talking a bunch of goobledy - gook from his point of view . grad b: I think it 's good when we 're when we 're into data and looking at the some specific linguistic phenomenon in in English or in German , in particular , whatever , that 's great , professor c: Yeah . grad b: and Ben and and Hans are , if if anything , more you know , they have more to say than , let 's say , I would about some of these things . grad b: But when it 's like , well , w how do we capture these things , you know , I think it 's definitely been Keith and I who have d you know , who have worried more about the grad a: That 's I I I think that should be the the core group grad b: s Which is fine . professor c: and that 's , you know , I think very close to the maximum number of people working together that can get something done . And then we 're gon we 're gonna because of this other big thing we haven't talked about is actually implementing this stuff ? So that I guess the three of us are gonna connect tomorrow about that . I was just gonna say , though , that , for instance , there was you know , out of a meeting with Johno came the suggestion that " oh , could it be that the meaning constraints really aren't used for selection ? " which has sort of been implicit in the parsing strategy we talked about . grad b: In which case we w we can just say that they 're the effects or the bindings . Which , so far , in terms of like putting up all the constraints as , you know , pushing them into type constraints , the when I 've , you know , propo then proposed it to linguists who haven't yet given me you know , we haven't yet thought of a reason that that wouldn't work . professor c: Yeah , it has to in the sense that you 're gonna use them eventu it 's you know , it 's sort of a , generate and test kind of thing , grad b: if there are some constraints that you hold back and don't use , in your initial matching then you 'll match some things grad b: professor c: I I d I don't think there 's any way that it could completely fail . It it could be that , you wind up The original bad idea of purely context - free grammars died because there were just vastly too many parses . And so th the concern might be that not that it would totally fail , but that grad b: Right ? So by just having semantic even bringing semantics in for matching just in the form of j semantic types , right ? professor c: it would still genera grad b: Like " conceptually these have to be construed as this , this , and this " might still give us quite a few possibilities professor c: Yeah . , cuz I think i I think it 's As you know , I think it 's real hard and if w if we Right . grad e: So , you your dance card is completely filled now ? grad a: Shoot . grad e: Why don't grad b: No , that 's not really true , grad a: Bummer . grad b: but like grad d: What about What about DDR ? grad b: It 's almost true . grad f: grad b: Oh , I don't have it this weekend , so , tsk don't have to worry about that . professor c: DDR , he asked ? grad b: Speaking of dance , Dance Dance Revolution I can't believe I 'm It 's a it 's like a game , but it 's for , like , dancing . Hard to It 's like karaoke , but for dancing , and they tell you what It 's amazing . Well , y you know of it ? I i i it 's one of your hobbies ? It 's great exercise , I must say . They have , like , places instead of like Yeah , instead of karaoke bars now that have , like , DDR , like Yeah , yeah , I didn't until I started hanging out with this friend , who 's like " Oh , well , I can bring over the DDR if you want <doc-sep>professor c: OK , what are we talking about today ? phd b: I don't know . phd a: Oh , this was the , talk where they were supposed to try to decide phd b: To to decide what to do , phd a: Ah , right . , so , let 's let 's assume for right now that we 're just kind of plugging on ahead , phd b: Yeah . professor c: because even if they tell us that , the rules are different , we 're still interested in doing what we 're doing . , well , we 've a little bit worked on trying to see , what were the bugs and the problem with the latencies . phd d: To improve phd b: So , We took first we took the LDA filters and , we designed new filters , using recursive filters actually . professor c: So when you say " we " , is that something Sunil is doing or is that ? phd b: I 'm sorry ? professor c: Who is doing that ? phd b: us . phd b: So we took the filters the FIR filters and we designed , IIR filters that have the same frequency response . phd b: So they had two filters , one for the low frequency bands and another for the high frequency bands . And the low frequency band has sixty - four milliseconds of delay , and the high frequency band filter has something like eleven milliseconds compared to the two hundred milliseconds of the IIR filters . So we have the filters but we still have to implement a routine that does recursive filtering professor c: OK . phd b: and professor c: You you had a discussion with Sunil about this though ? phd b: No . professor c: right ? So so you need to discuss with him what we 're doing , phd b: Yeah . , I yeah , I don't know if th that 's what they were trying to They were trying to do something different like taking , well , using filter that takes only a past professor c: Right . I think that the the fact that we we did that with had that thing with the latencies was indicative of the fact that there wasn't enough communication . Well , there is w one , remark about these filters , that they don't have a linear phase . phd b: Well , I don't know , perhaps it perhaps it doesn't hurt because the phase is almost linear but . , and so , yeah , for the delay I gave you here , it 's it 's , computed on the five hertz modulation frequency , which is the mmm , well , the most important for speech so . professor c: So that would be , a reduction of a hundred and thirty - six milliseconds , phd d: The low f f phd b: Yeah . professor c: which , What was the total we ended up with through the whole system ? phd b: Three hundred and thirty . professor c: So that would be within ? phd b: Yeah , but there are other points actually , which will perhaps add some more delay . Is that some other other stuff in the process were perhaps not very perf well , not very correct , like the downsampling which w was simply dropping frames . phd b: so we will try also to add a nice downsampling having a filter that that professor c: - huh . , because wh when when we look at the LDA filters , well , they are basically low - pass but they leave a lot of what 's above twenty - five hertz . phd b: and so , yeah , this will be another filter which would add ten milliseconds again . phd b: yeah , and then there 's a third thing , is that , basically the way on - line normalization was done , is just using this recursion on on the , on the feature stream , professor c: Yeah . , and when we look at this filter actually it has a delay of eighty - five milliseconds . If we want to be very correct , so if we want to the estimation of the mean t t to to be well , the right estimation of the mean , we have to t to take eighty - five milliseconds in the future . We would be at six so , sixty - five , plus ten , plus for the downsampling , plus eighty - five for the on - line normalization . So it 's professor c: phd b: plus plus eighty for the neural net and PCA . phd b: So it would be around two hundred and forty so , well , professor c: Just just barely in there . phd a: What 's the allowable ? professor c: Two - fifty , unless they changed the rules . phd a: What were they thinking of changing it to ? professor c: But phd b: Yeah . professor c: well the people who had very low latency want it to be low , very very very narrow , latency bound . professor c: Unfortunately we 're the main ones with long latency , but phd a: Ah ! professor c: But , phd b: Yeah , and basically the best proposal had something like thirty or forty milliseconds of latency . professor c: Yeah , so they were basically , they were more or less trading computation for performance and we were , trading latency for performance . And they were dealing with noise explicitly and we weren't , and so I think of it as complementary , that if we can put the phd a: Think of it as what ? professor c: Complementary . professor c: I think the best systems so , everything that we did in in a way it was it was just adamantly insisting on going in with a brain damaged system , which is something actually , we 've done a lot over the last thirteen years . So , w th w this was a test that largely had additive noise and we did we adde did absolutely nothing explicitly to handle ad additive noise . And , we did this , RASTA - like filtering which was done in the log domain and was tending to handle convolutional noise . So , the , spectral sub subtraction schemes a couple places did seem to seem to do a nice job . And so , we 're talking about putting putting some of that in while still keeping some of our stuff . I think you should be able to end up with a system that 's better than both but clearly the way that we 're operating for this other stuff does involved some latency to to get rid of most of that latency . To get down to forty or fifty milliseconds we 'd have to throw out most of what we 're doing . And and , I don't think there 's any good reason for it in the application actually . , you 're you 're you 're speaking to a recognizer on a remote server and , having a a a quarter second for some processing to clean it up . professor c: These aren't large vocabulary things so the decoder shouldn't take a really long time , and . phd a: And I don't think anybody 's gonna notice the difference between a quarter of a second of latency and thirty milliseconds of latency . What what does wa was your experience when you were doing this stuff with , the the the surgical , microscopes and so forth . , how long was it from when somebody , finished an utterance to when , something started happening ? phd a: we had a silence detector , so we would look for the end of an utterance based on the silence detector . phd a: And I I can't remember now off the top of my head how many frames of silence we had to detect before we would declare it to be the end of an utterance . phd a: but it was , I would say it was probably around the order of two hundred and fifty milliseconds . phd a: So professor c: Yeah , so you you so you had a phd a: this w professor c: so you had a a quarter second delay before , plus some little processing time , phd a: Right . professor c: And there 's physical inertia there , so probably the the motion itself was all phd a: And it felt to , the users that it was instantaneous . professor c: Yeah , so you would think as long as it 's under half a second or something . A person I don't think a person can tell the difference between , you know , a quarter of a second and a hundred milliseconds , and I 'm not even sure if we can tell the difference between a quarter of a second and half a second . , basically if you yeah , if you said , " what 's the , what 's the shortest route to the opera ? " and it took half a second to get back to you , phd a: Yeah . phd a: because when we talk to each other we tend to step on each other 's utterances . So like if I 'm asking you a question , you may start answering before I 'm even done . Well , anyway , I think we could cut we know what else , we could cut down on the neural net time by by , playing around a little bit , going more into the past , or something like that . phd a: So is the latency from the neural net caused by how far ahead you 're looking ? professor c: professor c: And there 's also well , there 's the neural net and there 's also this , multi - frame , KLT . phd a: Wasn't there Was it in the , recurrent neural nets where they weren't looking ahead at all ? professor c: They weren't looking ahead much . And and then But you also could just , we haven't experimented with this but I imagine you could , predict a , a label , from more in the past than in than than in the future . phd a: but I don't think professor c: Yeah , but we 've but we played a little bit with with asymmetric , guys . So , that 's what that 's what you 're busy with , s messing around with this , phd b: yeah . And , phd d: Also we were thinking to to , apply the eh , spectral subtraction from Ericsson phd b: Yeah . professor c: phd a: What is the advantage of that ? phd d: phd b: Well , it 's that by the for the moment we have , something that 's discriminant and nonlinear . Well , it 's it 's a linear transformation , that professor c: So at least just to understand maybe what the difference was between how much you were getting from just putting the frames together and how much you 're getting from the discriminative , what the nonlinearity does for you or doesn't do for you . Actually what we want to do , perhaps it 's to replace to to have something that 's discriminant but linear , also . And to see if it if it improves ov over over the non - discriminant linear transformation . professor c: Yeah , well , that 's what I meant , is to see whether whether it having the neural net really buys you anything . professor c: But maybe it 's just the discrimination and and maybe yeah , maybe the nonlinear discrimination isn't necessary . But the other part you were saying was the spectral subtraction , so you just kind of , phd b: Yeah . professor c: At what stage do you do that ? Do you you 're doing that , ? phd b: So it would be on the on on the mel frequency bands , phd d: We was think phd b: so . professor c: OK , phd d: Yeah , professor c: so just do that on the mel f phd d: we no nnn We we was thinking to do before after VAD or phd b: Yeah , phd d: Oh , we don't know exactly when it 's better . phd b: phd d: Before after VAD or professor c: So so you know that that that the way that they 're phd d: and then phd b: . professor c: one thing that would be no good to find out about from this conference call is that what they were talking about , what they 're proposing doing , was having a third party , run a good VAD , and and determine boundaries . professor c: The reason for that was that , if some one p one group put in the VAD and another didn't , or one had a better VAD than the other since that they 're not viewing that as being part of the the task , and that any any manufacturer would put a bunch of effort into having some s kind of good speech - silence detection . It still wouldn't be perfect but , e the argument was " let 's not have that be part of this test . " And so , I guess they argued about that yesterday and , yeah , I 'm sorry , I don't don't know the answer but we should find out . So , Yeah , so there 's the question of the VAD but otherwise it 's it 's on the the , the mel fil filter bank , energies I guess ? phd d: professor c: And you 're you 're subtracting in the in the in the I guess it 's power power domain , or or magnitude domain . phd b: and professor c: if you look at the theory , it 's it should be in the power domain but but , I 've seen implementations where people do it in the magnitude domain phd b: Yeah . professor c: I have asked people why and they shrug their shoulders and say , " oh , it works . professor c: and there 's this I guess there 's this mysterious people who do this a lot I guess have developed little tricks of the trade . , there 's there 's this , you don't just subtract the the estimate of the noise spectrum . phd b: so you have the estimation of the power spectra of the noise , and you multiply this by a factor which is depend dependent on the SNR . phd a: ! phd b: When the speech lev when the signal level is more important , compared to this noise level , the coefficient is small , and around one . But when the power le the s signal level is small compared to the noise level , the coefficient is more important . And this reduce actually the music musical noise , phd a: Oh ! phd b: which is more important during silence portions , phd a: - huh . professor c: Well , that 's , that 's what differs from different different tasks and different s , spectral subtraction methods . phd a: ! professor c: if if you have , fair assurance that , the noise is is quite stationary , then the smartest thing to do is use as much data as possible to estimate the noise , get a much better estimate , and subtract it off . professor c: But if it 's varying at all , which is gonna be the case for almost any real situation , you have to do it on - line , with some forgetting factor or something . phd a: So do you is there some long window that extends into the past over which you calculate the average ? professor c: Well , there 's a lot of different ways of computing the noise spectrum . So one of the things that , Hans - Guenter Hirsch did , and pas and other people actually , he 's he wasn't the only one I guess , was to , take some period of of of speech and in each band , develop a histogram . And , in fact I think the NIST standard method of determining signal - to - noise ratio is based on this . phd a: A couple seconds ? professor c: So No , no , it 's based on this kind of method , phd a: . Now , if you have signal and you have noise , you basically have these two bumps in the histogram , which you could approximate as two Gaussians . professor c: So so basically now you have this mixture of two Gaussians , you you n know what they are , and , sorry , you estimate what they are , and , so this gives you what the signal is and what the noise e energy is in that band in the spectrum . And the other thing to do is which is sort of more trivial and obvious is to , determine through magical means that that , there 's no speech in some period , and then see what the spectrum is . , a variant on that for just determining signal - to - noise ratio is to just , you can do a w a an iterative thing , EM - like thing , to determine means only . professor c: And then you just use those mean values as being the the , signal - to - noise ratio in that band . phd a: But what is the it seems like this kind of thing could add to the latency . Cuz if you don't look into the future , right ? phd a: OK , well that I guess that was my question , professor c: if you just yeah phd a: yeah . professor c: if you just if you you , a at the beginning you have some phd a: Guess . professor c: esti some guess and and , phd b: Yeah , but it professor c: It 's an interesting question . I wonder how they did do it ? phd b: Actually , it 's a mmm If - if you want to have a good estimation on non - stationary noise you have to look in the in the future . , if you take your window and build your histogram in this window , what you can expect is to have an estimation of th of the noise in in the middle of the window , not at the end . So professor c: Well , yeah , phd b: the but but people professor c: but what does what what what does Alcatel do ? phd d: grad e: Pretty stationary , phd b: but , professor c: Well , the thing , e e e e grad e: yeah . professor c: Yeah , y , you 're talking about non - stationary noise but I think that spectral subtraction is rarely is is not gonna work really well for for non - stationary noise , phd b: Well , if y if you have a good estimation of the noise , professor c: you know ? phd b: yeah , because well it it has to work . professor c: But it 's hard to phd b: i professor c: but that 's hard to do . So so I think that that what what is wh what 's more common is that you 're going to be helped with r slowly varying or stationary noise . professor c: If it varies a lot , to get a If if to get a good estimate you need a few seconds of speech , even if it 's centered , right ? phd b: professor c: if you need a few seconds to get a decent estimate but it 's changed a lot in a few seconds , then it , you know , i it 's kind of a problem . professor c: imagine e five hertz is the middle of the of the speech modulation spectrum , phd b: Mmm . So , phd b: So in this case , yeah , sure , you cannot professor c: Yeah . phd b: But I think y , Hirsch does experiment with windows of like between five hundred milliseconds and one second . and he worked on non - stationary noises , like noise modulated with well , wi with amplitude modulations and things like that , phd a: Were his , windows centered around the phd b: and But , yeah . professor c: No , I understand it 's better to do but I just think that that , for real noises wh what what 's most likely to happen is that there 'll be some things that are relatively stationary phd b: Mmm . professor c: and other things where it 's not so stationary and , you can always pick something that that falls between your methods , phd b: . professor c: but I don't know if , you know , if sinusoidally , modul amplitude modulated noise is is sort of a big problem in in in practice . professor c: I think that it 's phd a: We could probably get a really good estimate of the noise if we just went to the noise files , and built the averages from them . phd b: What What do you mean ? professor c: Just cheat You 're saying , cheat . phd b: But if the if the noise is stationary perhaps you don't even need some kind of noise estimation algorithm . phd b: We just take th th th the beginning of the utterance and professor c: Oh , yeah , sure . phd b: Well , everybody seems to use some kind of adaptive , well , scheme professor c: But but phd d: Yeah . phd b: is it very useful professor c: you know , stationary phd a: Very slow adaptation . phd b: and is the c phd a: th professor c: Right , the word " stationary " is has a very precise statistical meaning . But , you know , in in signal - processing really what we 're talking about I think is things that change slowly , compared with our our processing techniques . professor c: So if you 're driving along in a car I I would think that most of the time the nature of the noise is going to change relatively slowly . If you if you check it out , five minutes later you may be in a different part of the road phd b: But it 's it 's i i i using the local characteristics in time , is probably going to work pretty well . professor c: But you could get hurt a lot if you just took some something from the beginning of all the speech , of , you know , an hour of speech and then later phd b: Yeah . professor c: so they may be you know , may be overly , complicated for for this test but but but , I don't know . , if possible you shouldn't you should you should make it , the center of the center of the window . , phd a: If they 're going to provide a , voice activity detector that will tell you the boundaries of the speech , then , couldn't you just go outside those boundaries and do your estimate there ? professor c: Oh , yeah . So I I imagine that 's what they 're doing , right ? Is they 're they 're probably looking in nonspeech sections and getting some , phd b: Yeah , they have some kind of threshold on on the previous estimate , and So . Yeah , so , they h they have an estimate of the noise level and they put a threshold like six or ten DB above , and what 's under this threshold is used to update the estimate . It 's like saying what 's under the threshold is silence , professor c: Does France Telecom do this phd b: and grad e: . professor c: Does France Telecom do th do the same thing ? More or less ? phd b: I d I Y you know , perhaps ? phd d: No . , maybe we can talk about a couple other things briefly , just , things that that we 've been chatting about but haven't made it into these meetings yet . So you 're coming up with your quals proposal , and , Wanna just give a two three minute summary of what you 're planning on doing ? grad e: Oh , two , three , it can be shorter than that . , but I 'm , looking into extending the work done by Larry Saul and John Allen and Mazin Rahim . , they they have a system that 's , a multi - band , system but their multi - band is is a little different than the way that we 've been doing multi - band in the past , where Where we 've been @ @ taking sub - band features and i training up these neural nets and on on phonetic targets , and then combining them some somehow down the line , they 're they 're taking sub - band features and , training up a detector that detects for , these phonetic features for example , he presents , a detector to detect sonorance . And so what what it basically is is , it 's there 's at the lowest level , there it 's it 's an OR ga , it 's an AND gate . So , on each sub - band you have several independent tests , to test whether , there 's the existence of sonorance in a sub - band . And at the at the higher level , for every if , The higher level there 's a soft OR gate . , so if if this detector detects , the presence of of sonorance in any of the sub - bands , then the detect , the OR gate at the top says , " OK , well this frame has evidence of sonorance . " phd a: What are what are some of the low level detectors that they use ? grad e: And these are all Oh , OK . , and the , professor c: So that , by the way , basically is a is one of the units in our in our our neural network . Yeah , so he uses , an EM algorithm to to train up these parameters for the logistic regression . professor c: Well , actually , yeah , grad e: The professor c: so I was using EM to get the targets . So so you have this this this AND gate what we were calling an AND gate , but it 's a product product rule thing at the output . And then he uses , i u and then feeding into that are I 'm sorry , there 's it 's an OR at the output , isn't it ? Yeah , grad e: phd a: And so are each of these , low level detectors are they , are these something that you decide ahead of time , like " I 'm going to look for this particular feature or I 'm going to look at this frequency , " or What what what are they looking at ? grad e: phd a: What are their inputs ? grad e: Right , so the OK , so at each for each sub - band there are basically , several measures of SNR and and correlation . , and for for every s every sub - band , e you you just pick ahead of time , " I 'm going to have like five i independent logistic tests . grad e: And you initialize these parameters , in some some way and use EM to come up with your training targets for a for the the low - level detectors . grad e: And then , once you get that done , you you you train the whole whole thing on maximum likelihood . , and h he shows that using this this method to detect sonorance is it 's very robust compared to , to typical , full - band Gaussian mixtures estimations of of sonorance . You get enough of these detectors together , then you have enough information to do , higher level discrimination , for example , discriminating between phones phd a: grad e: and then you keep working your way up until you you build a full recognizer . grad e: So , that 's that 's the direction which I 'm I 'm thinking about going in my quals . , one is the going towards , using narrow band information for , ph phonetic features of some sort rather than just , immediately going for the the typical sound units . professor c: Another thing I like about it is that you t this thing is going to be trained explicitly trained for a product of errors rule , which is what , Allen keeps pointing out that Fletcher observed in the twenties , phd a: And then , the third thing I like about it is , and we 've played around with this in a different kind of way a little bit but it hasn't been our dominant way of of operating anything , this issue of where the targets come from . So in our case when we 've been training it multi - band things , the way we get the targets for the individual bands is , that we get the phonetic label for the sound there phd a: professor c: and we say , " OK , we train every " What this is saying is , OK , that 's maybe what our ultimate goal is or not ultimate but penultimate goal is getting these these small sound units . But but , along the way how much should we , what should we be training these intermediate things for ? , because , we don't know , that this is a particularly good feature . , there 's no way , someone in the audience yesterday was asking , " well couldn't you have people go through and mark the individual bands and say where the where it was sonorant or not ? " phd a: professor c: But , you know , I think having a bunch of people listening to critical band wide , chunks of speech trying to determine whether I think it 'd be impossible . professor c: It 's all gonna sound like like sine waves to you , more or less . professor c: Well not , it 's g all g narrow band , i I m I think it 's very hard for someone to to a person to make that determination . It could sh be that you should , not be paying that much attention to , certain bands for certain sounds , in order to get the best result . professor c: So , what we have been doing there , just sort of mixing it all together , is certainly much much cruder than that . Now we have I guess done experiments you 've probably done stuff where you have , done separate , Viterbis on the different grad e: Yeah . Did did that help at all ? grad e: it helps for one or t one iteration but , anything after that it doesn't help . professor c: So so that may or may t it that aspect of what he 's doing may or may not be helpful because in a sense that 's the same sort of thing . You 're taking global information and determining what you how you should But this is this is , I th I think a little more direct . phd a: How did they measure the performance of their detector ? professor c: And Well , he 's look he 's just actually looking at , the confusions between sonorant and non - sonorant . professor c: So he hasn't applied it to recognition or if he did he didn't talk about it . It 's it 's just And one of the concerns in the audience , actually , was that that , the , he he did a comparison to , you know , our old foil , the the nasty old standard recognizer with mel mel filter bank at the front , and H M Ms , and and so forth . But the one of the good questions in the audience was , well , yeah , but that wasn't trained for that . , this use of a very smooth , spectral envelope is something that , you know , has evolved as being generally a good thing for speech recognition but if you knew that what you were gonna do is detect sonorants or not So sonorants and non - sonorants is is is almost like voiced - unvoiced , except I guess that the voiced stops are are also called " obstruents " . , so it 's it 's , but with the exception of the stops I guess it 's pretty much the same as voiced - unvoiced , phd a: So , if you knew you were doing that , if you were doing something say for a a , a a Vocoder , you wouldn't use the same kind of features . Nonetheless , it was one that was interesting because , this is what we are actually using for speech recognition , these smooth envelopes . And this says that perhaps even , you know , trying to use them in the best way that we can , that that that we ordinarily do , with , you know , Gaussian mixtures and H M Ms and so forth , you you don't , actually do that well on determining whether something is sonorant or not . phd a: Didn't they professor c: Which means you 're gonna make errors between similar sounds that are son sonorant or obstruent . phd a: Didn't they also do some kind of an oracle experiment where they said " if we could detect the sonorants perfectly and then show how it would improve speech recognition ? I thought I remember hearing about an experiment like that . professor c: That would that 's you 're right , that 's exactly the question to follow up this discussion , is suppose you did that , got that right . phd b: What could be the other low level detectors , for Other kind of features , or ? in addition to detecting sonorants or ? Th - that 's what you want to to to go for also grad e: phd b: or ? grad e: What t Oh , build other other detectors on different phonetic features ? phd b: Other low level detectors ? Yeah . e , w easiest thing would be to go go do some voicing stuff but that 's very similar to sonorance . grad e: phd a: When we when we talked with John Ohala the other day we made a list of some of the things that w grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , so there 's a half dozen like that that are grad e: Yeah , nasality . professor c: Now this was coming at it from a different angle but maybe it 's a good way to start . , these are things which , John felt that a a , a human annotator would be able to reliably mark . So the sort of things he felt would be difficult for a human annotator to reliably mark would be tongue position kinds of things . professor c: But stress doesn't , fit in this thing of coming up with features that will distinguish words from one another , grad e: professor c: right ? It 's a it 's a good thing to mark and will probably help us ultimate with recognition phd a: Yeah , there 's a few cases where it can like permit and permit . professor c: Well , yeah , but i either case you 'd write PERMIT , right ? So you 'd get the word right . phd a: No , I 'm saying , i i e I thought you were saying that stress doesn't help you distinguish between words . As long as you get The sequence , professor c: We 're g if we 're doing if we 're talking about transcription as opposed to something else phd a: right ? Yeah . Yeah , so that 's yeah , that 's , you know , a neat neat thing and and , So . grad e: S so , Ohala 's going to help do these , transcriptions of the meeting data ? phd a: well I don't know . , we just talked about some possible features that could be marked by humans and , grad e: . phd a: because of having maybe some extra transcriber time we thought we could go through and mark some portion of the data for that . professor c: that 's not an immediate problem , that we don't immediately have a lot of extra transcriber time . professor c: But but , in the long term I guess Chuck is gonna continue the dialogue with John and and , and , we 'll we 'll end up doing some I think . , so , y you want to talk maybe a c two or three minutes about what we 've been talking about today and other days ? grad f: Ri Yeah , OK , so , we 're interested in , methods for far mike speech recognition , mainly , methods that deal with the reverberation in the far mike signal . So , one approach would be , say MSG and PLP , like was used in Aurora one and , there are other approaches which actually attempt to remove the reverberation , instead of being robust to it like MSG . And so we 're interested in , comparing the performance of , a robust approach like MSG with these , speech enhancement or de - reverber de - reverberation approaches . grad f: And , it looks like we 're gonna use the Meeting Recorder digits data for that . phd b: And the de - reverberation algorithm , do you have can you give some more details on this or ? Does it use one microphone ? grad f: o o phd b: Several microphones ? Does it ? grad f: OK , well , there was something that was done by , a guy named Carlos , I forget his last name , who worked with Hynek , who , professor c: Avendano . grad f: it was like RASTA in the sense that of it was , de - convolution by filtering , except he used a longer time window , phd b: And the reason for that is RASTA 's time window is too short to , include the whole , reverberation , I don't know what you call it the reverberation response . The reverberation filter from my mouth to that mike is like it 's t got it 's too long in the in the time domain for the for the RASTA filtering to take care of it . And , then there are a couple of other speech enhancement approaches which haven't been tried for speech recognition yet but have just been tried for enhancement , which , have the assumption that , you can do LPC analysis of th of the signal you get at the far microphone and the , all pole filter that you get out of that should be good . It 's just the , excitation signal that is going to be distorted by the reverberation and so you can try and reconstruct a better excitation signal and , feed that through the i , all pole filter and get enhanced speech with reverberation reduced . professor c: There 's also this , echo cancellation stuff that we 've sort of been chasing , so , we have , and when we 're saying these digits now we do have a close microphone signal and then there 's the distant microphone signal . And you could as a kind of baseline say , " OK , given that we have both of these , we should be able to do , a cancellation . " So that , we we , essentially identify the system in between the linear time invariant system between the microphones and and and and re and invert it , or or cancel it out to to some some reasonable approximation phd b: that 's not a practical thing , if you have a distant mike , you don't have a close mike ordinarily , but we thought that might make also might make a good baseline . , but And then there are s , there are single microphone methods that I think people have done for , for this kind of de - reverberation . Do y do you know any references to any ? Cuz I I w I was w w I I lead him down a a bad path on that . phd b: I g I guess I guess when people are working with single microphones , they are more trying to do professor c: But . phd b: well , not not very Well , there is the Avendano work , professor c: Right . phd b: but also trying to mmm , trying to f t find the de - convolution filter but in the not in the time domain but in the the stream of features I guess . Well , @ @ there there 's someone working on this on i in Mons professor c: Yeah , OK . phd b: So perhaps , yeah , we should try t to He 's working on this , on trying to professor c: Yeah . phd b: on re reverberation , professor c: The first paper on this is gonna have great references , I can tell already . professor c: It 's always good to have references , especially when reviewers read it or or one of the authors and , feel they 'll " You 're OK , you 've r You cited me . Well , he did echo cancellation and he did some fancier things like , training different network on different reverberation conditions and then trying to find the best one , but . professor c: The oth the other thing , that Dave was talking about earlier was , multiple mike things , where they 're all distant . So , there 's there 's all this work on arrays , but the other thing is , what can we do that 's cleverer that can take some advantage of only two mikes , particularly if there 's an obstruction between them , as we as we have over there . It 's part of why you have such good directionality with , with two ears phd b: professor c: So that Yeah , the the head , in the way , is really that 's what it 's for . It 's basically , phd a: That 's what the head 's for ? To separate the ears ? professor c: Yeah , it 's to separate the ears . professor c: Yeah ? phd a: I think th that may be due to the fact that Adam ran out of digits , and didn't have time to regenerate any . professor c: Oh ! Oh ! I guess it 's Well there 's no real reason to write our names on here then , phd a: Yeah , if you want to put your credit card numbers and , professor c: is there ? grad e: Oh , no ? professor c: Or do did any do we need the names for the other stuff , phd a: yeah , I do need your names and and the time , and all that , professor c: or ? Oh , OK

The team agreed that a heuristic of around 250 milliseconds would be effective in detecting the end of an utterance, although this would increase the processing time for utterance recognition. The professor informed the group that the current neural network utilized a sigmoid with a weighted sum as a low-level detector, trained using gradient descent. He suggested further exploration of this topic on Friday. Speaker C's use of an HMM-based detector with Gaussian mixtures has resulted in pre-segmentations that aid in transcription. In the construction "Where is X?", the ambiguity between location and path could be addressed through either semantic coding or contextual determination. The former approach would require creating different constructions for slight pragmatic variations, while the latter could involve instantiating belief-net probabilities in the lexicon.

Question: What were the Project Manager's thoughts on reducing button sizes, discussing finance, basic functions, and button design, as well as the call button suggested by the User Interface? Article: Okay the agenda we're gonna do an opening and then I'll talk about the minutes from the last meeting , what we d discussed , then we'll have the prototype presentation and a look at the evaluation criteria . So , starting off with the last the last one , oh I don't have it here , but we talked about energy , we're gonna use a kinetic battery , we want to use a simple chip , because we're not gonna need a a shuffle , we're gonna need a scroll , we're choosing a latex case w in fruity colours that's curved and we're using push buttons with a supplement of an on-screen menu . user interface: Right , do you wanna start ? industrial designer: Right , well we made three different prototypes and I guess we'll start with with this one . it's you hold it sort of either like like this in your left hand or you switch it over and it's easily adaptable to either hand . You can push the buttons with your thumb like a mobile phone , or you can push them with your index finger of your other hand , or even there's a whole variety , you can hold it like this and press it with your same index finger . We have our up and down buttons , which are also gonna be our channel selectors , and we have our little menu button here . If you push if you're just pushing these normally , they're the menu buttons , if the volume buttons rather . If we press select three times , the menu with the other features and pro possibly also with your T_V_ channel choices shows up , and you have your five presets down here . industrial designer: or shall I present the Martian ? user interface: Okay , project manager: The little lightning bolt in it , very cute . user interface: What We call that one the rhombus , marketing: I could project manager: The v the rhombus rhombus ? user interface: the rhombus . user interface: this one is known as the potato , it's industrial designer: user interface: it's a marketing: user interface: how can I present it ? It's an ergonomic shape , so it it fits in your hand nicely . the red ones are for changing channels , channel up and channel down and that's moves between your favourite channels that you've selected . this middle button here brings up the on-screen menu and when you're working in the on-screen menu you use the other four buttons to navigate around the menu system and the middle button to select and that's basically it , that's the potato . project manager: on , off ? user interface: that would be one of your channels , basically , project manager: Okay . user interface: so like channel zero would be t to switch switch the machine off , project manager: Yeah we turn it off . marketing: Could the middle button of the on-screen menu function as a power button ? user interface: not really , industrial designer: user interface: it would make it hard to turn the machine off , to turn your T_V_ off . project manager: industrial designer: And then you have on the sides to make it a little bit more three-dimensional , you have your channel changing , volume changing buttons and your menu button right here in the middle . So , that's for your consideration as well , plus it's an interesting talking point to have standing up . industrial designer: We figured it could stand up like this on your table , if you wanted it to , if I made the bot the bottom flat . marketing: Sorry , what's the yellow one in the middle , industrial designer: the menu select button . basically , in terms of making decisions , what we'd need to do is first of all decide on a form which of the three different shapes we want , then decide what kind of button layout we want , how many buttons , and then to choose what colours we want to make the buttons and if we wanna put any text on the device , like label on the buttons or put a brand name or or a logo on it or whatever . industrial designer: We were we were thinking that normally we'd go for fruity colours , but maybe we're also thinking that your sort of middle aged man , for an example customer , might not want a fruity coloured remote , so m maybe we'd have one version that's a bit toned down , project manager: 'kay . Yeah , something still a little bright to make it hard to lose , but user interface: Would Yeah , but we don't want it to look like a kids' toy . I don't know if you picked up your email , but the f the feature that we considered for it not getting lost . Well we were we were talking about that a little bit when we got that email and we think that each of these are so distinctive , that it it's not just like another piece of technology around your house . industrial designer: So we're we're not thinking that it's gonna be as critical to have the loss marketing: But if it's like under covers or like in a couch you still can't see it . project manager: It's really Would it be very difficult to just have an external device that like I dunno , you tape to your to your T_V_ that when you press it you ha a little light beep goes off ? Do you think that would be conceptually possible ? industrial designer: I think user interface: I think it would be difficult technologically , project manager: user interface: because if your if your remote's lost it's probably under the settee and in that case you can't you can't send an infrared sing signal to it to find it , project manager: . user interface: s so it's I'm not quite sure how it would work project manager: That's true , 'kay . user interface: and then I wonder if it's if it's more just a gimmick then anything else . ho how many times do you really , seriously lose your remote control and would would a device like that actually help you to find it ? industrial designer: There might be something that you can do in the circuit board and the chip to make it make a noise or something , but it would take a lot more development than we have this afternoon . Okay 'cause well , the designs are very bright , so you're right , they're gonna stick out , but industrial designer: So d do people have a preference as far as feel and functionality ? . marketing: I feel like this is simil or it's sort of what already exists so if we're trying to think of something sort of like new and fun , even though this is like what you're init I'm initially drawn to , just 'cause it's like comfortable and like not different . I sort of like this one , like I I don't know why , it just it's like small but still sort of like cute looking , I dunno . But I also like the b the side buttons on that one , like I think that's kind of neat . marketing: But I dunno how much any of this has to do with the fashionable , sort of cool looking thing that we also need to focus on . project manager: Could we maybe have like an extra button on the top for on off ? So then w we wouldn't have to have like a dual function ? industrial designer: yeah , user interface: Yeah , it's possible , yeah , yeah . industrial designer: project manager: why don't we do a product evaluation using your criteria , if you've developed some ? marketing: Well do we w like I think we're supposed to have one that we do it for . marketing: That was industrial designer: So where marketing: I was a little vague on what exactly I'm supposed to do , but let me I have to like write something on the whiteboard , so . Do you need this industrial designer: project manager: or just write on the white board ? marketing: No , I actually don't have like a PowerPointy thing , project manager: Okay . project manager: It's kind of like like a joystick kind of thing , industrial designer: Ooh . project manager: Oh it does , industrial designer: project manager: it's kind of like industrial designer: user interface: It's like a deformed foot , I dunno . project manager: There it could have a stem like that , 'cause I do l kind of like the stem . industrial designer: is that where people are leaning then , the potato ? I like the idea of the project manager: I think I'm leaning towards the potato . in that like i withing menus there are submenus , and so how do you get back to the main menu ? industrial designer: . industrial designer: Well that on the iPod , for example , you just every time you wanna go back you hit the menu button again and it brings you back one level . project manager: But that has a menu button separate from a select button , whereas if this one's both the menu and the select button ? user interface: Yeah . user interface: This is , it's the up and down buttons are used for scrolling up and down for a list of choices . industrial designer: maybe it can be one of those , if you press down and hold for two seconds , then it brings you back one level or something . Well , as long as we have that in mind as we're designing it still , 'kay . marketing: Okay , so which one are we sort of roughly looking at to address whether or not it meets our s necessities , the yellowy one is that industrial designer: The potato ? Are we leaning towards the potato ? user interface: Potato . marketing: So basically what we need to do is some of the things that we've talked about before we need to make sure that that remote actually does conform to the things that we said it was going to . marketing: So what we sort of wanna do is that we each need to separately rank each of the following things and then I'll tabulate an average just to make sure that it does meet that . marketing: So we'll just go through them one at a time and we'll just go around and each of you can tell me on a scale of one to seven with one being really extremely true and seven being not true at all , or false , if the remote that we've created conforms to the following criteria . So like in my opinion the for now at least , the yellow one is probably somewhere in the middle so I'm gonna say it's like a three . marketing: What does each of you project manager: I I kind of think it's it's unique enough that I'd give it a one or a two . Alright , and same sort of scale for functionality , is it functional ? I think it's extremely functional , I'm gonna give it a one . marketing: One ? user interface: I think it's it's functional , it's also pretty basic , so I'll give it a two . I think it'll get everything done , I think it might be a little confusing at first , I don't know if that's gonna be a later one . Well there's some other ones , I will address that , project manager: Okay , then I'm gonna give it a two . Not really , not so much , 'cause we we don't have the L_C_D_ screen , we don't have fancy chip . Other than what it looks like , I dunno if it's really project manager: Well , the kinetic battery . But it project manager: But they'll notice it after like a year , marketing: but we know it's there . marketing: And if it's made of like latex , that whole idea , that's pretty cool . 'Cause it we could've picked a lot of features that would've made it really industrial designer: Yeah . I I would say that it's Yeah , like fancy versus creative it's it's different . Everyone else ? user interface: I'd say it's technologically it's not it's not unique , it's it's just it is just pushbuttons , so I I'd give it a four . marketing: Next , is it easy to use ? Just so you know , easy to learn will be separate , project manager: 'kay . we next wanna see if it has a spongy quality industrial designer: user interface: marketing: and if indeed it's made of latex or rubber I it's spongy all the way . user interface: Yeah marketing: Iain , what do you give it ? user interface: I'd I'd give it a one . marketing: Alright and the next is , does it integrate some notion of fruits and vegetables ? industrial designer: user interface: . marketing: Well , is it gonna be yellow ? industrial designer: It it might be , 'cause that's our corporate colour , isn't it ? project manager: That's right , yeah , corporate colour , we didn't keep that in user interface: Yeah . project manager: if we I know it would make it a little less c a little more confusing , but if we had all the buttons in black , and a design in and the outside in yellow , that'd be our corporate one and we could also have alternative colours , one a more conservative one , one that's more fruity . user interface: Yeah , project manager: and can we have like an R_R_ inscribed on the bottom or something ? industrial designer: If we had a yellow Sure . industrial designer: So marketing: Alright , so I think it it's industrial designer: it was inspired by the potato , so I think it's pretty fruity . industrial designer: That's a much more trendy than a potato marketing: What are what's everyone's numbers ? industrial designer: one . industrial designer: marketing: Alright , and does the design match the appropriate behaviour ? Remember earlier we discussed that people don't use a lot of buttons , that they use the channel flipping and the volume the most . I think we really took that into account a lot , so I'm gonna give it a one . marketing: Okay , also we talked earlier about R_S_I_ and wanting to prevent any sort of like Carpal Tunnely kind of thing . Do we think that the latex sort of grip appropriately takes that into account ? I think I'll give it a two , 'cause I almost feel like no matter what you do , something is gonna happen . project manager: And if it's repetitive movement it is gonna be only four buttons that you're constantly pushing , but marketing: worth the risk , I think . project manager: I like how it fits in the hand though so I I'd go with a two . Because older people that aren't used to like texting with the thumb might find it a bit at first , project manager: . I just got mine , I still haven't read the instruction book and I'm doing okay , so project manager: . industrial designer: The menu system and the the fact that multiple buttons are used for different things might be a bit confusing , but I think if it's one it's one of those things that it might take you five minutes to figure out , but you'll have it afterwards . user interface: I think it it's probably a little harder then most remotes to learn , because you have to you have to use the menu system and you have to tell it what your favourite channels are industrial designer: Oh , good point . user interface: once you've , yeah once you'd learned how to use it , I think it is a lot easier . It's a pretty high learning curve , it'll be easy once you've done it , but industrial designer: user interface: Yeah . Alright , also earlier we had something about losing it and so now we're not addressing that at all , so project manager: We we industrial designer: project manager: I think we can kind of say we addressed it with colour , but marketing: Okay , so in terms of not losing it , do you think that on a scale of one to seven , how easy or hard is it to lose ? I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a four , 'cause I think that you can still if it's in between somewhere where you can't see it , you're kind of not gonna find it , project manager: industrial designer: I'd say I'd give it a three , I guess it depends on how tidy you are normally . user interface: I'll give it a five 'cause i it would be easy to lose something like that , yeah . marketing: Alright , we also said simplicity , how w how well does it address just being simple ? industrial designer: Simple to use or simple in design ? Do you know ? marketing: I think overall , 'cause we had said before our two main things were simplicity and fashion , industrial designer: marketing: so those are the next two things we're gonna look at . marketing: it like wants to be simple but it's not like totally totally simple , so I'm gonna give it a two . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: It's hot , it's a mango , come on . marketing: how fashionable can you make a remote ? I think it's bringing technology and fashion together real really well . user interface: industrial designer: I don't think it's quite as fashionable as my robot remote project manager: I do like the little Martian one . marketing: And does it meet our like demographic need sort of for international appeal , that whole thing ? Just that it would se serve our audience . marketing: Alright , did anyone have any other features that they think were important that we didn't talk about ? project manager: Well we didn't we didn't address the fact that it does need to b have a corporate logo , so let's let's make sure we keep that in mind that we ha that one of our colours concepts is corporate and has an R_R_ on it . marketing: And so we're gonna do that , so it will address it , project manager: I have an Excel sheet that we're actually gonna calculate the cost , so let me exit out of this first . marketing: Well don't we need plastic , and industrial designer: No , we we the plastic is the plastic for the inside is assumed . project manager: The wood ? industrial designer: Oh , I guess it was rubber rather than latex . marketing: Do we have more than one special colour ? project manager: Yeah , we're using we're gonna need at least two special colours . marketing: Well , but we know that we're having at least three colours , project manager: So let's y say three . marketing: so industrial designer: Well , are we talking about on each colour combination or are we , you know , we'll like we'll have yellow and black . That I thi industrial designer: Or or is white and black , then two more or project manager: I thought that would be under yours . project manager: Maybe the R_R_ will be in colour as well , industrial designer: Alright . Oh , we'll do we wa Are the buttons in special colour , special f I didn't get information on project manager: Oh , marketing: Oh wait . So the case material will just have one colour , right , industrial designer: Well , project manager: but then the buttons will be in special colours ? industrial designer: does it marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: but if we're making multiple varieties of this is where I'm getting confused . project manager: Okay , so each unit will only have one colour on their industrial designer: Alright , and each button s project manager: but the case is could have up to thr the buttons could ea could be up to three colours , 'cause that how it's designed there . project manager: Special form ? They're all kind of just push button , industrial designer: No , project manager: right ? industrial designer: I think they're fine . project manager: Special material ? industrial designer: Material , we want them rubber as well probably , yeah . Oh do I have to do it per button , do I ? industrial designer: No , I don't think so . project manager: Yeah , what can we reduce ? industrial designer: Okay , let's have our buttons all be one colour . Okay , it's the kinetic battery that's kind of expensive , but we have a simple chip , single curve , marketing: project manager: case material is rubber and it's a special colour , industrial designer: Yeah . How did it get more expensive , what did you just change ? project manager: What ? industrial designer: It was it was thirteen and now it's fifteen . marketing: We industrial designer: user interface: What was our target price again ? project manager: Twelve point five . Satisfaction with for example the room for creativity , leadership , teamwork , the means , any new ideas found . So I guess what we're gonna talk about here is just evaluating how we created this project , the information we got on the news , how we used it , if we were able to , you know , use our creativity with the information , how how well I guess I led it , the how well we worked together as a team , the digital pens , the whiteboard . user interface: in that we've achieved almost all of the design goals that we've set industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: I think we could've done even better with a little bit more information , project manager: industrial designer: like what's a single-curved case , how many colours , what do colours count project manager: industrial designer: things , but given given what we had I think that we did we did really well . marketing: Yeah , if I'd had more market research on the fruits and vegetables , maybe we could've taken that into account . industrial designer: Do you think we could user interface: marketing: No , I thought the pen was a little distracting for me personally , like its heaviness , and like just being so conscious of like turning the pages , I dunno . marketing: That was the last one , like I chose not to do a PowerPoint 'cause I didn't think it made sense to , so I liked that I had the option to do that and just to take my own notes and that whole sort of thing . marketing: project manager: I don't think anybody dominated it , which I thought was really good , like each of us was able to like each of you had your information and I I tried to facilitate it without like taking over , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: industrial designer: Should we have that somewhere on the packaging ? I have a little R_R_ . project manager: I know , industrial designer: project manager: let's think of it like a little jingle . industrial designer: marketing: I like the R_R_ , that's gonna be etched in . Hopefully not with just my fingernail at some point but it's quite a useful little gadget . What did we find for new ideas ? project manager: new ideas found ? industrial designer: People should really base their remotes on fruits and vegetables . user interface: industrial designer: That was marketing: Yeah , I didn't even know they existed . industrial designer: I I knew you can get watches that had them , like really quite expensive watches that just never need a battery , 'cause you're always moving your wrist . so , this is the great product kids , I think we've created something really interesting and that we have a market for it , especially if we can produce it at twelve point three industrial designer: Yeah . Make sure in your questionnaire to put down criticisms of both the process and the the final results and . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: If we could choose more than one , that would be my second choice . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: I'm afraid I would user interface: That's cool . industrial designer: It started because I wanted to have it as st as a stem user interface: Break the stem off . industrial designer: Is it started as a pear , but then it started looking more and more like a Martian project manager: Oh industrial designer: when I put the user interface: marketing: Kind of looks like a penguin , like with no eye . user interface: industrial designer: So are are project manager: user interface: That was bound to happen.$ marketing: Oh , sad . Anything else to say ? marketing: Nothing will come up until after our meeting's supposed to be over , project manager: Alright . project manager: I got more master classes , anybody else wanna like take a master's class ? industrial designer: It's really funny that you got spam in your work emails . marketing: industrial designer: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: marketing: No the first one that you sent like I didn't realise that it was a joke and I was like why did she send this to us ? project manager: Oh industrial designer: marketing: It's very it's very work relevant , project manager: It is . project manager: Yes definitely industrial designer: Let's see , project manager: I'm very sad that I didn't get any links to the corporate website . industrial designer: what did I get through the corporate website ? It's just inspiration about circuit boards . project manager: I love Excel , marketing: Here , like , basically project manager: it's one of my favourite programs . marketing: it's like inspiration , basically I'm gonna give you two sentences on fashion and that kind of thing , see . industrial designer: Yeah , my inspiration from from last time is the in interior of a remote control being taken apart bit by bit , talking about circuit boards . industrial designer: Now I have all about circuits and chips and transponders and I wrote it all down , because I thought it would be relevant , like all the different parts of the inside of a remote control , but then they're like , you don't actually need this you just need to talk about the case . marketing: That's like mine it was like , would you prefer an L_C_D_ screen or a multifunction remote control ? And then it didn't have like any kind of table , like awesome , I'm glad they asked that question and didn't report the result . industrial designer: and user interface: We didn't we didn't use the whiteboard that much . project manager: Although I don't see how we could have very l at least for me user interface: industrial designer: I yeah . If I'd gotten pictures of the different parts of the case , the different looks of the case , I would have probably drawn them up , project manager: . industrial designer: but marketing: 'Cause we weren't like voting on anything and I think usually , like whiteboards are good , you know like crossing out ideas , or like if we had had like a brainstorming period . industrial designer: Yeah , we could've put our brainstorming stuff up there rather than just talking about it , project manager: project manager: And with and with the PowerPoint that we can all look at , like you can do all those things pretty much on PowerPoint industrial designer: I think if you had a larger group marketing: Get crazy . marketing: And these might've made us more willing to like take notes than to like write up them here , project manager: . industrial designer: We if we were all gonna stay in here all the time , then having the notes up on the whiteboard would've been alright , project manager: project manager: Now when you were creating your prototypes here , did you work together or did you like do separate projects ? user interface: we we worked together , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: but we were making like we sort of made different shapes and then discussed how the how the buttons might work , project manager: industrial designer: So it was a bit of both really , we just kind of started out by each taking a colour of clay and just fooling around with it and I came up with that rhombus shape project manager: industrial designer: and he came up with the sort of potatoey , mangoey shape , and then just went from there really . user interface: I think we did well in first of all giving our meetings the time , project manager: It's kinda fun . user interface: and second we actually we we did a good job of making firm decisions at the ends of the meetings . user interface: I know what happens sometimes is that you tend to sort of have meetings and then people sorta drift away without anything actually really being decided . user interface: But I think here we got we got clear and and decisive decisive points at the end of the meetings , so that we we knew where to go on from there . industrial designer: Yeah , I was quite worried at the end of the last meeting that we weren't getting we didn't really have enough information to make firm decisions , project manager: I'm not usually a very decisive person , so it helped to have people say this needs to be done in five minutes . project manager: I found that we did we could have used another five or ten minutes sometimes in the meetings . project manager: Yeah I think the last time we had a lot of information , but at the same time not quite enough , industrial designer: Yeah , project manager: you know what , industrial designer: Yeah . And I I felt the first two meetings , that I was coming in with no information , project manager: . industrial designer: and not sort of made me really like , ooh I don't know , throwing together PowerPoint out of no no information and then last time it was like the opposite . project manager: It was interesting what came out like later , like as I was doing the when I was doing the breakdown on the agenda that they gave me , that more points came out from your presentation even . I'm a little I am a little disappointed that we didn't do a something for losing the remote , because that was kind of a big point . that was something like in order to talk about that we would've had to have actual knowledge about circuit boards and things like project manager: About yeah . marketing: Well the problem was , even when we just were creating from the Excel file , there wasn't like a option to select to somehow have it included , project manager: marketing: There was no way for us to have project manager: Considered the re industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Well marketing: project manager: it's interesting that they industrial designer: I think we really got into it , I got into it as the day went on and I got really like , ooh I'm designing a remote control , I dunno if that's just me , project manager: - , yeah . industrial designer: but project manager: It was interesting though that they put that fifty percent of people say they have frustration with losing their remote and yet they didn't provide us with information to we weren't provided with information to discuss that . project manager: I know that like people people have like things they can put on their keys that you press it and it'll beep , but I but I'm sure that would require some kind of technology industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: that I just don't know what it is , but industrial designer: I think there are some of those like infomercial remotes that have things so you won't lose them . we were talking about it and like i in my household at least , there's only about two places that the remote is ever project manager: . industrial designer: 'cause there's only one T_V_ and there's only like three chairs . marketing: That's like saying you're never gonna lose your keys , and I always do , anyway . marketing: like you just will forget that or you like put it down somewhere that like made sense and then not remember , project manager: . project manager: It d yeah , it depends on how organised you are personally , but industrial designer: Yeah , or like I guess what the setup of the house is too . industrial designer: But , I am notorious for losing my keys , project manager: industrial designer: I just I guess I've just never lost the remote . industrial designer: You you're taking stuff from a bag and putting them in the refrigerator and then go back to my room . marketing: I always do that , leaving it in my coat , and then like using a different coat . industrial designer: But I guess it's 'cause we don't carry remotes around that much . Maybe with our little robot one we could've had him have a robot , alien , pear , whatever he is , have a little voice like , I am located marketing: industrial designer: Oh a G_P_S_ system , internal G_P_S_ . project manager: Or or like some crazy like electro-magnet , that you push it and it'll go zoom to the T_V_ and stick there . user interface: project manager: industrial designer: Just if you like you'd have a remote for your remote , that'll . project manager: Well , but if you could attach them to the T_V_ , then you can . I decided to you know how I sent you the email saying that PowerPoint minutes will be complimentary , rather than like repeating them . project manager: Just gonna make I'm making full minutes , so that it'll include all of the agenda and all that . project manager: But I didn't have like information to sloth through either , so industrial designer: Yeah , I guess How much of your PowerPoint was already done for you , every meeting . Yeah , I didn't even think about adding slides , 'cause I would just get slides with titles on them project manager: . project manager: Well , the thing was they would provide y an agenda with s like several points , but it wouldn't have a slide for each point . project manager: I know personally when I do PowerPoint , that's what I do and so I had it once , even if it was just like the title of it , like the three presentations , and I would do your three . marketing: You have you have to have the slogan on it or can it just be like project manager: The slogan on it ? industrial designer: No , no , definitely not . industrial designer: No , I don't think we need to user interface: project manager: I think we just need the the R_R_ , industrial designer: I think the R_ and R_ , especially if the yellow and black one . project manager: Yeah , I was just kinda going by the web page , 'cause they didn't give me any clear , like yellow , grey , or . marketing: project manager: Wasn't it interesting that I thought it was interesting that our market marketing expert did not agree with the marketing marketing: Yes . project manager: the marketing choices , industrial designer: user interface: project manager: you know , like industrial designer: marketing: I will project manager: that was a bit of a conflict . marketing: I just feel like if you're really doing like a a really big market evaluation , you wouldn't just have like one set of source , industrial designer: marketing: it's kind of an they were so not backed up , it would just be a sentence like we did a survey , this is what people said . industrial designer: I guess it i it sort of a grey , isn't it ? Yellow and grey , but then the slogan's in blue <doc-sep>I'll again be the secretary and make minutes , take minutes , and it will be three presentations , just like the last meeting . , before we begin it , I want to say I've I've put the minutes of the second meeting in the shared folder , but they're still not quite okay . It it still some technical difficulties so the the first part of the minutes are very hard to read , because there are two documents that were layered over each other . project manager: But , from now on I won't use my pen anymore , so will be p just ordinary keyboard . industrial designer: Okay , when we talk about components design , it's really about the material and the and really the stuff we build the remote controls of . We have to choose th these wisely and it could affect a kind of grow of in in buying the remote controls . the properties of the case , it has to be solid in hard material like hard plastic with soft rubber for falling and and yeah , it feels good in your hand . they're telling me that when we build a remote control of of plastic or rubber , the buttons have to be rubber too . I when we use a rubbled a doubled curved case , we must use a rubber push-buttons to the the rubber double-curved case is a is a t three-dimensional curve in the in the design , which is necessary when we want to be trendy . , the basic battery , which I thi prefer because of its its non non-depending of of of here you have to have a hand yeah , kinetic energy . Also in this one , like in the watches , but a remote control can lie on a table for a day , and then you push a button and so you don't have to walk with it all the all the time . marketing: project manager: industrial designer: also the case material , I think that plastic is the is the best with rubber , because wood or titanium would also be a bit weird . , the base station is also off the shelf , all the materials and the components are just available in in our factory . , it's all off the shelf and even the speaker and the wireless retriever are all available in our company . Could be something special to our remote control , and it's possible , but it only cost a bit more , but maybe it can be within the limits of twenty five Euros . industrial designer: I th I got an email with some examples and it these were were the most trendiest one . user interface: industrial designer: You see a covers , which can be project manager: What are those , t tooth brushes , or so user interface: industrial designer: I don't know . marketing: project manager: But it's actually kind of user interface: I project manager: well , it resembles the design I had in mind for this proj industrial designer: Yes . industrial designer: Yes , maybe we can bri bring a couple of couple of types of project manager: And we can we can steal their ideas . industrial designer: Maybe we can bring a whole line with with a huge variety of project manager: Well , it's a possibility , too . industrial designer: Like maybe radios and television also in this in this in the same style , but project manager: industrial designer: Yes , because we have to we have to we have to bring the logo and all the stuff back into it . marketing: user interface: I was thinking about just the basic functions and I got project manager: Oh , we decided upon that in the last meeting . Didn't we ? user interface: Yeah , but but then wh I don't know when there are new user requirements . Well , tha I didn't receive any new requirements or somethi user interface: I ha I ha I have the I have project manager: Just user interface: nothing . user interface: I dunno if they're maybe a little bit more , but project manager: Well we maybe we can think of that later . project manager: these are the ones you already summed up in the user interface: Yeah , I I well , I pointed them out here , just to make it a little bit easier . , I was also looking for what you said , for I got an email about L_C_D_ in in in front of the remote control . I don't know if that's a good idea , or maybe it's a little bit too much for twelve and a half . I don't know what kind of information it would user interface: Yeah , I don't know . marketing: Then you project manager: user interface: a little too A little bit marketing: and then you've got a flag s Very big R_C_ . user interface: It's it's just the base things we already discussed that the no V_C_R_ or that kind of marketing: No . And I thinked of the button sizes and I'm not sure if they have to be big or just small industrial designer: But you're the expert . user interface: Well , I'm not a e I'm the expert for user-friendly , but not for trendiness . user interface: Maybe it marketing: Well , if you save Perhaps s tiny buttons aren't user-friendly , then we wouldn't im implement that of course . project manager: user interface: Well industrial designer: marketing: user interface: okay , that's your point . marketing: user interface: Yeah , I've nothing to s industrial designer: project manager: Well , w when we only use basic functions , we have the possibility to make the buttons larger . user interface: I thought so , but maybe with the project manager: Well , I think we already agreed upon the fact that the the the skip buttons and the cha and the volume buttons , th th those two have yeah , they have to be large . project manager: th th the the two two basic buttons , you know , the to skip channels and to user interface: Large ? Yeah . project manager: I think yeah , I don't know why , but I think that is that's t trendy too , user interface: Most the most used buttons . marketing: Those are probably the the th project manager: because that's the mo it it you know , it's acc acc accentu , how do you say it ? It puts an extra accent on the the on the simplicity of our remotes to j to make these two most basic functions extra big , like t marketing: Yes . I've done some investigation , and well I got some information from fashion watchers from Paris and Milan . And the third point there in this order if of importance , the third point , is a high ease of use . And , well , for the idea , I've put some trends for the market of elderly people . user interface: marketing: The younger market likes Well , the themes of of this year are surprisingly fruits and vegetables and spongy material . industrial designer: user interface: industrial designer: marketing: I found this image , which is Well , it symbolises the idea of fruits and vegetables . But with a little bit of fancy project manager: Well maybe c then we have to do something with Sponge Bob then . I got some ideas user interface: marketing: well , yeah , pictures isn't really good word , but industrial designer: marketing: some symbols of fruits or vegetables maybe . marketing: And , the docking st industrial designer: marketing: I think the spongy material is is very irritating for the remote control itself . But to industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , the To implement some spongy thing , maybe we can do it in the in the docking station . And , we could bring one line with a dark colour to p yeah industrial designer: marketing: v how do you say ? project manager: For diversity or something . marketing: Yeah , also a bit for elderly people who are a little bit crazy and want maybe want a little younger design but still the dark colour . user interface: Well , how industrial designer: marketing: it it it reaches a different market , but it it it doesn't cost really much effort to b to bring like a black R_C_ on the market or whatever . user interface: But how do we use fruits and vegetables in Christ's sake with remote control ? industrial designer: project manager: No , but I I I think that our design already resembles so a piece of fruit . marketing: Yeah , there's there's always a user interface: make it a banana ? project manager: It's like a pear or something . I think this part of the R_C_ well the upper the upper part or whatever is is not not used with buttons , I guess . project manager: No , I don't think you have to do it like industrial designer: user interface: marketing: So you you can put some fruity things project manager: Yeah , but it that doesn't have to remind you , you know , like explicitly of s our f of a of a specific piece of fruit , but just , you know , like the the the the round curves . project manager: And so y I I think this y it already sem resembles something like a pear to me or something . marketing: Especially i user interface: Yeah , but th yeah , but that marketing: Yeah , yeah . project manager: You do get the idea , eh ? The fruity kind of round user interface: Yeah project manager: 'Kay . marketing: A and we could use one of these for the w what is it ? project manager: Yeah , yeah , I don't know . user interface: But d don't we need a creative artist or something like that to m make it to feel like a a a a vegetable or fruit ? industrial designer: project manager: Yeah , yeah . marketing: And , maybe , yeah , a b a banana is is n not easy for a remote control , but m yeah . project manager: No , but I think it's it's already what we were were up to . project manager: it's it doesn't have to resemble what I already said , a specific piece of fruit , but just , you know , like a fruity thing going on . user interface: marketing: B but that's great , and and and what I was project manager: And , but I do like the marketing: what what I was saying , the catchy colours project manager: yeah , I do like the f to the idea of making a a y , a catchy colour design and a d because I do I think a dark colour would be nice too . user interface: But , we we have to There have to be the the the the firm colours , our own colours has to be in it . Pictures was a was a bad word , but project manager: Okay , but what are the This is yellow . user interface: A yellow do marketing: If this is our docking station , we can make our logo over here . project manager: Yeah , on n on the bottom of the remote you can do marketing: Well , the button button over here or whatever , user interface: Okay , yeah . project manager: Okay , you can you open the conceptual design presentation ? marketing: Conceptual design , yes . project manager: but I don't think it's there , yeah , do we want to use an L_C_D_ display , for example ? marketing: Well , it's nice , of course . industrial designer: Maybe maybe we can make a T_V_ guide on it , for the channel you're on . marketing: project manager: Yeah , but it's so marketing: Yeah , but it should be li like this big , and I don't think industrial designer: No , no , only the T_V_ channel with the with with four programmes . marketing: Yes sure , but it it has to to show an entire title of a programme or at least a q a quite quite large part of it and then you get a very large L_C_D_ screen , because industrial designer: Yes , it can On your No , on your mobile phone you can y you can read text also . project manager: And it's also not I don't th even think it it looks s like sexy or something , user interface: Well well what would you display on it then ? project manager: it's industrial designer: programme information or or or or g or a guide marketing: Programme information . user interface: But is it isn't that a already on T_V_ , a lot of new T_V_s ? marketing: But industrial designer: on t on teletext , yes . marketing: Well a lot a lot of T_V_s indeed show when you zap to a industrial designer: But project manager: But you're already watching the T_V_ , you're not gonna watch your remote control . marketing: But then we also w need to bring out a line of T_V_s which we were planning to , user interface: Yeah , project manager: user interface: and we also have to yeah . Because the T_V_ has to send information back to the R_C_ , and I don't know if that's possible . project manager: marketing: Yes , yes , o of course it's possible , user interface: marketing: but you gotta implement it in the T_V_s , and I don't think everyone's gonna buy a Real Reaction T_V_ within a month after the release of our remote control . industrial designer: project manager: I really understand you want to make your job more exciting by putting an L_C_D_ in it , user interface: And I also industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: but I I really don't think it's a good n goo because it also doesn't stroke with we wanted c When we talk about the materials , it's a good idea to use these plastic materials with soft rubber stuff on it . It was our idea , you know , to give it a more sturdy look and that you ca like you can throw with it . project manager: But I don't think a L_C_D_ display fits in that image . marketing: That's true , that's true , it breaks f yeah , it it it's not very solid , it's frag fragile . You could make it , but it's just it it doesn't I don't think it it's coherent with the design we're after . user interface: industrial designer: project manager: If we wanna user interface: Yeah , I dunno . industrial designer: project manager: And I've read somewhere that I've got some kind of veto veto rights . project manager: But did we skip the Yeah , you could do marketing: project manager: m but what what i so what i but do you think we should user interface: Yeah , I don't know . , I i if it's it's a simple p project manager: We're not even sure what what information we want to display on it . So user interface: No , that that's right , industrial designer: No user interface: and I also have to think about new functions , maybe buttons or something like that to control it . Kind of L_C_D_ or something or industrial designer: Y yes , you can use buttons w that are already on the remote control for double functions . user interface: But how does it display then ? W when I go to the second channel , what what does it show me ? industrial designer: then you push a button . user interface: About that programme ? industrial designer: But but yeah , what he said was right , about the televisions , they have to be customised to the project manager: Nah , that's not gonna work . industrial designer: But maybe in future it will be a giant hit , and when you are the first marketing: No . industrial designer: you have the biggest project manager: Do you know th like the the bigger rem universal remotes , they have d L_C_D_ displays , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yes , you can put a little L_C_D_ display on it with with lots of information . project manager: But it just it j it doesn't doesn't match with the our whole basic concept . But whe but when you put a a a transparent plastic screen on top of it , it i it isn't vulnerable . That's maybe not the most important , industrial designer: You can throw with it and project manager: but it's just user interface: Is it fashion ? project manager: I don't think so . industrial designer: When when you put maybe a colour L_C_D_ t screen on it , it's very special and very trendy to have a remote control from user interface: I don't know . project manager: Yeah , well do you ha do you have to You haven't looked after the trendiness of L_C_D_ displays , have you ? marketing: No . industrial designer: user interface: Because our our motto is we put fashion marketing: Well , I think it's I think it's pretty trendy , to be honest , but I don't know if if if well , I'm coming back to the costs again , but I think we gotta build a b pretty cheap design to to stay within our limits . project manager: Yeah , but we're gonna if it marketing: did it say a price also for for monogramme L_C_D_ or coloured L_C_D_ ? user interface: Yeah , if you want to be trendy you have to be coloured . Coloured marketing: Yeah really , user interface: If you have black and white or something , or grey , that's marketing: if y if you c i project manager: Then then you better don't yeah , d marketing: I in in two thousand and four you can't put something on the market which is a monogramme . industrial designer: No , but it doesn't sa say anything about a colour or But , I alf I also got a possibility to put a scroll button on it . But project manager: I really don't feel the whole idea of an L_C_D_ display . I don't know how well how to with you guys , but I don't really feel it . We already we're user interface: It's too much maybe with with the L_C_D_ and the docking station and project manager: Yeah , we already have the the th th th base station gadgets , marketing: Yeah . project manager: and want and it , do it has to be a simple design , which sturdy , which soft industrial designer: Yes , but o on the marketing: W we've we've gotta find a balance , of course . project manager: I don't think I j , and really , I don't see how the the L_C_D_ display is gonna add anything , you know , on a design level . industrial designer: No , when y project manager: Y we want to it's simplicity , w you have two big buttons and you can do whatever you want with these two buttons , so you don't need an L_C_D_ . industrial designer: Yes , but but when you want to have something special project manager: Yeah , but we already have the docking station , which is industrial designer: Yes , but you had a picture of it from another company . industrial designer: project manager: but no , but it that's industrial designer: project manager: that's our that's our killer feature . marketing: Is that so ? Was it it wasn't just a prototype ? user interface: Well I industrial designer: Yes , he have a picture of it . project manager: but re we really have to cut this off , user interface: project manager: I re I know you I I I I I get the idea you really like it , you know , the the L_C_D_ thing , but I I think it's it's not a good idea , and we have already mentioned all the arguments . I don't , do you guys agre How do you guys think ? I d user interface: No , it's too much . project manager: I'm sorry , maybe you can do something if we are at your own place , or make it make it make it happen in your basement or something . industrial designer: Yes , maybe a bit of a cushion is project manager: Yeah yeah yeah , p Exactly . This is what it w Yeah , but it it was already what we're we're after , you know , to give it , you know , the soft touch in your hands marketing: Yeah , for the spongy feel . industrial designer: Maybe it marketing: industrial designer: but then we have to look that it w will not be too childish to see . And that's why I like the dark t col dark colour bit , you know , because it may be the design , it's maybe it is a bit of the marketing: Yeah . project manager: it's a bit nineties maybe , what we're what we're up to rat fun to this point . project manager: Yeah , that's that's true , but but it has to be a little big solid . user interface: But can we ge project manager: It mustn't be too , n you know , th too overwhelming , then when you put it on your just user interface: Can we combine it or something ? with yellow and black ? project manager: Yeah . marketing: Well , we can as as I industrial designer: But that's not really fruity . project manager: But marketing: But , i project manager: Okay , but what , what are other tef technical things we have to discuss ? user interface: project manager: industrial designer: fronts of the We can have different fronts of the project manager: Should we do that ? industrial designer: telephone . That's project manager: The materials you mentioned in your your personal preferences were all were quite okay . project manager: O o only only the last point your user interface: And tita titanium , is is is it a no ? industrial designer: Yes , project manager: no titanium's not not out of question , I guess . industrial designer: But also w Yes , b bu but when we use s soft project manager: But is it possible to use both the the plastic and so soft things and t p titanium , as well ? industrial designer: marketing: Sure . It will make a huge noise or break other stuff project manager: It will it will break other stuff w when it's plastic , as well . industrial designer: But also on the colours , the young project manager: Okay , think of the possibilities and make it in completely titanium . Well would it be more trendy ? More chic ? marketing: Yeah , I think it I think it does . industrial designer: Yes , but a titanium remote control , when you're watching T_V_ or your hands are a little bit sweaty , and the user interface: In trendy things . marketing: Yeah , o On the other hand , if you want to make fruit fruity stuff with user interface: Yeah . project manager: Yeah , but I I really like the idea of the the the plastic and the big kind of thing . project manager: But the question is i then it's , you know , is is it fits in our s philosophy to make it sturdy and simple and , know , like user interface: Yeah . Define project manager: When you make it titanium , it becomes more like some kind of gadget you actually don't need . And when it's big and plastic , it's like some fun stuff you can always have around . user interface: Isn't that titanium with a little bit of rubber ? industrial designer: Yes , it's w but it is plastic . industrial designer: Yes , w we can do that on the on the marketing: What ? user interface: Yeah , he is . 'Kay , that that's very with rubber , so it's very marketing: Oh , yeah . industrial designer: this is just a project manager: Oh , maybe th maybe this is an marketing: Yeah , I th I think that's difficult , because that's different material , and then you gotta have like two material lines of of of industrial designer: No , we c we can make it from the same kind of plastic . marketing: Yeah , if it's just a colour which you which you change then , I guess it's it's nice to have one of these . project manager: No , I do like the idea of maybe a t titanium kind type of body w and then with s plastic colouration around it . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: You know , like the the soft stuff , marketing: Yeah . , I I didn't got it project manager: But you can't make the plastic give the ti titanium look . But if you want to la yeah , last longer than two weeks or something like that , you can maybe marketing: Yeah . project manager: And and marketing: project manager: maybe we sh should we t I don't know if we should talk about , how how much time have we got left ? industrial designer: in a lot of other user interface: I don't know . user interface: What time does industrial designer: in a lot of other product categories like even in b in bags industry . , they began with t typical leather bags , but then they became stylish , with all all si all sort of colours , and w kind of fon of of fronts , like we can use on the telephone and it marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Like Eastpack began a revolution with it with all this kind of bags and and colours and and project manager: You putting in different colours . industrial designer: They have also a kind of roses on it , a and marketing: yeah , yeah . But , let's think about the bas industrial designer: Then we can always use the same design for a greater resemblance , but with new with new colours , new marketing: Yes . project manager: But wha th our basic idea y , you gonna we're probably gonna have like two type of materials , like the d d b the plastic enclosure and then the the pads that surround it . But , do w gonna gonna are we going to give it a two-tone colour look , like the the plastic mould is in in one colour and the s the cushion pads around it are in another colour ? Is that the idea ? Is that a good idea ? marketing: How do you mean ? Th th the base in a in another project manager: How many colours are we how many colours are we gonna we're f f user interface: The rubber . project manager: Like two-tone colour ? T industrial designer: There there are three components three components type . industrial designer: You have the buttons , the the case itself , and the rubber and th marketing: How the buttons yeah . project manager: I think maybe the case itself should be in one colour and then the rubber of the buttons , and the cushions as well should be in another colour . user interface: Or you just make one colour , maybe with a a z a kind of like a big wave or something like marketing: Yeah . project manager: Well , yeah , it's user interface: Not more than two colours I think . industrial designer: Yeah , or or when you use the buttons as black , it you can use two colours as well marketing: Yes , definitely . user interface: The funct yeah , I was I was thinking about th the st do we still want a joystick idea . user interface: The volume , teletext and project manager: And maybe want to access a a menu or something . marketing: Yeah , but that's that's I was thinking that's gotta be on the television . user interface: Yeah yeah yeah yeah , b project manager: That's just i the only button only user interface: Yeah , but wha what kind of menu ? project manager: You know , I user interface: Is isn't that different from every television ? project manager: No , I think most T_V_s have an a menu nowadays to access the screen settings . Yeah , if it's c if Yeah , I think it's okay to to add a menu button for user interface: project manager: But that that covers all the all the other settings . marketing: and if the T_V_ doesn't have a menu , then industrial designer: But then you have to put up and down and left and right marketing: Yeah . project manager: No , you can use the marketing: Yeah , you can put that on the two eight four and six or whatever . project manager: Th in that way we have like only the numbers , the power button , skip and volume , and then ten rem marketing: yeah . So project manager: Something important about a s , no , which sh should remind us of the remote itself , I guess . marketing: Are we gonna do something with the spongy thing there ? project manager: Just use I think the spongy thing already comes forward in the in the in the cushions , pads and things on the s side . project manager: And we will make it spongy and and and well , the fruity thing is just the shape should be fru i did I think this is kind of fruity , you know . Just round shapes with user interface: marketing: Yeah , it's kinda fruity , and with th with catchy colours w project manager: Yeah , but we're gonna have to we really have to think I think colours is very important , because it has to be flashy , but and but it d it doesn't have to be annoying , that when you , know , some things is just over the top , and when you have it on your table for more than two weeks , you it just gets annoying , because it's so big and flashy . project manager: it has to be some level of subtlety , but we have to still have to think of how we manage to to get to that . project manager: But we I think also we just so we have to do something with colour but also , I I think we have to keep the dark colour thing in mind . project manager: too much colour maybe m user interface: Too much colour , i it when you got it in a living room , it's too much maybe project manager: But our des design experts will work that out . It has to be project manager: Okay , well I think the meeting will be over within a minute . Well , you will read the minutes in the you can find them in the user interface: Oh , okay , yeah . You see a kinda prototype you can a little bit more industrial designer: I will make one in the next twenty minutes <doc-sep>Let's shall we all introduce ourselves ? marketing: Hi I'm Chiara , I'm the Marketing Expert . , would you like me to talk about my aims at the moment , or would you like me to just say my name and then we can talk about business later ? project manager: I think we'll get around to that , yeah . I forgot to s say I'm the Project Manager but I figured you all knew that already , industrial designer: user interface: project manager: so . And to do this , we have to there's certain things we have to consider about functional aspects and conceptual design of the thing . user interface: So you want us to draw it and then talk about it ? Or just draw it ? project manager: marketing: I think both . project manager: Does anyone know what they wanna draw ? industrial designer: user interface: I gotta think about it for a second like . Does it have to be functional , trendy and user friendly ? project manager: I don't think so . user interface: Yeah , it's industrial designer: project manager: 'S like playing Pictionary . project manager: So what characteristics do you like about your animal ? industrial designer: user interface: I like its tail . industrial designer: user interface: no , I think dolphins are really I dunno , they're smart and they they're cute and they like swimming and that's cool , like project manager: They're graceful . user interface: Yeah they're sleek industrial designer: user interface: and they look intelligent and I don't know , they're I guess it's the whole like binocular vision thing . He's a I dunno they're I think it's cool the the the interaction that or the th things that the reasons people seem to like you know you get ex you know people are sitting on the beach and p they're like oh look there's dolphins and it's kinda like but they're you know they jump around in the water and they're happy and they're mammals , but they swim . project manager: I dunno if the the industrial designer: I think the pen is running out of marketing: Well I had the cat as well , but I've got a spare one . I don't really know how the legs go , industrial designer: project manager: That's very good . I think they're very pretty and they go well with the environment , and I like the way they run and I used to do horse riding and they're just very sort of sturdy and nice animals . And I like the way they feel , sort of under under the hand , I think that's pretty much it . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: So I'm thinking we should design a remote control that's water resistant , strong and furry . So I'm guessing that we're not actually in Scotland , we're in some European country . user interface: Sorry can you just say that what's the what are our price goals again ? project manager: selling price is twenty five Euro . marketing: How many should we sell then ? , a lot , project manager: Anyone a mathematician ? marketing: two two two million , two mi no , more f four million . And it industrial designer: marketing: well it's the profit so if a profit for each is twelve fifty , that'll do four million . , I don't know what these mean because I didn't actually make the slide-show . So I guess we have to reflect on our experiences with remote controls to decide what we would like to see in a convenient , practical , nice remote control . so do we have any initial ideas for how this remote control should be designed or formatted or the the buttons it should have . marketing: I think one thing is that it should be easy to find industrial designer: user interface: I was thinking that too . user interface: I think we should design something that has like a so you can like somehow like you you always know where your T_V_ is , so just have a call button , industrial designer: user interface: I've always wanted that , project manager: Yeah . user interface: so like you can push a button on your T_V_ marketing: Yeah , yeah yeah yeah yeah . user interface: Yeah , yeah yeah yeah , so you should have a call button on your television to be able to find your remote control . marketing: In which case you're going to be l but if it has a sort of signal which isn't any sound user interface: Yeah . marketing: I don't know if it's expensive maybe to user interface: I don't yeah it but like marketing: Maybe call is enough . user interface: just like your phone even just has so like it can vibrate , it can light up and make noise and I dunno marketing: Yeah yeah yeah . project manager: What if it had something like just like a magnet on the back of it and you could j just to have some place to put it besides like a base . user interface: Yeah , project manager: 'Cause people just stick it on top of their T_V_ , but the point of having a remote is not to have to walk over to the T_V_ , so user interface: industrial designer: Well that's why it's always in the couch . marketing: project manager: user interface: I dunno , it seems like though that that would be hard , 'cause you not you're not gonna be lazy anyway and project manager: Yeah . marketing: But even just a thing to attach it to the w you know if you had a thing , a pretty object attached to the wall . project manager: Do you think it needs to be bigger to not lose , or does that not factor in ? marketing: And the other thing is user interface: Bigger . marketing: Not well it needs to be sort of project manager: Like Hand hand held size , yeah . I don't think you need a project manager: Not not huge , but industrial designer: marketing: But definitely not well I don't know . industrial designer: project manager: industrial designer: user interface: That would be really I'm sure we could do that for twenty five Euros a pop . , oh we just user interface: I also think though that it shouldn't have too many buttons , industrial designer: Yeah , I agree . user interface: I know it has to have enough functions but like , I don't know you , just have like eight thousand buttons and you're like , no , you never use half of them . project manager: You what if may be a little fancy but what if it had like a little screen , so it has less buttons but it still has all the functions . it just seems like project manager: So you could like like if you have I dunno if you have satellite if you have a hundred channels , you can the way you do it on your radio is that you user interface: yeah . project manager: s y yeah but you can programme , so you can programme like your favourite channels , so like if you had a s marketing: But , would you have the screen on the thing , or would you have it on the telly transmitting the screen . marketing: Because , I don't know if it's I think it's e expensive , if you have if you use the telly screen , 'cause the telly's already a screen , then you can pro sort of have a programming function , really easy sort of arrow up and down , on the remote , project manager: Yeah . Something like not it's not on the button but it's telling you what to do , project manager: Yeah . user interface: Or like you h you see those you know people I'm thinking of like celebrity cribs kind of things when like they have all those these things that at their house you know their their entire house is so electronic , and they have like this one master control that and it's like a hand held like turns on everything sort of control and it has like a screen and like so I think it should be possible to have some kind of a screen , I don't know if it must be it would probably marketing: Yeah . user interface: marketing: Or some it i we can find out probably on the internet how much it's project manager: Yeah . Yeah , and the other thing you said that thing about robust and water industrial designer: marketing: What was the word ? user interface: Furry . project manager: Oh I was just user interface: marketing: No but it's I thought , ah , spot on . industrial designer: marketing: Good feel , tact tactile , good tactile feel , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Maybe just like a simple thing to have a clip on it , like so you can clip it to your user interface: Yeah . We should probably start wrapping up , we've got some initial ideas that we can all look into . , and come up with some new ones for the next meeting , which will be in another thirty minutes . The Industrial Designer , what does that stand for , I_D_ , industrial designer: Yeah I think so . So I guess you'd be looking at lots of the things we discussed about screen and that sort of thing . I guess that maybe the working design has also to do with like the physical feat like just the way it looks and the way it w user interface: So technical function . user interface: What is technical functions exactl I I don't really know what project manager: I guess you'd have to find out . user interface: It does but it I just don't really industrial designer: I wrote down what mine were . marketing: Be a medium between you and the telly I think , user interface: Yeah , yeah . project manager: And the M_E_ , what does that stand for ? M industrial designer: Marketing <doc-sep> I think we made some definite progress at the last one and come up with some interesting w suggestions for our our new remote control . the the the problem with existing remote controls , we felt , was that they're ugly and that people are prepared to pay a premium for something better . they've got lots of buttons on them that people don't use and find difficult to learn . And We we thought that f for our our new remote control that everybody will want to rush out and buy , that we're we should look at speech recognition rather than r rather than buttons , and that if we have any buttons they should be very few of them and only for those functions that are actually identified that that people use . That we want to go for a long lasting battery that we gua we guarantee for the life of the the product and a shape that will be instantly recognisable , A_ as a trendy remote control , and and B_ as a Real Reaction product . So that w when people are happy with that , they will they will want to buy everything else from us . So again , I'll we'll have the three three presentations from the the the three of you and then we'll we'll make a a final a final decision . and the the decisions that we need to to make today , finally , are what energy source we want to use , whether i it is practical to use a a a long lasting one . And I I think our discussion was around the fact that if we're gonna go for a long lasting power supply , then basically it's sealed for life and if anybody does manage to run one down , we'll we'll give them another one . And it it'll be , you know , prominently displayed as part of the th the advertising literature that it's , you know , for life , guaranteed for life . now the the the internal chip and this is where I need Kate's expert advice industrial designer: project manager: and given that th this has to to go to market as quickly as possible d d do we go for a custom designed chip ? Or or do we buy one off the shelf and and programme it ourselves ? I'm I'm I'm n not an expert on these things , but presumably , there must be loads of 'em already on the market that we can modify . And then the , you know , the the overall design of the case is is is Kendra's field and user interface: industrial designer: project manager: we we had some discussions last time as as to how we might go forward and we'll we'll finalise those da today . and thi this is all linked in with the the the user interface , whether we p go for voice , buttons , or or a bit of both . and then , you know , f for the next meeting Kate will be looking at the the the s the look , feel and design , Kendra the ho how the the user actually uses it and and Andrew of course the the product evaluation . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: so , if if we can have the the three presentations again please , and p perhaps you'd like to start k . basically they wait for you to press a key or give a voice command and then this is translated into light signals which are then seen by the T_V_ . the materials we're gonna need to look at the two big ones are the integrated circuit chip and the battery and the in integrated circuit chip works in conjunction with a a diode transistor or resonator , two more resistors and a capacitor and the battery works in conjunction with a resistor and a capacitor . basically what happens is you'll press a number or give a voice command and this creates a a connection within the the remote that allows the chip the chip then senses this connection and produces a signal in a Morse code format . This signal's sent to the transistor which amplifies it and then sends it on to the light emitting diode and which is then trai changed into a infrared light which is sent to the T_V_ and sort of seen by the T_V_ and which changes the channels . so as for how we should end up using this in our remote t couple of main questions are the buttons . y the fewer buttons you have , I guess the fewer internal connections and internal codes you're gonna need . however to n not have buttons or to use a voice commands instead of buttons might make these connections more difficult and raise the production cost . Also we have to work within the company constraints , and the company has informed me via email that they're experts at pushbuttons and that seems to be the most cost-effective way of producing it . also with battery connections the company has some limits on the batteries we can use , so I was thinking perhaps a combination of solar cells with a back-up basic battery and somehow between the combination of that two we might be able to come up with something that will last the the lifetime or the five to ten years and we could still keep that original idea . we also need to look at the chips , v custom-designed versus off the shelf , and the custom-designed will give us much more flexibility and enable us to incorporate the voice function that we all seem to have agreed upon . , however that's gonna cost more , but the off the shelf is gonna be cheaper and it's gonna be allow us to produce it quicker and get out there faster , but it's going to be less flexible with the features , especially things like voice activation , which haven't really been used much on remotes , so there's not really chips out there that would be easy to to convert , project manager: Okay , industrial designer: so if we were definitely gonna go with the the voice option we'd probably have to design our own chip . project manager: d d d okay , inevitably a b a custom design chip is gonna be more expensive . project manager: And and do we know how long it'll take to develop a a custom chip . Oh w yeah , we did the the problem is the the the voice technology is not really highly developed , project manager: Right , industrial designer: it's sort of still still in an ex experimental form , project manager: okay . project manager: that would appear to effectively constrain us to an existing chip and thus therefore conventional button technology . now before we go round everybody else , does anybody h have any have anyti ha anything to say about that ? user interface: I I just have a question about that . does it make a difference if there are just a few commands , for example if you can pre-programme in like numbers one through ten and pre-programme say , you know , nine channels and then just use the voice recognition to say channel one and then you've programmed in say B_B_C_ four as your channel one , as your favourite , it's like to have a certain number of favourites industrial designer: W just to to incorporate the voice activation in it is is sorta the trick . user interface: and that w industrial designer: Once you've got the whole voice chip in there , then it's pretty much the the world the the sky is your limit , user interface: Okay . industrial designer: but to actually the the big step is to actually get the voice activation chips in there and working . project manager: Cause I must say I find it slightly surprising given that , you know , mobile phones incorporate voice activated dialling . project manager: I d d for slightly different well no , it's if you you speak somebody's name and it'll dial the number for you , so bu the this this information is from is this is the internal company information , is it ? industrial designer: bits of it , yeah . project manager: So user interface: Of course mobile phones do tend to be more expensive , industrial designer: Yes , as well . project manager: Yeah , true , again but if it's without any without any p price informations that's difficult to industrial designer: project manager: decide . marketing: Also lots of mobile phones have got a lot of technology in them , not just that , so . It's like it's it's you can't 'cause mobile phones are expensive , you can't say it's the voice recognition bit that is . I su i if given that the the technology is not well developed and and given that it's it's never been done before , th th the double risk , perhaps we ought to stick to to buttons , since the last thing we want to do is present a product that doesn't work . Thoughts ? user interface: Well , another thought I marketing: Would user interface: oh , sorry , go ahead . marketing: Oh I was just gonna say mayb maybe it sh like maybe we can like cut corners somewhere else to bring in over cost . project manager: do w do we think that the voice technology is fundamental to the project ? industrial designer: it's fundament well I guess it it's something we've discussed since the the sort of the beginning , so I th I think in in our in our minds it's it's fundamental , but I don't know that the the upper echelons of the company would necessarily agree with that , so I think you have to project manager: I think we user interface: Oh yeah . industrial designer: user interface: Well , I kinda think if we're gonna have the voice recognition for part of it , then maybe we should have it for the whole thing . user interface: Anyway , I'm I'm incli kinda inclined to say that we should just go for it . marketing: yeah , it's the second most important aspect to users that the device should be technologically innovative . project manager: if if that means if that means we can't afford buttons but b b industrial designer: project manager: second question , do we need the five buttons for channel change , up down , volume up down and on off , just as a a backup or just so that people can j j just sit there pressing buttons ? user interface: Yeah . Sorry , d did you want to say anything ? No ? industrial designer: nope , project manager: Okay . Is it gonna work ? project manager: yeah , industrial designer: Yeah , it's thinking about it . user interface: so I did some research on the internet and what you know , the interf user interface are just aspects that are seen by users , commands and mechanisms for the operation , and there're just kind of a variety of choices . user interface: and these were just a couple examples of different kinds that are a little bit more unusual . user interface: There're some special ones available , like this one right here , project manager: -huh . user interface: and one of the things that n we need to watch out for is a V_ in volume because people some Bring a little picture of what I thought ours could look like . industrial designer: user interface: So just kind of minimise the clutter , project manager: user interface: avoid too many buttons and also one of the things that people have used is a slide button , like you have on a mouse , that possibly we could use that on the sides for volume , for example , have the slide button on the side , marketing: . user interface: and then you can pre-programme the channels , the voice recognition and then the voice response sample locator . project manager: I think the reason everybody uses pushbuttons is that they're they're si simple , cheap and reliable . I , I think it's just sort of the the there's a lot of slide buttons out there . user interface: Just because I n for example if I'm using a mouse I like to be able to slide it up and down industrial designer: . user interface: so I thought it might be good for volume to just be able to kind of roll it and then have the up and down project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: project manager: Three buttons , channel up channel up down and user interface: Y yes , yes . marketing: Well , if you g if you if you got a channel up down , we can have a slider in that as well . Because if it if you no user interface: marketing: if you notice on the thing it it kind of like has got kind of if you you know it s kind of like sticks , if you know what , up like one unit , if you see what . marketing: So it kinda goes up one , then y like you can keep rolling it up , but it's like like like like a cog or something . user interface: The only advantage I was thinking of to having the buttons , like the buttons on one side for the channel , and then the slider is that if you're just holding in your hand , and you pick it up , it's easy to n s know , okay , this is just the volume and this is the channel . project manager: This one on the one side and one marketing: you could you could as l as like a mouse you could project manager: yeah . industrial designer: Ye yeah , 'cause I've definitely picked up remotes and like meant to change the channel and turn the volume , or vice versa , project manager: Yeah . project manager: or yeah th th the thi this is what the user interface: That was marketing: Yeah , like the shape of it almost like a mouse , with a project manager: we have to come up with is the the actual shape that people can ins instantly pick it up and and know know know what it's going to do . project manager: Okay , so we we're looking at sliders for both a volume and channel change user interface: well project manager: of one sort . user interface: I was thinking kind of just for the volume , project manager: Just for the volume , . user interface: but what what do you guys think ? marketing: Dep I dunno if it user interface: We could marketing: depending on the final shape of it , 'cause you could have like , I dunno , it looks like you can c control the volume with your thumb , user interface: Yeah , yeah . industrial designer: 'cause if yeah , in that kinda position the fingers would be better for pressing and the that for rolling , project manager: It yeah , it it it seems to me that it it al also has the advantage that it it the two are clearly different , user interface: B industrial designer: just the way it would user interface: Yeah . project manager: that's sorry is that that all you want to say at the mo user interface: Yes . marketing: The data's come off internet from executive summary for us on the top three things wanted by the consumer . industrial designer: marketing: And the most important aspect is the l the look it has to look fancy , look and feel project manager: This is a st well I was gonna say yeah twice as important as the second aspect , project manager: . So and the third being easy to use is probably a given , we have to try and incorporate , so project manager: Well I I th I think that what we're suggesting ought to address all three of those . yeah , and from the fashion watchers from Milan and Paris have said fruit and vegetables are an important theme for clothes and furniture and shoes , et cetera . industrial designer: project manager: I hadn't thought of that , that's different , certainly . But I was gonna say yeah , project manager: What ? marketing: fruit and vegetables , important to this year important to furniture , I'm just gonna say f like it's in if if fashion if we're going for the it looks fancy , then fashion is obviously the line we gotta be going through . industrial designer: Well that can kinda tie into our changing face things , like we could have the fruit and vegetable theme this year marketing: . project manager: industrial designer: and whatever happens next year , we can have the face plates , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: and then we can just whip that off and industrial designer: yeah . You know , that kind of spongy industrial designer: yeah , that weird I dunno what that is , project manager: . you have we could if we could save depending on the cost of the product itself , you know , could we have a cheaper b cheaper power source and then just have it annually renewed ? Instead of having a ten year guarantee ? With interchangeable covers , could just buy a new one every year , a new one when new fashions come out . user interface: project manager: I it its I that's an interesting idea , it's like the old Swatch watch where on only batteries ever got changed in those , 'cause people just bought a new one when it went out of fashion , industrial designer: . user interface: Wh project manager: yes if if if they're made in sufficient quantity industrial designer: I I think it's easier sometimes to have them buy changeable covers for it than to buy a whole new one , because you don't feel like you're investing in a whole new product . project manager: W we we can b but my feeling is that current power sources are such that for relatively little cost you can make it last , you know , a long time . project manager: but if we also make it cheap enough that people either change the cover every year or even buy a new one every year then it it's it's even better . user interface: So industrial designer: That all c also kind of encourages 'em to buy new covers user interface: like industrial designer: and yeah . project manager: I n I know the only p the the the the immediate thing that comes to mind with that is that it it it y you've then got the connection user interface: So f project manager: and you've immediately got a sort of unreliability , whereas the advantage of having it plumbed in is that that the whole thing is all , you know , completely soldered together industrial designer: yeah . project manager: but I d I I I know what you're saying and understand where you're coming from . marketing: Or well , but like like more than just the battery , like a complete different like you've only got like , you know like th this bit's the bit you keep , and this is the expensive bit , this is like the chip industrial designer: And then project manager: I th I s I think if we're gonna go down that route , then we're talking about even if it costs slightly more than that , just building the whole thing in one , then having getting cheaper production costs marketing: Yeah , you probably are right . project manager: and , you know giving people the option of buying a new a a complete new thing , the advantage of a replaceable cover is that even if they don't it doesn't have a cover on at all , it will still work totally . project manager: then if , you know , if people lose the cover , they they might be well inclined to go out and spend however many Euros on a on a new one rather than a a complete new re remote . industrial designer: Well that that's just it with the covers , you're sort of tricking 'em into continuing to spend their money on our products without making 'em feel like they're being ripped off having to buy a new product . project manager: Yeah , it is it's up to it's up to industrial designer: So , user interface: Yeah , just another five Euro to get industrial designer: yeah . project manager: it's it's up to our marketing people to to ma to ma turn it into a a fashion item . project manager: and , you know , as as external fashions change , then we get new new covers on the market and , you know , readily available . project manager: And industrial designer: And that's the sort of thing , once you get the mould set , you can just whip out different colours , different pictures very very quickly . user interface: Yeah , like they have for mobile phones industrial designer: Yeah , yeah , exactly , exactly . we hadn't finished your marketing: oh , don't worry it's all said , I was just gonna say yeah , are we gonna make this as part of like like a part of the f like it it the fashions apply to furniture , so are we gonna make this part of the furniture ? project manager: It's the sort of thing that we want people to have prominent dis displayed on their coffee table to say this says something about me . marketing: with project manager: I , you know , I'm I'm I'm with it , I'm up to date . And you know , th the the design that I've got , and and it could be a a home-made design , you know this says this is not just a a television remote control , this is , you know , a fashion accessory . , so the the the basic shape i is is what we given that we've got you know one one on off button presumably , two buttons for channel change and one slider and basically nothing else , industrial designer: . And , know whether we go down the fruit and veg route , and I don't suggest we make it look like a banana , but know sort of the the organic , you know , curved look , industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: you know , t to deliberately get away from the you know , the the the the square look of most current remotes industrial designer: . project manager: and , you know , whether whether the you know , the the fixed part of it is the corporate yellow . or 'cause there's certainly you know , the the corporate logo needs to be prominently displayed so that people s th looked at it and say right , that's a Real Reaction remote control , I want one of those . industrial designer: I dunno that we should make the whole thing yellow I kinda thought with a you'd have like a yellow circle with the R_R_ in it somewhere on it , project manager: Yeah the the or or b industrial designer: but I'd user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: yellow seems a bit of a strong colour user interface: like an . project manager: Yeah , I'd I'd industrial designer: to make the ent like the thing user interface: Yeah . no industrial designer: no , but just like white or grey or black or some sort of blah colour . project manager: I d I I agree , we're we're we're simply it's simply required to incorporate the the the the corporate logo prominently . user interface: Well n project manager: Well , th this is this is the whole point , yes , you know , I'm I've got a a Real Reaction remote control to go with my Real Reaction coffee maker or or whatever . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: And then people , you know , people demand more Real Reaction stuff . user interface: Well I was sort of kinda picturing like maybe a shape that's almost like a mouse . user interface: So that , you know , when they hold it it's because a mouse is pretty comfortable to hold in your hand maybe we could make it a slightly different shape so they could hold on to it , but that way they can have the volume on the side and then the channel buttons and project manager: Yeah . project manager: Oh no that well there's the sim my my idea was something a b probably you know a bit fatter than this but sort of tha that sorta shape user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , you'd want it narrower than a mouse though user interface: Kind of a c industrial designer: 'cause it a mouse you're kinda just resting on it , you want something you can definitely grip . project manager: W it well it's sort of it's it's sort of a a mouse , industrial designer: So maybe it'd be user interface: Yeah . project manager: but held , you know , so it's you sorta hold it in your hand like that , i with , you know , and fiddling with the buttons . user interface: Yeah so yeah , kind of maybe maybe a little wider than this , 'cause this is pretty comfortable to hold , and then if you had industrial designer: Maybe almost like a hairbrush , like you could get the about the width of that end of the pen and then it widens up top user interface: Yeah , industrial designer: and you can fiddle user interface: then wider up here . user interface: And then it would have a l wider thing to have the light , the infrared light at the T_V_ and just kinda change channels and adjust the volume industrial designer: Yeah , yeah . marketing: Yeah , that sounds I'm just I'm suddenly realising that yeah we're discussing how much how good it's gonna be to change channels t we still can just tell it to . are we are we starting to get away from the the voice functionality of it ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: I think we d I think we decided that w we're actually going down both routes . project manager: we need the the manual controls and that they should be of that form , but that yeah . industrial designer: But do you know , this shape also kind of les lend itself to to voice 'cause if you're you're holding it and you're fiddling , but you can also bring it up like that project manager: Then you just bring it up to your mouth and just speak to it , industrial designer: and it's microphone-esque , user interface: Yeah , and just say project manager: yeah , yeah . marketing: Yeah , maybe we cou like w like we're leaving out the buttons for the the f less frequently used stuff , industrial designer: . project manager: I th I th honest my personal view is that if it's not there , people wouldn't use it anyway . marketing: I suppose , but t there is the off chance that , you know , th the brightness is wrong on your T_V_ or the contrast needs changing . project manager: It's cer it's certainly possible , but they we we're going beyond w w industrial designer: Bu . project manager: given the state of the technology we want something that we kno we know will will work . if the power button was also somehow like a menu button you could press that and or do voice commands , and either volume thing could also be to scroll through other options like y and you could scroll through brightness project manager: marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: and and sc marketing: that's a good idea . industrial designer: and then you can you can minimise the buttons user interface: Yeah , I suppose I sup industrial designer: and still have those , you know , brightness and tint and stuff . project manager: If we we're I'm getting a clear message that we think that we should have those facilities available . industrial designer: Yeah user interface: We could have the channels and the power and then a menu button and then the volume . project manager: marketing: project manager: Okay , if we if we're going down that route , then we need some sort of display . Do we need some sort of display ? industrial designer: But the television would be the display project manager: We actually use the television , okay . industrial designer: that things like that usually c pop up on a televi like you hit menu user interface: Yeah , and then y industrial designer: and menu will come up on television and have like tint brightness , and you'd use the scroll , scroll through it yeah . marketing: on a onto like a mouse , the ru the scrolling button , is actually a button as well , you could press it , you could press that and have it as a menu button . user interface: Yeah , press that is t industrial designer: I never understood how that worked though , user interface: yeah , that might work . user interface: Yeah , it's like yeah , it's like the mouse where you just kinda click it . user interface: Yeah , and you could just click that to so if you had like the menu then you could scroll through and then click it to select . project manager: so I d I think we've actually very conveniently just come to a good point to s to sum up . project manager: So b b Kate and Kendra now go away and pa play play with a bit of Plasticine or play-dough , industrial designer: Play with play-dough . industrial designer: project manager: and actually put what we've discussed into something I was gonna say concrete , marketing: . project manager: but that's a slightly inappropriate word industrial designer: project manager: to something that we can we can see and Andrew n can go away and th th think about how we can actually market this as a concept and not j not just a a a simple remote control . marketing: Our energy source is gonna be project manager: I think I think we decided that we're gonna for marketing: long term . project manager: for simplicity of , you know , manufacturing and maintenance that we will go for a a long term battery source , industrial designer: . project manager: I you know , on the basis that that , you know , if we're going for making it a fashion statement , then people are more likely to change it anyway before i it runs out and make an assumption that we we can aim for a battery that will last most people for we'll say at least five five ten years marketing: industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: And we're having a custom chip ? project manager: We're having a a custom chip , but given the the we've cut the functions down , that will hopefully not be too problematic , but given that technol technological innovation is important , industrial designer: project manager: then we need to , I'll say it again , technologically innovate . marketing: project manager: and we we , know , we must resist any efforts to to try and water that down . marketing: And interchangeable case ? project manager: I i interchangeable case seems to be important to the concept . project manager: it it should be cheap , you know , if if we avoid any , you know , electrical connections . project manager: And i you know , i if we can come up with some way of of allowing people to actually personalise it to whatever they want , then this is totally new . project manager: We d we don't know whether that to what extent people do it or not , but if they've at least got a a good selection of covers that they can use anyway , and and if if we can keep them , you know , rolling , then you know , so they can get them in the supermarket when they go down to a any of the famous supermarkets , I won't mention any mention any names , industrial designer: marketing: project manager: it's it's good for the supermarket user interface: project manager: and it's good for us and it hopefully makes them feel better . marketing: And are we gonna have it il being illuminated from inside onto the buttons or project manager: the that that's no , because we've got so few buttons that it that actually makes that redundant . user interface: Yeah , and especially for making them so like different and industrial designer: different to feel , project manager: Yeah , yeah . project manager: you know , that that solves one of the problems of b of battery life , 'cause that would well that would clobber the battery life , industrial designer: project manager: so no , given the nature of the buttons we're having , it's actually unnecessary I think . marketing: Are we having it that it's any angle , or is it just project manager: As as wide industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: so that if you're holding it , you know , anyway like you're likely to and it's you know , i i it will work most of the time . project manager: Not like my my mum who points it at the ceiling and wonders why the th th the television doesn't work . industrial designer: user interface: project manager: yeah , I d I th I sorta envisaged that if if this was the the thing , then sort of the the whole of the top would be the the infrared . project manager: Yeah , 'cause the r reality is people are they're gonna be looking at the television whilst they're using it , the chances are , so if if they're holding it anyway , the they're reasonably likely to be holding it to use it , user interface: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so thank you very much indeed and I'll s see you all again in thirty minutes

The Industrial Designer proposed reducing the number of buttons to four and having them all in one color. The Project Manager, however, believed that six buttons were necessary and suggested using a single-curved design and a simple chip to balance the product cost. The group reached a consensus on this decision, resulting in a reduced product price of 12 Euros. Additionally, the Project Manager suggested making the skip and volume buttons larger to emphasize the simplicity of the remote. Initially, there were doubts about using slide buttons, as the Project Manager believed that push buttons were simpler, cheaper, and more reliable. However, when the User Interface team revealed that slide buttons cost the same as push buttons, the Project Manager agreed to the idea and proposed installing three buttons on a slide button to save space. In terms of features, Marketing suggested an easy-to-find button and the User Interface team proposed a call button on the television. Marketing also wanted a feature that could vibrate or provide a signal if there was no sound, but they were unsure about the cost of implementing it. To address this, the Project Manager suggested designing a magnet or portable phone-based couch for the remote control, eliminating the need for people to walk over to the TV to find it.

Question: What were the key discussions and decisions made regarding the user interface, trigger button, remote control design, and target users? Article: project manager: Okay so we're here to talk about the detailed design of the product , 'kay ? user interface: Yep . I'm just gonna open , say a few boring words to start with again , and start taking minutes afterwards . You guys are gonna give us a presentation of our wonder product that I can see some demonstrations of over there . marketing: Bra user interface: project manager: Then we're gonna talk about finance , and I've got a lovely Excel spreadsheet that I knocked up in the last five minutes for this . project manager: So industrial designer: project manager: Your thing is in where is it ? Is it in user interface: Three , three . Production costs estimated by our manufacturing department and the research department , which is us , is fifteen point eight Euros , user interface: industrial designer: someone forgot the units there user interface: Unit price . we implemented the basic functions , which is just T_V_ functions plus the locator , which was one of the marketing things , cradle , scroll wheel for the the channels , and we implemented the f the the way of putting the new and revolutionary zapping , your favourite channels functionality , in the scroll . So this is the user interface: So here I'll give you the so this is the cradle unit , and this is the actual remote itself . so the scroll bar is or the scroll wheel is this this green little scrolly guy here , and then the volume controls are here and here . user interface: you've got the keypad which is the numbers f from zero to nine and then ten . we have our we have the enter button and what was the other button here ? This is the teletext . industrial designer: Start s the the start to to to user interface: The programme button , industrial designer: programme yeah . So this bl this button will be used both for the favourites and for programming your the the type of television you wanna use . So the plastic is the white area of this of the model here , and the red area is like a rubber covering . user interface: So you can see that when it lays like this or like this and the buttons are all gonna be rubber , so it's pretty hard to actually damage it project manager: Is that could that be easy to for the scroll wheel to be rotated if it lands on it ? user interface: Yeah that might be a possible a mi possible problem , but if you drop it industrial designer: Not helping . user interface: Yeah and it depends on if it's sliding , but I think it's pretty ergonomic . industrial designer: project manager: I take it that this is gonna be slightly lighter in the final design as well . user interface: Yeah the the power button is a bit of a reach , but I think we might scale down the final model a bit . user interface: These this is a bit larger than it would be , but project manager: It's cool . user interface: project manager: And hold it so marketing: that's project manager: wh what's the marketing perspective ? marketing: oh that's oh I like it . you guys gave me more than I was asking for , so I'm happy because we've got some really marketable features in this . So you ha you have like the the base station with the little button for the where's my remote . industrial designer: Wicked isn't it ? project manager: So let me get it , user interface: so project manager: if I press this button user interface: beep beep beep project manager: I see . industrial designer: marketing: So you can take this ho take this home with you tonight and you can push that and he'll be across town user interface: Beep beep beep project manager: I plan to do that as well . no no no tha that's alri project manager: So the the two blue are are those for the the it to charge off of in ? user interface: Exactly that's exactly what those are for . user interface: And there's one other feature that we were debating , but we decided to go against it , is you could industrial designer: project manager: user interface: beep beep beep industrial designer: user interface: we were thinking that it might be interesting to have a trigger button here because you have this finger project manager: Yeah it's the right shape isn't it ? user interface: it it's it kinda feels like there should be something there , but we couldn't figure out what button is important enough to put there . And we we don't wanna accidentally be hitting the power button like that so project manager: But maybe if you had a trigger plus the scroll then that would get past the the problem of it landing and scrolling , user interface: . So maybe in a final design phase we might tweak that a little bit , project manager: Okay . project manager: But it's definitely got options for like different types of models and things as well based on that , hasn't it ? user interface: The scroll wheels , a problem with them not being sort of user interface: industrial designer: project manager: I don't think the user interface guy wants to touch it anymore . marketing: Well of course , user interface: industrial designer: marketing: My my s my suggestion is we're gonna go go to the silvers and blacks like most of the televisions . user interface: marketing: So you're not gonna find my my folder up there I gotta do mine up at the board . So project manager: Can I not get your get at stuff from your shared folder now ? marketing: No it's not in there because I had the computer problem and I I I cou I couldn't create it . marketing: I couldn't create it in the PowerPoint , project manager: marketing: and I think I've got this really strange cable . So what I had , basically going from the PowerPoint format , is that yeah yeah I like this a lot . Is this one of the tests is to see how we can adapt to s changing situations in the in the meeting room ? project manager: industrial designer: Nah . We've got the features , we have the characteristics , and we have the I I don't know what we would call the other part what we call you know the the the corp corporate Help me . So the features I think we got the scroll , we've got the the locator , we've got the durability , we've got the dependability , industrial designer: It fell off . marketing: the characteristics I talk about , we have reliability , we have comfort , we have ergonomics , we have environmentally s sensitive . and the corporation , we're talking about we're we're a new we're a new company . We're wanting you to find our product so we're gonna give you a good product at a fair price . One thing I would want to to see is is can we can we get a lifetime guarantee on this product , a normal use guarantee , which means that this product , for the for the life of of the life use , if it should have a technical problem , that we could re replace it at no cost ? That was something I would be interested in . so yeah without going into great details , we have a we have a product , it has the features and the characteristics , and the background , I believe , to make it marketable I believe at a cost of of of thirty thirty five to to fifty Euros . We're gonna be competitive , and we're gonna we're gonna have a market niche . w project manager: Do you would you a argue that that we're better going for the higher cost than bringing it down into twenty f five as we probably could , but lowering our profit margins ? marketing: That that would be that would be I think a decision best made by corporate I I m for my evaluation , based on what our competition is , I th I think that that we can go after this and and and go after more of the exclusivity sense than the mass market sense . But you guys came up with a great product , and at that cost I think it there's nobody else that's putting this this combination of of ingredients together . But with all of these other features I think people c one thing I'm I'm hoping for is people are not gonna even notice . There's gonna be somebody going home and say oh sh this thing doesn't work for my D_V_D_ and my but I like these other things , so they keep it , they don't take it back . project manager: And we're actually quite open to be able to expand the product for a later version with those features quite simply anyway , aren't we ? Th there's no fundamentally different technology to do that . marketing: Well one of one of the thoughts that I had is can can this unit be be produced in a way that makes it upgradable ? project manager: . You know is there a card in th can we make a card and so after industrial designer: W we need we need we need s some more buttons if it would to work on some other stuff , but user interface: marketing: - , but you follow what I'm s I'm s industrial designer: We we w yeah we could get another version of it that actually works . But marketing: Yeah 'cause if if we can make this unit upgradable then we're yeah but then we talk about changing the warranty concept and everything , but that's that was just an idea I had . to me the only additions project manager: Yeah , the plus there's the the risk of making it unusable as well , or making it less b because at the moment it's actually very straightforward to look at all the buttons , you know what they do , it's very simple , and it just works . So I have a little spreadsheet for us where I I was wondering , you when you talked about the fifteen point eight Euros , I was wondering how you came up with that figure ? user interface: Well , that was just just our technical team added up the production costs of the individual units . project manager: I've made a f few assumptions here in that I'm assuming that our power adaptor we can make for a cost of four Euros , user interface: -huh . project manager: equivalent to solar cells , which I think is probably fair considering that we have in-house manufacturing of power adaptors already . project manager: and I'm assuming that the locator beacon , the you know the user interface: Yeah . project manager: Can be made for it sounded different that time can be made for a similar price to an L_C_ display , user interface: Oh , sorry . industrial designer: project manager: an do you think that's fair coming from a m the manufacturing ? user interface: Yeah I do think we that we we don't need the events chip on print , we only need the the regular chip on print , project manager: . user interface: And we and we have a single-curved project manager: Is that a single-curved rather than a double-curved ? user interface: I think that project manager: We're not entirely sure what single-curve versus double-cur marketing: We've got a we've got a curve and a droop . user interface: It's single-curved , project manager: You think ? Okay user interface: yeah . But we save one Euro that way , yeah ? So we come bring it down to Fifteen point four . marketing: project manager: Do don't speak so it's in here , in that user interface: Okay . project manager: w do we have any we have special form don't we ? user interface: Yeah we do . project manager: But the the the we haven't talked about any special colour though I don't th user interface: Oh it's a that's not very special , it's pretty project manager: if we're going for greys and silvers then I don't think we're O okay so we're user interface: If th . project manager: Push-button , scroll wheel , we're basically we have th industrial designer: We don't project manager: is this intended to be a button as well or just a scroll ? user interface: That's a scroll . project manager: Just a scroll ? It's not one of the scrolls where , for example , with this one you could push it down to be a button ? user interface: no we just use it as a scroll . project manager: Okay so we're on to the user interface: S 's kind of s frighteningly accurate . project manager: We're on to the pat-on-the-back part of the presentation , where we have a look at the criterias th that Paul the criterion criteria that Paul has has given us , and we can use that to tell How's it going ? Anyone got any thoughts ? user interface: What ? project manager: How how have we done today ? user interface: I think we did pretty well . marketing: No , I think we come up with a with a attractive marketable product and and concept . project manager: Any other chang thoughts ? Okay so th th what about room for creativity ? marketing: project manager: Is it the . marketing: well we we we kinda broke we kinda at least adjusted every every criteria they gave us project manager: . marketing: because we d we still have the the teletext capability in this thing right , user interface: marketing: So you know you know if this thing flies then we've we've adjusted or broken every every idea they gave us . project manager: no yeah but we did we did break with the specs a little bit I guess , industrial designer: project manager: but the marketing: But I like when I say we have we had I believe we have room for creativity 'cause w this is we did it . project manager: 'Kay leadership , what do we report back to the bosses ? No th th I think they were r reasonably flexible with us over the whole changing the specs thing . industrial designer: It was more of a teamwork thing then really leadership based project was project manager: I agree . industrial designer: That's almost a crotch mi cr project manager: That's it's down , it's quite close . marketing: You know you know what they're gonna have on the recording in there from that microphone is your lunch digesting you know th project manager: Keep it , keep it calm . marketing: project manager: So yeah the the pen came in alright and it's a little uncomfortable to use but I guess it works . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: I've been wor I've been wondering about that all day , but see these look like they're that looks the oth that looks like it would be that way around , industrial designer: Use them like that . What new ideas have we found ? industrial designer: user interface: Oh wel marketing: New ideas f for the product or for the the the the environment or project manager: Well let's do both then . marketing: what are we ta project manager: for the product ? user interface: Well we had the favourites list , and the scroll bar , and we have the cradle , and the r remote call feature . project manager: And for the meeting room , Has anyone got any more industrial designer: Yeah comfortable headsets would be nice . marketing: clearly remote control microphones would be the would be a nice solution to all these cables , but I'm sure that there's there's some justification for these things that I don't know about . user interface: marketing: It's not been it's not been cooperating so well , but I don't think that's the that's avoidable . project manager: Oh hang on it really that's something we that the costs were under twelve fifty Euros . industrial designer: project manager: And the costs within the budget ? Not the original budget , but they are now . user interface: industrial designer: Who wrote that one ? project manager: Thank user interface: project manager: Thanks guys . marketing: S I've got a lot of paperwork to catch up on so let's close this and come back and 'kay <doc-sep>project manager: You all saw the newsflash ? industrial designer: It's project manager: Or you got the same message ? marketing: Yeah I I just saw it one minute ago . Yeah I received an email so I thought I I can't mail you so I thought I'd just drop it in the folder , but marketing: Yeah pretty much . industrial designer: Huh ? marketing: ? project manager: industrial designer: What the marketing: Oh right . project manager: or is there some pressing issue ? industrial designer: Yeah my computer is not functioning properly . user interface: marketing: project manager: Did you plug in the power cable when you come back ? industrial designer: Yeah yeah . industrial designer: I spent a lot of time thinking about what I was gonna do and then a couple of minutes before this I get my function you know the information that I need . This presentation is mainly based on my own ideas 'cause I hadn't time to intergrate tha the information yet so user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: Ts marketing: there is also was also some research on the most relevant and and and irrelevant f functions . marketing: if you can't control the the sound settings if you dislike a very loud bass or something , you you need to change that . industrial designer: By the way my T_V_ doesn't have an equ equaliser but marketing: We c we c Yeah w we can't project manager: Next generation does . teletext but we can skip that because I saw the newsflash , and teletext is so outdated that it it's i should not be used any more in the future . industrial designer: By the way where did you guys get that newsflash from ? user interface: Yeah . marketing: I thought I read a project manager: Our current customers are in the age group forty plus . marketing: Yeah ? project manager: And the new product should reach new markets , which is the customers below forty . marketing: Below ? Okay well user interface: But where did you get that information ? project manager: That's in a newsflash . marketing: that's that's in the newsfla project manager: user interface: Okay . Yeah well we can skip this part as well , because I thought I read above forty so we could skip the features , but we just have to build them in because they find it very interesting . and and also there's so not only the design of the bus buttons but o how you can push them , and stuff like that . And I think and certainly for for the for the lower age groups , nice design , which does not make the remote control in your room . marketing: It's it's actually a part of your interior , of of your design in your room . So it's the people can say , well what's that , well that's my remote control , so it's d it has to look nice and feel nice , and and have all the functions that project manager: Yeah . marketing: Yeah so but I I don't think that's that's a problem because the thing has to have a colour anyway , and most of the times there is a brand present on it . industrial designer: user interface: How do I project manager: You pressed alt F_ four ? user interface: No no no . user interface: this one is the the yeah the advanced one with a lot of options and functions and buttons . marketing: Yeah and and and marketing research stated that that that kind of users are not afraid of of a lot of functions . industrial designer: And we do have to integrate the screen and the the speech marketing: And the speech recognition yeah . We have to to make them very easy so for just zapping around the channels you can just push one button . user interface: But if you want to to use your your video recorder or something else , you should use use an an advanced option . marketing: Yeah but the the newsflash also stated that it should control only one device , only your television . marketing: Yeah well what what we can do with the screen is is all the the configuration options , you can put that in the screen . marketing: And the and the yeah screen menu to to to to do that , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: So it looks very simple and all the advanced features are hidden in the screen , with a clear menu . project manager: So what does the screen do ? They said they needed it but what does it do ? What do they want with the screen ? user interface: For for the advanced functions I think . marketing: Yeah well it yeah it didn't project manager: So but what did the marketing marketing: it didn't say what they want to do with the screen . marketing: Well I , my guess is it's it's pretty handy for advanced advanced functions . user interface: the we have to to to watch out for the i if we make it f very fashionable , it it the functional functionality will go down . marketing: Well you can improvise right ? project manager: which one is it ? Technical functions ? industrial designer: Yeah a little bit . user interface: project manager: You didn't put it in ? Or industrial designer: I have no idea . marketing: So we can go for the look-and-feel of the the left example , and then a screen on top of it . So I was just working off the top of my head and using my colin common knowledge about remote controls . industrial designer: so I didn't really know what kind of functions we had to put into it yet . industrial designer: I was working on a s yeah on a schedule , and I was supposed to do it like this . But yeah then the information came and it was kind of exact with all the steps in the remote control that I had to follow , so I was trying to organise them for myself . Mean you press a button the it tru goes , it sends a signal to a chip , project manager: And then through a transformer , it the signal gets boosted and then sent to the to the receiver on the T_V_ project manager: Yeah decoder . industrial designer: I dunno if I'm too slow for this stuff , but project manager: Work harder . marketing: user interface: Okay shou should we make a list of the of all the functions we want marketing: industrial designer: Yeah . for those that didn't see yet the basic new requirements of the management were no teletext , only for T_V_ . it should be designed for a use g group below forty , but I don't think it's w wrong if we can target the current customer group as well . And we have to decide on the functions , and on the , let's see what was it , the target group . project manager: Yeah so I think it's easy but marketing: I guess that's that's the tar yeah or male and female user interface: But it's it's also for children or just project manager: Yeah it's below forty so we can decide where to marketing: six the marketing research started on s on the age of sixteen . marketing: Sixteen to twenty five , twenty five to thirty five , thirty five to forty five , something like that . marketing: How do you mean ? project manager: So is it from sixteen to forty ? Is it from twenty to forty ? Is it from thirty ? marketing: sixteen to forty . user interface: And if we have a larger public we have yeah more options to to sell our product . industrial designer: Yeah so what we might wanna do is yeah cust I have customised the screen functions , if you know what . industrial designer: The younger users are more acquainted with these kind of machines so they can use more advanced functions . user interface: Yeah that's that's why I wanted to to make yeah two different yeah groups of functions . The the simple functions for for the the whole public , and the the advanced options for the younger people yeah who are more yeah experienced with industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: But all incorporated in the screen or or just on the remote itself ? user interface: Na I w I should put the the yeah the extra advanced options on the onto the onscreen display . marketing: like like you have a visual of the of the brightness with with a kind of sliding bar and a bus and and stuff like that for sound and and vis and and visuals ? project manager: Yeah . So is you should have a menu for all the the functions you don't use regular and which are marketing: you can make a if you make a drawing . project manager: Yeah we get the marketing: Yeah well , this is basically it's industrial designer: The remote ? project manager: The remote , yeah ? marketing: alright the remote ? well usually the power button is on top I guess . user interface: Yeah but if you are using the the normal functions , the the basic functions , you normally press them on the u yeah . So it should be a little bit longer so that you can put your thumb , also reach the middle . marketing: Okay so y yeah you have you have it in your hand , and the screen is below , and the buttons are in the middle . marketing: Okay for example if you put the screen here , it's more about the functions now than the than the layout . project manager: You want the normal piece of paper ? And you have a pen ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: Yeah ? marketing: Like if you have like ten buttons for for all the for all the channels , project manager: marketing: So you have up and down for the for the channels , and left and right for the volume project manager: And left to right . I thought but this is really your department , that we need just the functional display and four cursors . project manager: Yeah okay but this is function so if you can use them for multiple things marketing: And you you have industrial designer: And marketing: most of the time you have one button in the middle . marketing: and then if you press it you the screen gets activated and then you can use these buttons to scroll up and down and left and right to go into functon project manager: marketing: mo most of the time this menu button is also like okay , to to confirm a a kind of action . marketing: Then okay to confirm , and then on on each on each screen there's there should be an option to go back to a to a upper level . user interface: And do we need a a logo on our remote control , or marketing: That's more your your department to to to project manager: Yeah . But it should be if the screen is here then the logo should be like on on top , user interface: On the left top yeah . Yeah the position of the screen is also more essential than we we look where we have space left and then put the logo over there . marketing: But Yeah so it should be if you have it in your hand here , should be on top somewhere , maybe . This would be industrial designer: Why did we wanna put the display in the bottom ? marketing: i project manager: No that's not s sure so industrial designer: Okay . marketing: but it's user interface: Yeah may maybe because you're industrial designer: Because yeah if you use the functions your hand will block the display . user interface: Yeah okay but only for the basic functi if you're going to use the advanced option , you're going to press the the menu button and then yeah . marketing: But most most of the times if a if if a T_V_'s on standby people just press a channel to put it on . project manager: Yeah but then it's possible that you cover it with your hand so user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: But if you if you hold the ma the remote like this , if you put it on the top on the side project manager: Yeah okay . Can we leave this up to you ? user interface: marketing: Yeah it doesn't matter that much . So but the screen is on top ? Which functions did we have left ? this is basically numbers , volume , channel up and down . project manager: So maybe it , we should decide what advanced options we want to put in the L_C_D_ screen . industrial designer: Yeah so we we needed to integrate the sound and and image options right ? project manager: Yeah so sounds ? industrial designer: Like bass marketing: Yeah . project manager: Yeah user interface: Yeah it it's just a remote control so project manager: and they're industrial designer: Yeah treble , middl middle , bass or something . project manager: Coffee ? marketing: yeah sound and then within sound I guess treble and bass ? industrial designer: Yes please . marketing: wh why would you use that ? industrial designer: Yeah isn't that that depends on the on the signal of the of what program you're watching . industrial designer: And yeah in the functionality of the user interface: Television itself industrial designer: no no of the remote do do we want the buttons to make sound when you press them ? As a confirmation or whatever you know ? user interface: . marketing: most mobile phones used that in the beginning but user interface: We we could make an option for it , but you can disable s industrial designer: Under the a yeah advanced option menu you can put those things . marketing: Yeah but people don't want to sit on their knees on their knees in front of their television with only three buttons then it's very hard to project manager: . project manager: And the others were in your presentation right ? So I can just copy those ? marketing: Well yeah well I guess that these were the only ones , I guess . project manager: Yeah you have basically a button menu , which you can use directly , according to the old principle . project manager: And the L_C_D_ options are activated by some some software options , thats communicates with the infrared decoder yeah . marketing: Yeah with the chip and then project manager: So you You have an additional processor and and software part . marketing: and what you say , channel settings or channel programming ? So you you have an option to to start scanning all the frequencies , and when it encounters one , well it shows on your T_V_ . project manager: Yeah so I've g channel program is autoseek ? marketing: Yeah , autoseek . project manager: name a channel , or marketing: Well most T_V_s automatically display the name , which they get through the cable . marketing: It only has to match the the channel frequency on your T_V_ , with with the with the position on your T_V_ and and so your remote . Yeah but can you also say I want f Veronica on the channel number five or industrial designer: Help . How do you call that ? marketing: Yeah how do you call that ? ? Wait you you should be able to to browse through a list or something , which w displays all the all the values , all the channels which are possible . marketing: Just browse through it and then in some kind of way see if it if it if it is programmed . other functions ? marketing: So you most of the time if you if you swap it S let's say for example you have R_T_L_ five on on channel five . And Veronica on channel eight and you want to move Veronica to channel five , most of the times you override the previous the previous one . project manager: That's you're industrial designer: He only has to figure out how it has to look . project manager: Yeah but also , which buttons you have to press to get a certain result ? industrial designer: And how user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: to use project manager: And the working design was to specify how ph the physical interation between the components was , as I believe . project manager: marketing: Or or is it too hard to to ju to just do it all on your remote ? To programme the channels ? project manager: No I don't think so . project manager: No that's the marketing: you you current channel and then then it just says , on which number do you want to save this , and you just press a number on your remote , and then say confirm , okay , and then it's it's saved . It's easier , it's it's it's harder to , if you have already programmed it , to to swap . project manager: The User Interface Designer can design a menu for all these function I put them on the marketing: Yeah k kind of structure into layers . user interface: On the yeah can you i make a a map with with all the yeah 'cause it's now there are lots and lots of documents project manager: . marketing: So project manager: So you design the basic function menu for the L_C_D_ screen ? I think marketing: And and the layout of of the thing itself . project manager: th I think the yeah the layout of the screen user interface: The the layout of the remote control ? project manager: and I think you can concentrate more on the button placement and the placement of the screen itself on the marketing: . industrial designer: I have to know what it has to do , so if you wanna you know the changing the channels kind of s thing is , I have to integrate that in the design . user interface: But do I have to to to yeah to make the the menu layout also ? Or project manager: Yeah . user interface: Yeah ? I I'm going to make project manager: I think i that's your department yes , user interface: yeah o okay . project manager: because w he already knows what industrial designer: Yeah we have to kind of work together . industrial designer: If if I make the the the yeah the menu like , I have to state which function has to be in the menu , project manager: But we're not allowed . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: and then you have to decide , it's , in a in a way that b is user-friendly . Y you you are going to make a list of what functions are are going to to be on the the screen , the menu screen . project manager: Yeah and also make clear which buttons to press to get certain result , marketing: So some menus . marketing: So it's like the the save button on your your mobile phone , if you have a Nokia or like that . marketing: To go one step back you it's only two extra buttons , user interface: Yeah . W we marketing: but if it if it's very clear that they are for the screen user interface: I think we have to to group , to make two groups . the one group for the for the display , and one group for the basic functions , and industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Yeah but they're incorporated ? Up and down is user interface: Yeah okay but we we have a m marketing: Yeah because this this is used for both . user interface: yeah but maybe that's that's not project manager: Smart ? user interface: yeah if you're if you're z zapping with your yeah remote control , you can press the the menu button , and then you are suddenly into the the yeah the display . marketing: And and just put it under the screen , the screen project manager: Put it on top . user interface: Yeah j just just group group the yeah we make these the advanced functions and these the basic functions . But we should place the screen on top , right ? project manager: Well user interface: F oh yeah . project manager: do we do the extra two buttons or not ? user interface: industrial designer: I think you should . So we have a a menu button and a s project manager: And to , okay and back , also . Both the L_C_D_ marketing: Should we save this picture , or or you know what it looks like ? user interface: Yeah I'm I'm not s clear about the the extra two buttons . user interface: Okay so that that's not Yeah that Those are project manager: Those are both both user interface: multifunctional . industrial designer: Hey is it interesting for users if we put LED lights under the buttons ? So that if you press on the menu function that only the buttons that are used for the menu are ligh li light up . project manager: Light marketing: Yeah that's a good idea because then it becomes clear which buttons are active now , which you can use . project manager: marketing: So project manager: Anything else ? marketing: Those buttons are are lit up . Should we use those two ? Them ? Or only this to to scroll ? project manager: I've marketing: And then use the two functional buttons to confirm , to go into something ? Oh no we have to use this to adjust some some bars ? project manager: Volume . industrial designer: Yeah keep it optional 'cause maybe you can you know go left to right and up and down in a in one menu . user interface: No industrial designer: The pr the problem with the okay button in the middle is , sorry project manager: Yeah okay go ahead . marketing: Yeah ? industrial designer: sorry , is if you're pressing up and down , you can easily press the okay once you , when you're not already at your choice . user interface: Yeah the with with the the channel and the volume yeah m a multifunctional navigation button . project manager: and then we can work for thirty minutes , and I have to write very fast to make the minich min minutes . user interface: But do we have to write to write down the our stuff now ? Or first lunchbreak ? industrial designer: Okay . project manager: marketing: project manager: I think you can put the laptop back in the room and user interface: 'Kay . marketing: Aye Y you saved it ? Does it save automatically in the project folder ? Or project manager: Yeah . It's it's just my own map so I put everything into the project manager: Yeah yeah yeah . user interface: But you got some extra information project manager: Yeah that's in the functional design folder . marketing: industrial designer: So first we have a lunchbreak now ? user interface: project manager: Yeah <doc-sep>user interface: project manager: Okay ? So we are here for the functional design meeting so first I will show the agenda so we will I will take notes during this meeting so I will try to summarise it and put that summary in the shared folder if you want to look at it afterwards user interface: project manager: so then each of you will lead a presentation on the task that has been required last time so user requirement specification , technical function design and working design . Then we will take the decision on on the remote control needed functions and then I will assign you the task for the next part of the meeting . So who want to start the the presentation of what they did ? industrial designer: F do you want to start ? user interface: Make a start yeah . project manager: You have PowerPoint ? user interface: Should be in my in their folder no ? project manager: Ah yeah maybe there . industrial designer: With the the whiteboard ? project manager: If you remember yeah user interface: Yeah . So most people want to have a a remote for their hi-fi and T_V_ and stuff like that . user interface: And but other people want th also remotes for controlling and toys like robotic pets and little robots and stuff industrial designer: user interface: Yeah , so there's a project I think called X_ house or something like that that does that , you can integrate your remote with computers stuff . and th the buttons part would be a set of buttons for choosing devices , a set of buttons for special navigation in space , industrial designer: user interface: a set of buttons for linear access of medium and a set of buttons for random access . user interface: Yeah ? industrial designer: What do you mean by linear access then ? user interface: Like a video tape goes forward , backwards , fast and stuff yeah . project manager: and there's a fourth one no ? user interface: ? project manager: So the better now for special navigation ? user interface: Yeah . For special navigation for example you might have a T_V_ in the menu and you going to change yeah ? project manager: Okay . user interface: So if there are common parameters maybe we should put special buttons for that project manager: Okay . user interface: or maybe we could have everything generic but there are a lot of remotes on the market right now and basically this is most of the almost everybody has this stuff . We could assign any button a command to any button , if we have enough processing power , project manager: Okay . Okay so in our usability lab we observed the remote control use among one hundred subjects project manager: . marketing: okay ? And here I have the results so you can see that seventy five per cent of users find most remote controls ugly so we have to find something to make them more more nice , more kind . Eighty hundred per cent of users would spend more money when the remote control would look project manager: user interface: marketing: oh to it's not good . project manager: We can just keep doing that ? marketing: So it's not in theory but I I can I can say yeah . marketing: and fifty per cents of users say they only use ten per cents of but of the buttons in the in the remote control . marketing: So all the buttons we we have to put are have to to have a use a real use project manager: Okay . marketing: and not only or project manager: Okay , so fewer buttons maybe would be good ? marketing: Yeah . user interface: But what kind of remote controls did you look at ? marketing: Sorry ? user interface: What kind of task was it ? It was a T_V_ ? marketing: Yeah . Yeah but in fact we it it seems that we are going to make a T_V_ remote control according to new requirements I received from the management user interface: Huh . marketing: So there are other frustrations expressed by users , so they said they lost often the remote control in in the room so they want to have a way to to project manager: Yeah . marketing: and lot of the time they it takes too much time to learn how to use a new remote control . marketing: And remote controls are bad for project manager: What is her other side ? marketing: R_S_I_ user interface: Other side yeah , yo wa your wrist marketing: I dunno . industrial designer: marketing: Okay before that I I have some some some thing to say before project manager: Yeah . marketing: So it's better to put something very easy to set and and project manager: Yeah . marketing: and we asked this question if they prefer an L_C_D_ screen or on their remultific function remotes control project manager: Yeah . So you know that project manager: marketing: for the younger it's very important project manager: To have L_C_D_ and voice . And and the others is not so important but we know that people between fifteen and twenty five are people who watch a lot T_V_ and who who wh can use a lot this . project manager: Moreover th maybe those like those teenager customer could advice their parents to buy this equipment and so we can user interface: . So as we say before , I think a remote control lightening in the dark it's it's a good thing . marketing: e easy to use a way to find it easily in the room and resistant to to shock and to to industrial designer: project manager: Okay these are the user requi marketing: I dunno if you see something else important or industrial designer: project manager: industrial designer: I'm just thinking of some thing . industrial designer: We want to have a no , I don't know if this is a good idea . project manager: Cos it would be costly and and also it it would take more time to develop to have a a general generic remote control . Because I received that email from management board and they seems to tell that that if we want to be on the market as early as possible we should focus on T_V_ more where it seems that the market is more important . What's your opinion ? user interface: I have I've no idea I should know a bit more about how fast we can design it . marketing: user interface: I don't think project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: yeah . industrial designer: But basically yeah maybe I can continue with my presentation , it would be al you you project manager: Okay . project manager: Maybe you can go to the whiteboard if you have some drawings to do industrial designer: If fact project manager: I don't know . project manager: industrial designer: Okay so I'm just going to describe in fact for for a remote control this is quite easy . We just have project manager: user interface: industrial designer: sorry , I'm going project manager: Okay . Let's say that something like that , which could be a L_C_D_ let's say or an array of push button , something like that . So I say U_C_ and I feed that to L_E_D_ which is infrared which is a an infrared component . industrial designer: Y it's a it's this just a chip which does all the numerical project manager: Computation . We just need to take to define what we want to do when the user interface wants something and after that we just do the coding to s and send that to to to the not the to the television . we just have to define the processing power that we need especially if we want to do some speech recognition , in that case that mean that we are going to use more for simple user interface: This will think this will take more time to develop also . project manager: To have a you s you speak about with voi voice control ? industrial designer: No no no no , project manager: Standard button one . project manager: So do you have any idea of how long it would take to have voice recognition now ? user interface: Ten years . project manager: user interface: industrial designer: I would say about eight months to have the first results . project manager: Even if we have a L_C_D_ display ? industrial designer: Yeah even . So who think it would be good to go for like speech recognition ? user interface: But we don't have time to market . industrial designer: during the kickoff meeting you say that we we shouldn't we shouldn't go up to twelve point five Euro per unit marketing: project manager: Euros . user interface: How muc how much do you get how much do you if you buy one million units h no , one hundred thousand units . How much will it cost for one hundred thousand ? industrial designer: Usually this is less tha at two dollars per chip . project manager: Because we are user interface: So you have any idea for a powerful one that has good enough for do speech recognition . Maybe we can we can look at the new requirement I receive from the management board and discus discuss all function we want to have . industrial designer: I just had a question do you want to continue with your presenta ? marketing: project manager: Yeah I I will continue . industrial designer: you say that I don't remember by heart but thirty per cent marketing: ? industrial designer: of the tested people say that's it's quite difficult to to to use the remote control . industrial designer: Do they say that this is difficult but for the same reason or do they have other reason ? To to marketing: Oh . industrial designer: maybe to keep in mind maybe to access to that menu you should do something like that . marketing: Would j yeah w I I think they they say that it's difficult to learn how to use it but i when you know how to use it , it's it's okay . industrial designer: But yeah maybe and what about if we design a remote control which can be configure as you want ? You say that I want , I have six button user interface: Mh A a lot of people are if you have the L_C_D_ screen if you can do it completely the way you want because the buttons also look the way you want them industrial designer: Yeah . I think the young people are th are marketing: user interface: Christine here said you have a industrial designer: Yeah . Maybe it would be more complex to configure it to be simple than creating a simple product . user interface: And there are another thing is that if we make something that's simple and easy to use that's bas to use immediately that means that it will be exactly the same as everything else . user interface: Otherwise , if it's different then of course everybody has somebody has to learn to use it first . project manager: But also we we see that that most people find it find remote controls too complex because they have too many buttons and they mainly use only channels and volume buttons . project manager: So we may just make a very easy to use remote control with mainly those buttons user interface: Yeah . project manager: and maybe also some lightning stuff too because most people find also hard to to find the remote control . project manager: These these are these two points are the main frustrations so maybe if we design something very simple and easy to find when lost it will add a serious competitive advantage without making something too complex and too long to develop . So we don't have to so this this is is in the this is in the same direction as we were speaking so we don't have to make a very complex remote controls to access teletext and stuff like that user interface: But teletext is just one button . project manager: Yeah but then you have to you have to define the buttons to surf amongst pages and stuff . So well user interface: So will you add with the channel keys , right ? project manager: Yeah . So anyway we don't have to include this feature because it's it's not used any more by users , user interface: So . If if if we want to make it very simple we have to reduce number of buttons compared to th to our competitors . Also so as as I told before it would be better if it's only for the T_V_ because we want to be quick on on the market . And then also we have to make very clear that this this remote control is is part of of our products and show our corporate logo and and colours on the on the design as well so that they identify it as one of our product . marketing: project manager: So before finishing we can define what would be the characteristic of the o th of the control of the remote control and which button do we need which function do we want etcetera . project manager: So do you so so from from the the Marketing Expert I think a key aspect is the easy to use aspect , it should be very simple and most button are never used marketing: . project manager: only ten per cent of the button are are used often so I think we have to do something very simple and I think we all agree on that point , no ? industrial designer: user interface: Well if it is going to be just a T_V_ remote control it is going to be very simple . So few buttons , channel , volume control and what el what function do you see in addition to that ? user interface: Well if it's going to be as simple as possible then just have the remote control , there is no other function that I can see project manager: Yeah . project manager: Maybe switch T_V_ on and off user interface: industrial designer: project manager: user interface: no you want to keep television on so that the advertising can revenue can come back to us . project manager: And that's all ? industrial designer: I know that som you say that many people are doing plenty of a lot of zapping . user interface: industrial designer: I know tha I discovered that when I did a quick look , they do now som they do something which is quite nice now , user interface: It's a memory , yeah . industrial designer: you have a button , you you press it , and this is the previous channel which has come back . So we have like channel button , the previous channel button , the volume button , plus a mute button , and just the the traditional on off button . I I talk about that , yeah ? user interface: How should they how should we implement that ? Because could be numerical only or could be also incremental . This is incremental , but once you press it for a long time , you go five by five . It's an interesting idea , that if you press it for a long time it does something else , in general . So if you you have your ten buttons for the for the numeric the numerical buttons and you have instead of having just one memory industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: Maybe we should have also a digit button user interface: Maybe we should have a complete keyboard and just type console commands . project manager: I dunno bec because if you have the user interface: Well if it's useful like if if you want to change between three channels for example then you h you cannot you cannot cannot work with just memory being incremental . Because you have your previous channel button if you have incremental only it's not it isn't worth it because the previous channel is eith either minus one or plus one . project manager: Maybe we we can make very obvious the channel and volume button button and smaller button down there with the the digits . user interface: Yeah when you zap usually you will have to press the same button all the time project manager: Yeah . user interface: Hey I just thought this thing industrial designer: You user interface: there is a you know there is are some with a wheel like this . project manager: So have a wheel for incremental , have the digits on the lower side that can be closed so as you say protected , industrial designer: project manager: and yeah I think this is the basi user interface: On the lower side I think it you have to turn it . industrial designer: Or a or a ball , yeah , not a a wheel but a ball , and you say to project manager: No , a wheel is better . user interface: So you have to the user has to like to should feel the the the discrete sense a bit . project manager: Well also we have to decide so it should be lightening in the dark I think because most people lost their remote control . industrial designer: 'S quite it's quite easy we do that w with back light on the on the wheel . Even if i L_E_D_ or a if if it's the L_C_D_ feature industrial designer: A blue a blue L_E_D_ and we sell that . project manager: and do we put an L_C_D_ display ? marketing: user interface: Yeah . If you do not multi function then there is no p point in having L_C_D_ . project manager: And so no speech as well because it w it would delay too much the development process user interface: Well if it's going to delay yeah industrial designer: Okay . Because a user could say C_N_N_ for example and it would go C_N_N_ . project manager: and Maybe we can just industrial designer: Ten years project manager: user interface: project manager: Okay . So I I will I will so I we will move to next meeting so in after the lunch break here are the individual action you are required to do industrial designer: project manager: but you will be recalled to the actions by email I think but you can take notes if you if you want but well the instruction will be sent . project manager: and I I will make a summary of that meeting that I will put in the shared folder you can't see industrial designer: Okay . marketing: project manager: and and then you will you will be able to to see what has been has been said on on this meeting and and what has been decided . user interface: What is the folder that you put yours in ? And did it it did work ? marketing: No . Okay ? user interface: Okay what is your email ? project manager: So yeah I I'm it's in the first email so I'm participant one at AMI user interface: At participant one <doc-sep>Well , of course we're new to each other , so I'd like to get acquainted first . So let's do that first , Let's start with you , can you introduce yourself ? You're our Marketing Expert . And I will see what the user wants and what we can do with the new produ project product . industrial designer: My name is Xavier Juergens , I'm the Industrial Designer , and there are three main questions that I have to find an answer to today . First one is what happens inside the apparatus , second is what is the apparatus made of , marketing: . So , our new project is about we need design a remote control for television set , so , which has to be original , trendy and user-friendly . It's We're inspired by latest fashion , not only electronics , but also the latest trends in clothes and interior design . Everybody has a piece of individual work and a meeting afterwards , so we can share information about So I'm gonna keep this short , since we had a technical problem . Every meeting we everybody can present their their views and everything , so to help with these , you have we have the SMARTboards here . I'm supposed to give you an introduction on this doodling board , so it's actually it's very easy . And so it will be easy just to illustrate your views , if you wanna change the format , you just either take out jus just like the pen , and whatever you want , your current colour , your line width , just to make the line bigger . We're just gonna keep using this board all the time , so I think it will be it's very clear for everyone , I suppose . Yeah , just just just stuff that you wanna share , just put it in the in the project folder , like I put my presentation now . I'll put the the minutes of every meeting , I'll put them there too , so everybody can read up if they have to leave early or whatever . user interface: Well , I'm more into the technical aspects of drawing , industrial designer: user interface: so I'm not really good at drawing animals , project manager: Draw us a technical animal . industrial designer: project manager: user interface: This thing isn't doing what I'm What I want . project manager: marketing: user interface: I'll just finish up real soon , because I'm marketing: user interface: So it doesn't really look like a dolphin , project manager: Anyway , user interface: but then again , this is all new for me . project manager: it should It It's supposed to be a dolphin , you like the freedom that it that it represents . Do that in my spare time , so that's basically an project manager: What do you like ? Okay . It's big , it's strong , so Oh , it's a little bit user interface: It's not really that responsive , no . project manager: user interface: You picked a hard one , didn't you ? industrial designer: My drawing skills are really bad , so . project manager: marketing: What ? They are industrial designer: They are really bad , my drawing skills . industrial designer: I'm not sure how the legs should go , but project manager: industrial designer: these are stripes . project manager: What does it want ? industrial designer: well , basically it hunts for prey , but it does it always in a very well-thought way . industrial designer: And it always goes for security , in seeking a hide spot and and doing everything , marketing: . So marketing: project manager: I'm just too lazy to draw it all black , so That's the coolest ant ever . user interface: You've done this before , haven't you ? industrial designer: project manager: I love to draw ants . You're supposed to make i make it different from from what other people have , and just make it a little distinct . Well I guess we have a little little time extra , but Just a little quick discussion to to open open our work . What are y What are your first ideas for the new product ? What user interface: Well , I basically had a question . Do Are we going to introduce a multi remote control ? Is it just the T_V_ or do we want to in project manager: The project I got was just for a T_V_ remote control . marketing: But user interface: thing to keep in mind is that we need to stick to what people are familiar with . user interface: No rational changes or whatever , 'cause it revolutionary changes , project manager: Okay , so very intuitive design , I guess . So that was something I wanted to add , project manager: user interface: and perhaps some usability aspect . Do we want people who are disabled in any way to , yeah , to be able to use it as well ? project manager: Yeah , we want I suppose we want almost everyone to be using it . So I think , really disabled people , yeah , might be a problem , but I think it's a little take it into consideration . industrial designer: Only one thing that has to be added according to me is the the material it is made of , it should be something light . industrial designer: That's it speaks for itself , project manager: It should be light , okay . project manager: What do we This Quick What we're going to Selling price , twenty five Euros . Do you have anything you you came up with yet ? About marketing transfer , whatever ? marketing: about what ? Marketing ? project manager: Marketing I'm not sure what you what you came up with yet . You have anything to share ? Or else we'll cut the meeting just cut the meeting short marketing: no , not really yet , project manager: since we're supposed to stop . marketing: and I will say it project manager: Anyways , the the personal coach will give you the your p your personal assignments and everything

The user interface designer and project manager discussed potential changes to the remote control's user interface. The designer suggested adding a trigger button, but they were unsure which button should be placed there to avoid accidental power button presses. The project manager proposed a solution of having a trigger button and a scroll button on both sides to address the landing and scrolling issues. The designer agreed and suggested further tweaks in the final design phase. However, considering the management board's message, the project manager emphasized the importance of marketing competitiveness over creating a generic remote control for all purposes, leading to the cancellation of the generic plan. Additionally, the user interface designer proposed adding an extra function to the remote control, allowing certain features to be hidden and displaying a clear menu. The project manager supported this design as it would make essential functions easier to find on the menu.

Question: Summarize the discussion about changing the style, features, and trend-watching of the remote control, as well as the presentations of ideas related to it. Article: , on the agenda for this , for this particular meeting , we'll have your three presentations on what you've done since our last meeting , after we came up with some general ideas of our design . And , then we have to make some key decisions on , on our remote control concept , and how we're gonna make it , what materials we're gonna use , and that sort of thing . I've been doing some research into the different components that we could use , what's available to us f to actually make the remote control . , first of all we have to look at how the remote control is actually made , and what is it happens inside the casing , which is more your field . , thes main internal feature is a circuit board , which contains all the elec electronics and also the contacts with the power source . , there are several components of , the circuit board that we need to consider , where we'll be getting them from , what they'll be made of . , diodes , transistors , resonators , resistors , and capacit capacitors all need to be considered as well . project manager: Are they all included , like mandatorily , or r are these different options ? industrial designer: these , they're all different options , they're all separate , apart from the chip , which we will probable decide whether we buy a simple , a regular , advanced . , all the other things are individual components that we'd have to get in separately , and work out the most , like , effective circuit , including all the wires and everything like that . And the L_E_D_ of course , that's a light emitting diode . So , we could , so we've got flex flexibility with colours and things , with that as well . We could use a basic battery , but that brings with it , like they need to be recharged and the bulk , the size of it as well . There's a hand-powered dynamo which is a sort of thing that was used for torches fifty years ago . project manager: What is a hand-powered dynamo ? industrial designer: where you manually charge up the power . project manager: Just every , every once in a while ? industrial designer: Like you wind up something . marketing: industrial designer: Whereas kinetic energy is a new idea that's being used by some watches and other devices , where you just shake the device and it gives it power . , or there's solar power , which we've been considering inside a building , which is where it's gonna be used , might not be quite so useful . , lots of considerations for the case , like what sort of shape it would be , curved or flat . I know I've had a remote control before which you couldn't tell which was the front and the back , user interface: industrial designer: 'cause it had so many buttons on , and the shape was so symmetrical that I'd be pressing like a volume button instead of the on button . industrial designer: we also can choose what materials , the we could use metal , we could use rubber which might be more ideal for the anti-R_S_I_ . It's like the same sort of rubber that's used in stress balls and things like that , so it's very like soft , not so stressful on your hands . user interface: industrial designer: I don't think that's quite up to date with what we're looking for here . We've developed some we've got some good advances in technology , with our research team have found some new multiple option scroll buttons . I think that was brought up for , they're basically quite a flexible design , modern , you don't have to use individual buttons . It , it industrial designer: project manager: we would have to have an L_C_D_ industrial designer: Yeah . We're going on to that later with the advanc with the L_C_D_ that means we'd need a really advanced chip . industrial designer: also we've got the integrated pushbutton , which is what we're most familiar with . It's not been seen before , so it could be quite a , a novelty factor , attractive as well . And also energy saving 'cause you're producing the energy , you don't need an external sort of battery supply or solar panels . industrial designer: Rubber casing I thing would probably the best , if we're going for the anti-R_S_I_ and like more choice with aesthetics . And probably the regular chip as opposed to the simple , marketing: industrial designer: then we could possibly have the scroll and the push , but no L_C_D_ , 'cause we probably can't afford that one . , one concern with the rubber casing is that it would be rubber encapsulating all of these chips and diodes and delicate technology as industrial designer: Another thing is it might be more difficult if it's a rubber exterior talking about putting on interchangeable plates . project manager: I don't see how a like a rubber plate going on top it would stay there . industrial designer: Maybe if the , if it was just kind of a , more of a rubber coating which was on to a case . user interface: W industrial designer: So , it was kind of , the whole thing would be removable . user interface: Well , there's , there is a certain phone that has like a rubber casing , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: you can get sort of outer casing for iPods and something , that's just it's protective as well . industrial designer: it would reduce the impact if it was dropped or something , as well , 'cause it wouldn't damage itself so easily . I , is it possible to put designs onto this type of rubber ? industrial designer: As far as I know . industrial designer: I thought that was project manager: But I think that it's worth it , kinetety , kinetic user interface: Yeah , tha marketing: user interface: marketing: I guess it's a bit scary 'cause it hasn't been done before . marketing: Yeah so there's there is a one battery , because most remotes use two batteries I believe . marketing: So , if it was running off of one battery as a user interface: That would be good yeah . user interface: Maybe we could you were saying about solar power ma maybe not working indoors , but a lot of calculators , yeah , have solar power . user interface: So maybe that could be incorporated as industrial designer: May maybe that could be the backup . user interface: Do , do those calculators industrial designer: s but some marketing: So , if we're doing user interface: yeah . If we're industrial designer: But thing is , it's not you don't need the solar all the time . It can be like you can have the solar energy and then it can store that energy and use it . industrial designer: I suppose it would be really annoying if you get to think , oh no , I forgot to charge my remote today . industrial designer: Like if the kinetic thing , I think what's best about that is that it's instant energy . industrial designer: You don't have to , you know , you can shake it a few times , or whatever . Instead of you don't have to like make sure it's in the right place to charge and . It's the aspects of a computer system which can be seen or otherwise perceived , for example , heard or felt maybe , or by the human user . There's the graphical user interface , which emphasises the use of pictures for output and a pointing device , for example a mouse for input control . I'm not really sure about the pictures that maybe that's on an L_C_D_ screen . user interface: Do you think it's project manager: Yeah , 'cause industrial designer: So I suppose sometime project manager: I'm sorry ? industrial designer: after you . user interface: project manager: because command interface requires you to type textual commands and input at a keyboard , so the numbers are sort of like a keyboard . user interface: So you must , for the graphical user you must need some kind of presentation for the graphics . industrial designer: I s I suppose where on some buttons you would have like the power would be s some kind of symbol . industrial designer: I know we're not having that , but a similar thing , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: you , they have there's a like little picture with a screen with lines across it , which I suppose it's that sort of thing like the , the symbol on the button . industrial designer: But if we're having a simplified display anyway , w that , we probably won't have to focus so much on that . project manager: Yeah , we'll be doing industrial designer: It'll be more the on the numbers and the volume . It'd be more a command interface , and then industrial designer: I suppose we need to think of symbols for like the volume , display , and stuff like that . marketing: So it's just draf graphical for the pointing aspect ? industrial designer: I marketing: The infrared is like , that's considered a project manager: ? user interface: No I think it's to do with the actual symbols that are on the , that's on the buttons of the remote control , and per marketing: Okay . So when it says pointing device that doesn't include industrial designer: For inp user interface: Well it could be a wee scroller thing , and something could come up on the screen . user interface: But I think we're gonna go with the command interface anyway , project manager: Yeah . project manager: What do you mean ? user interface: Like I can't think of an example , but Sort of like little pictures rather than project manager: Oh yeah , like how the buttons user interface: Like a little sound . project manager: So , it's a keyboard in the shape of it , right ? user interface: Yeah m perha yeah . user interface: the co we've decided that the command interface would be the most useful for a remote control . , the remote control would be cheaper to design , so that we'd have more money in the budget to , target the design area of the interface . We , we also have to keep in mind when we're designing our , more user-friendly remote control , that a lot of interfaces consist of a clutter of buttons , that , that their functions , colours and forms aren't always helpful . So , that doesn't improve the use of the produ product , so we need to come up with something that's easy to understand . user interface: Does anyone have any questions ? project manager: Do you think that we should keep all the buttons to one same colour , just to keep it , give it a simplistic look . marketing: so and , and we might , depending on what comes out of the design , we might have to stick to just black buttons . user interface: But project manager: But what about the lighting up effect ? marketing: You mean different colours for the lighting or project manager: well , I thought we had decided that we would if you touched one of the buttons they'd all light up . industrial designer: So there would have to , have to be some parts maybe transparent around the buttons , or something . user interface: In the phone that I was thinking of as well , when you change the covers of it , the , the little buttons that actually , you know , that contro control stuff , are behind the rubber . project manager: If it's flat then , like o like on a cellphone or a mobile phone , it's like all very flat , and you just have to sort of press down on these tiny little buttons , but user interface: Yeah . 'Cause if it's just like constructed in the same way as like the front cover of a mobile phone . I don't think it would matter that the buttons were bigger through the , the top casing . I'm sure you could f work it out to fit in the casing , without causing too much difficulty . , the first one is that there should be a fancy look-and-feel , instead of the current functional look-and-feel . So , I think we've done a lot of talking about that , just with lighting and the buttons and the face-plates . And the recent fashion update , according to fashion-watchers in Paris and Milan , is that fruit and vegetables will be the most important theme for clothes , shoes and furniture . , also , in contra in contrast to last year , the feel of the material is expected to be spongy . So , my personal preferences here , of course , as we , we've already talked about the personal face-plates in this meeting , and I'd like to stick to that . The fruits and vegetable themes , I don't know if that's going to work for us . marketing: So maybe we I've seen a lot of purses with olives on them , you know . marketing: But I I think , I think if we stick to T_V_ based , you know , maybe T_V_ shows , or project manager: But they still need to fit into people's decor though . we don't have to make something in the shape of a strawberry , but it could have the curves of a strawberry , or something . industrial designer: Or just like you know really make it a quite abstract , if that's fits in more with what we're doing . It doesn't s quite fit in with the trendy well , obviously it does , if that's the current theme . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: But may maybe we could go more directly , I don't know . marketing: One thing I was thinking though is project manager: marketing: I dunno if you all remember from our kickoff meeting , we talked about our favourite animals . marketing: that might be getting , you know , too specific , and we should see what the success of the first face-plates are . marketing: And , did you have any questions ? Pretty straightforward ? project manager: Yeah industrial designer: Yeah . Have you guys been saving your PowerPoint presentations to the industrial designer: I didn't for the first one . project manager: Does anyone know how to take it out of , user interface: Just escape I think . industrial designer: Or do we just project manager: But would a backup really be necessary ? will people just use the battery if there's no , if there's , industrial designer: I think maybe we could just go for the kinetic energy , project manager: if there is backup . industrial designer: I think project manager: There's like no reason why it wouldn't work , right ? industrial designer: yeah . industrial designer: Is everyone happy with that ? marketing: So if it's not working they just have to shake it a bit and that revitalises it ? project manager: Yeah . And that linked in with what buttons we would gonna have , so project manager: Right , and we were going for more simplistic style , right ? industrial designer: Yeah , it was user interface: Yeah . project manager: I think we decided on the pushbuttons , right ? industrial designer: so that's the simple . project manager: Would we need a more advanced one for the lighting , the interior lighting system ? industrial designer: Yeah possibly . project manager: Yeah ? industrial designer: So , it's probably gonna be the regular chip that we're going to need . , does this , is this dependent on shape , or what it's made of , or what ? industrial designer: So th I think this is just like gonna be the a very outer case , which we will decide on rubber . I , I I'm sorry , I've lost my PowerPoint thing , so I can't remember what it's ca it's the component industrial designer: Your screen ? marketing: Think it was called command interface . What's that all about ? user interface: I think that is marketing: project manager: user interface: well we haven't really made any decisions about what we're gonna do about the cluster of button functions , colours and forms , in the in consistent use . Like what what are ideas to combat these problems ? project manager: user interface: You know how different interfaces are very different , and can be confusing because because of their difference , and because of the different clusters of buttons that they have . project manager: what are our choices here ? user interface: Well it's just w where where shall we locate the buttons . What kind of functions wi shall we have ? project manager: You mean like we'll have the numbers of the channels , and we'll have the channel-changer , and volume , and power ? industrial designer: The power . Like I don't know if we should go into like adjusting light levels , things like that , because different televisions will have industrial designer: May yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , it was minima marketing: Do you remember that ? industrial designer: well , it wasn't the l project manager: Yeah , it was hardly ever used really . Yeah , and surely that would be like quite specific to the individual television , user interface: Yeah , each television . I think most of that comes like on the i individual television set itself , user interface: You don't change that often , yeah . industrial designer: doesn't it ? I'm sure it has its own buttons , so you don't necessarily need to have it on remote . project manager: Like we , I don't know if we can make a remote that would be universal to all the different kinds of industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: So we're just going for power , channels , volume , project manager: Volume . Some T_V_s will have the option of like living room style , movie style , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and that , they say that's used zero point eight times an hour , which is actually somewhat high . user interface: It w it would seem silly if we'd having anything else , just have an audio button though . project manager: Yeah , user interface: Do you know ? project manager: I don't , I it's , it's a problem with the international appeal , I think . user interface: But we industrial designer: I've marketing: Yeah I guess that it affects the marketing , 'cause it , it is a good sales ploy to say , aren't you annoyed with remote controls that have all these buttons . project manager: Yep , and the user interface design , so this is where the trendy stuff comes in . user interface: project manager: And , your personal coach will give you the rest of the information of what needs to happen . So , anyone else have something to say ? industrial designer: I just have one question about the whole fruit and vegetable aspect . industrial designer: Are we seeing as that was the most popular thing that came up out of your market research , I thi I think we should keep to that rather than moving to animals or something , because even if that may not seem obvious to us , if that's what the surveys brought out , I think that we should probably go along with that . But you're happy to go ahead with the fruit and veg ? marketing: Now do you guys need want an idea of how many are you gonna come up with casing ideas ? industrial designer: Y Yeah . user interface: What I What I was thinking what do yous think of this ? , having the numbers kind of like , not a bunch of grapes , but you know like purple and kind of in a triangle . user interface: That's just industrial designer: We can have a look at those ideas , yeah . marketing: So it's a something that will , you know , appeal to the fifteen to twenty five year olds <doc-sep>project manager: Right w welcome to the the first meeting of Real Reaction's development meetings for our our new television remote control . this follows our very successful entry into the the consumer market over the last year or so which we want to to build on , taking advantage of the the the latest developments in in technology and the the latest feelings in in consumer design and and demand and we want to make this the the very best product th that's possible for everybody , one that everybody wants , at a good price for the consumer and at a good price for the company . project manager: I'll just go round th the table , Andrew , marketing , m Kendra with the designing the the the User Interface and Kate with the the industrial design . What's the the th th project is is here to do , is is to to get this this project up and moving , ev everybody is is free to say wh whatever they want , everybody has a contribution to make and everybody feel free to interrupt me at any time to to say what you want to say . in in terms of the immediate meeting the everybody knows everybody else , everybody's worked for the the company for a while , if if an anybody feels that they need to say more about themselves please do , if if if anybody wants to b briefly give their their background so that everybody's quite clear what everybody everybody's experience is please do so . in fact I'd I'd I'd welcome anybody to say something briefly about themselves , in fact we will do that by by going round the table quickly and and saying what what contribution you you're looking to make . marketing: Oh my name's Andrew I'm a I'm the Market Research person for this for this meeting and this project for creating this new remote control and yeah I'll be presenting information statistics on what people want to want to get from this new design , what people want to like and from a fashion point of view and the practicality point of view . user interface: I'm Kendra and I'm the Us User Interface Designer and I haven't had a whole lot of experience in this kind of thing before but I'm m so I'll be working on the design . project manager: Right at least means you haven't got any preconceived ideas so . industrial designer: I'm the Industrial Designer and I'll just be I guess presenting about the the inter workings of our little remote control and yeah . project manager: Okay , very very quickly , this I don't want to make this meeting too structured because the the whole idea is that it's a you know a think tank . Everybody says what they what they want to say , and we don't want to be constrained by kind of convention or slides on screens or or anything else but briefly th th this is what we want to do . The the remote control needs to be original , there has to be something about it that other remote controls don't have so that as soon as people see it they think yes that's different , I want one , and that goes along with being trendy , you know the I want it scenario . User-friendly as as we all know , remote controls can be very user-unfriendly so we want to make ours one that people can pick up marketing: project manager: and think oh yes that's it's obvious how that works , and they also want to look at the price and think oh yeah that's something that I may not need another remote control but it's such a nice one I'm gonna have one . And last but not least , or indeed first of all , it it must make the company money , and we make the company money by producing what the consumer wants . The the further work to be done is i the the functional design , what it what it must actually do , the conceptual design , how we actually present that to the consumer and th the the detailed design i is how we get that into production . now th the main design tool that we have available to us at the moment is is the white board and let us very quickly do what i what it says in the in the in the prompt slide here , In fact I suggest to avoid everybody untangling themselves from the the the wires , that we don't do that , So I I everybody knows what whiteboard is so we'll we'll do a virtual drawing on the on on the whiteboard of of your your own favourite animal , but le let's go round the table , your favourite animal . project manager: and why ? marketing: it's it's got nice contrast with black and white and project manager: -huh . marketing: I feel they're underdog kind of status project manager: Oh right marketing: and they're , the project manager: my my wife says my beard looks like a badger's arse 'cause of the the white streaks in it . user interface: I just I li I like the way they look and they're just nice animals and I like how they can fly or swim or walk around or whatever . user interface: project manager: I'm not sure that I've got any favourite animal to be quite honest , I think homo sapien industrial designer: project manager: because of their their overall ability to user interface: marketing: Make mobile phones and T_V_ remotes project manager: Sorry ? industrial designer: marketing: to make T_V_ remotes . project manager: Indeed absolutely yes , industrial designer: project manager: tha that's Okay and w we need to keep in mind here that the we want to sell this for for twenty five Euro , we want to m make an overall profit for the the company of fifty million Euros so we're we're looking at selling a lot of these ag across the the entire planet and and we're looking at a gross profit of fifty percent . so we're not only looking at a a very trendy original product , we're looking at making it at a very good price . , okay , would anybody like t like to to start by giving their o sort of quick views of of current remote controls . user interface: Well I think I find a lot of them really complicated to use with all the different buttons and it's handiest when you have one that works both the D_V_D_ player or whatever and the T_V_ as well . , but that it's easy to if you can switch back and forth instead of having to press a bunch of different buttons project manager: No . user interface: and so I think it's is best when they're clearly labelled and you can see which buttons you're supposed to use , you know . project manager: Any any thoughts about buttons or any oth other way of approaching the p the the problem ? Or anybody else , strong feelings about remote controls ? Are there you know , bad ones they've used or good ones they've used or ones that they've lost and never found again ? industrial designer: I think it's important that you should be able to when you when you press the buttons it'll actually pick up the signals from kind of anywhere and you shouldn't have to like contort yourself and twist your remote control to get it the T_V_ to actually pick up the signal . marketing: Think a lot of the time , remotes that come with T_V_ players and T_V_s and D_V_ players , like they aren't industrial designer: . marketing: like an area that's put a lot of effort into , they're very boring , very plain . marketing: Like it's very a very like making a a stylish remote control would be a very like Easily put us one step ahead of the current competition . project manager: what so wh what's in in what particular style features are you thinking about ? marketing: . industrial designer: marketing: So if you want , something that looks like something that makes you think oh what's this ? Like this pen doesn't really look like a pen , project manager: -huh . project manager: d no do you think there's a risk if it doesn't look like remote control , people won't see it as a remote control and marketing: I suppose suppose that's up to the marketing to to make make people aware of the product . Any other thoughts about th the physical appearance of a of remote controls ? user interface: I think something that's comfortable to hold because sometimes you get the remote controls that are just those big , rectangular things industrial designer: . user interface: and they're kind of awkward to hold onto , marketing: user interface: so something that's more comfortable that fits in a person's hand better . project manager: th the thing that i immediately comes to mind is computer mouses which y you get all sorts of shapes in the shops industrial designer: . project manager: some from personal experience which look nice industrial designer: project manager: but aren't particularly comfortable . marketing: Well from the mouse idea you could , remote is a piece of plastic with the big rubber buttons sticking out of it which you press , whereas if you want could all be flat and the buttons are very kind of almost subtle that instead of being raised out of the device you push into device you see , like a mouse button . project manager: Yes , the only thing is if if you're watching television in a in a a darkened room you need to be able to industrial designer: . user interface: But maybe they could be concave instead of sticking up to have them be kind of down so you could feel them industrial designer: . project manager: Yeah , that's must admit I don't think I've ever seen one with concave buttons , that's certainly be different . do we need it to I can't think of any re remote controls that I know of that actually light up at all . So , Andrew have you had any thoughts yet about how we might market something which there are already millions out there and that we want to t take over the entire the planet with ? industrial designer: user interface: marketing: - , especially if we try to sell , what two million of them . Oh sorry , four million of 'em , but I think if w if we market it as as not as not well this you c you could either market it as the point of view we could have the two we could have parallel marketing s schemes where you've got one where it appeals to people that want to have the new device that looks cool , is fashionable industrial designer: . marketing: and like you just it's it's like it's one that rather than ra I wan I want rather than a kind of a need relationship with the device , project manager: marketing: but that might considering the act what the device is for and the nature of some people might not like respond to having a device that they just looks nice , therefore they want it so make it practical at the same time . I think it's this is gonna have to appeal to people that want device that can enhance their living room project manager: Okay , yeah , yeah , well marketing: So , I dunno we'll have to decide which which angle we're gonna go to or both . project manager: I d I think an any any facets that we identify w we aim need to aim for for all of . industrial designer: Oh I think it's it's remote controls are kind of a unique object 'cause it's you depend on them so much , but you don't i i it's you sort of just assume they're always gonna work , you don't think of them as a comp like a computer can break down and you're kinda like oh well fair enough there's all these complex things going on , it's gonna something's gonna get messed up eventually . They they just need to be very very dependable because people sort of take them for granted and then if your remote control breaks it's God forbid you actually get up and manually change the channel project manager: Indeed . user interface: marketing: industrial designer: it just it needs to be very effective , very always dependable . I don't think we should make it too small I 'cause I think it needs to it can't be too big like you were saying big an and huge and awkward , but also if you make it too small kinda like you know how mobile phones are getting smaller and smaller , it's just gonna end up under a couch cushion somewhere and yeah . project manager: Okay , and colours , materials ? Kendra , anyone ? user interface: Well , most I think most of the remote controls now are either just black or grey , project manager: . user interface: so maybe we should go with something different or be able to I was just thinking of what they're doing with mobile phones now how you can get the different what are they called ? Like the face-plates project manager: Yeah . user interface: that you change so we could have maybe I don't know if it would be feasible to do something with that , where you can change the face-plates or have kind of a variety project manager: -huh . Have it kind of look how they want to , different colours , things like that , project manager: Right . Okay that's Again I don't think that's ever been done before , user interface: project manager: it's the sort of the sort of thing that would get people thinking yes that's something that I haven't got and might need so . Andrew , any thoughts about how we might market interchangeable fronts on on the remote control ? marketing: well we could either market it together by getting control in a set colour or with like you buy it with several like you ge you get the f the face-plates with it when you buy or as a separate thing , but maybe thinking of that , it's considering the nature of the device , maybe a second thing like a second campaign to market new facials for your to your might go a bit astray industrial designer: . marketing: since it is the kind of thing where y you generally get one and then forget about it . marketing: Unless you were trying to project manager: I think industrial designer: Well you could come up with like novelty ones , like they've done with the the mobile phones , you can get like different you know scenes from different movies and stuff on the remote control marketing: . marketing: Oh industrial designer: and sorta stagger the release of them marketing: it's that's a that's a good idea . industrial designer: and get people like oh I want that cover on it now and that'll keep them spending money . then we'll we will reconvene in in thirty minutes and try to get some of these ideas more formalised <doc-sep>So does anyone have any thoughts as to the tool training that is required ? industrial designer: Tool training user interface: I'm not exactly sure what you mean by tool training . user interface: marketing: project manager: Oh I see , so we shouldn't really be Oh right okay , so . So we have the project team , which is to basically to come up with a new r remote control device . industrial designer: project manager: we have the starting base was the original which has been in existence now for a period of time . And our idea is to to make the new remote control device more user friendly than the previous one , and to to be trendier , to be with it , and therefore to to get a bigger market share and bigger audience . project manager: So method of doing this is split up as you can see into the functional design , the conceptional design , and the detailed design . So in each of these phases we'll basically be handing over to yourselves , the designers of this this device . project manager: And having meetings so that we can during the course of the day come up with a better better inst implement than we had before . marketing: user interface: project manager: Right so everyone's to supposedly draw their favourite animal over on the white board over there . marketing: Your microphone's just project manager: I take it that user interface: Are we supposed to do this right now , do you think , or ? project manager: I would I would guess so . and this would be because they're very independent , they're very intelligent , compared to dogs maybe . I'll I'll user interface: Shall I rub that out , actually ? project manager: I don't see as there's any need to . project manager: We've had more time to prepare over this side , industrial designer: There's one . I'm gonna go for the bear which I'm be able to draw very well , project manager: You get marks for artistic impression . user interface: project manager: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: and I like my animal that looks nothing like a bear because I dunno maybe because there's so many cartoon characters made up after the bear like the jungle book characters and stuff like that . And they're always happy , so whenever whenever you're feeling sort of a bit a bit down or tired , they're always coming up and they're always quite excited . project manager: industrial designer: user interface: marketing: Okay , that's why I like dogs . Well I've not actually had too many pets over my time 'cause to be honest with you I'm not too keen on them anyway . So what my daughters have got at the moment is they've got a few fish and so hopefully won't prove too difficult to draw . And one of the best things about fish is that they don't really take too much looking after because with most of the animals if you're going away on holiday or whatever , you've gotta spend money or get a friend or whatever to look after them for you . Whereas if you got fish , you just gotta put the food in a a a dripper feed which feeds them over the couple of weeks that you're away and change the water every couple of months , and buy in a few plants , so . Other than the fact that they keep dying , industrial designer: project manager: fish are are not are are are reasonable pets in that they're low maintenance . And therefore making a profit margin of well not actually a profit margin it's because obviously you're gonna have overheads and various other costs to take from from that to give you your profit margin per unit . And so depending what the the overhead costs are will determine how many units we're looking to sell or projecting to sell at this point in time . So I guess we're looking at having a discussion at this point in time to help you folks design our our new model as it were . project manager: So any any thoughts ? industrial designer: I with some remote controls the buttons were a little small so they're quite hard to press so maybe we make something with easy to press buttons . project manager: Okay , so so basically we're looking for some we're looking for a device that is robust and and therefore won't get damaged too easily . project manager: we're looking for a device that is What was the other things you said there ? industrial designer: sort of easy to use so the buttons are accessible . user interface: Can I just check ? Is this just a television remote ? Because a lot of systems are kind of T_V_ video combined now , or T_V_ D_V_D_ combined . industrial designer: user interface: Or is it just a television that we're supposed to be doing ? marketing: . industrial designer: project manager: But it seems to me sensible , user interface: project manager: 'cause as you rightly said , there's nothing more annoying than having three or four devices littered about the about the room . one of the things we found from the market research is that people often get confused by the number of buttons on them as well . And sometimes they sort of remote controls defeat their own purpose because you're sat in the chair and the remote is somewhere else in the room . So whereas in the past you'd have to get up to change the channel , now you have to get up to sort of pick up the remote . So so I don't we need to sort of maybe think about how we could maybe develop a remote control which moves around the room . marketing: That's that's maybe something for the future when you can talk to your television , but industrial designer: Yeah . You can't have both the th the one device and then have few buttons on it to marketing: Yeah . project manager: 'cause you want you want simplicity as well , you want any idiot to be able to use it . project manager: you could argue that experience of using devices and similar devices as people get more and more used to using remotes , therefore they're more with handling them , industrial designer: Yeah . Or are we just doing the design of the remote control itself , or sort of the instructions that would come with it ? project manager: Better instructions . we've done some research about sort of you know what the cutting edge sort of hand held devices are , and a lot of them sort of use you know they're like they're like mini laptops . marketing: So it's possible that we could devise a system where where you're you're basically sort of holding a a miniature computer which is controlling all your your sort of your television , your stereo , and where you know if you buy a new thing then it sort of you can link it to that as well , maybe . project manager: So Right , so we've got I_D_ the Come on , where's my marketing: If you just click return it should be okay . So we've got function Oh what happened to the user interface: I think that might be back to the start . marketing: project manager: Okay , so we've got the working design for I_D_ . Are we all clear what objectives we're looking to meet in the next thirty minutes ? industrial designer: project manager: And I guess I'll try and write up some minutes of this meeting to to give it to you for the next meeting . user interface: I'm not exactly clear on what we're designing the rem remote for . user interface: Is this a mun multi-functional one or do we decide that ourselves as we go away and work on it ? industrial designer: I think you just said at the start it was a television remote control , project manager: Television remote control . project manager: That's true , 'cause during during the course of our day we might make decisions based on information or meetings that would change where we're going . project manager: But at this point in time I think you're right that shall we make it just a T_V_ <doc-sep>project manager: I have some points I would like to some some issues I would like to point out . first of all , if you make minutes yourself as well , like Sebastian does , could you put them on the shared folder ? If you do not make minutes , no problem , but it's easy for me to see what you wrote down , user interface: Yeah . the second thing , I was th s thinking to myself , I have this little remote control , and I'm talking to it , but I still need to point to the television , because it works with infrared . industrial designer: So project manager: the agenda for now are there any pre-discussion questions ? marketing: user interface: No . industrial designer: project manager: we wi we will have your individual presentations , then the decision on the remote control concept , and the closing . So I think we we can immedis immediately start with the individual presentations , the progress you've made . project manager: I think it might be smart to look at Ruud's information first , because I understood there are some significant changes in the market situation . Ease of use is important , but innovation is more important , and a fancy look and feel is even more important . And some fashion watchers have found out that the young target group likes fruit and vegetables in their clothes , shoes and furniture , user interface: marketing: and that they want spongy material . But we since we are concentrating on the younger group project manager: w wait a sec wait a se industrial designer: Oh wait wait up . project manager: could you go to the previous slide ? because I'm taking minutes marketing: 'Kay . The feel of to be spongy industrial designer: so do you think when fruit and vegetables are important for clothing and shoes that they are in remote controls also ? marketing: Well , one example given was this , so I assume they just want something colourful . user interface: you said in the p industrial designer: marketing: No , the younger group likes more colourful objects . marketing: But user interface: I had industrial designer: But can you can you go back to that slide ? The marketing: Which one ? industrial designer: just one slide back , marketing: This ? industrial designer: no no no . industrial designer: Has it something to do with that natural feeling also , do you think ? project manager: marketing: well , it might . project manager: Okay , so so , yeah , it might not be t it it shouldn't be too hard . marketing: Yeah , and like the older group likes familiar materials , user interface: Or we could make oh . But since we're conten concentrating on the younger group , I think we should use soft materials and make it colourful or like cell phones , exch exchangeable covers . industrial designer: project manager: Do you know the phone ? industrial designer: I don't know the phone , project manager: It's the Siemens C_ twenty five , industrial designer: but I can imagine it . project manager: I believe it's it's the one the Post-bank gave away , user interface: thirty five . project manager: the very user interface: And the b the light blue and it's also in yellow . project manager: You kn you know , Ruud , as well ? About th marketing: I've seen it , project manager: Okay . Okay , so the the m important findings are innovation is more important than ease of use for the our target group . Well , I don't ha really have much to add , because most of things we already said in the previous discussion . project manager: Okay , well it's good to to sum up the things we already thought about . user interface: the previous ideas were voice recognition and the round button for the p channel programming and volume . These are both with with voice recognition , but they're very advanced and very high-tech and just , well , a weird shape . user interface: So I suggest I couldn't I had a small mock-up sign on the on paper . But it's it's kind of it's kind of o organic , so that's very good . project manager: And what I'm thinking about , maybe we should make very light but a grip this is how you hold a remote control . project manager: it shouldn't be too glatt , too slippery , industrial designer: Slippery . project manager: s because user interface: But if you have something like the Siemens phone , it's rubber . There are there are also remote controls who have a little shape underneath where you can put your fingers in , project manager: Yeah , ex for your fingers , yeah . industrial designer: user interface: Oh and to add on Ruud's information , in this interface we can have high-tech with the voice recognition and , well , the the fancy colours and and so on , and still have the ease of use , because we have an easy interface . user interface: So if you have the voice recognition , you can you can programme like thirty thirty c controls on it . marketing: industrial designer: project manager: Okay , b but I think we'll industrial designer: Okay , but I'll I'll go into that , project manager: yeah . I had a talk with our manufacturing division , and we had a talk about all the different components who are in this design . that's the most common remote con control form we're used to is just a it ju it's just a box . I c I think you can compare it a little bit with the big grey image you had in your presentation . industrial designer: But it's quite advanced and it's it's quite daring to to use I think . We can use plastic , which is very slippery and maybe not so nice , but you can give it any colour , which is the same for rubber , but it's not slippery . And these latex cases , there's there's just the plastic ones won't allow the use of solar cells as an energy source source . project manager: user interface: marketing: industrial designer: You really have to imagine like winding up your user interface: Great . project manager: Well , it would be very new to the market , industrial designer: I d marketing: project manager: but industrial designer: It would be very new , marketing: industrial designer: but it's a kind of a retro style , I think . So when you're watching T_V_ or when you're you you have to make some kind of energy kinetic energy by shaking the remote or throwing it against the wall , whatever you wish . project manager: marketing: industrial designer: It have it it has to move , that's the the sense of it . project manager: I think , if if I can hook on to that , the kinetic thing is very funny . project manager: solar is of course it's nice , but it's , well , your your calculator has a solar panel . project manager: hand dynamo user interface: But if you're watching a movie , how many times you take the the remote control and and project manager: Well , maybe m user interface: if if you have a watch , you have the kinetic idea in a watch also . industrial designer: But you know you know from your own watch your watch uses a minimal con it consumes a minimal amount of energy . the the shaking of your body , which is almost every activity makes your body shake , it charges it . So I think you have a problem when you're watching a movie and you haven't moved the remote i remote control in a in an amount of time , and you want t to switch the channel or something , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: So , but maybe maybe there's a possibility com to combine it with m traditional batteries , so we can save on the batteries project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: and when there's enough kinet kinetic energy , use the kinetic energy , and otherwise use the batteries . project manager: Okay , because I guess the voice recognition feature u consumes quite a f a lot of power . industrial designer: And we of course have the traditional solar power , which is just a piece of material on the remote control which transfers light energy into electricity . The user interface controls , of course we have the push-buttons and we also have scroll-wheels . in the indicators we have the L_C_D_ displays , which means you can watch in a display w which channel you have chosen or something like that of the li amount of volume which is currently user interface: So we don't really have the the kind of button we had in mind in our in our last meeting , the the thing with the the round with the four user interface: user interface: But I th I don't think the scroll-wheels I had some I had some information about it too . user interface: I don't think there's any possibility for us to use scroll-wheels . project manager: Well user interface: I d I can't see any scenario where you would use a scroll-wheel with a button on it . What about integrating a scroll-bar on this side ? user interface: Yeah , that's a possibility , industrial designer: it's do it's done before . user interface: But Flores , think about a scenario where y where you would use the scroll-button for project manager: Volume ? industrial designer: Well , it's it well , i what he means is there's an button integrated in the scroll-wheel . project manager: Ruud , wha what do you thing about a scroll-bar ? scroll-wheel . But it's done before , there are many other devices like telephones and our radio , pocket radios . industrial designer: And Well , it's it's been done years ago and I don't see it anywhere now . project manager: Nokia has a well , okay , it's not really a scroll-wheel , but on their side th the the volume button is on the side , because you gri grab it like this . user interface: Yeah , I believe if you have what we've earlier said , the grip places in in the remote control . You have your hand on one place on the remote control , so you have to place all the buttons in a range of your thumb . user interface: So in that case the volume button on the side of the remote control would be perfect . industrial designer: Okay , we have to know , if you want to use these rubber double-curved c case , you must use these push push-buttons . We basically have three types of chips we can use and these chips incorporate all the Logica and hardware that is needed to send to send a signal . So so user interface: you programme it , you m mute and you g you give an an action to it that that's really the mute function industrial designer: okay . user interface: So you say mute , he repeats mute and you makes a computer sound mute , and then goes to the mute function . If we want to use the L_C_D_ display , we really need the advanced version , which is a bit l little bit more costly . And if we don't want to use any of these more advanced functions we can keep with the simple chip , which is a bit cheaper . project manager: d did we already decide on the display ? To industrial designer: no , but I think that's something for Roo here to think about . Well , I don't have I haven't looked for for information about it , but I don't think information y I don't think you need it on a display . user interface: Especially when when we have to look at a cost , I don't think industrial designer: I I don't think either . user interface: 'cause all any T_V_ can can view a digit on on screen , industrial designer: No . Okay , well project manager: th industrial designer: my conclusion , unfortunately the market has decided the a little other than I thought . I thought the market would like a sort m sort of titanium casing , but they seem to like natural stuff . It's it's more advanced , but I'm I think you should combine it with batteries . project manager: Okay , it's maybe a bit too too flashy , industrial designer: Otherwise it will not too advanced , project manager: too industrial designer: well . industrial designer: It's in in in some way it can give us an advance , because you will save on your batteries . user interface: But what about the markets wants colourfuls designs ? So if you use titanium project manager: No no , but the that's what Sebastian said . project manager: No , user interface: And I would think marketing: And project manager: r marketing: yeah , project manager: rubber with colours . industrial designer: Okay , well these scroll-wheels , I think they they can be they can be handy . user interface: And they can be implemented with a regular chip ? industrial designer: So Yes , they can . But they really need the regular chip , you cannot use the sa simple user interface: Okay , but we also we already need the regular chip for the sample sensor speaker industrial designer: Well , I'm not very sure . Maybe that's an a different user interface: oh , project manager: But but do we want the curved design , user interface: evalu project manager: or industrial designer: I think so , if you if you stick with the the simple straight-forward not curve design , i it's too dull . industrial designer: And if you take the double-curved , then you cannot you can only use the rubber buttons and you cannot use the scroll-wheels . project manager: Okay , what about the issue I addressed at the beginning of the meeting ? the voice function w with the infrared issue . It's it's I I can imagine it's very dull to talk to a device w if you have to point to another device . But project manager: It depends also on your on your user interface: Well , if you if you take your hand before it , okay , it won't work , but you can point it just to the other wall . project manager: But if you have carpets on the wall , which our natural loving friends probably do have , then yeah , th th it might be a bit more of a issue . industrial designer: I think it gives us the advantage of user interface: And and the scroll scroll-wheels . project manager: according to Ruud , the the the market likes new flashy technology , industrial designer: Technology . project manager: well , ok I know , but it's m it's less s standard marketing: Standard ? project manager: than than Well , we are not very w we do not know much about the the f the financial part . project manager: Because if we do have enough space in in our finance , I would say do integrate it , industrial designer: user interface: But we already have the scroll-wheels , the sp the speaker the speak recognition , the rubber , the fancy colours . I think i Ruud , do you have any anything you would like to add or or maybe thoughts or marketing: Nah , n no , I don't think so . M project manager: No ? Sebast nee , Roo ? Roo , do you have any other user interface: no . the n the next phase will be the not the project manager: Sebas industrial designer: what is the next phase f Flores ? project manager: Well , we we need to describe decisions now . project manager: So industrial designer: So i project manager: on the energy , well , we decided . project manager: User interface user interface: but can't scroll-wheels work with one one-curved case ? Yeah , okay . marketing: user interface: project manager: and the I_D_ and the U_I_D_ need to work together on the prototype drawing on the SMARTboard . user interface: The project drawing is for the next industrial designer: So you will be on the Bahamas . marketing: project manager: Yeah , it's it's when we come back in thirty minutes , you will have a prototype ready . So can you give us a summary of all decisions we've made ? project manager: Yeah ? I can . user interface: But can there be wor can they work together ? Or do we have to choose between them ? project manager: No , user interface: 'Cause if we have to choose project manager: they can be complementary . industrial designer: Well , project manager: Every device user interface: What if not ? industrial designer: It it should be . Okay , industrial designer: So project manager: th industrial designer: So just the energy source is the batteries and the solar . What about the finishing of the case ? We have decided we wanted to use the rubber ? project manager: Yeah , with colourful rubber . project manager: if it's possible with different covers , but I'm not sure if our suppliers can can help us with with such a wish . Don't you think ? project manager: Well , I was more thinking about the fruit colours that the Ruud showed us before . so maybe it shouldn't even be two colours , it should be a full colour cover with such an image industrial designer: . project manager: or or thinking in two colours is is too black and white for our m c market group , I guess . marketing: industrial designer: Okay , marketing: industrial designer: but I'm afraid it's not possible to print a picture on the device . Just a week ago , a keyboard manufacturer would print , industrial designer: Oh , I've read . industrial designer: And th the they should be spongy also , because they're they're rubber too . marketing: user interface: What what did you say ? industrial designer: Well you can use well , when you use the buttons , they'll they'll be made of rubber too . Because it i what do you touch the button , and what do they want spongy devices , or or i user interface: Yeah , b But then you just have the the fact that the drawings on the buttons will disappear eventually . user interface: What I said in the in the first discussion , the digit six on the button , it will disappear when it's from rubber . project manager: is that does our our supplier say so ? user interface: It is not something it's no information I read about it or so , but it's just from marketing: didn't did we inc include the digi digits or leave them to the speech recognition ? user interface: No , but but it marketing: 'Cause things like volume could be placed next to the button . So still then , if you feel li if you feel your remote control , you just rub on the cover , so you rub on the painting . project manager: No no , there's no painting , only yellow or But it's into the rubber . project manager: Yeah , but this is on the pla user interface: You have to draw the industrial designer: Yes , the signs . project manager: What about making this rubber and making this plastic ? industrial designer: I see what you mean . project manager: But the front , on which the the buttons are doesn't have to be rubber . project manager: industrial designer: Well , I'm I'm not so sure , user interface: Y can you separate these these industrial designer: I think it c should be Well , I'm not sure , I have to ask with manufacturing , but I'm I'm not sure that's what you want , because our customers specifically ask for the spongy feel , and that's what you get with rubber . So if you want the spongy feel , you need to make these buttons all all of rubber . project manager: I know , but do you touch this or do you touch this ? industrial designer: I think both . The side , but do you touch between the the these buttons ? user interface: I think Yes , especially when there are l a few buttons on it , you have a lot of space to touch . project manager: because you have to make its prototype , and yeah y you have the most knowledge about the suppliers , the possibilities and user interface: Yeah . The chip is is not really industrial designer: The only difference between the advanced and the regular version is that the advanced version of the chip supports L_C_D_ . project manager: Yeah ? Yeah , if you write wrote anything down , could you put it on the shared folder ? industrial designer: Okay <doc-sep>Last time we discussed the squishy fruitiness of our remote controls and how we might pursue that . so for later in the meeting I've done a a spreadsheet of production costs so we'll take a look at that . This is a button , serves as the power button if you hold it down , and if you just tap on it I think it brings up the menu . And the base of the remote control , which has a squishy spongy rubbery feel , is interchangeable . project manager: Oh is that broccoli ? industrial designer: This one's broccoli . project manager: industrial designer: The it's trendy fruit , it's not just ordinary fruits . I guess strawberry's not as trendy , but project manager: 'S a very bright strawberry . industrial designer: So we'll come up with a variety of trendy and exciting fruit designs for the remote control . And then people will be encouraged to buy three or five of them , because they'll need to switch 'em out . user interface: It's been a l project manager: user interface: It's been a little bit difficult to make sure that it's hand-holdable , and that the user can use it , you know , it's not too big . but we think that this you know , this size will be okay and we will have to fit the battery case in there somehow . user interface: And I guess the only other thing that we really didn't talk about was or design yet actually , would be the thing the locator . user interface: Okay so that's just industrial designer: And the beeper's also inside there too somewhere user interface: So you have to have a button on your on your you have to attach the button to the industrial designer: Yeah we didn't design that . But if I missed anything that we've gone over , or if you see something that has changed industrial designer: project manager: we decided on batteries , and the regular chip would be necessary for the more advanced iPod-like button . I think that's what you have there , is that right ? For the for the plastic part would be industrial designer: My impression was that flat meant like like one of those square remotes . industrial designer: But it's really not very clear , because you got single curve and double curve and d I dunno what that means . industrial designer: marketing: project manager: so what else ? There's plastic for that area around the button . Do you see anything that I've missed ? industrial designer: No I think that's alright . project manager: Okay so that would make our total of eleven point nine , which is even less than twelve point five , which means we'd be making even more of a profit . I think that's marketing: So I need where's the cable ? Right what happens is we have to decide whether this this whole this whole project we've been working on actually meets the standards we were set at the start . the method is we well I've analysed the user requirements and integrated them to the trends found in marketing reports and in our company strategy marketing . And the findings were that we need it to look in a certain way , feel in a certain way , and this is everything's listed down . , look in a certain way , feel in a certain way , it has to be technologically innovative and it has to be easy to use . We have to use a table , I'll show you that later , together to decide whether it meets the standards . And we we have therefore in total We have five we have eleven points according to which this should be evaluated . marketing: so the que the questions I've given you c could you write that down ? True is one and and false is seven . Is it possible that we can bring this up on our own marketing: Yeah it's in the it's in the project documents . marketing: Do you want us to discuss this together or do you want us to do it singly ? project manager: we can do it separately and then discuss it marketing: Yeah okay . project manager: Wait , one is true and marketing: project manager: so these are the questions we're answering . And one is marketing: yes it's if it's fancy you put one , project manager: One , right okay . Should be more like Are the batteries easy to insert ? industrial designer: I'm gonna say yes . project manager: Are we just about ready ? marketing: Apparently I'm supposed to use the whiteboard . It's marketing: We'll just do project manager: yeah the the marker thing kinda stopped working last time we industrial designer: marketing: user interface: Yeah . project manager: Un unless you feel you need it t to marketing: I don't feel any project manager: okay okay . industrial designer: project manager: We'll user interface: marketing: right Right so one point one ? We'll just go in a circle . Okay so do we just add it up and divide it by four ? Is that what the company does ? project manager: I I think we should industrial designer: It's four if you wanna do that . One point three is user interface: So it's a one was true and seven was false ? project manager: . industrial designer: Huh ? user interface: Okay , so you guys really didn't like it ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: So we do have about the same thing , we just have it the other way marketing: Well industrial designer: Sh Yeah I I was thinking one means no points , you know , all the way up to the top . user interface: I was like , why did you guys design it that way if you hated it ? marketing: Yeah . Wait , is that two point one ? industrial designer: Yeah I put it down as one point four for some reason . industrial designer: marketing: Okay I'll I'll just do the calculations now if you want to continue . marketing: Or is it tedious ? I'm I'm sorry this was so tedious for everyone . project manager: No no that's I think we should look at the ones that like where s where people said four , where it looks like we might wanna discuss changing an aspect of the remote . marketing: do you want to change it ? What are the suggestions ? I don't know , anyone ? project manager: user interface: Which one is that again sorry ? Three point one ? project manager: user interface: I think marketing: Four point two ? project manager: See I'm having I'm having trouble imagining the is it gonna be the size , like the the controller ? It or bigger ? industrial designer: I think the wheel would probably be . project manager: Because user interface: What if we just smash all the vegetables down flat ? project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: And like then it you could hold it in your hand better . industrial designer: I think the base would definitely be larger , 'cause some of these are not as easy to hold . No but I imagine even if it was bigger , like if it's round and it's big then you you can't get that's why remote controls are long because you have that thumb kind of user interface: Yeah . project manager: but I don't s I I personally don't think this is comfortable to to sit there , like it's an awkward position . But like if if you just squash them flat like and you made it flat industrial designer: Well if they're that s stress ball stuff they would be pretty squishable . And would it even resemble fruit that way ? industrial designer: project manager: user interface: Yeah like certain ones you'd have to limit the fruit selection , project manager: Yeah . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: You could do , although the broccoli is quite comfortable , I have to say , like sorta like a joystick . So industrial designer: marketing: Are there any fruits that look like broccoli , no ? user interface: . marketing: despite the user interface: I think we needn't project manager: What if the it was just patterns on like we we chose the shape or the sh shape could be whatever we wanted and then it would just be like a design on the rubber . project manager: But if we if we need marketing: Yeah and just have the colour match or something . And if we wanna incorporate the fruit thing somehow , there might be user interface: project manager: if it if it in if it conflicts with the comfort of actually holdi holding the industrial designer: marketing: user interface: Yeah . user interface: Or like I dunno , some of 'em you can kind of think see as like marketing: user interface: like you could if it was only this you know , if it was shaped like that , and it just had that . But you see the problem is you have to attach that , and this has to be detachable . user interface: So like maybe that's just too big project manager: Well see th the reason the broccoli works is you can kinda hold it like that , user interface: because project manager: which is a nice kind of user interface: Yeah it's sorta like a joystick . project manager: is there some way we could make it this kind of shape ? user interface: I guess project manager: 'Cause like kind of industrial designer: We could make it that shape but just have different colours , and call 'em the different fruits . project manager: Or like even user interface: Dif industrial designer: We went with shape because we were having fun with the play-dough . project manager: And you could like if it's like this , you could put fruit designs and stuff on that part . project manager: But it do we have any other ideas about that ? marketing: user interface: We could tr I don't know . Batteries easy to insert for some reason , industrial designer: marketing: which can be easily I think that's not a problem any more . project manager: The batteries are going in the back ? industrial designer: That everyone gave that a one or a two . project manager: The reason I I ga I didn't give it a one I think I gave it a three because I thought you'd have to like unc clip industrial designer: No I imagine there'd be sort of a hatch door , project manager: no you could Just like any other one . industrial designer: So it would probably either in the f no it can't be in the front 'cause the I_R_'s right there , but it'd be on one of the sides probably . marketing: industrial designer: user interface: so I can't think of any So we'll have to like . You could make the touch pad in th in different shapes , but then that kind of re-designs the whole project like , industrial designer: It might also sort of annoy people if we get used to having the buttons in one shape . project manager: I guess we're supposed to discuss the prod the process of the project and how satisfied oh , oh it's alright . marketing: It's alright yeah ? project manager: Did you feel there was a lot of room for creativity in the sort of industrial designer: Sure . marketing: user interface: The prototype making was very creatively stimulating industrial designer: user interface: and I think we've come up with a product that's fun and meets all the criteria . project manager: And how was our leadership and teamwork ? industrial designer: I think it was good . industrial designer: Well you told us when to start and when to end , and that's all that matters . project manager: Yeah , well I'm never gonna do a management position , I know that now . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: project manager: yeah , I thought we all worked very well together . user interface: Yeah I think it more than anything we didn't really have our set roles so much , as we just would be like I don't know , all had ideas about it but project manager: Yeah . marketing: project manager: and the means for like the materials we used , how convenient were they ? Like the the pens , the whiteboard , industrial designer: project manager: we used industrial designer: Well I'm not a big fan of any Microsoft , PowerPoint or any of this stuff . project manager: Are you a Mac person ? industrial designer: No no I never touch Macs either . marketing: industrial designer: I just use the Unix or the off market , sort of WordPerfect and all these other things . Well the problem is if you don't like my new computer never has WordPerfect so I have to go track someone down who has an old disk and then I have to reinstall it . user interface: I felt like my I dunno if it was just my role , but l but I di I thought that my the information that was available to me was kind of just like or maybe it was just the idea that we had . But there's kinda it was kinda like okay , I don't really think I dunno what I'm doing here . So I kind of just made up my own stuff and I didn't really like the PowerPoint presentations , project manager: Yeah . user interface: But yeah I d I don't really like PowerPoint personally , think it's kinda stupid . project manager: It industrial designer: My first bit of information was like this child's drawn picture of how a remote works . marketing: I though it was brilliant no ? project manager: Really ? user interface: marketing: No mine was really helpful as in my stuff was quite helpful I think . user interface: So like a f marketing: I think it depends on the role project manager: yeah , yeah . marketing: no ? project manager: 'Cause my problem was , you guys had access to like they'd put send you to sites and stuff right ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: See I couldn't do that , so I didn't really know what you guys were doing . And when you were talking about it I was just like industrial designer: project manager: you know that's wh that's why I seemed so ignorant when when you were j explaining things , marketing: project manager: 'cause I industrial designer: Yeah well mine was mostly made up except when they told me like you know titanium costs more than wood to make a remote control . marketing: a whole system , industrial designer: marketing: 'cause of course they can't give you anything comparable to the internet for the project manager: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , it industrial designer: Well I think it's interesting how it all went together , like I had the stuff about how me how rubber's cheap , and you have how people want it to be spongy , and marketing: Yeah , yeah . user interface: Yeah I kinda thought that I felt like I would go and like try to use my information , or like I'd make this stupid little presentation and then like I just would end up talking about something completely unrelated industrial designer: user interface: because project manager: Yeah . But project manager: Well we really got into talking about like personal practicalit like it wasn't necessarily what was like we would never have thought of fruit or sponginess you know ? industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: So it's industrial designer: If I hadn't been told that fruit was marketing: But I think that it it might be to see whether people actually all come up with the same thing . given certain information or Just marketing: Yeah , like if everyone's given the same input project manager: yeah . marketing: what's next ? Looks like oh no that's not project manager: What do you guys think of the pens ? marketing: It's quite project manager: It asks about that . industrial designer: user interface: I I'd like to see what what it looks like on the industrial designer: They're nicer than the pen that I'm using , because like your stuff actually shows up here , rather than having to look at the screen and write . project manager: And new ideas found ? industrial designer: marketing: Yeah it's all very new , project manager: Yeah . user interface: I think the microphones are okay when you're sitting down , but like they're kinda clumsy I guess when you're like when you're s going up to the whiteboard like . user interface: I think , and I think that all this technology like I guess some people must be interested in using it but I can't imagine finding it any more useful than like looking at someone's notes , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Well the thing is , like I actually worked in a company , user interface: or like I dunno . And like the last thing I would have wanted would be to have to watch a video 'cause I missed a meeting . project manager: industrial designer: There's just there's really not that much information that actually goes through a real meeting , like when you're actually at a real meeting in a real company . industrial designer: And you're sort of going over general stuff that anybody who's sort of on task should already know . industrial designer: It's like the there's just really not a lot of information that goes through . industrial designer: Like if I missed a meeting I could probably get it summed up in like one sentence . industrial designer: I wouldn't need to have to watch like a t two hour video with the sound and the transcript and project manager: Yeah . user interface: I guess it would be it's gotta be worth it to I 'cause I'm just mostly curious about like what kind of person or like company would would really find it useful , 'cause can't really imagine , dunno . How about a p a ? project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: I dunno . project manager: Well does anyone wanna talk about fruit more while we still have time ? industrial designer: project manager: Any other ideas for marketing: What what's the end ? Are we are we supposed to you supposed to write a report ? Or we ending ? project manager: we still have time if there's any other input . marketing: Is that the end ? industrial designer: project manager: the I think we did really well personally , which is why we've you know , gone through this so quickly . 'Cause we've all we all kind of agreed our product is satisfactory , it fits the budget , and it's trendy <doc-sep>See , shall we wait ? I'm not sure if he's late or delayed or whatever , so I'm gonna start soon , we have now don't have much time anyway . project manager: have a little thoughts on what your vision is and on this project , so I put the minutes on the I made on the on the p the the project share , so if you wanna review them , they're there . I will do so after every meeting , so if you have some information you wanna take back you can find it there . after that I got some new project requirements from project board , so we're gonna go af go after over this later . marketing: there was a little problem with my computer so not the whole presentation project manager: Anyway , let's see what you have . The the method we used it it's not m not a slide , because it went wrong , but the method we use , we tested it w with a hundred men , and we asked them to w what the remote f feel like and what what's important . project manager: If I can cut in , is it people or men ? marketing: People , project manager: Is it people , okay . project manager: 'Cause I thought it was only men , marketing: Both women and men , project manager: so marketing: yeah . marketing: Yeah , and yeah , most th th they want to spend money for a better system , for better remote control , so we can do a l a little nice things with it , and they use yeah , they use zap a lot , fifty percent say they only So that's the most important things . marketing: oh yeah , not all of it is it on mine on my PowerPoint presentation , project manager: Okay , just talk ahead . marketing: they use it , but it's not very important on the scale of zero to ten they six and a half project manager: Okay , that's okay . user interface: marketing: and but not important is the channel selection , the the ? project manager: That's a little weird . marketing: Oh , user interface: Which channel selection ? marketing: the the no no no no no , that's very important , but w and not important in the audio settings , display settings project manager: Okay , marketing: and project manager: we can we can hide those under a menu or something , user interface: Oh , okay . beep to find your control , was project manager: That's like a button on your T_V_ ? marketing: that was in the test , the the most people f find it irritating when they cannot find a rem their remote control , project manager: Remote , okay . marketing: so I think it's a bee beep to sound it and you can find it . And another thing they want was speech recognition so they can say what they want to let's go to channel one and that's kind of things . marketing: And they want maybe an L_C_D_ screen to to look it wh what's on every channel and what do I want with it ? user interface: project manager: We wanna have a little preview on the remote control . my personal preferences is a button for my favourite channel , so I can I dunno , so I can zap to my f quick to my favourite channel wh what I so , the remote mu must see or must see wha what mine preferences are for which channel , project manager: Okay , you don't set it yourself , marketing: so I can zap t to project manager: it just remembers the channel that you are on most , for example . marketing: What ? project manager: You want the you want it to be programmed , for example y programmed f marketing: Yeah . project manager: Let's see , you you spend twenty minutes each day on that channel , marketing: Recognise project manager: so it recognises your favourite channel . project manager: Okay , so it's it it does it recognise itself , you don't have to set it marketing: No , project manager: Okay . marketing: the computer crashed , project manager: No problem , it's it's okay , marketing: so . user interface: It sounds really easy , what does the user do , what does the th remote control do , but there are quite some issues . So the things I'm going to concentrate on are the user aspect , because the technical aspect , that's pretty much covered . Where is the remote control ? We've all had it once , I want to watch some television , marketing: Yeah . user interface: where's the remote control ? That was one of your ideas which you posted in the network folder , marketing: Yeah . user interface: There's nothing more annoying than faded symbols , because you don't know which channel is this button , so possibly we could find something for that , project manager: Okay , so have it more make it more durable actually . So you press more once remote control goes kablouey or something like that , project manager: Okay , so the buttons should be user interface: so we have to pay attention not to put too mun too many buttons on the remote control . user interface: So this is basically what I h had in mind in the fade-proof symbols , locator , a sound , so clear we should stick to existing symbols , but maybe we could do a little investigation to see whether some symbols are need to be replaced by others . So what we want to go to is not this one , project manager: Yeah , it's true . user interface: This is not the final design , project manager: No , of course user interface: this is just a general idea of how I'd like to see basically the general idea . So we agree on the the part that we need to get something on the on the remote to find it somewhere and increase it the durability of of the thing , user interface: Yeah , I think it's a really good idea . project manager: The other aspects , we'll just see how what you came up with and what's possible for that budget . if it should be programmeab grammeale then we need something like a mode that you can switch it . industrial designer: And how big is the remote control going to be ? I'll tell you why that's important to me . there are a lot of technical parts in the remote control , so that's why I also would like to say go a little bit easy on the designs , I heard ab you talking about beeps and about video screens , but the material inside and the technical aspects are quite complex already . industrial designer: So keep in mind that everything that you keep think of , it has to b to be built . that is how it is done and all the remote controls work that way , I think we can just go on with that . industrial designer: Exactly , so if we make a circuit board with the the connections already on it , then that's cheaper . project manager: So you have industrial designer: This is what look like looks like if you press one button , so this is not the entire thing . The switch if you p press it then some electrical charge goes into the processor , that thinks over a Morse code , that's how you should see it . You have infrared and an interv how to say it ? a light in indication , light that you know that it's functioning . industrial designer: here again , that's my story about the different modes , if you do want to make remote universal , then the processor has to make up a different Morse code when some button is pressed . That makes it much more complex , so we really need to have a look , do we want that or not . I don't have any personal p preferences so far , except for the materials to be used light , that they are light . Like you said teletext is not not very popular anymore because the the internet , nowadays people don't use the teletext anymore or hardly , so it can either Well , I don't think we should remove the button , because there are always people who are using it . project manager: But I don't think it should be very it should be one of the big buttons for example . we're targeting young people now , because our This is a new product and with this new product we want to appeal to younger people , marketing: . project manager: that's also good with the fashion and everything , marketing: B project manager: so yeah . marketing: Yeah , and they want to pay for it project manager: They want to pay for it , people are willing to spend money actually to buy a remote that they like . marketing: and project manager: If they like the way it looks , the way it functions , so they're actually gonna spend spend money on it . marketing: in the project manager: see how far we can go with it anyway , so marketing: Yeah . project manager: And one thing that should be important is that the corporate l colour and slogan are recognisable , which is apparently black and yellow , but I'm not sure if we I think we should keep the the logo in mind , because with colours you can have a lot of fashionable colours and everything on it , which suits everybody's taste . So With that concept I started thinking , so why not just steal Nokia's idea and just make changeable covers for your user interface: Oh . project manager: those cost hardly anything I think , and people could even spend extra money on buying a cover industrial designer: Yeah . That's just a little marketing idea that could be applied , so you can p it appeals to really everyone . project manager: So that was that was my idea on what we could do to appeal this product to everyone . project manager: just I'm not sure if you came up with anything in the meantime , after making a presentation . industrial designer: But marketing: But oh ? user interface: Is it manageable ? Is it easy ? industrial designer: Go ahead . marketing: Yeah , with with an L_C_D_ screen you can project manager: Oh yeah . I think we should lose the L_C_D_ screen , industrial designer: Y Yes , I think so too . I think for example it's it's huge I think the L_C_D_ is huge , user interface: Yeah . user interface: And it costs too much to fabricate , project manager: It costs a lot , I think . industrial designer: Okay , project manager: What we could do , what could be possible , is maybe not an L_C_D_ screen but with a preview , marketing: Okay . project manager: just just a text only , not colour , just a little text thing industrial designer: I have to check that out , project manager: but maybe okay , make it industrial designer: I'm not sure . project manager: Yeah , find a little compromise in that , but What did I write down ? marketing: Yeah . project manager: I think the p yeah , the beep is a very simple thing to imple implement , just make a button on your T_V_ industrial designer: That must be possible . user interface: And it's industrial designer: whe where do you wanna hit the T_ you wanna we want a button on the television . project manager: I thin Yeah , where else should you put it ? industrial designer: In th okay , but that rules out a universal remote control . project manager: but how are you gonna use that if your if your remote control is lost , how are you gonna press where are you gonna press the button ? industrial designer: . user interface: Maybe just a slap-on sticker with a button which sends out a small signal . project manager: A little little box you can attach to your T_V_ is fine then , okay . industrial designer: Okay , then I'd I'd like to know now if we want the universal remote control or not , because that's determines everything I'm gonna do . I think we should go for universal , industrial designer: If not project manager: because apparently we're a separate company making separate c remote controls to sell to a lot of diverse people . marketing: Everyone wants to buy it , so we w project manager: Yeah , I think we're targeting everyone , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: And it's marketing: Or when you say one two i it it's enough , project manager: Yeah , but I don't see Arabian people speaking one , two whatever . user interface: Besides that , the technology isn't really super yet , so that is a problem in implementing this . project manager: It's not a mature technology , I think it takes a lot of memory and everything in in a remote control , marketing: Okay . project manager: so user interface: It's a good idea , but it's just not I don't think the market's ripe for that yet . project manager: maybe we don't have have to do all the buttons , but especially the ones that are the popular buttons , so those always fade first . industrial designer: If we make a remote control with changeable covers , then we can also make a cover for every language area . project manager: For example ? industrial designer: That's fo is especially for older people , that they can read it read it in their own language . project manager: Well , we're not we're not targeting older people , marketing: Yeah . project manager: You assume that that they read correctly and I think they're industrial designer: Huh . project manager: The most important thing about young people is that they're really sensitive to to trends that are passing through the world , marketing: But b project manager: so industrial designer: okay . user interface: But should the exchangeable covers include the buttons themselves or just the project manager: No , of course . No , I think it's just something you you put over them , because Yeah we c Yeah , you ca Well , industrial designer: . project manager: tha that's not a that's not a bad that's not even user interface: C marketing: But every user interface: that's a problem with the with the text then . , for example , if you're if you're into the durability issue you could user interface: industrial designer: . project manager: For example , if your buttons are faded , after if you make a durable remote , they are faded , you can just buy a new cover . industrial designer: but I know that the buttons are like a Nokia telephone on one sleeve , project manager: industrial designer: It works the same as a Nokia telephone , it's it's in my 'kay . project manager: Yeah , I know , it's just just a one one piece of rubber for example , marketing: Yeah . Either either change both the buttons and and the cover or just the cover , I'm not sure which which is easier , industrial designer: . project manager: so anyway , yeah , this is what we're gonna do afterwards , just lunch break and have more individual work after that , so let's see what we let's see we So you have to come up with a components concept , yeah . I want some you should do some trend-watching , because even if we're if we're gonna do those covers and everything , what people really want , that's what we need to know in this phase , marketing: Yeah . project manager: because that's gonna be the essential final design that we're gonna come up with . for example I bought a remote control last week with a new T_V_ , it was it l it's like all buttons and you have no idea what it does at first , industrial designer: project manager: and I'm total T_V_ new , anyway . So I think it should be have less or l very little buttons and maybe a second second level menu for the advanced things . Or maybe just stick 'em under a menu , like you said the the sound options and the surround and whatever , they're more complicated , just stick 'em under one menu and give it a just put it in in s in a software piece , you can menu and you can select everything you want to to set on your T_V_ . user interface: Is it techni technically possible to send a signal to a television and then pops up a menu , project manager: industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: because we're working with different types of television , so we're going to work with that ? project manager: That is true . user interface: It's an in-built menu , industrial designer: and if it doesn't know how , it's user interface: isn't it ? Yes . user interface: So basically project manager: I'm not sure if it's impossible , user interface: we project manager: but there's a chance it's not , so . user interface: Or we could use a double-sided for less used functions project manager: A double-sided remote control ? user interface: you project manager: I don't think that's useful . I it's basically an idea to overcome these issues , project manager: Yeah , but then you're gonna have a lot of wasted buttons . user interface: because project manager: For example you have a Sony T_V_ and the half of the buttons won't function if you have a for a Sony that won't for a Philips T_V_ . project manager: I don't think we should user interface: Because if we use a universal remote control , we're going to have to have most buttons on it , project manager: Yeah , for exam user interface: so project manager: I'm not s marketing: yeah . project manager: yeah , for ex you have to make it a little decision between the part if you want a universal remote control that it should do what people usually do with their T_V_s , not not the very complicated settings industrial designer: . project manager: that you can usually do that with either a old old remote control if they really hate that thing , industrial designer: . project manager: but you can't you cannot take into consideration all the different brands of T_V_s . project manager: I think there's I think there is a standard for example between industrial designer: . 'Cause everybody I have a universal remote control and it can use the menu button , so I think industrial designer: . project manager: I'm not sure , if you can put some research into that , if it's possible . For instance , if your old remote control is broken and you buy ours , then you should be able to get everything out of the television that's in it . project manager: we need to put some research into that if if we can open the menu , I think it's possible , just the way how to . project manager: Yeah , then then you could do everything I suppose , because usually the T_V_s have tha that inside in this other little piece of software , so it's okay . For instance Sony makes all their remote controls exactly the same for all their devices , project manager: industrial designer: and you always grab the wrong one because formatting of the buttons is exactly the same , only the labels are different . Yeah I think it should be a little distinct from everything else , industrial designer: We should not do that . project manager: So user interface: I'll put some on paper and present them next time the ideas that I have . project manager: because we have forty minutes , I'm not sure how much time we have left for the meeting anyway , so . project manager: So anyway , yeah , we could do some i do some work now on on the design for example . what do you want , do you want , but user interface: Yeah , but we like some some curves or project manager: Yeah , may maybe something like this . Let's see what I think this should these are always on top of the of the control , so they should be here . user interface: Yeah , and since you're holding it like this , I suggest you put the channel up channel down and volume project manager: Think it's like this . So you have the up channel the down channel the volume , do we want that horizontal or vertical ? project manager: Do you take triangles or marketing: it's it's fine , I think . project manager: I think it should be I think it user interface: This is basically what people are accustomed to , project manager: Maybe we should make 'em bigger or whatever . industrial designer: Perhaps we should also make something like a flash on it , if you if it's lost , for people that are deaf . project manager: Yeah , but for example if it's lost in your armchair , we'll not see the flash . Yeah , it's true , but it's it's only has to do so when you press the button that it's lost . user interface: We could make a combination that it goes beep and that you that some light lights up . marketing: Just a light on it or user interface: So we have the basic channels we've got here , the power button somewhere over here ? project manager: Oh yeah , it's true . project manager: You shouldn't be you shouldn't press it by accident , but it shouldn't be stacked away somewhere . marketing: And user interface: What would you like to ? project manager: Yeah , I thought maybe we should move the buttons down marketing: But you r project manager: and put it here for example marketing: And you are reading from the t project manager: to marketing: you always read from the top to the the bottom of it . Yeah , that's true , marketing: Yeah , project manager: you should marketing: so it's project manager: I think the bu the power button should be on top , industrial designer: . user interface: Is that used often ? marketing: So i it's user interface: The mute button ? Do people use that often ? marketing: sorry ? project manager: Mute . user interface: 'Cause I'm pretty much accustomed to it right over here , at least in general , marketing: . user interface: but project manager: I don't think it's important , but I think it I think it should be you c user interface: It's not that important , no . project manager: No , because it Yeah , people are accustomed to that , marketing: Around not not at top at the around the volume selection . marketing: I don't know where exactly , project manager: Take this out and here see marketing: but project manager: are we gonna take triangles anyway ? I'm drawing triangles , but marketing: user interface: That's pretty much what people are accustomed to , project manager: Yeah , user interface: aren't they ? project manager: it's maybe a bigger lesser than thing . So anyway , I think this is should be the channels and or sh user interface: Well , marketing: Wha user interface: I'm accustomed to the channels being on top . industrial designer: Shall we also look if it's possible to make a rechargeable remote ? That you don't have to buy new batteries if every project manager: Well , marketing: Yeah . project manager: for that is it's on one part it's it's a good thing to recharge it marketing: Maybe it's more ex expensive . project manager: Maybe we should what what could be possible is one with rechargeable batteries for example . project manager: You have just put Penlite batteries that are rechargeable , because it's an it's it's it's very annoying . user interface: But isn't that expensive in the entire package ? industrial designer: But that's already possible . project manager: I'm not sure y I'm not sure it's if it's expensive , but just take a look at it , because it might be a very good idea . Because if it's it's useful to have it rechargeable , user interface: project manager: but at the same time , if you don't want recha if you forgot to recharge it and you wanna watch T_V_ now , you wanna be able to put different batteries in it , use it now and not in half an hour . you could make a device , but I'm not sure how that is possible with the costs , that you can put in normal batteries , rechargeable , project manager: I think I have a nice idea . industrial designer: You can put in normal Penlites , rechargeable Penlites , but they can also be recharged with the remote , with a wire . project manager: I think it's it's a pretty good idea to have like sort of a maybe a base station that you put on the T_V_ . industrial designer: So but marketing: Yeah , that's g industrial designer: But I think that will cost a lot . project manager: A what ? industrial designer: Like a like a P_D_A_ , a hand-held . You can just put it in the electricity and it charges itself , project manager: Well , we were talking about the fact that we wanted to insert either a beep or a flash into the thing with a little separate signal industrial designer: you don't need basic station . marketing: But Which project manager: It's a very small Yeah , I'm drawing it big now , but So you can put your remote on flat for example . user interface: 'Cause that means that we have to implement rechargeable batteries , a docking station industrial designer: project manager: I'm not sure if it costs a lot , that that's what he r industrial designer: . I'm not sure if there's information available on this , project manager: It's just an idea , we have to find out if it's possible . industrial designer: but marketing: But user interface: And do people actually want that ? To pay extra they want to pay for rechargeable ? marketing: Yeah , they want to pay for it . project manager: I'm not sure , you should find out if it's if rechargeable is important . marketing: But project manager: They want to pay for comfort , industrial designer: Well , this is comfort . project manager: we just assu we we could either make a separate station which just sends a signal to the remote control to either beep or flash to find it , marketing: But f . project manager: and Yeah , we have to either that or make it integrated with a with a docking station . marketing: project manager: So marketing: project manager: let's go through the industrial designer: I like the covers . So user interface: marketing: project manager: what we have is you have I think you have to do a lot of work on if it's possible for the cost . industrial designer: I hope if I have information about that , project manager: Maybe yeah , industrial designer: I'm gonna project manager: or maybe you can find out i what people are willing to pay . project manager: We are going for twenty five Euros sales price , industrial designer: marketing: Yeah , okay . project manager: but just try to find out what they're willing to pay for it , because if they're willing to pay more , we could lose a little profit and maybe attract more customers , marketing: Yeah yeah yeah . What it costs and what kind of materials that we can choose what we want in it project manager: Yeah , if you have some financial information that that'd be nice , industrial designer: and exactly , I need it . user interface: Could you post some other essentials of what people want , so that I can work with some buttons , where to put it project manager: marketing: Yeah . user interface: You seem to have information on that , I'd like to see some of it . industrial designer: Was it not possible to send emails around the office ? project manager: No , it wasn't wasn't allo user interface: No , it's not . So that's why I'm not sure that you're allowed to share documents on the on the draft . marketing: but I have the user interface: Well , I have your PowerPoint presentation , I can get some inf information out of that . marketing: Yeah , but I Here I have the the s the homepage of our internet , user interface: Let's see . project manager: Yeah , the oh , they inc marketing: and here is my project manager: they include the new one . user interface: Oh , where would we marketing: here is my marketing report , project manager: Oh marketing: maybe you ca you can look at that project manager: no , I didn't have that . marketing: and user interface: Where would we want the teletext button ? marketing: Ah yeah . project manager: All it tells just let's make make a new marketing: And one user interface: Do we put it somewhere over here ? project manager: tick the new one . Yeah , let's increase it a little because marketing: And wha what people want , I've user interface: Or maybe this is something for the next meeting , I can draw out some ideas . project manager: Yeah , draw us up some some designs of of possible marketing: I have another thing project manager: just keep in mind that the important buttons should be on top and either big , user interface: Yeah . project manager: so the more less important user interface: Well , we have decided more or less the basic structure . user interface: I can put the other buttons in project manager: Just play a little with this , put l shift a little up or down and we'll see what looks best . industrial designer: What what did you wanna say ? project manager: Or just po post your designs from time to time on the product share . marketing: what I al already said is the the the remote controls are always lost , user interface: Maybe another idea . marketing: but it it's also for people , they want to learn it fast , industrial designer: . marketing: not they want to project manager: Yeah , so we don't want we want very little buttons , just the buttons you use a lot . marketing: It's yeah , it's easy to learn user interface: Yes , but it should cover all the functions , marketing: wi and project manager: Well user interface: so possibly , just an idea that popped in project manager: what we had function that what people do , marketing: project manager: so . People change channels , people they change the volume and they they change channel , they turn T_V_ off and on , for example . That's the basic fu that's what you do I'm not sure who present that again , but those are the basic function that people use it for , so those should be very well represented . user interface: Yeah , but we could go a step further , marketing: And The If user interface: because some T_V_s have the possibility to adjust brightness , that kind of menus . user interface: Yes , but it Because we're making industrial designer: But that's the question , is it ? marketing: industrial designer: Because it needs to be configured in the television under the menu . project manager: Yeah , but industrial designer: If it isn't , then we cannot reach it . industrial designer: isn't there a possibility to do research on that , so we know that for sure ? If you rule out functions , then and that gets known , then people are not gonna buy it . marketing: user interface: No , I thi industrial designer: Then the consumer bond or something says you cannot do this and that with it . That's a bad bad com commercial marketing: If project manager: we'll we'll see what we can come up with . marketing: Another thing I want to say is that we are looking at the market for the age younger than forty . marketing: on my report , I didn't ish I didn't show it in my presentation , project manager: Yeah , project manager: shall we ? industrial designer: Do they realise how much that costs ? marketing: and industrial designer: That's almost undoable . user interface: Oh , we're not going to be able to sell it for twenty-five then , with an L_C_D_ screen . marketing: but project manager: That's all here , here it says industrial designer: No , that's that's . marketing: So user interface: marketing: we can project manager: Speech recognition is quite marketing: We can look at the possibilities for an L_C_D_ and project manager: Yeah , just look at the possibilities then , marketing: I dunno . project manager: it's supposed to be a luxurious remote , marketing: How much it will cost industrial designer: . Or find a compromise , maybe just a black and white or for some extra information on it , on your programmes . industrial designer: I user interface: Well marketing: user interface: I doubt it , but industrial designer: But I really need finance information . Even if you put it even if you put a different cover on it , it looks still looks boring , marketing: Different colours maybe . marketing: But all industrial designer: This is Philips , huh ? project manager: I have no clue . Oh , I realise if we make it small , then it needs to be a little thicker , project manager: I think it's a very industrial designer: because I need to put all the electronics in it . project manager: Sorry ? industrial designer: If we make it s smaller , less wide , then we need to m make it a little thicker , project manager: Yeah ? industrial designer: because I have to put all the electronics in it . project manager: Huh even if user interface: So project manager: in the worst case we can even user interface: what kind of project manager: Could you give me the pen back ? user interface: Yeah , sure . project manager: So let's say that people would want an L_C_D_ thing . We could let's say we have an L_C_D_ screen , people want an L_C_D_ screen . marketing: project manager: It doesn't have to be really big , but just just have to be has to be there . project manager: Think it's a good place , people don't marketing: If you're reading from top to bottom , I think it's better to put it at the top . project manager: No ? It's not that it's not the most important function , industrial designer: Me too . marketing: It's j project manager: it's just an extra thing , industrial designer: Ah project manager: it just you press the buttons on top , marketing: . But i if you if you are going to put the L_C_D_ on it , I think it's very important to use it , industrial designer: but . marketing: because it's use it project manager: How can you use an L_C_D_ screen ? marketing: But nee the function of it . project manager: if you t if you press a button , you can see it , industrial designer: . project manager: ri I'm not sure wha I'm trying to imagine myself what it would look like . marketing: so project manager: this looks a little user interface: I'm still not convinced of the marketing: you must use the maximum of it . project manager: if it's possible wi if it's not too expensive , we should include it , industrial designer: They want it . But industrial designer: Also keep in mind again , the L_C_D_ screen is very flat , but it needs transistors , resistors , I don't know what more and that needs space . user interface: So basically industrial designer: But if we user interface: can I project manager: we have green now user interface: what we have to decide now is what goes on top . Do we put the volume control and the channel control here , or do we put it on he Would we like to press it in the middle ? project manager: Or maybe we should m we could draw draw something a bit that has it on on on the bottom . user interface: Yes , but we do agree that we keep this at the centre , project manager: because it marketing: Yeah . project manager: We're not sure about the size anyway , user interface: So maybe you'd put them here . For example if you take user interface: Yes , but a big remote control probably not something which people would like . For example just industrial designer: If we have a a space issue , we can also lose one battery . project manager: I don't think if we if we even use an L_C_D_ screen , we need to , definitely . Yeah , but if we need two batteries and an L_C_D_ screen , that means a lot of space that we need . project manager: The L_C_D_ doesn't have to nee doesn't need to be very big . So either user interface: So would we like this or would we like the project manager: We either we have to decide what what people want . project manager: so if your basic function's here , we should like we decided before , programmes up and down , and volume here . marketing: Or And what about speech recognition project manager: Well you can just no , I'm not sure if we can do that , marketing: Yeah , yeah , project manager: but we could put a microphone in here for example . project manager: Just to do research into both , w what it costs and what it takes for space . industrial designer: One more thing I'd like to say , let's give this a name , and not like some vague serial number that no one understands , like with cars . marketing: Yeah , okay , yeah , industrial designer: Shall we all try to think about a name ? user interface: So I think of a name . project manager: Okay , at anyways , the the minutes will be on the on the web shortly , user interface: So project manager: so there we go . project manager: industrial designer: Yeah , I've Do we save the ? project manager: marketing:

The Project Manager suggested discussing a potential change to the remote control, specifically focusing on the material. The group provided suggestions for a smaller size, a fruit-shaped or smashed design, and printed patterns on rubber. Although there were suggestions to change the batteries, it was ultimately agreed that there were no issues with the battery design. Marketing revealed that the younger target group preferred colorful and soft materials, and the Project Manager added that the remote should be lightweight and not slippery. The Industrial Designer presented three casing possibilities: uncurved, single-curved, and double-curved. After considering the drawbacks of the uncurved and double-curved designs, the team decided on the single-curved design. During the presentation, Marketing emphasized three important aspects of the remote control: a fancy look-and-feel, technological innovation, and ease of use. They also mentioned that the popular theme for the year was fruit and vegetables, leading to discussions on incorporating this theme into the design through abstract designs and photos. Marketing also suggested the possibility of the remote control knowing users' preferred channels and emitting a beep when it couldn't be found. User Interface focused on the size and durability of the buttons and agreed on the need for an easier-to-use remote control. The Industrial Designer analyzed the previous discussions and highlighted the importance of integrating materials to reduce production costs, as well as the idea of creating a unique Morse code for specific button presses. The team agreed on the need for a robust device and believed that fewer buttons would enhance usability. They also favored a combined remote control that could serve multiple devices, although they acknowledged the challenge of reconciling these two features. Marketing proposed a stylish remote control, while User Interface emphasized the importance of comfort in holding the remote. To improve button visibility, User Interface suggested making them concave, and the Project Manager agreed, suggesting the use of illuminated buttons for visibility in dark rooms.

Question: What were the Project Manager's proposals, suggestions, and reasons regarding the general arrangements, project initiation, and team coordination at the beginning of the meeting? Article: marketing: project manager: A minute please , my laptop is oh , there it is , thank you . At the functional design meeting the plan is that each one of you , so not me but only you will present the the things you worked on the last half hour . I will take minutes and will put the minutes that I have at the end of the session in the shared folder . Also the minutes of the previous session are also in the shared folder now , so you can read that now or afterwards . I had an email from the from the management board marketing: project manager: I don't know if you a al also received it , but there were four points which I think are very important . First one is they think that teletext teletext becomes outdated and internet will be the the main focus . the remote control shou should onl only be used for the television , so it not gonna it's not gonna be a multi-purpose remote control , so that's one thing to keep in mind . user interface: marketing: project manager: second , and I think that's important for the Marketing Expert , the current customers are in the age group group of forty years and older , but with this new remote they will would like to reach a group younger than forty . and I think to keep in mind , but not really for now is that they want the the the slogan and the and the logo to to be recognised more in the remote . marketing: project manager: So , we have forty minutes , so I think not more than ten minutes per presentation each , and please use all the the the facilities so that you have either SMARTboards , the the Word files , what you whatever you want . , as you can see here , the market share for the first audience is about sixty percent sixty five . and some interests from the from the age groups , it seems like the young users of remote controls really like the fancy new technology stuff , like an L_C_D_ screen on the remote control , speech recognition . , and when you see the audience , the age is going up Yeah , they don't really want it anymore , at least the new technologies . First point is , seventy five percent of the users find the most repo remote controls very ugly , and eighty percent of the users would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy . , persons were asked what the buttons were they use most , how much an hour , project manager: Switching channels , yeah , that's pretty pretty normal , that's what you do with a remote control . , I think it's good that we know what the user want wants , at least the these three points have to be very clear . project manager: But it's strange that the the manage board the management board said that the teletext will be outdated by the internet . Yeah , okay , but at the moment teletext is Yeah , th the best thing you can get on T_V_ , like getting information . marketing: So , when you ask people , what do they use , they use teletext and not the internet on a remote control . marketing: That's a ne i it It's a new technology , project manager: Yeah . , yeah , people from sixteen to forty five watch a lot of T_V_ , more than people who are el elder . second point , we have to impro improve the most used functions , as I said here , switching channels , teletext and volume controls . Third point that came out of the of the questionnaire , people used to get lost off the remote controller , so maybe it's an idea for us to design ex kind of placeholder on side of the , yeah , of the T_V_ project manager: Yeah , that's a cool idea . industrial designer: When you mentioned improving functions , what what do you mean by that what what are you think about ? marketing: not not the r not the functions , industrial designer: the funtionability . marketing: but it came out that a lot of buttons weren't even used on a remote control . So you can have a remote control full of buttons , a hundreds hundreds of buttons , but if you don't use them , yeah it's project manager: Yeah . marketing: j just to t to get it done if necessary , user interface: marketing: but the most used buttons have to be bigger or industrial designer: Could you use perhaps one button for multiple functions , like example pressing it in longer makes it switch to an different function for example . marketing: Just to get less buttons on the remote control , to make it easier and quicker to learn . Well what I did was I dissected current remote controls and I viewed how how they w looked , how they worked , what kind of components are involved , and how they are connected together . And after that I put up a scheme about how these things are organised and I'll show it to you in in a in a few seconds . And I'll explain a bit about how it works and how we could build one and why I think several possibilities that we discussed in the earlier meeting falls off . well what I did was I I checked remote controls and the remote controls of today are all infrared , not like all probably know . And the thing about that is the remote controls have to act as a T_V_ or a stereo or something , and those have a transmitter that's also focused on infrared , so if we want to build a remote control with Bluetooth for instance then the T_V_ should have Bluetooth too in order to communicate , so that would mean extra cost for the user and thus that's that wouldn't mean a a cheap remote control for us . Furthermore they all have a a very simple structure , so that would probably mean lower costs and i that could mean for us a good thing 'cause well we we should be able to build a relatively cheap a cheap remote . Well as I mentioned ready , we have some Bluetooth Well it may be possible , but I figured it wouldn't be possible in within our budget , but that's not for me to decide , but that's maybe something for marketing to look into . F because well my personal opinion is is not to do Bluetooth or or radio waves , although marketing: What do you think about incorporating Bluetooth or a radio receiver in the place-holder next to the T_V_ , connected to the T_V_ ? industrial designer: Yeah , actually I have t marketing: So it's in the wrong product . Yeah , I actually I figured that would be that would be rather nice , but then you'd still have the the infrared function . industrial designer: but what I did think about was when you mentioned about the the cup-holder , is why not introduce a speech function like where is the remote . If somebody says , where is the remote , then it goes beep beep beep beep or something , user interface: marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: I dunno , maybe maybe something to look into , I dunno what the cost that something like that would be . I figured that would be best , 'cause when the battery stops functioning we could just use you could just go out and buy a new one . So we didn't and we don't have to do all to be too complicated about that . the energy source is connected to the infrared button , but the infrared button works only via the chip and the subcomponent to the switch there is a switch between these . When the switch is pressed in a w on this this case it switches a button , when a button is prush pushed in , a electric current goes through here , and in immediately , a l a bulb lights up displaying to the user that something has happened . That's that's so the h user won't be thinking , well did the button be pressed , w what happened . Or I press button but nothing's happening on the T_V_ , so is is something wrong or something . w well the signal goes via chip that's translated into electric sig electronic signals and then it's processed and then it's sent to the infrared bulb where it will be received on the receiving end . Not too many gadgets and functions , just like you said well the most users n you have a lot of buttons and you u u use you don't use them , so why why should we invent w spend more time on those . So I think we shouldn't be spending time on teletext and st things like that , because when you want teletext on infrared you'd have to build in a receiver too , and so in order to receive the signals from what's on T_V_ and such . So I figure that would be spending too much money and time and marketing: yeah , maybe another problem , I think current T_V_s can even send infrared . industrial designer: Yes , but what should we s I I I f I agree with you , but should we spend money or and time on building a receiver into the remote control ? marketing: Huh . Like I said , use one button for instance for m multiple functions , or well just hide the few buttons o of switching it open or something , the usual stuff . And don't overbuild , we shouldn't make a big remote control for simple functions , but we we should stick to the basics . project manager: Tim and Janus don't talk to ten minutes , industrial designer: project manager: so take your time . user interface: marketing: project manager: If you take your time too long I will eventually industrial designer: project manager: warn you . user interface: marketing: user interface: Well , I'm going to give a presentation abut some of the technical functions of these design and usability functions . project manager: user interface: what's my opinion about what's most important to combine the design , technical possibilities and the user friendliness in one , so if you going to design a remote that looks good , that shouldn't weigh over the if it's possible to make , of course , but also the user friendliness , so tha that's that's some of the main points . And another one is the use of many functions will will make it more difficult , so use as as little functions as possible or at least don't display them all at once on the same remote . If you have fifty functions you don't want fifty buttons t to be shown at the same time , marketing: . user interface: 'cause when you visit an internet site you don't want fifty links to see , but maybe use a hierarch hierarchy structure . marketing: user interface: And well one of the ideas was maybe use touch screen , but s I don't know in how far that is possible , marketing: . user interface: since we are sticking to infrared and and the remote cannot receive anything , but we might consider that . If you you can use remote like this with all the functions , many functions , but Well , your thumb is a little bigger than th it than this . You have to be very careful what you push , marketing: user interface: and if you're looking for teletext you'll be searching for half an hour from yeah well , where is it ? Where the hell he here I guess and , yeah , when you have to use something else . well this was because of our last discussion , if multiple machines are used , create easy switch between the machines , but it's no longer applying . Well yeah , I prefer to use it only for T_V_ and n not to give too many options and and if possible , the buttons should give a dr direct action , not first select project manager: you you just said you wanted to to combine more functions in one , so user interface: Yeah , project manager: you you want to keep it simple , user interface: and so that's where the difficulties lie . industrial designer: Yeah , but project manager: but I think that if you want to do that , then you can't escape the the fact that there will be buttons which give s more options than one . Yeah , but user interface: Do we want to use a few options and might not be so or original , or multi-purpose as we thought , project manager: marketing: it's maybe an option if you use an L_C_D_ or a touch screen , that in the middle are the the main keys , like displayed on the user interface: marketing: yeah . Okay , just in the middle the general functions , like play , channel switching , user interface: Yeah . marketing: and then at the top or at the bottom , some menus like settings or that you can drop down . user interface: Yeah , but when all the questions I had Do we want to use a menu display on the T_V_ ? Or does have to f everything be in remotes ? 'Cause if you use a memory display on the T_V_ , you can simply push a more menu and then select the options you want to have and press okay . user interface: so that's my recommendation , if you use many options in one buttle button , display the menu on the T_V_ marketing: Nah . user interface: and don't use combination of t of two buttons at the same time or pressing buttons three times for five seconds , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Yeah , but marketing: I think so too , but and that's partly because a lot of T_V_s have different menus , and when you have a particular menu at your device , it could be that don't correspond to the menu what's actually on T_V_ . industrial designer: you d you have to keep in mind that several T_V_s don't even have a menu structure , or they have a very simple menu structure , so you have to keep in mind that not all d not our remote won't be able to work on all televisions . user interface: So if we have to stick with current technologies and well yeah , the restrictions of what's is on the market today , you should keep it s at this . especially the important buttons , if you want to switch channel , change your volume , use teletext , it it has to work at once and more advanced options may be put it s somewhere away on the remote , behind a little little thing or a touch screen . industrial designer: Not embed Yeah , but then with something like a touch screen could could make more menu up pop up or something . user interface: And yeah , if you want to s put on stand-by or change the channel , that should always be possible to do . If the user is pushing a button he should know if the television or n at least remote is reacting and not just that the batteries may be low . So maybe we should just ease down on the functionality to to keep it accessible on t because you all know , if there are a lot of function on the the television , some you you'll never know and never use , and therefore it's important marketing: Yeah . user interface: if you want to change the volume or channel that is always accessible and easy and other functions that are not so important well you we should consider just not using them or at least putting them somewhere on the remote where they're not in the way for the for the most important functions . , they have like a touch screen with really big pictures on it like call hang-up , and that's a big ad advantage I think , because one the one hand you make the remote control compatible for elder users just by scaling up the pictures or something . user interface: and for some design issues well , put a logo on it and maybe use it in some aesthetic aesthetic form . project manager: user interface: But th the important buttons m make them always accessible and pushable and clear industrial designer: user interface: and maybe use a touch screen , or if that's will become too difficult just like televi some o older telephones use a l maybe it's possible to to flip them open and just expand the number of options that are normally visible . marketing: Yeah okay , but but if you pick the the idea , the left idea user interface: Yeah . marketing: then what's gonna be displayed on the touch screen ? industrial designer: The extra functions . user interface: The extra functions , you you just see a menu from system functions or teletext functions , and you just choose one , marketing: Yeah , but l like menu functions or industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: Wouldn't it be better to make just one big touch screen , one one small touch screen applet marketing: Yeah , I think so . industrial designer: and I'll just make let's say fifteen buttons on it , and we have three of those , actually just menus with sub-menus , with or sub-items , sub-functions . industrial designer: You just have a f a few selected buttons and a few menus , and with this idea you could actually make several you can also improve later on . project manager: So you think it's will be better to have a t kinda total touch screen . industrial designer: Yeah , I wou I would actually go for the project manager: Jirun ? user interface: Okay , I agree , but I think it's very important that they always make the same buttons accessible , so use just for special options a part of the touch screen . user interface: an elder parents or grandparent picks up the remote from the little child and who's all in the systems functions , you'll have to have the possibility to turn off the T_V_ or to switch the channel without well using all the menu structures to get back to the primary functions . marketing: like building in some kind of PIN code which allows parents to switch to all channels , user interface: Yeah . marketing: but children if children don't don't know the PIN code , they can't switch to violent channels or user interface: Yeah wh Is that possible to use or no ? industrial designer: That is possible , that well that actually depends on the television , marketing: Th there's just user interface: Well , yeah well , industrial designer: but I think I figure that would be user interface: does it have to depend on the television ? marketing: Ju just a simple log-in , something like that . industrial designer: y you s you see the fi thing is when you buy a remote , you you set the channels , the the channels are different on each te television , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: so if you lock on a remote , let's say channel fifteen , well channel fifteen on this television is different than channel fifteen on the other television , marketing: user interface: Well , I think that he means that maybe by some option make sure that remote control and the T_V_ match , and then after that you can use some s insert some passwords as being apparent that the children cannot use this change the settings of the T_V_ , like colour and then volume marketing: Yeah . user interface: and marketing: Yeah , th that kind of stuff , but maybe if you log in first as a parent , you address the the channels user interface: marketing: and like oh , that's channel fifteen , that's vi violent channel , user interface: Oh , something like that . marketing: m my ki my kids I don't want my kids to watch that , industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: then you set the priority to only parents , industrial designer: project manager: Okay , yeah . user interface: Well b but make it a separate option in the menu , industrial designer: Yeah , that would b marketing: for example . user interface: so that it's it's dif dis displayed from displayed here , marketing: Yeah okay , but but yeah , that's just user interface: so parents marketing: that's an a an added feature . But let's not go too wide about the those things , that's that why we're here . project manager: It's it's a nice idea , but I think that's we wel later in the stage . project manager: yeah , a partial , because I think elderly people may be not used to a touch screen , so they want the the the normal functions like teletext , volume changing , to be , yeah , kinda traditionals marketing: Yeah . project manager: and the the the the other functions , the more difficult functions to be maybe on the touch screen , marketing: marketing: Yeah , but but if you display it on L_C_D_ screen with r r really big numbers user interface: Yeah , you can de display it on the on the old style . industrial designer: because well , it's just not the same when you touch a touch screen user interface: Yeah , okay . industrial designer: or when you touch a button , but well we have to look at what's our target audience . industrial designer: W we are aiming for younger people project manager: Yeah , that's true , yeah . industrial designer: So that's that's probably a marketing: And th those young people , yeah . Y you saw it in my marketing report , they like the new fancy stuff , project manager: marketing: so A touch screen , like Microsoft al already developed something like that for multi-media applications . project manager: I've added the this four things from the management board just to keep in mind . project manager: each time I I had a sort of summary on what you told and what you personal think . th the the main points in this in this meeting is I think how it's going to look with we must keep it simple , but have the opportunity to have more options and have them hidden or something , so they don't you don't have a big thing full of buttons or and the point that you wanna use one controller for hypothetically each television , so you must the the the the functions , know , like the menus or the the parental control must be all by the done by the remote control and not by the television . The menus are not identical for all th for all T_V_s , so you have to display it on one T_V_ . user interface: Well you can use when you how do you call it , s synchronized , the remote and the T_V_ , marketing: Yeah , but that's not possible . user interface: then there's always , there are always possibilities to change the colour and the brightness and the volume marketing: - , yeah . user interface: and well maybe we can look out if there's options that the remote in its memory can see what kinda T_V_ it is , from ah , it's a Philips , this and this and that , and then give the options that are capable the capable from the t project manager: Yeah , but you have an marketing: Add th that that's an opportunity . project manager: yeah , but you have an international market range , so you have I think a big range of user interface: Well there are universal d remotes project manager: Yeah . user interface: and they all have a functionality for all the T_V_s , so this wouldn't be a extra feature to incorporate the men menus of these . industrial designer: But they marketing: But project manager: And it's not too complex to do it . user interface: industrial designer: Well they they all have to be programmed to fit your T_V_ marketing: No . industrial designer: I actually use one of those when They are they are kinda kinda troublesome , but but the thing is whe when you start building something like this you have to build a receiver into the t into the remotes , because in order for the remote to process something from the T_V_ , like to synchronise and you have to send and receive , user interface: Yeah . user interface: no , you can just say the c marketing: He he he he me he means just just one other thing . marketing: with the current remote controls , the universal ones , you have to press yeah , you have to press a code for T_V_ . industrial designer: Oh , okay , yeah , sure , user interface: and you press code four five five on the in the remote industrial designer: Yeah yeah yeah . Now we just connect the T_V_ type to a set of options , in just just in the memory , user interface: Memory in the in the remote . marketing: so that if you yeah , like profile , so that if you touch in like one four one zero kind of T_V_ industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: I th don't think that's that takes a lot of storage space or some just varia variables . industrial designer: No , that wouldn't be user interface: Yeah , well industrial designer: Yeah , a few variables . user interface: if you look at the manuals from universal remotes , there are maybe three four hundreds T_V_s at maximum . If you have all of them , all the old and new T_V_s summed up , marketing: It is definitely po marketing: But , on the other hand on the other hand , if you have a remote and buy a new T_V_ that isn't incorporated in the remote project manager: We have five minutes to go . Well then you have to buy a new one , it's very good for marketing marketing: New remote ? user interface: Maybe , or an update , software update . marketing: maybe we can incorporate some kind of U_S_B_ or a firewire connection , so that you can connect it to the P_C_ and download the newest firmware from from the internet . Well the most most people have , user interface: Well , at industrial designer: but not not everybody user interface: you can go back to the shop industrial designer: and user interface: and they marketing: Yeah , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: Yeah , ser o industrial designer: Yeah , maybe something like service cen marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Or you could well you could s actually look at the place-holder you talked about earlier , user interface: Well already digital information is sent t to the the standards , T_V_ connections , industrial designer: Yeah . user interface: you can see what's programme is on on the new channels , so maybe j they we can send that information along with standard T_V_ industrial designer: Well then then it's be back to the building a receiving well if it's actually worth it to build it in , user interface: Receiving . industrial designer: but I dunno , it it would be bringing more costs with with it user interface: Difficult . industrial designer: and marketing: I I think it's most cheap or cheapest to just do the updates at the service centre or at the shop . industrial designer: Like when you when you buy a T_V_ you just ask well I'll marketing: It's it's it's not a lot of work , just one docking station where you put it in , industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: marketing: And your vote ? user interface: Well , I was doubting about which one to take , but you've convinced me that if you di display buttons about the same as they would look on a normal remote all elderly people will know what to do . user interface: Break it , I don't get marketing: Yeah , th th th that i Yeah . I will put my minutes I have updated them so s they're updated in the shared folder too . marketing: Thirty minutes ? project manager: Thirty minutes , the marketing: How minutes ? project manager: Failure . the specifi specific instructions for the next meeting you will all will receive at the the the email . I don't think I can say much about it , so wait for your email and hopefully you get it done in the in the thirty minutes , and I w will see you after the lunch break and the thirty minutes . marketing: One question , project manager: Yeah ? marketing: how late do we have to get back be back here ? project manager: well thirty minutes . Thank you , that was a very good session I think , user interface: industrial designer: project manager: we we user interface: Yeah , is it possible to store this on the share documents or what marketing: Yeah , me too . project manager: Yeah , because all things are stored in smart board dot X_D_K_ marketing: Yeah , v project manager: and that's in marketing: But but you can open a from your pr from your laptop . user interface: Oh yeah , it's not connected to the project manager: You all have the the questionnaire again about the after work . user interface: The questionnaire , fill in we fill out d after lunch or project manager: well , it's it's simply filling oh no , it's it's also filling out no , I'd do it after lunch I think . user interface: We can leave the P_C_ on I think , yeah and return to the marketing: Yeah , of course . industrial designer: marketing: To my exave executive project manager: My executive big room with the with the panting <doc-sep>And I want to introduce myself , my name is Shrida Daseri and I'm a project manager for this new project which we are going to discuss now . And what you're drawing ? user interface: sure my name is Agnes and I'm an user usability user interface designer . So thanks for coming for the meeting first of all , and we have a long time , just twenty-five minutes to discuss about this project and the the project initiation . First of all I want to ask Mister Ed about your marketing plan and your product plan and marketing: Well I think that we'll see that throughout the day in how we're going to put this together as a marketing to to market the product . We'll have to see on a through discussion on where we're gonna go from here and from with this . project manager: - but do you already have like a functional design or a technical design or marketing: for the moment not yet . project manager: Oh for the moment not yet , okay , but what's what's your do you have some project plan , something with you or marketing: Good question . No , this is like I said that we have to be discussed between all of us and we'll go from there . Okay , so by when you think you can give me some kind of project plan , okay , a discussion with marketing: Certainly by the next meeting . Okay , so there's any questions or first of all about this project ? industrial designer: What is the goal of the project ? project manager: the goal of the project I think maybe I'll hand out to the Ed , okay , so to explain what is the project because he's in the sales and the accounting . marketing: industrial designer: marketing: I'm in the sales I'm supposed to explain them what to do . We have to define exactly what our product is , from project manager: Yes , so can you explain what exactly the product is ? marketing: From what I had in mind we're supposed to be marketing coffee , is that right ? project manager: Oh I think , if I'm not wrong , we're making the remote control . I had a first part of mine was to make a remote control for a new f remote control for television , and afterward I had a discussion about coffee so project manager: Yes . marketing: Something visual that has something that will will draw people to buy the product , project manager: marketing: because I think everybody's experienced with remote controls , and some remote controls are are worth throwing out the window . th most of them ar I don't know we're have to come up with a new idea on how to make it a lot easier to use , project manager: marketing: 'cause a lot of times spend half a day through the instruction book trying to figure out how to use it . project manager: And what abo Christine , what about your the industrial design plan ? Are you have a design already on this product or you're still working on the design ? industrial designer: no , I I have not begun working on the design , project manager: industrial designer: and I I actually didn't know we were designing a remote control , I thought we were designing a new monitor . the website I went to look at had some announcements about an introduction of a some sort of a seven inch monitor , and I understood that that was the project goal . So I'm glad I didn't d do any work ahead of time because I clearly didn't understand the project goal . industrial designer: I just did s see that we were starting a new project together and there was going to be a four member team composed of these people , and that's about that's project manager: industrial designer: and I I read through the different steps , and what my responsibilities were relative to the steps . project manager: So you'll be leading the team for your design team or how many members is working in the team , for the design ? industrial designer: for the industrial design ? project manager: Yes . marketing: project manager: That's industrial designer: because , you know , you can you can make it you have different choices with different financial models . project manager: Yeah , but before we talk about the finance , okay , do you have some idea how we can sell this product or project in the market and how much is going to benefit to the company and of course it's to the individual also . industrial designer: Well , you know , I kind of think that in general you have to do y you have to have something that's very fashionable , that's very attractive that people see and recognize its goal , and they immediately wanna have it have one of their own . So it would really would need to something like the iPod would be good , seems to have caught on fairly well , project manager: industrial designer: so d you know , I don't care what it does , just so it looks cool . project manager: Okay , but when you think you can give me like a kind of design on the functional design or the technical design ? industrial designer: Well , I've got a lot of other projects I'm doing right now and so I'll have to wait and see how those how those go . project manager: Yeah , but I need something in the writing , so like what's your functional design , what's your technical design , and how many people you need for this project , and what's the time frame you're looking , okay , and what is the budget , maybe initial budget you're looking , okay , and how is going to the market , okay , industrial designer: project manager: so you've you've had to meet with the marketing team and how they're going to market and what are the marketing strategic plan , okay , when are you going to introduce , okay , and by the time you introduce the product and you know there there would be a competition , okay , so I need some kind of the plan in the writing from you . Okay , and it's po industrial designer: And when would you like that ? project manager: B as soon as possible . industrial designer: well if if we have enough time then d do you think two weeks is a is close enough ? project manager: Yes I think that would be good , because I need to go to the management and tell them what we are going to do , and what cost is , okay , and what's the time frame and what's the project plan , because without any documentations , I cannot go to the management and say , so we are going to do this and we need this much money , okay , so then it's it's difficult for me to say , okay , that's the reason I need some kind of plan from you , initially , okay , then we can have the further discussion again . industrial designer: are there other people who will be contributing to the plan ? project manager: Yes , of course , if you need some help , so let me know . So , who are the people you need from the marketing or the technical side or the administration point of view , okay , to add in any documentation , or some technical point of view , industrial designer: project manager: so just let me know so I can coordinate all the teams . And Ed so what's what do you think about this project for the remote control and d do you have some already planned something for your marketing strategy or the sales strategy ? marketing: Well not yet other than doing research and taking remote controls and looking what other companies have to do , what they're building , their designs , their ideas , project manager: . marketing: It should be a fairly large market because the number of people that the competition , project manager: marketing: th I agree it has to be something it has to be something new , it has to be something that that draws people saying eh , I like this . Whether it works or not , they have to first say I like this , I like the design , and then it's gotta be simple to use . project manager: Yes , so what I prefer maybe you need to interact more with the Christine , okay , because you know what she is going to do it , okay , and you know how to sell it . Okay , because she is doing the design , but you are the core because you are in the marketing , okay , marketing: Yeah . project manager: so because you need to sell and you're the responsible for the all the money , the finance , okay , tomorrow . project manager: So , what I prefer , okay , so you need to interact with the Christine more and within her team , okay , who is using the functional design or technical design , okay , marketing: project manager: and you need to come up with some kind of plan , okay , how we are going to do the your sales plan , okay , th marketing: Do we already have a cost limit on this , th an idea of how much we want to market this for , how much it's gonna sell for , project manager: Th That that's marketing: that's up that's up to us to decide , eh ? project manager: Yes , that's you have to decide , okay , so the best thing is you both of the Christine and you discuss with yourself , okay , and come up with the cost , and how we are going to compete in the market , okay , in the the technically , or in the sales wise , okay , the commercial wise , okay . Then we have to design , okay , how long it will take the whole project , okay , how much is going to cost us , and how much we are going to benefit for the company . Okay , so I think it's maybe if we can give me some kind of your the sales plan , okay , including the technical what she's going to talk to you within the team , okay , then it will help me to discuss with the management for further , okay , and put it in the the proper project plan . Okay , and if you need any coordination in between compared to the maybe the some technical vendors or commercial vendors , okay , depends if you want to have some marketing plan or technical plan , okay , so you let me know . my job from what I understood was to look at the usability requirements and make sure that the product is usable , it's acceptable to the people who are gonna use it and look at the best ways to do that . user interface: So I think I'll have to interact with Christine and discuss with her , so that she's not designing something that my studies will show right off the bat that it's not going to work , project manager: Th Christine , yeah . Which is user interface: and so it's sort of it's a loop that feeds in , but I don't think necessarily that I'm in a coordinating position for it . Yeah , so basically you need to interact with Christine more , okay , for the user acceptability , okay , and the testing , okay , user interface: Yeah . project manager: then you will user interface: Which will also feed into the marketing , project manager: Yes . user interface: because depending on what users want , depends on how you sell it , what tag lines you attach to it , how you try to make it more attractive to users . , and then I guess build the plan based on all of that , because I think you need to take all the factors into account . But what I request , okay , keep Ed in the loop , okay , in between your meeting and Christine meeting , because he should know what's happening . Okay and please please copy all the mails , okay , all the discussions to me , okay , so I need to submit to the management . user interface: So , the immediate next step is to start determining the functional design , or project manager: Yes . To come up with the functional design and to discuss with Ed , okay , and how it's going to be work , and first of all with your user acceptance , okay , how it looks like and how it's going to be work in the market , okay , user interface: industrial designer: Would you mind at the conclusion of our meeting could could you send us a copy of your slides ? project manager: Yes , I will . project manager: I'll copy , le let us keep all the emails and all the copies , okay , share each other , okay , so you know everybody what's happening , okay ? user interface: Sure . project manager: And if anything you need anytime so please either you can call me , or just send me email , or just come and knock my door , okay , so I'm available here

The Project Manager outlined four key points for the remote control project. Firstly, he emphasized the shift from teletext to internet as the main focus. Secondly, it was proposed that the remote control should be exclusively for TV use, rather than a multi-purpose device. Additionally, the project should target a younger customer group under the age of 40. The Project Manager also mentioned the importance of having an attention-grabbing logo and slogan for the remote control, although this was not an immediate priority. In order to proceed with the project, the Project Manager requested that certain subjects be presented in written form. These subjects include functional and technical design, team scale, timeline, initial budget, cost limit, marketing strategic plan, product introduction, and the benefits for the company and individuals involved. These matters needed to be determined before further discussion. The Project Manager expressed the need for documentation to be submitted to management before the Industrial Designer presented the product in detail, as there would be competition by that time. He also requested that all emails and copies of discussions be kept to ensure that all team members were informed about the project's progress. Furthermore, the Project Manager hoped for increased interaction between the Marketing and Industrial Design teams, as well as coordination between the sales and finance departments. He emphasized the importance of all teams working together to consider all relevant factors in the project.

Question: What are the official commitments to support Wales universities during the transition period and why did Eluned Morgan and Llyr Gruffydd have different opinions on this matter? Article: lynne neagle am: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome Suzy Davies to the committee, and to thank Mark Reckless and Darren Millar, who have left us, for their service and hard work as members of the committee. We will move on then to our evidence session on our inquiry into the impact of Brexit on higher and further education. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams, Cabinet Secretary for Education, and Eluned Morgan AM, Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning. Can I just ask you to introduce your officials for the record, please? kirsty williams am: Bore da, Lynne, and thank you for the invitation to join you. Eluned and I are joined this morning by Huw Morris, who's the group director at SHELL—skills, higher education and lifelong learning—and Marie Knox, who is deputy director, overseeing European transition. I'd like to ask you both, if that's okay, a little bit about preparedness. But if I could start with higher education, I understand that—I don't know, it must be about 18 months ago now—Ken Skates told another committee in this place that there had been nine sector analyses done. Presumably, one of those was HE, because of the—well, Welsh Government had a presence, and still does, in Brussels, related to higher education. I don't know if you've got any comments on that research, or whether it's been brought to your attention yet. kirsty williams am: Well, Suzy, following the vote, I was very keen that we work very closely with colleagues in higher education and further education, to get an understanding from on the ground about the potential impact. So, in terms of preparedness, we started that group in the September, and that work from that group, which includes both HE and FE, has been instrumental in helping the Government form its views, which were articulated in the Government's White Paper, 'Securing Wales' Future'. There has been ongoing work being done—as the debate in London and Europe becomes a little bit more clear, then it becomes a little less clear, and then a little bit more clear, but, bearing in mind the difficulties of working in an ever-changing field, we have been refining those approaches. Each institution has been looking at their own institution, because, as you can imagine, although we have an overview of the sector, the challenges are very different for individual institutions—so their exposure, for instance, to the number of European Union students that they have at their college, or the work that they might be doing with Horizon 2020, or their success—and there has been considerable success in the HE field in securing structural funds for various projects—the exposure and the potential impact of leaving the EU, in a 'no deal' or in a 'deal' scenario, is very, very different. suzy davies am: Maybe just to use the 'no deal' scenario is probably the easiest, isn't it? kirsty williams am: The 'no deal'? suzy davies am: Well, yes, because that's the worst-case scenario, so let's look at that one. huw morris: As the Cabinet Secretary mentioned, the higher education Brexit working group's been meeting since September 2016 and has been looking at that in general. More recently, when the prospect of no deal became talked about, officials have been visiting individual institutions to talk to them about their preparedness for that. As you'll be aware, the funding for much of the activity is secured, we believe, even under a 'no deal' scenario, until December 2020; that's a letter we had from the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I think the research you're referring to may be research that Cardiff University has been doing with the Bevan Foundation and others. suzy davies am: Well, that's really helpful because my understanding was that this Cardiff University research had superseded all those nine sector analyses. Certainly, there are published papers by Max Munday and a team at Cardiff University on the impact of Brexit on the Welsh economy, but for HE and FE and apprenticeship provision, it's as the Cabinet Secretary outlined. suzy davies am: So, are there any formal risk assessments that are available for us to scrutinise, for example? For HE and FE for that matter. kirsty williams am: Well, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales have been doing some specific work; I can't comment on how wide they would want that to be shared. We have been doing some broad analysis, as I said, for the sector, looking at what we can do to mitigate the risk, bearing in mind that each institution is an autonomous institution, a principle that they guard really jealously, and rightly so. So, we have been, as Huw said, because the prospect of a 'no deal' has become, perhaps, more to the forefront, officers have been visiting each institution to try and make sure and to satisfy us, as people who fund part of their activity, that they have their own plans in place to deal with these scenarios. So, for instance, we continue to work with officials in Westminster around Erasmus+ provision in a 'no deal' scenario, what a UK stand-alone project would look like, the impacts of a 'no deal' on Horizon 2020. So, we look at the broader picture and we are encouraging continually individual institutions to make sure that they themselves are looking at their specific needs within that. suzy davies am: Well, if there is something that's shareable, I'm sure we'd be very pleased to see it— kirsty williams am: Anything that we've got— suzy davies am: —particularly with FE, actually, because, of course, we haven't got a HEFCW for FE; you're doing that regulation yourself. I'd expect to see that type of work evidenced somewhere from within Welsh Government, and we would be able to see that then. suzy davies am: Yes, because the student thing isn't such an issue, is it? eluned morgan am: You've got to remember that the FE colleges are much more anchored within their communities, they're much more localised, and so, for example, the number of EU students in these colleges is significantly lower. The number of staff in these colleges—I think they've analysed that there are only about 71 people. So, we're keeping in touch with them and we're letting them know what we are being told in terms of the Home Office settled status and what we can do to protect those 71. suzy davies am: What are they telling you about European social fund funding, though, because, as you say, they're locally anchored—the impact on FE of ESF funding is probably more significant than the issues we're talking about with higher education. How are you finding this out? Is this through one-to-one conversations? eluned morgan am: We are engaging with them all, and, obviously, we're engaging with ColegauCymru, who've done their own analysis, and what we found, in particular, is that the real problems are probably in relation to ESF funding and apprenticeships. But what you've got to remember is that that link between apprenticeships and the local work community is absolutely crucial. eluned morgan am: —the economy nosedives, or if there's an issue that we see—just the dislocation of companies in those areas as a result of Brexit—then that will inevitably have an impact on the number of apprenticeships that will be on offer. So, it's those kinds of things, but at the moment I think it's worth pointing out that about £15 million a year goes into the FE sector just in relation to apprenticeships. suzy davies am: Can I just come back finally on that, before handing over? In both your areas of responsibility, there's going to be an impact on Welsh Government in how it responds to that, as well. Can you tell me a little bit about the European transition team, which I think is about building resilience within the Welsh Government to deal with the impacts of Brexit? Is that a formal arrangement you have with officials? I don't really know much about this team, but it seems to meet fortnightly to get Welsh Government ready for Brexit, so could you just give us some clues on this? marie knox: Yes, in terms of the European transition team, that's the central co-ordinating group that pulls together all the leads in each department who are pulling together the work on European transition. So, I attend that group in relation to higher education and further education, and, obviously, other representatives in terms of agriculture, transport, the economy, et cetera. suzy davies am: It's great that you're on that group, but what does it actually do? That's the bit I wasn't sure about. marie knox: I guess it provides the governance structure for the Welsh Government as a whole in relation to European transition. So, individual departments do their own work, and the European transition team provides the governance structure, and, also, they lead on the discussions with the Department for Exiting the European Union, No. 10, the Joint Ministerial Committee—those kinds of ministerial arrangements. This discussion between HEFCW and higher education, these challenges in terms of how ready they are for the changes to come, and the work that the Government is doing with FE, I suspect, is happening at an organisational level. So, I just want to hear a little about where the student voice comes into that discussion and where the engagement happens in terms of the students. kirsty williams am: So, we have a close working relationship with the National Union of Students. They have been very clear, and I think there is a huge amount of consensus between the Welsh Government, what the universities are asking for and what the students are asking for. You'll have seen, only earlier this week, the very powerful campaign by NUS Wales about the importance of Erasmus+ arrangements. Many of us, I know, have had the opportunity to study abroad as part of our own studies, and there's a lot to be gained from it. We've been very clear from the outset, as have the sector and the student voice, about the importance of participation in that scheme. Our HE institutions, to a greater extent than FE, have faculty staff from the EU—it runs at about 11 per cent. They want to have the best teachers, they want access to the best learning opportunities, and we've been very clear about the importance of providing security and stability for those staff, making sure we send very clear messages that they're very welcome and we value their contribution. Again, as far as we've been able to, we've been able to give messages about the security of funding for European students for the next academic year. We're working to the limits of what I feel comfortable in being able to guarantee without further guarantees from Westminster. So, we've been working closely with the student voice, and I think, Llyr, what's very clear is there is a consensus about what is important across the Government, the institutions and student voice. So, that is making sure we send very clear messages about Wales's institutions being open for business and that we welcome both EU and international students, that we value the contribution of faculty, and that we want to be able to continue in Horizon 2020. That's especially important if we're looking at attracting postgraduate work and postgraduate students into our system, as well as Erasmus+. As I said, there's a consensus, I think, between the Government, the institutions and the students about what we need the UK Government to achieve for us. lynne neagle am: Before we move on to student recruitment, it's increasingly the view of many experts that we're heading for a 'no deal' Brexit. Can I ask both of you what specific plans you've put in place in the event of such a 'no deal' Brexit happening and us crashing out next spring? eluned morgan am: Well, I think it's really difficult for us to prepare for a 'no deal' Brexit, but obviously we need to think through very carefully what that might look like, and I think that scenario planning is starting to happen. So, in relation to FE, what we do have is funding—ESF funding—which the UK Government has said that they will underwrite until 2020. So, in March next year, if there is no deal, the immediate impact on FE is unlikely to hit in the way that we may have feared. The problem then becomes: what exactly is the deal with the EU in future, because we will have some kind of relationship, and what that impact will be on the broader economy and our ability to work with companies locally, and industries, to provide that link between training needs? So, the colleges, basically, are providing the training for lots of the apprenticeships, and so if the number of companies reduces, then that is likely to have an impact. Farming is obviously one that we are concerned about, because that could have a difference in terms of day one of no deal. Health and social care—obviously, we are concerned that there are a number of people who work in that sector who are EU citizens. What is the impact? Are they going to feel unwelcome? Are they likely, then, to return home? Where will that skills gap, therefore, be? So, that's a problem for us. So, one of the things we're doing is we've developed these regional skills partnerships where we ask local employers, 'What is it that you need in terms of skills development?' and we are now asking further education colleges to respond to that need. So, rather than them just getting people through the college system, who are easy to get in because they're doing courses that they're excited about, let's try and encourage them to do courses where we know there are skills shortages. So, that is a new structure that we've developed that is already having an impact; there's a £10 million project there. In manufacturing, obviously, if there's no deal, the rules of origin, that could have an immediate impact. Just-in-time—we could have real problems in terms of dislocation there; and hospitality and tourism. So, those are the sectors we have most concerns about, and all of them have very strong links to the FE sector. kirsty williams am: From the HE perspective, from a point of principle, we just have to keep working towards some kind of deal. Although the prospect of no deal, maybe, has risen up the agenda, we have got to be consistent in our messages to the Westminster Government: we need a deal. If that worst-case scenario was to happen, because of the underwrite guarantee, actually, for European regional development fund and European social fund programmes in the HE sector, it would be business as usual. And because of the current underwrite guarantee, the forthcoming bids for Erasmus and Horizon 2020 would be covered, but they would be the last applications that could be made. You'll be aware that there are some proposals for an extension to that guarantee, but from my understanding and our understanding of it, that would only give us third-country status for Horizon 2020 and Erasmus. What that does mean is that we would have limited access to the Horizon 2020 programme, and if you look at the activity that is currently being undertaken by the Welsh HE sector under that programme, that would mean that we'd probably lose about 50 per cent of that work, because that's the split between the bits we would still be able to access and what we are currently accessing. As I've already said, we have made a guarantee for EU student support for the next academic year, but, without clarity from the Treasury, I don't think it would be prudent of me to commit Welsh Government to anything further than that. What can we do? You'll be aware that we have been working with Universities Wales to access resources under the European transition fund, under the Global Wales programme, to look to boost international marketing of the HE sector and to talk about the strengths that we have in the sector. And we continue to look at other opportunities within the EU transition pot of money to assist the universities and the FE sector in that regard. We also continue to look to respond to the Reid review proposals, about how we can beef up our own research and continue to engage with UK Research and Innovation to make sure that, with any research money that comes out of that negotiation, Wales is in a competitive position to be able to bid successfully for that. I'm going to, because we've got a lot of questions, appeal for brief questions and answers that are as concise as possible, please. hefin david am: How does the Welsh Government account for the fact that EU student applications in Wales this year—that Wales is the only country in the UK to have seen a significant drop? kirsty williams am: Okay, well, I think the first thing to remember is that we will not get a full picture of student recruitment until, first of all, November and then the true picture, because some institutions, as you would know, have two admissions dates—we won't get the full picture until the spring. I think it was inevitable, given the change in Government policy with regard to student support, which had previously allowed European students to benefit from a tuition fee grant, and given the fact that that option is no longer available to them, that that has had an impact on EU recruitment, and there's no point trying to hide from that. hefin david am: So, together with leaving the EU, that's a double-whammy effect that's hitting Wales harder than the rest of the UK. kirsty williams am: It just puts us in the same position as EU students applying to England, but it was inevitable. It was anticipated that this could be a consequence of the change in policy, and I think we see that reflected in the initial figure, although, as I said, we won't get the true picture until the first census in November, and then, ultimately, the final picture in the spring. hefin david am: How concerned are you by that? kirsty williams am: Clearly, we want our universities to be able to attract students from both the EU and from around the world. The fact that the tuition fee grant arrangements may have had an impact on European Union students at this stage does not preclude the fact that Wales, up until now, has been successful in recruiting international students. So, the change in the fee regime should not be a barrier to the recruitment of international students, because, actually, international students outside of the EU make up a bigger proportion of students not from the UK who come to our institutions. hefin david am: That's a fair point, but it's unfortunate timing, though, isn't it? kirsty williams am: I think, from a public policy point of view and moving towards a sustainable way of funding our HE sector, then both my priority and, I would say, the priority of the institutions was to see the implementation of Diamond, which is what we have done. What about the fact that we've got a relatively imbalanced higher education profile compared to other countries of the UK with regard to high, medium and low-tariff universities? We've got one high-tariff university, and they're the ones that tend to show the growth in recruitment of EU students. Are you concerned about that balance of profile in the HE sector? kirsty williams am: As I said in answer to your question earlier, there is a difference reflected in the exposure of institutions to EU and international students. I would argue that it's not necessarily the case that institutions that are not high-tariff are not able to do very well in this sector. If you look, for instance, at Swansea University—if you look at the work Swansea University has done, that shows you what is possible. hefin david am: What is Swansea's success, then? What can we learn from Swansea? kirsty williams am: What I think is important—and this is not about any one institution—what I think is really important is that we look to—. It's a combination, I believe, for all universities, of getting their offer right—so, having a curriculum at their institution that is attractive and offers courses that people want to study. It's about that curriculum being delivered in an excellent fashion, so high quality ratings for teaching, as well as having an infrastructure that is attractive to students. So, it's all about getting the offer right and providing what students, both domestically and internationally, want. hefin david am: But the evidence would therefore suggest that that model of success that you've just outlined is happening in Swansea but it isn't happening in other institutions, and they're seeing a drop. kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, I think what we can see from Cardiff, Swansea and others is that it is possible to do very well in the sector. kirsty williams am: As I said, what we can see is that, if you get the offer right, I think we have something very special that the HE sector can market itself on. llyr gruffydd am: Just coming back to the drop in EU students, you mentioned that one of the reasons probably is the change in the funding that's available to students coming here. So, does that suggest that, under the current regime, Wales was punching above its weight in terms of attracting students and we've lost that advantage? I know we're gaining in other ways in introducing the new system, but really we're not much different to England in terms of fees now, so why would they come to Wales as opposed to going anywhere else? kirsty williams am: I think you're right; there was an added incentive, potentially, to come to a Welsh institution because of the availability of the tuition fee grant. That advantage is no longer there, which is why we need to work alongside the sector, as we're doing with the Global Wales programme, to increase their ability to market HE in the round across the world. There's something for everybody, whether you want to be in a city like Cardiff or whether you want a coastal experience in a small town like Aber. So, we've got a lot to offer and that's why it's really important that, although we have seen a change in the tuition fees, which may have an impact, we are investing with universities, for instance, in the Global Wales programme. lynne neagle am: In terms of the drop that we've seen in Wales, which is differential amongst institutions, will you be taking any specific action to try and prevent Brexit exacerbating that? kirsty williams am: We are working with HEFCW and individual institutions, as I said, to test their preparedness. We can't tell them what to do in that sense, but we can, because of our governance arrangements and HEFCW's monitoring arrangements, continue to test with them. I meet regularly with vice-chancellors and separately with the chairs of the institutions and separately again with HEFCW representatives, and the sustainability of the sector and recruitment issues is always something that is on the agenda. julie morgan am: The additional £6.4 million that went to HEFCW in the 2017-18 year, which I think you say is partly because of Brexit and partly because of demographic and recruitment challenges, what do you expect to see as a result of that spending? kirsty williams am: That funding was allocated, as I said, to enable HEFCW to deal with any short-term implications arising out of demographic changes, because we've seen a drop in the number of 18-year-olds, and the initial implications of EU transition. It was allocated as part of HEFCW's overall grant in aid, and therefore the council was given discretion as to how it was to be apportioned to the sector. The money was brought forward a year, because, in conversations with HEFCW and the institutions, they felt that that money would be more useful earlier on. So, it was money that was brought forward into the allocation for 2017-18, as opposed to 2018-19, because they wanted to have that resource earlier rather than later. With regard to additional resources, you'll be aware that we have made an additional resource of £5 million available to mitigate the freeze in tuition fees, and £5 million has been made available to HEFCW to kick-start the work on postgraduate support until we're in a position to fully implement Diamond at the postgraduate level. kirsty williams am: The financial allocation, as I said, was agreed with the funding council and it was there to help universities with any cash flow issues, but if you'd like further details I can provide those as much as I'm able. julie morgan am: I think it would be interesting if we know what the money was spent on and, of course, that money is now not available for the next financial year, so there's no way of carrying on what they were doing with it, presumably. kirsty williams am: Well, as I said, it was part of the overall allocation to HEFCW. With specific regard to dealing with the impact of Brexit, you'll be aware that we have reached an agreement in principle on the funding of £3.5 million to the Global Wales initiative. This was an application that came in from Universities Wales looking at specifically targeting and beefing up international work and international recruitment work to support them at this time, and we're currently working with Universities Wales on the exact details and outcomes they would expect from that investment. julie morgan am: And do you have any estimate of how many students you hope to attract by that? kirsty williams am: That is subject to continuing negotiations with Universities Wales before we let any contracts with them. What's important is that that work is based on research that has been done by Universities Wales to look at the optimum markets that we should be targeting, specifically the United States of America and Vietnam. julie morgan am: And will this money be used equally between all the universities? kirsty williams am: We expect that all institutions—should they have a desire to participate—will be able to be assisted, as well as the overall global branding from Universities Wales and the new Study in Wales initiative. I think we've covered the EU student fees, haven't we? lynne neagle am: Okay. Do you want to ask question 12? julie morgan am: Has the Welsh Government explored the possibility of looking at different immigration rules for international and EU students who may wish to study here? kirsty williams am: Okay. Well, with regard to immigration, clearly, this is something, at the moment, that is out of our hands, and I have to say, it hasn't got off to a great start when initially the post-study work visas were issued just for a number of institutions in the south-east of England, with no consultation with us and I don't believe with the Scottish Government either. So, we have campaigned, pushed, cajoled, lobbied, and I was very glad that in December last year, the Home Office did then make that scheme available to Cardiff and to Trinity Saint David. We continue to press the point that we do not believe that, first of all, international students should be included in any immigration targets. I think all the evidence suggests that the British public don't regard international students as immigrants, and therefore we do need to make sure that they are taken out of the targets and we can continue to press that message with the UK Government. At the moment, you'll be aware that Welsh Government has looked at a specific piece of work on whether there was any scope for specific immigration policy for Wales, although I must say that was mostly in the field of actually the workforce rather than students. You'll be aware that this week the Government's migration advisory committee—there are so many committees these days—have said that they don't believe that there is a case for a separate provision for EU students, as opposed to international students. But we want an immigration system that makes it as easy as possible for those students who want to benefit from education in Wales, and indeed the UK, to be able to do so. llyr gruffydd am: So, what are we doing from now on in then? Are we just waiting to see or are we continuing to push? kirsty williams am: No—gosh—Llyr, we continue to push the case at the official level, and at the moment, I'm trying to convene a quadrilateral, if it can be quadrilateral in the sense that Northern Ireland aren't up and running—but certainly with officials from Northern Ireland. We're trying to arrange another quadrilateral between myself, the HE Minister for England and the new HE Minister for Scotland. If I can speak candidly, I don't believe that there's any difference between our view, with regard to the status of international students, and the views of English Ministers within the department in England. So, I don't think we need to persuade Sam Gyimah about the importance of this. Jo Johnson got, I think the current Minister gets it—it's a question of whether we can persuade the Home Office of that particular case. Firstly, with regard to higher education, we heard that, even without Brexit, higher education is in managed deficit, whilst the funding announcements from Diamond and Reid are awaited. So, is that a concern to Welsh Government, and could Welsh Government take away that uncertainty by outlining a clear funding commitment to the Diamond and Reid reviews? kirsty williams am: Welsh Government is fully committed, John, to implementing the Diamond review proposals. It's a commitment that was an element of the agreement between myself and the First Minister that brought me into the administration, and we have been very clear with HEFCW about our expectations and what the implementation of Diamond will mean for grant going to HEFCW. With regard to Reid, we continue within Government to discuss how we can implement the recommendations of Reid, but one of the whole principles behind Diamond was to move us to a more sustainable funding settlement for the HE sector in the round, that is fair to students, encourages those with the ability to partake in higher education to do so, especially from those from a poorer background, as well as being able to provide our institutions with the resources that they need. john griffiths am: So, you don't accept, then, that there hasn't been a clear funding commitment from Welsh Government to those reviews—the Diamond and Reid reviews? kirsty williams am: With regard to Diamond, I would absolutely refute that. We have been very clear and we have shown HEFCW our analysis of the figures going forward in relation to what is sometimes called within the sector the 'Diamond dividend', although the Diamond dividend is never as big as people imagine the Diamond dividend to be. Now, with regard to Reid, those are ongoing discussions that form part of the normal budgetary process within the Government, but I think we have been as clear as we can be with regard to Diamond. The second question, really, is about HE and FE and it's about European funding, which, of course, has been and is on a multi-year basis, which gives, I think, a lot of security and comfort to the sectors, knowing what the budgets will be over a period of time. So, would you commit to introducing multi-year funding settlements for HE, and indeed for FE, moving forward beyond Brexit? eluned morgan am: Shall I take this and give you a little bit of a break? She's not very well. People can plan, you can get staffing in place, you can have really strategic aims and I think that's really useful for the institutions involved. So, whilst I think we would, in an ideal world, like to see a better view of what's coming our way, it's extremely difficult for us to be able to offer that without having that multi-annual funding commitment from the UK Government. Of course, it's not just about ESF and apprenticeships—it's also about ERDF funding. So, you mustn't forget that, actually, there's been a lot of ERDF funding that's gone into these institutions. Also, FE colleges—we've got Coleg y Cymoedd, the college in Blaenau Gwent. It's because of the multi-annual nature of the fact that we've been able to prepare for them that they have been able to progress. So, that will be a huge loss, but I think it's really important that we don't forget the ERDF aspect in addition to the ESF impact that there will be on these institutions. As far as further education is concerned, in your paper you state that it's a priority to support the FE sector to maintain all the learning opportunities that currently take place under European Union funding. So, would you be able to give the committee an idea of the level of resource you would estimate that the sector requires to achieve that priority, and—? I'll stop there for the moment. What we've said is that we want to maintain that range of learning opportunities that is provided by EU funding. The UK Government have made us some promises and they've made some commitments, and we need to hold them to that, and so let's keep the pressure on. The moment we start saying, 'No, it's all going to be okay, we'll sort ourselves out'—I think that would be a huge mistake. We have been promised that we will not lose a penny as a result of Brexit, and we need to make sure that we keep them to that commitment. I think it was quite interesting to hear what Philip Hammond said yesterday when he was in Wales, saying that the money that we will receive will depend on the future shape of the economy, which implies that he has no idea what's going to happen there, and that that shared prosperity fund will be designed around the deal. I think we have some real concerns about the shared prosperity fund not really following through on the commitments that were made during the Brexit referendum. But, in terms of the replacements, we'd be looking at about £15 million a year, and that would be a huge impact for us, but we're not looking at that—I don't think we should be—because they made some promises. john griffiths am: So, could you say that, if they keep their promises, then at least that level of funding would be maintained? eluned morgan am: I think that would be a minimum, but that's just one aspect of it. suzy davies am: Yes, just very quickly on the multi-annual point, obviously I recognise that we're talking about six or seven-year cycles with Europe, and I completely take the point that you don't really know from year to year what your budget's going to be, but Welsh Government does make multi-annual commitments. How are you able to do that and yet not quite feel confident that you can do that with—well, both your sectors, really? eluned morgan am: I think it's probably easier to do with capital than it is with revenue, so that's what would make the difference. The one thing we all know is that employment opportunities today—the transitional nature of employment and the fact that people are not getting the kind of contracts that we'd like them to get—that makes their lives very precarious and they're less likely, then, to be committed to those institutions. I think it's a really, really concerning thing, because what makes these institutions work well is their staff, so that makes life very, very difficult without that multi-annual commitment. suzy davies am: They also have to raise some of their own money as well—we mustn't forget that. eluned morgan am: No, I think that's right, and I think that there's more that these institutions can do in terms of their own funding and being more responsive to employers and the need for skills in their areas. lynne neagle am: So, given the precarious state of planning for the finances, are you considering letting universities charge EU students international fees? kirsty williams am: We don't regulate the ability for universities to set fees for international students. They would be in a position to—[Inaudible.] They are in a position to set international fees at a rate that, I guess, they feel is appropriate for the provision that they give to those students. I just wanted to pick up on the funding of apprenticeships and the long-term funding, because the ESF—the commitments take us to 2023, which takes us beyond any transition period. So, I just want to hear from you that there are assurances that the apprenticeship programme can be delivered as a whole, come what may. eluned morgan am: Well, we're fine until 2020, because we've had that guarantee from the Government. The issue for us is the n+2 that we would have if we do have some kind of transition deal or an agreement with the EU. So, there is a risk and there is concern, beyond 2020, that that would create problems if they don't agree to fund that, which is the expectation that we have. llyr gruffydd am: But it is a prospect that this wouldn't be achieved as you foresee. eluned morgan am: Well, we do hope, because we've had the pledges and commitments from the Government, that they will respect what we expected and what was expected by these institutions that have had the commitment of the funding. llyr gruffydd am: So, to what extent does that undermine the current work? Because institutions want to enter into agreements with providers and so on. Businesses want to know, if they're starting on some sort of journey, that they are going to get to the end of it some years down the line. eluned morgan am: Well, as I said, because the guarantee is there until 2020, I think that, for now, people are willing to go into those agreements, and I hope that we'll have a better outlook by November of the direction we're moving in. You have to remember that the number of apprenticeships in Wales is rising, while they've collapsed entirely in England. So, it is important that we do continue, and it's important that we don't create an atmosphere here that's going to undermine the confidence of our employers in committing to training in the workplace. llyr gruffydd am: Are you confident that the Government will achieve its targets in this context? eluned morgan am: Yes. But let's be clear: if there is a 'no deal' scenario, that will have an impact on the economy, and who knows what will happen then to some of these companies that are reliant on the EU. llyr gruffydd am: Talking about the impact on the wider economy, on the point you made earlier that it's not just the direct effect on these institutions, but also on the businesses that they engage with, that is a concern in this context, that means, of course, that there is a lot of pressure in this context on the work that other departments in the Government are doing, because perhaps they are the ones dealing with some of this. So, could you tell us a little bit about how you're working with Ministers and Cabinet Secretaries and other departments within the Government to safeguard these interests? eluned morgan am: So, as part of the employability programme, I have started going round every member of the Cabinet to ask what the impact will be on them—for example, in health, and, certainly, the economy, but here are many other areas. What's important for us is that we do collaborate and we do get this analysis, but we hope to do that on the ground through the regional skills partnerships. That's our way of ensuring that we can have an understanding, on the ground, of what's needed by employers. And so ensuring that people feed into that and that we respond to those requirements—that's where we're focusing our work. So, we're asking, for example, health boards to ensure that they feed into the regional skills partnerships. llyr gruffydd am: Is there a danger that we're a little bit behind in this process? Because Brexit could be upon us in no time at all, and, of course, this work is still ongoing. eluned morgan am: Well, I have been pushing and ensuring that in the direct areas facing the greatest risk, and agriculture's one of those, of course—. We have been pushing to see what we can do further, so, for example, I'm in the process of developing a policy on rural skills at present because I do think it's important that we do focus on those sectors that are likely to suffer the worst impact if the worst does happen. So, those preparations are in place as far as they can be, but, of course, it's very difficult without knowing to what extent it's going to impact on us. llyr gruffydd am: And each sector's running on its own timescale, I would presume. But, as you've mentioned rural skills, when do you foresee that that work will appear, and when will plans or schemes or whatever you're intending to put in place see the light of day? eluned morgan am: Well, we hope during this term that that will be published or announced. So, certainly, it is something that we have been discussing with people in rural areas directly, with the colleges, to see what the provision is there and to what extent we need to expand that, and to what extent we will need to change and move really quickly if there is no deal. That's something that I think we have to learn and we need to convince the FE sector about in terms of moving more quickly and to be more responsive to the demand that there is in the workplace. llyr gruffydd am: Yes, because there is the dilemma you touched on earlier about providing the skills that are required for the economy and providing the courses that are easy to fill. That is a live discussion across FE and HE, but you're confident that that discussion is taking place in a constructive and positive way and moving in the right direction. eluned morgan am: Well, it's helped that we've put £10 million on the table, because they do understand now that we are serious about our aim of ensuring that they do respond to what employers are asking for. So that has helped a lot in terms of focus and, of course, we're in the middle of a review now as well in terms of how we fund FE, and that will certainly be a part of that. Can I just go back—? kirsty williams am: Sorry, Chair, could I just clarify something? The last question you asked me about— lynne neagle am: I was just going to go back to that, yes. There could be a scenario where there are reciprocal arrangements, so, if a deal was reached with the European Union that established the principle of reciprocal arrangements, then, obviously, the ability of the HE institutions to charge international fees would be curtailed. lynne neagle am: If there's not that agreement— kirsty williams am: If there's no deal— lynne neagle am: —then it will be open to universities to charge market-driven, international rates. I should have made it very clear that the answer I gave was in the context of no deal, which is what we seem to be talking about mostly this morning, but if there was a deal to have reciprocal arrangements, then that ability, obviously, would be curtailed. Okay, well, can I thank the Cabinet Secretary, the Minister and the officials for attending and for answering all our questions? We very much appreciate your time. Members will see that there are 18 papers to note, so I'd like to suggest that we note them as a block, please, and just to flag that I would like to return to paper to note 18 when we go into private. Item 6, then, can I propose, in accordance with Standing Order 17.42, that the committee resolves to meet in private for the remainder of the meeting and the whole of the meeting next week? Are Members content? Okay, thank you.

The group discussed the Wales government's promise of a multi-annual commitment to support the universities during the transition period. While some members expressed concerns about relying solely on government funding, they agreed to maintain apprenticeships even if other regions had abandoned them. Suzy Davies compared two types of commitments, one related to revenue and the other to capital, and expressed doubts about their effectiveness. However, Eluned Morgan emphasized the importance of the commitment related to capital during the transition period. Despite differing opinions, Eluned Morgan expressed confidence in the government's support for the universities, while Llyr Gruffydd believed that relying on official funding would be challenging and entering into agreements could disrupt current work and pose risks.

Question: What were the opinions of PhD D and PhD F on the paper and Eurospeech? Article: Actually , I think he he redirected it to everybody also so the PDA mikes have a big bunch of energy at at five hertz where this came up was that I was showing off these wave forms that we have on the web and and I just sort of hadn't noticed this , but that the major , major component in the wave in the second wave form in that pair of wave forms is actually the air conditioner . I I have to be more careful about using that as a as a as a good illustration , in fact it 's not , of of the effects of room reverberation . And then we had this other discussion about whether this affects the dynamic range , cuz I know , although we start off with thirty two bits , you end up with sixteen bits and you know , are we getting hurt there ? But Dan is pretty confident that we 're not , that that quantization error is not is still not a significant factor there . So there was a question of whether we should change things here , whether we should change a capacitor on the input box for that or whether we should phd b: Yeah , he suggested a smaller capacitor , right ? professor a: Right . But then I had some other thing discussions with him phd b: For the P D professor a: and the feeling was once we start monk monkeying with that , many other problems could ha happen . professor a: A simple thing to do is he he he has a I forget if it this was in that mail or in the following mail , but he has a a simple filter , a digital filter that he suggested . professor a: The other thing that I don't know the answer to , but when people are using Feacalc here , whether they 're using it with the high - pass filter option or not . So when we 're doing all these things using our software there is if it 's if it 's based on the RASTA - PLP program , which does both PLP and RASTA - PLP then there is an option there which then comes up through to Feacalc which allows you to do high - pass filtering and in general we like to do that , because of things like this and it 's it 's pretty it 's not a very severe filter . Doesn't affect speech frequencies , even pretty low speech frequencies , at all , but it 's phd b: What 's the cut - off frequency it used ? professor a: Oh . I don't know I wrote this a while ago phd b: Is it like twenty ? professor a: Something like that . I think there 's some effect above twenty but it 's it 's it 's it 's mild . So , it probably there 's probably some effect up to a hundred hertz or something but it 's it 's pretty mild . I don't know in the in the STRUT implementation of the stuff is there a high - pass filter or a pre pre - emphasis or something in the phd f: . We we we want to go and check that in i for anything that we 're going to use the P D A mike for . He says that there 's a pretty good roll off in the PZM mikes so we don't need need to worry about them one way or the other but if we do make use of the cheap mikes , we want to be sure to do that that filtering before we process it . And then again if it 's depending on the option that the our our software is being run with , it 's it 's quite possible that 's already being taken care of . the thing is it was since I was talking about reverberation and showing this thing that was noise , it wasn't a good match , but it certainly was still an indication of the fact that you get noise with distant mikes . It 's just not a great example because not only isn't it reverberation but it 's a noise that we definitely know what to do . professor a: So , it doesn't take deep a new bold new methods to get rid of five hertz noise , so . So it was it was a bad example in that way , but it 's it still is it 's the real thing that we did get out of the microphone at distance , so it wasn't it w it w wasn't wrong it was inappropriate . So , but , Yeah , someone noticed it later pointed it out to me , and I went " oh , man . So I think we 'll change our our picture on the web , when we 're @ @ . One of the things I was , I was trying to think about what what 's the best way to show the difference an and I had a couple of thoughts one was , that spectrogram that we show is O K , but the thing is the eyes and the the brain behind them are so good at picking out patterns from from noise that in first glance you look at them it doesn't seem like it 's that bad because there 's many features that are still preserved . So one thing to do might be to just take a piece of the spec of the spectrogram where you can see that something looks different , an and blow it up , and have that be the part that 's just to show as well . Another , I was thinking of was taking some spectral slices , like like we look at with the recognizer , and look at the spectrum or cepstrum that you get out of there , and the the , the reverberation does make it does change that . grad c: W w what d what do you mean ? professor a: Well , all the recognizers look at frames . professor a: So it 's , yeah , at one point in time or twenty over twenty milliseconds or something , you have a spectrum or a cepstrum . And if you look at phd b: You could just you could just throw up , you know , the some MFCC feature vectors . You know , one from one , one from the other , and then , you know , you can look and see how different the numbers are . Well , that 's why I saying either Well , either spectrum or cepstrum phd b: I 'm just kidding . professor a: but but I think the thing is you wanna phd b: I don't mean a graph . Yeah , at first I had a remark why I am wondering why the PDA is always so far . Since the last meeting we 've we 've tried to put together the clean low - pass downsampling , upsampling , the new filter that 's replacing the LDA filters , and also the delay issue so that We considered th the the delay issue on the for the on - line normalization . professor a: But it 's not wer worse and it 's better better latency , phd f: It 's not professor a: right ? phd f: Yeah . It seems better when we look at the mismatched case but I think we are like like cheated here by the th this problem that in some cases when you modify slight slightly modify the initial condition you end up completely somewhere air somewhere else in the in the space , the parameters . For Italian is at seventy - eight percent recognition rate on the mismatch , and this new system has eighty - nine . I don't I don't think it means that the new system is more robust professor a: - huh . professor a: Well , the test would be if you then tried it on one of the other test sets , if if it was phd f: Y professor a: Right . professor a: So then if you take your changes phd f: It 's similar for other test sets professor a: and then phd f: but from this se seventy - eight percent recognition rate system , I could change the transition probabilities for the the first and it will end up to eighty - nine also . phd f: By using point five instead of point six , point four as in the the HTK script . phd b: th the only difference is you change the self - loop transition probability by a tenth of a percent phd f: Yeah . From point phd f: Even tenth of a percent ? phd b: I I 'm sorry phd f: Well , we tried we tried point one , phd b: f for point from You change at point one phd f: yeah . professor a: Oh ! phd b: and n not tenth of a percent , one tenth , phd f: . phd b: alright ? so from point five so from point six to point five and you get ten percent better . phd b: And it 's I think it 's what you basically hypothesized in the last meeting about it just being very phd f: phd b: and I think you mentioned this in your email too it 's just very phd f: Mmm , yeah . phd b: you know get stuck in some local minimum and this thing throws you out of it I guess . professor a: Well , what 's what are according to the rules what what are we supposed to do about the transition probabilities ? Are they supposed to be point five or point six ? phd b: I think you 're not allowed to Yeah . But changing it to point five I think is which gives you much better results , but that 's not allowed . phd f: Yeah , but even if you use point five , I 'm not sure it will always give you the better results phd b: Yeah . We only tested it on the the medium mismatch , phd f: on the other training set , . phd b: right ? You said on the other cases you didn't notice phd f: Yeah . I think the reason is , yeah , I not I it was in my mail I think also , is the fact that the mismatch is trained only on the far microphone . Well , in for the mismatched case everything is using the far microphone training and testing , whereas for the highly mismatched , training is done on the close microphone so it 's it 's clean speech basically so you don't have this problem of local minima probably and for the well - match , it 's a mix of close microphone and distant microphone and Well . phd b: I did notice something phd f: So th I think the mismatch is the more difficult for the training part . phd b: Somebody , I think it was Morgan , suggested at the last meeting that I actually count to see how many parameters and how many frames . phd b: And there are almost one point eight million frames of training data and less than forty thousand parameters in the baseline system . phd b: I did one quick experiment just to make sure I had everything worked out and I just f for most of the For for all of the digit models , they end up at three mixtures per state . And so I just did a quick experiment , where I changed it so it went to four and it it it didn't have a r any significant effect at the medium mismatch and high mismatch cases and it had it was just barely significant for the well - matched better . And I think also just seeing what we saw in terms of the expected duration of the silence model ? when we did this tweaking of the self - loop ? The silence model expected duration was really different . phd b: And so in the case where it had a better score , the silence model expected duration was much longer . I think you know if we make a better silence model I think that will help a lot too for a lot of these cases so but one one thing I I wanted to check out before I increased the number of mixtures per state was in their default training script they do an initial set of three re - estimations and then they built the silence model and then they do seven iterations then the add mixtures and they do another seven then they add mixtures then they do a final set of seven and they quit . Seven seems like a lot to me and it also makes the experiments go take a really long time to do one turn - around of the well matched case takes like a day . phd b: And so you know in trying to run these experiments I notice , you know , it 's difficult to find machines , you know , compute the run on . And so one of the things I did was I compiled HTK for the Linux machines professor a: phd b: cuz we have this one from IBM that 's got like five processors in it ? professor a: Right . phd b: and so now I 'm you can run stuff on that and that really helps a lot because now we 've got you know , extra machines that we can use for compute . And if I 'm do running an experiment right now where I 'm changing the number of iterations ? from seven to three ? phd d: And so if we can get away with just doing three , we can do many more experiments more quickly . And if it 's not a a huge difference from running with seven iterations , you know , we should be able to get a lot more experiments done . But if we can you know , run all of these back - ends f with many fewer iterations and on Linux boxes we should be able to get a lot more experimenting done . So I wanted to experiment with cutting down the number of iterations before I increased the number of Gaussians . professor a: But they 're not making things worse and we have reduced latency , right ? phd f: Yeah . But actually actually it seems to do a little bit worse for the well - matched case and we just noticed that Yeah , actually the way the final score is computed is quite funny . It 's not a weighted mean of word error rate , it 's a weighted mean of improvements . Which means that actually the weight on the well - matched is Well I well what what What happened is that if you have a small improvement or a small if on the well - matched case it will have huge influence on the improvement compared to the reference because the reference system is is is quite good for for the well - ma well - matched case also . phd b: So it it weights the improvement on the well - matched case really heavily compared to the improvement on the other cases ? phd f: No , but it 's the weighting of the of the improvement not of the error rate . Yeah , and it 's hard to improve on the on the best case , cuz it 's already so good , right ? phd f: Yeah but what is that you can have a huge improvement on the H HMK 's , like five percent absolute , and this will not affect the final score almost this will almost not affect the final score because this improvement because the improvement relative to the the baseline is small professor a: So they do improvement in terms of accuracy ? rather than word error rate ? phd f: . improvement ? professor a: So phd f: No , it 's compared to the word er it 's improvement on the word error rate , professor a: OK . professor a: So if you have ten percent error and you get five percent absolute improvement then that 's fifty percent . So what you 're saying then is that if it 's something that has a small word error rate , then a even a relatively small improvement on it , in absolute terms , will show up as quite quite large in this . Sure , but when we think about the weighting , which is point five , point three , point two , it 's on absolute on on relative figures , professor a: Yeah . That 's why I 've been saying we should be looking at word error rate and and not not at at accuracies . phd b: it 's not it 's not that different , right ? , just subtract the accuracy . professor a: Yeah but you 're but when you look at the numbers , your sense of the relative size of things is quite different . professor a: If you had ninety percent correct and five percent , five over ninety doesn't look like it 's a big difference , but five over ten is is big . professor a: So just when we were looking at a lot of numbers and getting sense of what was important . professor a: What 's a little bit ? Like phd f: Like , it 's difficult to say because again I 'm not sure I have the phd b: Hey Morgan ? Do you remember that Signif program that we used to use for testing signi ? Is that still valid ? I I 've been using that . I just use my old one from ninety - two or whatever professor a: Yeah , I 'm sure it 's not that different but but he he he was a little more rigorous , as I recall . s phd f: well we start from ninety - four point sixty - four , and we go to ninety - four point O four . For Finnish , we start to ninety - three point eight - four and we go to ninety - three point seventy - four . And for Spanish we are we were at ninety - five point O five and we go to ninety - three - s point sixty one . professor a: And is that wh what do you know what piece you 've done several changes here . Because nnn , well we don't have complete result , but the filter So the filter with the shorter delay hurts on Italian well - matched , which And , yeah . And the other things , like downsampling , upsampling , don't seem to hurt and the new on - line normalization , neither . If we saw that making a small change like , you know , a tenth , to the self - loop had a huge effect , can we really make any conclusions about differences in this stuff ? phd f: phd f: I think we can be completely fooled by this thing , but I don't know . There is first this thing , and then the yeah , I computed the like , the confidence level on the different test sets . professor a: But OK , so you these these degradations you were talking about were on the well - matched case phd f: So . Do the does the new filter make things better or worse for the other cases ? phd f: Yeah . OK , so I guess the argument one might make is that , " Yeah , if you looked at one of these cases and you jiggle something and it changes then you 're not quite sure what to make of it . But when you look across a bunch of these and there 's some some pattern , so eh h here 's all the if if in all these different cases it never gets better , and there 's significant number of cases where it gets worse , then you 're probably hurting things , I would say . So at the very least that would be a reasonably prediction of what would happen with with a different test set , that you 're not jiggling things with . What I was asking , though , is are what 's what 's the level of communication with the O G I gang now , about this and phd f: Well , we are exchanging mail as soon as we we have significant results . We are working on our side on other things like also trying a sup spectral subtraction but of of our own , another spectral substraction . It 's going professor a: Is there any further discussion about this this idea of of having some sort of source code control ? phd f: Yeah . As soon as we have something that 's significant and that 's better than than what was submitted , we will fix fix the system and But we 've not discussed it it it this yet , yeah . Sounds like a great idea but but I think that that he 's saying people are sort of scrambling for a Eurospeech deadline . Anybo - anybody in the in this group do doing anything for Eurospeech ? phd f: S professor a: Or , is that what is that phd f: Yeah we are We are trying to to do something with the Meeting Recorder digits , professor a: Right . phd f: and , well , some people from OGI are working on a paper for this , but there is also the special session about th Aurora which is which has an extended deadline . professor a: So the deadline When 's the deadline ? When 's the deadline ? phd f: ? I think it 's the thirteenth of May . So , I I think that you could certainly start looking at at the issue but but I think it 's probably , on s from what Stephane is saying , it 's it 's unlikely to get sort of active participation from the two sides until after they 've phd b: Well I could at least Well , I 'm going to be out next week but I could try to look into like this CVS over the web . That seems to be a very popular way of people distributing changes and over , you know , multiple sites and things professor a: phd b: so maybe if I can figure out how do that easily and then pass the information on to everybody so that it 's you know , as easy to do as possible and and people don't it won't interfere with their regular work , then maybe that would be good . And if you 're interested in using CVS , I 've set it up here , phd b: Oh great . grad c: j phd b: I used it a long time ago but it 's been a while so maybe I can ask you some questions . Maybe you and I can talk a little bit at some point about coming up with a better demonstration of the effects of reverberation for our web page , cuz the , actually the the It made a good good audio demonstration because when we could play that clip the the the really obvious difference is that you can hear two voices and in the second one and only hear phd b: Maybe we could just like , talk into a cup . professor a: No , it sound it sounds pretty reverberant , but you can't when you play it back in a room with a you know a big room , nobody can hear that difference really . professor a: They hear that it 's lower amplitude and they hear there 's a second voice , grad c: - huh . professor a: but that actually that makes for a perfectly good demo because that 's a real obvious thing , that you hear two voices . But for the the visual , just , you know , I 'd like to have , you know , the spectrogram again , grad c: Yeah . professor a: because you 're you 're you 're visual abilities as a human being are so good you can pick out you know , you you look at the good one , you look at the cru the screwed up one , and and you can see the features in it without trying to @ @ phd b: I noticed that in the pictures . phd b: I thought " hey , you know th " I My initial thought was " this is not too bad ! " professor a: Right . But you have to you know , if you look at it closely , you see " well , here 's a place where this one has a big formant formant maj major formants here are are moving quite a bit . professor a: So you could that 's why I was thinking , in a section like that , you could take a look look at just that part of the spectrogram and you could say " Oh yeah . The main thing that struck me in looking at those two spectrograms was the difference in the high frequencies . It looked like for the one that was farther away , you know , it really everything was attenuated professor a: Right . Since you 're getting all this indirect energy , then a lot of it does have have reduced high frequencies . But the other thing is the temporal courses of things really are changed , and and we want to show that , in some obvious way . " but I I just After after they were put in there I didn't really look at them anymore , cuz I just they were different . So maybe we can just substitute one of these wave forms and then do some kind of zoom in on the spectrogram on an interesting area . professor a: The other thing that we had in there that I didn't like was that the most obvious characteristic of the difference when you listen to it is that there 's a second voice , and the the the the the cuts that we have there actually don't correspond to the full wave form . It 's just the first I think there was something where he was having some trouble getting so much in , or . But it it 's it 's the first six seconds or something of it and it 's in the seventh or eighth second or something where @ @ the second voice comes in . So we we would like to actually see the voice coming in , too , I think , since that 's the most obvious thing when you listen to it . phd f: So the thing that we did is just to add spectral subtraction before this , the Wall process , which contains LDA on - line normalization . phd f: And so we started to look at at things like this , which is , well , it 's Yeah . And the sentence contain only one word , which is " Due " And it can't clearly be seen . phd f: Where is the word ? phd b: This is this is , grad e: . phd f: This is a plot of C - zero , when we don't use spectral substraction , and when there is no on - line normalization . phd f: then when we apply mean normalization it looks like the second figure , though it is not . phd f: and And then the third figure is what happens when we apply mean normalization and variance normalization . What we can clearly see is that on the speech portion the two channel come becomes very close , but also what happens on the noisy portion is that the variance of the noise is professor a: phd b: Can I ask what does variance normalization do ? w What is the effect of that ? professor a: Normalizes the variance . phd f: So it phd b: No , I understand that , phd f: You you get an estimate of the standard deviation . phd f: phd b: No , I understand what it is , but , what does it what 's what is phd f: Yeah but . professor a: Well , because everything If you have a system based on Gaussians , everything is based on means and variances . professor a: So if there 's an overall reason You know , it 's like if you were doing image processing and in some of the pictures you were looking at , there was a lot of light and and in some , there was low light , phd b: professor a: And the variance is just sort of like the next moment , you know ? So what if one set of pictures was taken so that throughout the course it was went through daylight and night ten times , another time it went thr i is , you know , how how much how much vari phd b: Oh , OK . I guess a better example would be how much of the light was coming in from outside rather than artificial light . So if it was a lot if more was coming from outside , then there 'd be the bigger effect of the of the of the change in the So every mean every all all of the the parameters that you have , especially the variances , are going to be affected by the overall variance . professor a: And so , in principle , you if you remove that source , then , you know , you can phd b: I see . So would the major effect is that you 're gonna get is by normalizing the means , professor a: That 's the first order but thing , phd b: but it may help First - order effects . professor a: but then the second order is is the variances phd b: And it may help to do the variance . professor a: because , again , if you if you 're trying to distinguish between E and B phd b: OK . professor a: if it just so happens that the E 's were a more you know , were recorded when when the energy was was was larger or something , phd b: professor a: or the variation in it was larger , than with the B 's , then this will be give you some some bias . phd b: professor a: So the it 's removing these sources of variability in the data that have nothing to do with the linguistic component . And it and this professor a: i is if If you have a good voice activity detector , isn't isn't it gonna pull that out ? phd f: Yeah . Well what it it shows is that , yeah , perhaps a good voice activity detector is is good before on - line normalization and that 's what we 've already observed . phd b: I don't know , it seems like this would be a lot easier than this signal to work with . What I notice is that , while I prefer to look at the second figure than at the third one , well , because you clearly see where speech is . phd f: But the problem is that on the speech portion , channel zero and channel one are more different than when you use variance normalization where channel zero and channel one become closer . phd b: But for the purposes of finding the speech phd f: And Yeah , but here phd b: You 're more interested in the difference between the speech and the nonspeech , phd f: Yeah . For I th I think that it perhaps it shows that the parameters that the voice activity detector should use have to use should be different than the parameter that have to be used for speech recognition . phd f: Well , y professor a: So you can do that by doing the voi voice activity detection . You also could do it by spect spectral subtraction before the variance normalization , right ? phd f: Yeah , but it 's not clear , yeah . phd f: the the number that at that are here are recognition experiments on Italian HM and with these two kinds of parameters . phd b: Where 's th phd f: But the fact is that the voice activity detector doesn't work on channel one . phd b: Where at what stage is the voice activity detector applied ? Is it applied here or a after the variance normalization ? phd f: ? professor a: Spectral subtraction , I guess . Is it applied all the way back here ? phd f: It 's applied the on , yeah , something like this , phd b: Maybe that 's why it doesn't work for channel one . professor a: Can I phd f: So we could perhaps do just mean normalization before VAD . Can I ask a , a sort of top - level question , which is " if if most of what the OGI folk are working with is trying to integrate this other other spectral subtraction , why are we worrying about it ? " phd f: phd f: It 's just Well it 's another They are trying to u to use the the Ericsson and we 're trying to use something something else . When we do spectral subtraction , actually , I think that this is the the two last figures . phd b: Speech is more what ? phd f: Well , the difference between the energy of the speech and the energy of the n spectral subtrac subtracted noise portion is is larger . phd f: Well , if you compare the first figure to this one Actually the scale is not the same , but if you look at the the numbers you clearly see that the difference between the C - zero of the speech and C - zero of the noise portion is larger . but what happens is that after spectral subtraction , you also increase the variance of this of C - zero . And what they did at OGI is just they don't use on - line normalization , for the moment , on spectral subtraction and I think Yeah . So yeah , we 're working on the same thing but I think with different different system and professor a: Right . , i the Intellectually it 's interesting to work on things th one way or the other phd f: professor a: but I 'm I 'm just wondering if on the list of things that there are to do , if there are things that we won't do because we 've got two groups doing the same thing . phd b: if you know , if if if you work on something else and and you 're waiting for them to give you spectral subtraction it 's hard to know whether the effects that you get from the other experiments you do will carry over once you then bring in their spectral subtraction module . I don't know if that 's true or not , but I could see how phd f: Mmm . , we still evidently have a latency reduction plan which which isn't quite what you 'd like it to be . And then weren't issues of of having a a second stream or something ? That was Was it There was this business that , you know , we we could use up the full forty - eight hundred bits , and phd f: Yeah . And they are t I think they want to work on the second stream also , but more with some kind of multi - band or , well , what they call TRAP or generalized TRAP . Do you remember when the next meeting is supposed to be ? the next phd f: It 's in June . Yeah , the other thing is that you saw that that mail about the VAD V A Ds performing quite differently ? That that So . This there was this experiment of " what if we just take the baseline ? " phd f: Mmm . professor a: set of features , just mel cepstra , and you inc incorporate the different V A And it looks like the the French VAD is actually better significantly better . If the use the small VAD I th I think it 's on I think it 's easy to do better because it doesn't work at all . He Actually , I think that he say with the good VAD of from OGI and with the Alcatel VAD . phd f: Yeah but I it 's I think you were talking about the other mail that used VAD on the reference features . professor a: it was enough better that that it would account for a fair amount of the difference between our performance , actually . phd f: And perhaps we can easily improve if if we put like mean normalization before the before the VAD . professor a: H Hynek will be back in town the week after next , back back in the country . phd d: Also is Stephane was thinking that maybe it was useful to f to think about voiced - unvoiced phd f: phd f: Yeah , my feeling is that actually when we look at all the proposals , ev everybody is still using some kind of spectral envelope professor a: Right . phd f: Yeah , well , not pitch , but to look at the fine at the at the high re high resolution spectrum . We don't necessarily want to find the the pitch of the of the sound but Cuz I have a feeling that when we look when we look at the just at the envelope there is no way you can tell if it 's voiced and unvoiced , if there is some It 's it 's easy in clean speech because voiced sound are more low frequency and . phd f: there is the first formant , which is the larger and then voiced sound are more high frequencies cuz it 's frication and professor a: Right . When you have noise there is no if if you have a low frequency noise it could be taken for for voiced speech and . professor a: but but phd b: Isn't there some other phd f: S phd b: d phd f: So I think that it it would be good Yeah , yeah , well , go go on . phd b: I was just gonna say isn't there aren't aren't there lots of ideas for doing voice activity , or speech - nonspeech rather , by looking at , you know , I guess harmonics or looking across time professor a: Well , I think he was talking about the voiced - unvoiced , though , phd f: Mmm . phd b: w ah you know , even with the voiced - non voiced - unvoiced phd f: Mmm . phd f: yeah , so yeah , I think if we try to develop a second stream well , there would be one stream that is the envelope and the second , it could be interesting to have that 's something that 's more related to the fine structure of the spectrum . We were thinking about like using ideas from from Larry Saul , have a good voice detector , have a good , well , voiced - speech detector , that 's working on on the FFT and professor a: U phd f: Larry Saul could be an idea . We were are thinking about just kind of taking the spectrum and computing the variance of of the high resolution spectrum and things like this . we had a guy here some years ago who did some work on making use of voicing information to help in reducing the noise . phd f: Yeah ? professor a: So what he was doing is basically y you you do estimate the pitch . professor a: And you from that you you estimate or you estimate fine harmonic structure , whichev ei either way , it 's more or less the same . But the thing is that you then can get rid of things that are not i if there is strong harmonic structure , you can throw away stuff that 's that 's non - harmonic . professor a: And that that is another way of getting rid of part of the noise phd f: Yeah . It was kind of like RASTA was taking care of convolutional stuff phd f: Mmm . We 've actually back when Chuck was here we did some voiced - unvoiced classification using a bunch of these , phd f: But professor a: and and works OK . professor a: But the thing is that you can't given the constraints of this task , we can't , in a very nice way , feed forward to the recognizer the information the probabilistic information that you might get about whether it 's voiced or unvoiced , where w we can't you know affect the the distributions or anything . phd b: Didn't the head dude send around that message ? Yeah , I think you sent us all a copy of the message , where he was saying that I I 'm not sure , exactly , what the gist of what he was saying , but something having to do with the voice activity detector and that it will that people shouldn't put their own in or something . professor a: I guess what you could do , maybe this would be w useful , if if you have if you view the second stream , yeah , before you before you do KLT 's and so forth , if you do view it as probabilities , and if it 's an independent So , if it 's if it 's not so much envelope - based by fine - structure - based , looking at harmonicity or something like that , if you get a probability from that information and then multiply it by you know , multiply by all the voiced outputs and all the unvoiced outputs , you know , then use that as the phd f: professor a: take the log of that or pre pre pre - nonlinearity , phd f: Yeah . i if professor a: and do the KLT on the on on that , phd f: Yeah . And then that would be phd f: Yeah , well , I was not thinking this yeah , this could be an yeah So you mean have some kind of probability for the v the voicing professor a: R Right . If you have a tandem system and then you have some kind of it can be pretty small net phd f: professor a: and the and and you use the thing is to use information primarily that 's different as you say , it 's more fine - structure - based than than envelope - based phd f: professor a: so then it you you you can pretty much guarantee it 's stuff that you 're not looking at very well with the other one , and then you only use for this one distinction . professor a: And and so now you 've got a probability of the cases , and you 've got the probability of the finer categories on the other side . professor a: if they really are from independent information sources then they should have different kinds of errors phd f: professor a: and roughly independent errors , and it 's a good choice for phd f: Because , yeah , well , spectral subtraction is good and we could u we could use the fine structure to to have a better estimate of the noise but still there is this issue with spectral subtraction that it seems to increase the variance of of of professor a: Yeah . phd f: Well it 's this musical noise which is annoying if you d you do some kind of on - line normalization after . Spectral subtraction and on - line normalization don't seem to to go together very well . I professor a: Or if you do a spectral subtraction do some spectral subtraction first and then do some on - line normalization then do some more spectral subtraction , maybe maybe you can do it layers or something so it doesn't doesn't hurt too much or something . professor a: But it but , anyway I think I was sort of arguing against myself there by giving that example phd f: Yeah . professor a: cuz I was already sort of suggesting that we should be careful about not spending too much time on exactly what they 're doing In fact if you get if you go into a harmonics - related thing it 's definitely going to be different than what they 're doing and phd f: I know that when have people have done sort of the obvious thing of taking your feature vector and adding in some variables which are pitch related or that it hasn't my impression it hasn't particularly helped . professor a: But I think that 's that 's a question for this you know extending the feature vector versus having different streams . Was it nois noisy condition ? the example that you you just professor a: And and it may not have been noisy conditions . I I don't remember the example but it was it was on some DARPA data and some years ago and so it probably wasn't , actually phd f: But we were thinking , we discussed with Barry about this , and perhaps thinking we were thinking about some kind of sheet cheating experiment where we would use TIMIT professor a: - huh . phd f: and see if giving the d , this voicing bit would help in in terms of frame classification . professor a: Why don't you why don't you just do it with Aurora ? phd f: Mmm . professor a: Just any i in in each in each frame phd f: Yeah , but but B but we cannot do the cheating , this cheating thing . Cuz we don't have Well , for Italian perhaps we have , but we don't have this labeling for Aurora . professor a: But you could you can you can align so that It 's not perfect , but if you if you know what was said and phd b: But the problem is that their models are all word level models . phd b: You So you could find out where the word boundaries are but that 's about it . grad e: S But we could use the the noisy version that TIMIT , which you know , is similar to the the noises found in the TI - digits portion of Aurora . phd f: Well , I guess I guess we can we can say that it will help , but I don't know . If this voicing bit doesn't help , I think we don't have to to work more about this because professor a: . professor a: and different ta it was probably Resource Management or something , I think you were getting something like still eight or nine percent error on the voicing , as I recall . professor a: what that said is that , sort of , left to its own devices , like without the a strong language model and so forth , that you would you would make significant number of errors just with your probabilistic machinery in deciding phd b: It also professor a: one oh phd b: Yeah , the though I think there was one problem with that in that , you know , we used canonical mapping so our truth may not have really been true to the acoustics . Well back twenty years ago when I did this voiced - unvoiced stuff , we were getting more like ninety - seven or ninety - eight percent correct in voicing . professor a: And we did this complex feature selection thing where we looked at all the different possible features one could have for voicing and and and and exhaustively searched all size subsets and and for for that particular speaker and you 'd find you know the five or six features which really did well on them . professor a: And then doing doing all of that we could get down to two or three percent error . professor a: So I would I would believe that it was quite likely that looking at envelope only , that we 'd be significantly worse than that . phd f: And the all the the SpeechCorders ? what 's the idea behind ? Cuz they they have to Oh , they don't even have to detect voiced spe speech ? professor a: The modern ones don't do a a simple switch . phd f: They just work on the code book professor a: They work on the code book excitation . They try they they try every every possible excitation they have in their code book and find the one that matches best . One of the ideas that we had come up with last week for things to try to improve the system . Actually I I s we didn't I guess I wrote this in after the meeting b but the thought I had was looking at the language model that 's used in the HTK recognizer , which is basically just a big loop , grad e: phd b: and then that can be either go to silence or go to another digit , which That model would allow for the production of infinitely long sequences of digits , right ? professor a: Right . I thought " well I 'm gonna just look at the what actual digit strings do occur in the training data . phd b: And the interesting thing was it turns out that there are no sequences of two - long or three - long digit strings in any of the Aurora training data . So it 's either one , four , five , six , up to eleven , and then it skips and then there 's some at sixteen . So I I just for the heck of it , I made a little grammar which , you know , had it 's separate path for each length digit string you could get . So there was a one - long path and there was a four - long and a five - long professor a: phd b: So it was you know , I I didn't have any weights of these paths or I didn't have anything like that . phd b: And I played with tweaking the word transition penalties a bunch , but I couldn't go anywhere . I thought " well if I only allow " Yeah , I guess I should have looked at to see how often there was a mistake where a two - long or a three - long path was actually put out as a hypothesis . phd b: So to do that right you 'd probably want to have allow for them all but then have weightings and things <doc-sep>professor b: So ne next week we 'll have , both Birger and , Mike Michael Michael Kleinschmidt and Birger Kollmeier will join us . professor b: and you 're you 're probably gonna go up in a couple three weeks or so ? When d when are you thinking of going up to , OGI ? phd d: Yeah , like , not next week but maybe the week after . So at least we 'll have one meeting with yo with you still around , and and phd d: - huh . So there was this conference call this morning , and the only topic on the agenda was just to discuss a and to come at , to get a decision about this latency problem . professor b: No , this I 'm sorry , this is a conference call between different Aurora people or just ? phd d: yeah . There were like two hours of discussions , and then suddenly , people were tired , I guess , and they decided on a number , two hundred and twenty , included e including everything . W It 's it 's p d primary primarily determined by the VAD at this point , phd d: . We probably should do that pretty soon so that we don't get used to it being a certain way . We have , like , a system that gives sixty - two percent improvement , but if you want to stick to the this latency Well , it has a latency of two thirty , but if you want also to stick to the number of features that limit it to sixty , then we go a little bit down but it 's still sixty - one percent . And i is the tandem network , small enough that it will fit on the terminal size in terms of ? phd d: no , I don't think so . phd d: It 's still in terms of computation , if we use , like , their way of computing the the maps the the MIPs , I think it fits , professor b: phd d: and I don't know how much this can be discussed or not , because it 's it could be in ROM , so it 's maybe not that expensive . But professor b: Ho - how much memory d ? H how many ? phd d: I d I d , I I don't kn remember exactly , but . I 'd like to see that , cuz maybe I could think a little bit about it , cuz we maybe we could make it a little smaller or , it 'd be it 'd be neat if we could fit it all . professor b: But I guess it 's still within their rules to have have it on the , t , server side . , mmm , and one of the trick was to , use some kind of hierarchical structure where the silence probability is not computed by the final tandem network but by the VAD network . , so apparently it looks better when , we use the silence probability from the VAD network professor b: Huh . So it 's some kind of hierarchical thing , that Sunil also tried , on SPINE and apparently it helps a little bit also . Yeah , the reason w why why we did that with the silence probability was that , professor b: Could ? , I 'm I 'm really sorry . So there is the tandem network that e e e estimates the phone probabilities professor b: Yeah . phd d: And things get better when , instead of using the silence probability computed by the tandem network , we use the silence probability , given by the VAD network , professor b: Oh . phd d: professor b: The VAD network is ? phd d: Which is smaller , but maybe , So we have a network for the VAD which has one hundred hidden units , and the tandem network has five hundred . phd d: Maybe it 's has something to do to the fact that we don't have infinite training data and professor b: We don't ? phd d: Well ! And so Well , things are not optimal professor b: Yeah . phd d: and Mmm grad e: Are you you were going to say why what made you wh what led you to do that . , there was a p problem that we observed , that there was there were , like , many insertions in the in the system . phd d: Actually plugging in the tandem network was increasing , I I I think , the number of insertions . professor b: So , you know , in a way what it might i it 's it 's a little bit like combining knowledge sources . phd d: professor b: Right ? Because the fact that you have these two nets that are different sizes means they behave a little differently , phd d: And , if you have , f the distribution that you have from , f speech sounds is w sort of one source of knowledge . professor b: And this is and rather than just taking one minus that to get the other , which is essentially what 's happening , you have this other source of knowledge that you 're putting in there . Well , there are other things that we should do but , it requires time and We have ideas , like so , these things are like hav having a better VAD . Of course we have ideas on this also , but w we need to try different things and , but their noise estimation , professor b: back on the second stream , that 's something we 've talked about for a while . professor b: so we have this this default idea about just using some sort of purely spectral thing ? phd d: yeah . professor b: for a second stream ? phd d: But , we we did a first try with this , and it it clearly hurts . So , if you just had a second stream that was just spectral and had another neural net and combined there , that that , might be good . Yeah , and the other thing , that noise estimation and th , maybe try to train , the training data for the t tandem network , right now , is like i is using the noises from the Aurora task and I think that people might , try to argue about that because then in some cases we have the same noises in for training the network than the noises that are used for testing , professor b: Right . Well , that 's something I would like to investigate further , but , I did , like , I did , listen to the m most noisy utterances of the SpeechDat - Car Italian and tried to transcribe them . phd d: but but still , what happens is is that , the digit error rate on this is around one percent , professor b: Yeah . , but what happens also is that if I listen to the , a re - synthesized version of the speech and I re - synthesized this using a white noise that 's filtered by a LPC , filter professor b: Yeah . phd d: well , you can argue , that , that this is not speech , professor b: Yeah . But s actually it sound like whispering , so we are professor b: Well , it 's phd d: eh professor b: There 's two problems there . , so so the first is that by doing LPC - twelve with synthesized speech w like you 're saying , it 's i i you 're you 're adding other degradation . professor b: Right ? So it 's not just the noise but you 're adding in fact some degradation because it 's only an approximation . , and the second thing is which is m maybe more interesting is that , if you do it with whispered speech , you get this number . What if you had done analysis re - synthesis and taken the pitch as well ? Alright ? So now you put the pitch in . professor b: What would the percentage be then ? phd d: professor b: See , that 's the question . So , you see , if it 's if it 's if it 's , Let 's say it 's back down to one percent again . professor b: That would say at least for people , having the pitch is really , really important , which would be interesting in itself . But professor b: if i on the other hand , if it stayed up near five percent , then I 'd say " boy , LPC n twelve is pretty crummy " . professor b: So I I I 'm not sure I 'm not sure how we can conclude from this anything about that our system is close to the human performance . Well , the point is that eh l ey the point is that , what I what I listened to when I re - synthesized the LP - the LPC - twelve spectrum is in a way what the system , is hearing , cuz @ @ all the all the , excitation all the well , the excitation is is not taken into account . And professor b: Well , you 're not doing the LPC phd d: in this case professor b: so so what if you did a phd d: Well , it 's not LPC , sure , professor b: What if you did LPC - twenty ? phd d: but LPC ? professor b: Twenty . professor b: So , all I 'm saying is that you have in addition to the w the , removal of pitch , you also are doing , a particular parameterization , phd d: professor b: so , let 's see , how would you do ? So , fo phd d: But that 's that 's what we do with our systems . Actually , we d we we don't , because we do we do , mel filter bank , for instance . Right ? phd d: Yeah , but is it that is it that different , ? professor b: I don't know what mel , based synthesis would sound like , phd d: I professor b: but certainly the spectra are quite different . phd a: Couldn't you t couldn't you , test the human performance on just the original audio ? phd d: So , y , your performance was one percent , and then when you re - synthesize with LPC - twelve it went to five . professor b: We were we were j It it it 's a little bit still apples and oranges because we are choosing these features in order to be the best for recognition . professor b: And , i if you listen to them they still might not be very Even if you made something closer to what we 're gonna i it might not sound very good . professor b: and i the degradation from that might might actually make it even harder , to understand than the LPC - twelve . So all I 'm saying is that the LPC - twelve puts in synthesis puts in some degradation that 's not what we 're used to hearing , phd d: - huh . professor b: and is , It 's not it 's not just a question of how much information is there , as if you will always take maximum advantage of any information that 's presented to you . And so it it isn't phd a: But professor b: But , I agree that it says that , the kind of information that we 're feeding it is probably , a little bit , minimal . And that 's why I was saying it might be interesting if you an interesting test of this would be if you if you actually put the pitch back in . So , you just extract it from the actual speech and put it back in , and see does that is that does that make the difference ? If that if that takes it down to one percent again , then you 'd say " OK , it 's it 's in fact having , not just the spectral envelope but also the also the the pitch that , @ @ has the information that people can use , anyway . phd a: But from this it 's pretty safe to say that the system is with either two to seven percent away from the performance of a human . professor b: Well , or it 's it 's phd a: Two two to six percent . professor b: Yeah , so It 's it 's one point four times , to , seven times the error , phd d: To f seven times , yeah . phd d: But but professor b: But that 's that 's what that 's the first thing that I would be curious about , is , you know , i i when you we phd d: But the signal itself is like a mix of , of a a periodic sound and , @ @ , unvoiced sound , and the noise professor b: So , what what do you mean exactly by putting back the pitch in ? Because phd a: In the LPC synthesis ? I think professor b: Yeah . professor b: So , and you did it with a noise source , rather than with with a s periodic source . professor b: Right ? So if you actually did real re - synthesis like you do in an LPC synthesizer , where it 's unvoiced you use noise , where it 's voiced you use , periodic pulses . professor b: Right ? phd d: Yeah , but it 's neither purely voiced or purely unvoiced . professor b: Well , it might be hard to do it phd d: So professor b: but it but but the thing is that if you , if you detect that there 's periodic s strong periodic components , then you can use a voiced voice thing . professor b: But I 'm I 'm just saying , at least as a thought experiment , that 's what I would wanna test . professor b: I wan would wanna drive it with a a a two - source system rather than a than a one - source system . professor b: And then that would tell you whether in fact it 's Cuz we 've talked about , like , this harmonic tunneling or other things that people have done based on pitch , maybe that 's really a key element . Maybe maybe , without that , it 's it 's not possible to do a whole lot better than we 're doing . Evi professor b: But , other than that , I don't think it 's , other than the pitch de information , it 's hard to imagine that there 's a whole lot more in the signal that that , that we 're throwing away that 's important . professor b: Right ? , we 're using a fair number of filters in the filter bank and phd d: If somebody was paying really close attention , you might get I would actually think that if , you looked at people on various times of the day and different amounts of attention , you might actually get up to three or four percent error on digits . professor b: So it 's you know , we 're not we 're not incredibly far off . On the other hand , with any of these numbers except maybe the one percent , it 's st it 's not actually usable in a commercial system with a full telephone number or something . , while we 're still on Aurora stuff maybe you can talk a little about the status with the , Wall Street Journal things for it . They wrote some scripts that sort of make it easy to run the system on the Wall Street Journal , data . , I 'm waiting there was one problem with part of it and I wrote a note to Joe asking him about it . , they on their web site they , did this little table of where their system performs relative to other systems that have done this this task . So they 're professor b: This is on clean test set ? phd a: This is on clean on clean stuff . They they 've started a table where they 're showing their results on various different noise conditions but they they don't have a whole lot of it filled in and and I didn't notice until after I 'd printed it out that , they don't say here what these different testing conditions are . professor b: phd a: You actually have to click on it on the web site to see them . professor b: What kind of numbers are they getting on these on the test conditions ? phd a: Well , see , I was a little confused because on this table , I 'm the they 're showing word error rate . But on this one , I I don't know if these are word error rates because they 're really big . professor b: phd a: So m I guess maybe they 're error rates but they 're , they 're really high . professor b: I I I don't find that surpri phd a: So professor b: we W what 's what 's some of the lower error rates on on on , some of the higher error rates on , some of these w , highly mismatched difficult conditions ? What 's a ? phd d: . phd a: Correct ? phd d: And the baseline , eh phd a: Accuracy ? phd d: error rate . professor b: So if you 're doing so if you 're doing , phd d: and phd a: Yeah . professor b: Yeah , and if you 're saying sixty - thousand word recognition , getting sixty percent error on some of these noise condition not at all surprising . phd d: The baseline is sixty percent also on digits , phd a: Oh , is it ? phd d: on the m more mismatched conditions . professor b: It 's a bad sign when you looking at the numbers , you can't tell whether it 's accuracy or error rate . , they 're I I 'm still waiting for them to release the , multi - CPU version of their scripts , cuz right now their script only handles processing on a single CPU , which will take a really long time to run . But their s professor b: This is for the training ? phd a: I beli Yes , for the training also . So , as soon as they get that , then I 'll I 'll grab those too professor b: OK . I 'll go ahead and try to run it though with just the single CPU one , professor b: if the phd a: and I they they , released like a smaller data set that you can use that only takes like sixteen hours to train and stuff . So I can I can run it on that just to make sure that the the thing works and everything . Is that about right you think ? phd d: we don't know yet , I I think . Did they say anything on the conference call about , how the Wall Street Journal part of the test was going to be run ? Because I I thought I remembered hearing that some sites were saying that they didn't have the compute to be able to run the Wall Street Journal stuff at their place , phd d: No . Well , this first , this was not the point at all of this the meeting today phd a: Oh , OK . phd d: and , professor b: Some phd d: frankly , I don't know because I d didn't read also the most recent mails about the large - vocabulary task . But , did you do you still , get the mails ? You 're not on the mailing list or what ? phd a: I I don't get any mail about professor b: I have to say , there 's something funny - sounding about saying that one of these big companies doesn't have enough cup compute power do that , so they 're having to have it done by Mississippi State . phd a: because there 's this whole issue about , you know , simple tuning parameters , like word insertion penalties . If you change your front - end , you know , the scale is completely can be completely different , so . But phd d: You didn't get any answer from Joe ? phd a: I did , but Joe said , you know , " what you 're saying makes sense phd d: - huh . phd a: that 's th We had this back and forth a little bit about , you know , are sites gonna are you gonna run this data for different sites ? And , well , if if Mississippi State runs it , then maybe they 'll do a little optimization on that parameter , and , But then he wasn't asked to run it for anybody . phd a: he 's been putting this stuff out on their web site and for people to grab but I haven't heard too much about what 's happening . professor b: So it could be , Chuck and I had actually talked about this a couple times , and and over some lunches , I think , that , one thing that we might wanna do The - there 's this question about , you know , what do you wanna scale ? Suppose y you can't adjust these word insertion penalties and so forth , so you have to do everything at the level of the features . What could you do ? And , one thing I had suggested at an earlier time was maybe some sort of scaling , some sort of root or or something of the , features . But the problem with that is that isn't quite the same , it occurred to me later , because what you really want to do is scale the , @ @ the range of the likelihoods rather than phd d: Nnn , the dist Yeah . professor b: But , what might get at something similar , it just occurred to me , is kind of an intermediate thing is because we do this strange thing that we do with the tandem system , at least in that system what you could do is take the , values that come out of the net , which are something like log probabilities , and scale those . But but , you know So because what we 're doing is pretty strange and complicated , we don't really know what the effect is at the other end . professor b: So , my thought was maybe , they 're not used as probabilities , but the log probabilities we 're taking advantage of the fact that something like log probabilities has more of a Gaussian shape than Gaus - than probabilities , and so we can model them better . So , in a way we 're taking advantage of the fact that they 're probabilities , because they 're this quantity that looks kind of Gaussian when you take it 's log . And we may end up being in a situation where we just you know really can't change the word insertion penalty . But the other thing we could do is also we could , this this may not help us , in the evaluation but it might help us in our understanding at least . We might , just run it with different insper insertion penalties , and show that , " well , OK , not changing it , playing the rules the way you wanted , we did this . " phd a: I wonder if it it might be possible to , simulate the back - end with some other system . So we we get our f front - end features , and then , as part of the process of figuring out the scaling of these features , you know , if we 're gonna take it to a root or to a power or something , we have some back - end that we attach onto our features that sort of simulates what would be happening . phd a: professor b: And just adjust it until it 's the best number ? phd a: and just adjust it until that our l version of the back - end , decides that that professor b: Well , we can probably use the real thing , can't we ? And then jus just , use it on a reduced test set or something . So , I I think that that 's a reasonable thing to do and the only question is what 's the actual knob that we use ? phd a: professor b: And the knob that we use should , unfortunately , like I say , I don't know the analytic solution to this cuz what we really want to do is change the scale of the likelihoods , phd a: grad e: Out of curiosity , what what kind of recognizer is the one from Mississippi State ? phd a: w what do you mean when you say " what kind " ? grad e: Is it ? , is it like a Gaussian mixture model ? phd a: Yeah . phd a: It 's the same system that they use when they participate in the Hub - five evals . , they started off with , when they were building their system they were always comparing to HTK to make sure they were getting similar results . And so , it 's a Gaussian mixture system , professor b: Do they have the same sort of mix - down sort of procedure , where they start off with a small number of some things phd a: I don't know . professor b: D Do you know what kind of tying they use ? Are they they sort of some sort of a bunch of Gaussians that they share across everything ? Or or if it 's ? phd a: Yeah , th I have I I I don't have it up here but I have a the whole system description , that describes exactly what their system is professor b: OK . phd a: It 's some kind of a mixture of Gaussians and , clustering and , They 're they 're trying to put in sort of all of the standard features that people use nowadays . professor b: So the other , Aurora thing maybe is I I dunno if any of this is gonna come in in time to be relevant , but , we had talked about , Guenter playing around , over in Germany phd d: professor b: and and , @ @ , possibly coming up with something that would , fit in later . , I saw that other mail where he said that he , it wasn't going to work for him to do CVS . professor b: So if he 'll he might work on improving the noise estimate or on some histogram things , or phd d: Yeah . I just saw the Eurospeech We we didn't talk about it at our meeting but I just saw the just read the paper . Someone , I forget the name , and and Ney , about histogram equalization ? Did you see that one ? phd d: it was a poster . It was something similar to n on - line normalization finally , in the idea of of normalizing professor b: Yeah . But it 's a little more it it 's a little finer , right ? So they had like ten quantiles phd d: Yeah . professor b: So you you have the distributions from the training set , phd d: N professor b: and then , So this is just a a histogram of of the amplitudes , I guess . And and and then , when you get a new new thing that you you want to adjust to be better in some way , you adjust it so that the histogram of the new data looks like the old data . professor b: You do this kind of piece - wise linear or , some kind of piece - wise approximation . They did a one version that was piece - wise linear and another that had a power law thing between them between the points . And , they said they s they sort of see it in a way as s for the speech case as being kind of a generalization of spectral subtraction in a way , because , you know , in spectral subtraction you 're trying to get rid of this excess energy . And then they have s they have some kind of , a floor or something , grad e: . phd a: So is this a histogram across different frequency bins ? professor b: and phd a: Or ? professor b: I think this i You know , I don't remember that . I Something like one per frequency band , professor b: One phd a: So , one histogram per frequency bin . phd a: So th professor b: And I don't remember whether it was filter bank things phd a: Oh . phd d: and I didn't professor b: or whether it was FFT bins phd a: Huh . professor b: or phd a: And and that that , histogram represents the different energy levels that have been seen at that frequency ? professor b: I don't remember that . And they do they said that they could do it for the test So you don't have to change the training . phd a: So they , Is the idea that you you run a test utterance through some histogram generation thing and then you compare the histograms and that tells you what to do to the utterance to make it more like ? professor b: I guess in pri Yeah . professor b: whether it was some , on - line thing , or whether it was a second pass , or what . We 're sort of curious about , what are some things that are , u u , @ @ conceptually quite different from what we 've done . professor b: Cuz we you know , one thing that w that , Stephane and Sunil seemed to find , was , you know , they could actually make a unified piece of software that handled a range of different things that people were talking about , and it was really just sort of setting of different constants . So , we 're not making any use of pitch , which again , might might be important , because the stuff between the harmonics is probably a schmutz . And and , And we there 's this overall idea of really sort of matching the the hi distributions somehow . So I guess , Guenter 's gonna play around with some of these things now over this next period , phd d: I dunno . professor b: or ? phd d: I don't have feedback from him , but professor b: Yeah . phd d: I guess he 's gonna , maybe professor b: Well , he 's got it anyway , so he can . professor b: So potentially if he came up with something that was useful , like a diff a better noise estimation module or something , he could ship it to you guys u up there phd d: - huh . So , why don't we just , I think starting starting a w couple weeks from now , especially if you 're not gonna be around for a while , we 'll we 'll be shifting more over to some other other territory . But , n not not so much in this meeting about Aurora , but but , maybe just , quickly today about maybe you could just say a little bit about what you 've been talking about with Michael . So Michael Kleinschmidt , who 's a PHD student from Germany , showed up this week . And he 's done some work using an auditory model of , human hearing , and using that f , to generate speech recognition features . And he did work back in Germany with , a toy recognition system using , isolated digit recognition as the task . , and he tried that on I think on some Aurora data and got results that he thought seemed respectable . And he w he 's coming here to u u use it on a , a real speech recognition system . And , maybe I should say a little more about these features , although I don't understand them that well . And I 'm - I 'm not sure what we have @ @ in there that isn't already modeled in something like , PLP . And then the second stage is , the most different thing , I think , from what we usually do . It 's , it computes features which are , based on sort of like based on diffe different w , wavelet basis functions used to analyze the input . So th he uses analysis functions called Gabor functions , which have a certain extent , in time and in frequency . And the idea is these are used to sample , the signal in a represented as a time - frequency representation . And , that , is is interesting , cuz , @ @ for for one thing , you could use it , in a a multi - scale way . You could have these instead of having everything like we use a twenty - five millisecond or so analysis window , typically , and that 's our time scale for features , but you could using this , basis function idea , you could have some basis functions which have a lot longer time scale and , some which have a lot shorter , and so it would be like a set of multi - scale features . So he 's interested in , Th - this is because it 's , there are these different parameters for the shape of these basis functions , there are a lot of different possible basis functions . And so he he actually does an optimization procedure to choose an an optimal set of basis functions out of all the possible ones . H What does he do to choose those ? grad c: The method he uses is kind of funny is , he starts with he has a set of M of them . , he and then he uses that to classify , he t he tries , using just M minus one of them . grad c: Whichever sub - vector , works the the best , I guess , he says the the fe feature that didn't use was the most useless feature , professor b: Y yeah . grad c: so we 'll throw it out and we 're gonna randomly select another feature from the set of possible basis functions . phd a: So it 's a professor b: So i so it 's actuall phd a: it 's a little bit like a genetic algorithm or something in a way . grad e: It 's like a greedy professor b: But it 's but it 's , it 's there 's a lot number of things I like about it , let me just say . , i i in truth , both pieces of this are have their analogies in stuff we already do . But it 's a different take at how to approach it and potentially one that 's m maybe a bit more systematic than what we 've done , and a b a bit more inspiration from from auditory things . The primary features , are in fact Yeah , essentially , it 's it 's , you know , PLP or or mel cepstrum , or something like that . We always have some you know , the the the kind of filter bank with a kind of quasi - log scaling . , if you put in if you also include the RASTA in it i RASTA the filtering being done in the log domain has an AGC - like , characteristic , which , you know , people typi typically put in these kind of , auditory front - ends . , I would agree that the second one is is somewhat more different but , it 's mainly different in that the things that we have been doing like that have been , had a different kind of motivation and have ended up with different kinds of constraints . So , for instance , if you look at the LDA RASTA stuff , you know , basically what they do is they they look at the different eigenvectors out of the LDA and they form filters out of it . But , they 're not sort of systematically multi - scale , like " let 's start here and go to there , and go to there , and go to there " , and so forth . It 's more like , you run it on this , you do discriminant analysis , and you find out what 's helpful . grad c: I it 's multi - scale because you use several of these in parallel , professor b: Yeah . , but it 's also , Hyn - when Hynek 's had people do this kind of LDA analysis , they 've done it on frequency direction and they 've done it on the time direction . I think he may have had people sometimes doing it on both simultaneously some two - D and that would be the closest to these Gabor function kind of things . And , the other thing that 's interesting the the , the feature selection thing , it 's a simple method , but I kinda like it . , eh , I remember people referring to it as old when I was playing with it twenty years ago , so I know it 's pretty old , called Stepwise Linear Discriminant Analysis in which you which I think it 's used in social sciences a lot . And what what Michael 's describing seems to me much , much better , because the problem with the stepwise discriminant analysis is that you don't know that you know , if you 've picked the right set of features . So , here at least you 're starting off with all of them , and you 're throwing out useless features . , so the only thing is , of course , there 's this this artificial question of of , exactly how you how you a how you assess it and if if your order had been different in throwing them out . , it still isn't necessarily really optimal , but it seems like a pretty good heuristic . professor b: And and and , the thing that I wanted to to add to it also was to have us use this in a multi - stream way . professor b: so so that , when you come up with these different things , and these different functions , you don't necessarily just put them all into one huge vector , but perhaps you have some of them in one stream and some of them in another stream , and so forth . And , And we 've also talked a little bit about , Shihab Shamma 's stuff , in which you the way you look at it is that there 's these different mappings and some of them emphasize , upward moving , energy and fre and frequency . But , I think we 're sorta gonna start off with what he , came here with and branch out branch out from there . grad e: As as we were talking about this I was thinking , whether there 's a relationship between , between Michael 's approach to , some some sort of optimal brain damage or optimal brain surgeon on the neural nets . grad e: So , like , if we have , we have our we have our RASTA features and and presumably the neural nets are are learning some sort of a nonlinear mapping , from the the the features to to this this probability posterior space . grad e: Right ? And , and each of the hidden units is learning some sort of some sort of some sort of pattern . And then when you 're looking at the the , the best features , you know , you can take out you can do the do this , brain surgery by taking out , hidden units that don't really help at all . grad e: And this is k sorta like professor b: Right ? grad e: Yeah . professor b: y actually , you make me think a a very important point here is that , if we a again try to look at how is this different from what we 're already doing , there 's a a , a nasty argument that could be made th that it 's it 's not different at at all , because , if you ignore the the selection part because we are going into a a very powerful , nonlinearity that , in fact is combining over time and frequency , and is coming up with its own you know , better than Gabor functions its , you know , neural net functions , grad e: grad c: professor b: so you could argue that in fact it But I I don't actually believe that argument because I know that , you can , computing features is useful , even though in principle you haven't added anything in fact , you subtracted something , from the original waveform You know , if you 've you 've processed it in some way you 've typically lost something some information . And so , you 've lost information and yet it does better with with features than it does with the waveform . So that 's why it really seems like the constraint in in all this stuff it 's the constraints that are actually what matters . Because if it wasn't the constraints that mattered , then we would 've completely solved this problem long ago , because long ago we already knew how to put waveforms into powerful statistical mechanisms . Well , if we had infinite processing power and data , I guess , using the waveform could grad e: Right . But but , i it 's With finite of those things , we we have done experiments where we literally have put waveforms in and and and , phd d: professor b: we kept the number of parameters the same and so forth , and it used a lot of training data . And it and it it , not infinite but a lot , and then compared to the number parameters and it it , it just doesn't do nearly as well . professor b: it 's not just having the maximum information , you want to suppress , the aspects of the input signal that are not helpful for for the discrimination you 're trying to make . So maybe just briefly , grad e: Well , that sort of segues into what what I 'm doing . grad e: so , the big picture is k , come up with a set of , intermediate categories , then build intermediate category classifiers , then do recognition , and , improve speech recognition in that way . , so right now I 'm in in the phase where I 'm looking at at , deciding on a initial set of intermediate categories . And I 'm looking for data data - driven methods that can help me find , a set of intermediate categories of speech that , will help me to discriminate later down the line . And one of the ideas , that was to take a take a neural net train train an ordinary neural net to , to learn the posterior probabilities of phones . And so , at the end of the day you have this neural net and it has hidden hidden units . , and I 'm gonna to try to to look at those patterns to to see , from those patterns , presumably those are important patterns for discriminating between phone classes . And maybe maybe some , intermediate categories can come from just looking at the patterns of , that the neural net learns . professor b: Be - before you get on the next part l let me just point out that s there 's there 's a a pretty nice relationship between what you 're talking about doing and what you 're talking about doing there . professor b: So , it seems to me that , you know , if you take away the the the difference of this primary features , and , say , you use as we had talked about maybe doing you use P - RASTA - PLP or something for the the primary features , then this feature discovery , thing is just what he 's talking about doing , too , except that he 's talking about doing them in order to discover intermediate categories that correspond to these , what these sub - features are are are are showing you . And , the other difference is that , he 's doing this in a in a multi - band setting , which means that he 's constraining himself to look across time in some f relatively limited , spectral extent . Right ? And whereas in in this case you 're saying " let 's just do it unconstrained " . So they 're they 're really pretty related and maybe they 'll be at some point where we 'll see the the connections a little better and connect them . Yeah , so so that 's the that 's the first part , one one of the ideas to get at some some patterns of intermediate categories . , the other one was , to , come up with a a a model , a graphical model , that treats the intermediate categories as hidden hidden variables , latent variables , that we don't know anything about , but that through , s statistical training and the EM algorithm , at the end of the day , we have , we have learned something about these these latent , latent variables which happen to correspond to intermediate categories . Yeah , and so those are the the two directions that I 'm I 'm looking into right now . Should we do our digits and get ou get our treats ? grad e: Oh , tea time ? professor b: Yeah . It 's kind of like , you know , the little rats with the little thing dropping down to them . phd a: That 's ri professor b: We do the digits and then we get our treats

PhD D mentioned that they had only read the poster on histogram equalization, not the actual paper. They noted that histogram equalization was similar to online normalization and that there was a histogram for each frequency band. On the other hand, PhD F discussed their work on meeting recorder digits for Eurospeech. They mentioned that some people at OGI were working on a paper that was due on May 13th.

Question: Summarize the discussion on improving the function and design of the remote, including the opinions of the Industrial Designer on speech recognition and functional features. Also, mention the final decision on automatic power control and the design of remote features. Article: So , we will first start by summarizing the the previous meeting and the decision we've taken . I will take notes during this meeting so that you can look at my folder to see the summary of this meeting afterwards . We'll then t take decision in concert and then we will define the nest next task , to have to be done before the next meeting . We have also the lightening feature for the remote control to be easy to find , and for fast development and low cost we have decided to have no L_C_D_ no voice features . So the conceptual specification by Industrial Designer , the specification of the U_I_ by or U_I_ user interface: Abdul al-Hasred is my name . industrial designer: I_D_ you want ? project manager: Maybe I can switch slide on your request . industrial designer: and I think a remote control is , as I s mentioned previously , you just have a a very simple chip and the the user interface is just done usually by push button and in our case we are using a a wheel control . So I was looking basically for that chip , which is very very standard , and I just looked for the wheel sensor and the standard push button . The push button are usually extremely cheap , but I just have one problem and this is related with the wheel sensor , which seems to be quite expensive . industrial designer: And I think we if we could just talk about that if we really need a wheel sensor or if we can not if if we could combine something with the push button . Yeah project manager: So will will will this with including all possible things , so buttons , wheel and the chip , be lower than twelve Euros to produce ? industrial designer: I I th But I don't think that we should We should talk about the design of the box also which needs some money . project manager: Okay user interface: Also have to say industrial designer: But user interface: Did you receive the email about the voice recognition ? industrial designer: that's all user interface: No ? project manager: You received something industrial designer: yeah . But I guess it could be project manager: And could it be adapted ? user interface: I guess it's possible . project manager: Okay and there can recognize some commands and stuff ? user interface: Yeah you reco recognize commands and you can record new commands and stuff , so if they already have it as as a chip project manager: Okay . project manager: Okay maybe we can just listen to this presentation and then take decision later on according to those news . industrial designer: Yeah but I think it's yeah Sorry , I haven't written my personal references . the I I just want to mention the the problem of the the r wheels sensor which is much more expensive than any push button , project manager: Okay . , what is the purpose of the light ? industrial designer: Just to to make something which is slightly more design that a squarey box with a rubber user interface: Is project manager: You can easily find the button in the dark or so ? user interface: But But in th in the dark Yeah but is going to be always turned on , the light ? project manager: It will be turned on when the when the user move the remote control I think , no ? user interface: But if you move it then you have it , you don't need to find it . user interface: But if you move it then you have to have some sensor to when you move it to detect your movement . industrial designer: I don't think that this is really expensive , but at the end this is plenty of unexpen eh very cheap devices but the bill starts to be user interface: Okay . Yeah , but I expected also the wheel would be cheap but you tell me that it is very expensive so , industrial designer: First of all I was thinking to have a a continuous light user interface: yeah . industrial designer: and you w when t you you you you press the on button you have the light on your remote control , when you want to turn off your device user interface: . project manager: But it can be battery consuming , no ? To have the light always on ? industrial designer: Yeah , a little bit . user interface: So I just look at some current designs on the web , of usually more complicated remote controls . And let's look at two of them because th even though they have many buttons they look quite simple . And in our case we just reject the buttons what we don't need and it become even simpler . project manager: And also does it fit well in hand ? Because it was th your wrist problem with the usage . We have all these buttons as you can see , but most of them , we just need the ones in the middle . user interface: So , from the bottom or whatever is there , the the numbers and then the top , until the ten also , this middle part , project manager: Yeah . So it's basically more or less how we would like it , with a big volume control , big channel control , and mute and power , yeah ? project manager: Yeah . user interface: So basically , w software we will build will look more or less the same as these two . user interface: Yeah , if you have , for example I think that the volume and the buttons that are there on the top are not very easy to reach with your thumb . Will be down or user interface: So that they're separate a bit , project manager: Okay . and it's easy to press the other the big buttons , but , it's not that difficult to press the the channel buttons either . Usually what I have noticed that people put the plastic cover on things that you normally don't mess with , like buttons for t tuning the channels and stuff like that . user interface: We could use the some wheels can be pushed down , could use the push down of the wheel for the record if we want . user interface: so we could just basically use one just wheel and user could use just the wheel to do everything with the channels in that case . So we can move to the Is there any question ? For designer of user interface ? or we can move to the next part , maybe , and discuss afterwards ? Okay . marketing: Can I ? So now the recent investigation we we have done fo of the remote control . So , the most important aspect for remote controls is to be fancy look and feel and not current functional look and feel . marketing: And the third most important aspect is to to is that the co remote control should be easy to use . And there is a fashion watchers in Paris and Milan that have detected the following trends , fruits and vegetables will be the most important theme for clothes , shoes , and furnitures . So , maybe if our remote control have to be a fruit form or vegetable form project manager: Okay . project manager: marketing: I don't know which material can be spongy , project manager: Yeah . marketing: and if you project manager: This is good also for user interface: Well , wou wou I think we can certainly just put the electronics in a spongy thing , industrial designer: Yeah . We could say that if you throw it , you have a sensor , and you throw it and hits the television and turns it off . And you know here the more iz important aspect is the fancy look and feel , after is technological innovative , and after the easy to use . marketing: Yeah that's why project manager: Has it ? marketing: Yeah that's why I think we have to keep that if it's possible . You know the pear , is like that and it's it's easy to to have in in hand project manager: Yeah , and it's ergonomic as well . D D Is is there anything you want to add ? user interface: Is there any fruit that is spongy ? marketing: project manager: I don't think so . I think we we can have like yeah a pear is good , fit well , or banana as you told . industrial designer: And for maybe look and feel , what about a a piece of ice , with blue L_E_D_ inside ? project manager: But that's not in the trend . user interface: You can make it marketing: project manager: The trend is spongy , and vegetable fruits . marketing: project manager: I think p spongy is good because it it will be robust as well . project manager: So , I think we can keep the wheel because it's easy , it's innovative , even if the cost is a bit higher , industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: and we also have to find a , so , a fruit like pear or banana wit any others idea you have . What kind of fr fruit would you like to to control your T_V_ with ? marketing: user interface: . industrial designer: You y you don't use the banana when the banana is curving like that , user interface: Two of the button , yeah . industrial designer: but when the banana is curving like that , with the wheel on the top and to control , user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: and here you have a a push button to marketing: But you don't have project manager: I think it's a good idea , yeah . user interface: Yeah so you can just have just have this curve , yeah , and you move your hand here to press the buttons and then you move on the other side . user interface: So you can have it on on two sides and it'll be cool , project manager: Yeah . user interface: no ? project manager: I think it's a good design and it's innovative as well then . industrial designer: If you if you start with fancy fruits and fra s and tha user interface: Ah-ha . industrial designer: Oh , yeah marketing: project manager: Yeah it's really really a good point . marketing: user interface: Now who are recording this meeting ? project manager: I think it So One second . So , so for marketing: project manager: sorry , for component , so industrial designer: So project manager: we have to think about those aspects , sorry . what do you mean by case ? project manager: I think it's the box that should be spongy , banana's shape . project manager: industrial designer: I just want to have so something to prin to to fix my my components onto that box , and that's it . user interface: But the thing is that the buttons and the wheel have to be industrial designer: Spongy also . user interface: if it's spongy then the buttons and the wheel have to if it's spongy then it's going to move , right ? So , it's going to be bend a lot . user interface: So if we try to push the buttons , it project manager: No the button would be user interface: You think it's possible ? project manager: In fact it it should be something odd shaped , with a spongy cover . Button , where do we want some buttons ? user interface: Well , usually hold 'Kay , we want it to be good also for the left-hand users , right ? industrial designer: Yeah . Sa let's say that th o It has to be basically you can only take two sides , one on ths this side where is the thumb and the other side where there is yeah also the thumb . Or you could use use this one , but I don't know if it's very comfortable , to use this one for the wheel . user interface: This for the wheel and then this for the buttons ? project manager: Yeah I think it's okay for both right and left . user interface: So if the left , we have the op project manager: I think you can turn it this way also . user interface: Yeah , the problem is if you have buttons and wheel then when you turn it around , the buttons are on the other side . project manager: And moreover , th the button ar are lighted so you you immediately identify the right side , because you have light on buttons . user interface: So the buttons have to be here and the wheel has to be Y Yeah I know , but if you hold with your left hand , and the wheel is here , and the buttons are here , then when you turn it around the buttons will be on the other side . No you you I think you will use it only on the right or left hand , whether you are righty or lefty . project manager: So , for interface we said also that we have this banana shape with button on the s on the side . I think it's we defined everything according to what we should what the decision we should take , yeah . That is to say , check if it fit the the requirement given by the users , but according to your presentation it seems to be okay . project manager: So so to prepare the prototype I would suggest that the Industrial Designer and the User Interface Designer work together . project manager: You feel free to express what you want to say ? You don't feel too constrained ? user interface: Yeah . industrial designer: user interface: Maybe you can make project manager: Okay , so user interface: okay <doc-sep>marketing: user interface: industrial designer: marketing: industrial designer: project manager: user interface: project manager: industrial designer: user interface: No , no . Not all the small buttons , you don't know project manager: Is this positive or negative , that big buttons ? industrial designer: Big buttons , positive . industrial designer: All all small buttons like when you have like a hundred buttons on your remote control , you won't know what they're working for . What are your experiences ? user interface: well I think the the the goal of a remote control is that it's it it has an influence on the T_V_ set . And I I I think it's positive if there's a a LED a LED on the corner of the of the remote . And that if you push the button the LED gives a light , and and you see that it's working . project manager: So and do they always have that ? user interface: Yeah , but No no no . marketing: at home we have a T_V_ , a video recorder , a D_V_D_ player , and a satellite receiver . But i it it had a lot of buttons on it , and you didn't know which one was what . So what ideas do you have for it , for the new remote control ? What what does it have to have ? industrial designer: The weight . industrial designer: When you push a but a button on the T_V_ , then you hear some some sort of bleep . industrial designer: marketing: Yeah I think it from a marketing point of view , it also has to look nice . So you don't won't have to change the batteries once a week or once every two weeks <doc-sep>project manager: So marketing: So project manager: I hope you're ready for this functional design meeting . we want to know to at the end to know the new project's requirement so we need to know the the user needs that we want to fulfil to fulfil the from the technical part we want to know how it going to work and third part I don't remember marketing: project manager: which is not very good . marketing: So I dunno if I can do that like this ? Yeah ? So it's being modified . I am the expert in marketing and I want to tell you about what people s want and like and dislike in remote controls , and I hope this is going to help you to to design it correctly . marketing: So basically what I suggest is that instead of deciding ourself what what could be and what should be a good remote control , let's ask people who are users of remote controls how they feel about w the current remote controls , what they like , what they don't like and and what they do with them by the way industrial designer: marketing: because they are supposed to be useful . So we've we've conducted a a survey on on the use of remote controls and I'd like to show you some of the results we found on this survey . Yeah , so basically what we found was that there are several things that the user don't like in remote controls . Current remote controls as you know they're the same as this one they're not nice colour , not nice shape , they're all the same , and they're not l good looking . what is interesting is that in fact it seems that they were people are ready to pay for nice and look and fancy looking remote control , so I think we should probably spend lots of time in and effort in that . And the other thing is that the the current remote controls are not so easy to use and it it the the current facilities that they offer do not match what people really want to use their remote controls . For instance we see that they zap very often so I think this is a very important functionality that it should be easy for them to to zap in one way or another . And most of the buttons on current remote controls are not used , so I think we should design something where some of the buttons which are those that are used should be easier to see and use than others that only a couple of people are using . Now people are very frustrated w with their remote controls industrial designer: marketing: and they for instance they don't even find it project manager: marketing: it's it's often lost somewhere in the in the in your home and nobody knows where it is . marketing: Maybe if we have something where we could ask the remote control please , where are you ? industrial designer: Yeah . of course phone you can always phone your phone project manager: marketing: but you can't phone your your remote control . industrial designer: marketing: And because of the fact that there are so many buttons in these remote controls that nobody use , industrial designer: . marketing: in fact they don't even know how to use them , so most of the the people say they they don't know how to they to use properly their r remote controls . And they are bad for R_S_I_ but I don't remember what is R_S_I_ . nobody has any idea about that ? Well I'll check with my industrial designer: Yeah , it's electromagnetic waves or something kind of maybe effect . marketing: I think it's a technical thing industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: which our industrial designer: because infrared uses some electromagnetic technology , project manager: industrial designer: and those waves have high marketing: So , it seems that it's a lot of people for a concept that we don't know user interface: But twenty six percent , do you know project manager: Or something we don't know . marketing: So anyway user interface: One of us marketing: that's for what the biggest frustration of the user and industrial designer: Yeah . marketing: s functions that may be used by u the user in the current available remote controls and well the tables look very nice to read but what is important is to understand that the power button is not used often because in general you use it only once per session , but it is very relevant . project manager: marketing: Ah now I remember what is R_S_I_ project manager: marketing: it's repetitivity stress injury . marketing: I continue my presentation so yeah , user interface: marketing: channel selection is very important , very often used . It seems that people find teletext teletext relevant , even if I personally never use it but seems that it's average relevant at least , so . project manager: I have been told that we don't consider teletext , that it's out of date now because of internet . marketing: I can tell you that in a l in a scale between one and ten relevant not relevant to relevant people scored a six on this , which is not as these these two one were had I think ten I think . marketing: Not very relevant , so if if there are good reason not to put teletext it's okay but just know that people find it somehow relevant . project manager: marketing: That's for the main functions I think and then we can ask ourself what people don't have that may be useful . One of the thing the trend that you are probably aware of is the possibility the eventual possibility of having speech recognition in your remote control , so you wouldn't have to tap tap in your buttons but just tell your remote control or whatever you need you have what you want . So we've conducted a survey about whether people would like or not to have this kind of functionality in their remote control and as we can see it really depends on the age . marketing: So now it really depends on the kind of targeting wha who are we targeting with this remote control ? industrial designer: 'Cause marketing: I think if we are targeting young people then it's probably something we have to consider . If we are targeting you very old people this is something they really don't know why they this should be so now project manager: And I don't have any conclusion , I didn't have time the meeting was very tight , so that's basically my findings . marketing: Yeah one question , user interface: you are a Market Expert marketing: yeah ? user interface: so marketing: I am . user interface: should we aim at the young people or not ? marketing: I think we should aim at the young people . marketing: In general the the early adopters of a new device are young people , less than more than user interface: Okay , then teletext is used less . project manager: So now I think it's the turn of the the I'm not sure marketing: project manager: Of the technical function , so marketing: So I think it's you , huh ? industrial designer: it's marketing: No ? user interface: That's me . project manager: what effect industrial designer: techni function of marketing: No , user requiremen industrial designer: Yeah . industrial designer: I have to do working design so project manager: So you're user interface: That's but this but number three , yes . marketing: user interface: However , Project Manager asked me to give you some presentation about technical functions design . , as I'm a more an artist marketing: project manager: user interface: that's gonna be less technical functions but more User Interface and current intentions and everything which is linked with this . marketing: project manager: user interface: 'Cause current remote controls they are never easy enough to use . marketing: project manager: user interface: It's quite a standard one , but it's not from a T_V_ , it's from a much easier device like air conditioning or something . Only buttons we need is on off , volume , channels and maybe some options or something else , and please make a click , compared to this one marketing: industrial designer: It's user interface: which one would you prefer ? I guess this . marketing: I would say the simplest one as long as there are the I find the buttons that I need every time I need a button . marketing: industrial designer: Maybe it can be yeah middle of like , between those two user interface: Yeah , and our method is going to be , provide simple industrial designer: li project manager: Oh sorry . user interface: Our question of the style , we should remember that our company marketing: user interface: puts fashion into electronics and we should never forget about it . user interface: it's very well , it's it's not an easy field to to play , you know ? So be simple . marketing: user interface: For personal preferences I think that to make a baby-proof remote control it got to be a titanium . project manager: industrial designer: marketing: user interface: It's a really good style , it going to be look like like this . And all these buttons should be easy to find and to click , 'cause when you watch a movie and you want to change something , you always try to find a good button and click it , but you should do it by touching it and finding it easily just by touch . So Press project manager: user interface: I would propose this concept for design , just few buttons , a screen with a back light which can change colours , titanium industrial designer: . And let us include two nice features into this device , first , power on and off can be made fully automatic . When you go to the sofa , take your control and point it to the T_V_ , project manager: It's off . marketing: And when does it turn off ? user interface: When you don't touch the control but you go out of the For for enough time marketing: Oh so you have a user interface: like you marketing: sensing sensor machine that knows user interface: It's a question to our technical design , our two engineers . industrial designer: project manager: marketing: Tech user interface: And another nice feature that I would like to implement is volume control . Suppose you set u you set up some volume and then you move out or you move to the other corner of the room and take your control with you . Like , you want to to change the chair or you want to move to the armchair from the sofa or something , and then the volume changes . user interface: you just control the marketing: According to your distance to and the angle maybe , if you have a stereo system . So marketing: I'm not sure about the screen , wha what is the use usefulness of the screen ? is it a touch screen by the way ? user interface: I think it can be just a menu which can be controlled with a left , right , up , down and enter . user interface: which makes it easier to find , and each can it can respond for your voice , like it can turn on the light for you just to f find it easily , yeah ? project manager: . project manager: I see that you target several s application not only T_V_ but i like we talk about universal remote control . user interface: Let it be universal , so you want to use it for your hi-fi system . S user interface: All the rest , we sh we'll put it into this menu on the screen . Since we were targeting a really soon date for the the the i issuing of this remote control I think we will only concentrate on T_V_ for the moment and then maybe m make it more generalised yeah . marketing: So for instance if I want to go to directly to channel twenty five , how would I do can I do that with this ? user interface: twenty five . marketing: that's not so easy to go just next next next when you have hundreds of channels . marketing: Or is it ? user interface: Basically you use just four or five channels , right ? marketing: Most people user interface: Yeah . user interface: So set up your T_V_ set like channels that you use they're one , two , three and five , and you will never have to go to a twenty fives channel . marketing: In fact in in one remote control that I've seen , instead of doing that d you could just say these are the cha ch channel three , twenty eight , forty eight and sixty four are those that I want to by cycled with my next button . industrial designer: But even we can have some L_C_D_ display , like you can de you can just button the number marketing: Go to channel twenty five . industrial designer: and then it go marketing: One thing is that as I said in my presentation people really do like to z zap . marketing: So even if they are only watching four or five channels , I think they want to zap out of the one hundred channels , user interface: But otherwise like we can put some display on numbers and then they can just press suppose two five they just press two and five marketing: So it would be industrial designer: and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: if you want to go for a universal then we ought to limit for functions for each of our devices . user interface: Could we carry out some research if we w really need this , like how many people really need to go to channel number twenty five and then to sixty four ? marketing: Well I could could have a look at that maybe . I am an expert in industrial design of all electronic devices and I previously devised many like digital calculators and electronic calculators . Well , as you know the basic function of remote control is sending some message to the the device , like T_V_ or V_C_R_ or D_V_D_ player etcetera . So we will have a p portable device which will send message to the the main device like T_V_ . So we need to have some energy source to do what to do the functions , what we want on this portable device . And usually this so to do these functions we need an interface , which basically some kind of pressing buttons or keys or like moving jack or something like that . And then these messages these key buttons can be transferred into some kind of message and then it will process by the chip and then it will generate some information to the main device . So , basically we need since we are focusing on our interface device remote control mainly the energy source like the battery and then we have user interface like the keypad and you know buttons we want , and then we have some chip , it's mainly digital signal processing chip because since we are I am one doing mostly digital devices we ought to have some kind of processor which take care of all these functions and put it in some digital format . And then we'll have the infrared L_E_D_ source which sends the information to the main device . Then we'll have switch in our main device to do particular operations , and we ought to do different codes for different T_V_s , project manager: industrial designer: so some T_V_s will have different encryption codes for doing s s channel changing and these things . industrial designer: Yeah yeah , because the people don't use one particular brand so project manager: . industrial designer: So we need to check their specifications and do their encryption that's passing information to the T_V_ device . industrial designer: Then , components , so we have the main energy source and then we will have some buttons and then we will have infrared source and then we have some inside some chip in in the device . And since I also want to know feedback from our Marketing Expert and User Interface , project manager: Yeah , I'm sure , because since our User Interface speech recognition and also Marketing Expert for the speech recognition is really handy , project manager: industrial designer: we can have another , like s simple speech recogniser on our D_S_B_ chip . industrial designer: Since we have some kind of energy this is our this normal battery , so this battery , once you s switch on it will take power and we can have some speech recognition and in our g generally small digital signal processing chip so that and we will put the small simple speech recogniser project manager: On industrial designer: and we can also train the speech recogniser for particular user so you just project manager: train it , okay . No , even in you can find even simple mobile device like any mobile brand you can have these voice dialers or these things , yeah . marketing: Think of a all these young people who would love to say that this remote control only works for them , user interface: Okay . project manager: And what about the price of this component ? industrial designer: So maybe we can make it in five Euros and even less than that , project manager: It okay . industrial designer: because we have only very few words like like power , switch on or some like project manager: industrial designer: then we'll have something like this we'll have volume and then we will have s particular channel , so users can listen . marketing: The user will just be able to say please can you pump up the vo pump up the volume project manager: industrial designer: Ye No , yeah , a user can use any kind of sender but they should have this prompt volume and then marketing: Okay . industrial designer: yeah volume and decrease or increase , so we try to only recognise those words marketing: Okay . industrial designer: and and because we can't really say user to say same wording marketing: Couple of words . industrial designer: And then we can have channel they can say , okay I want eight , because we don't know like users have different programmes , they don't really follow same channels strict so we just want channel number , project manager: Okay . industrial designer: we don't want like B_B_C_ or C_N_N_ or something else marketing: Of course it has to be industrial designer: because it will be complicated so we'll have only these three main basic anyway volume is not really speech recognition problem , marketing: Okay . user interface: No you know it's a conceptual question , 'cause now I see th this the picture in front of my eyes like a user taking his remote control and shouting into it , volume up , volume up , project manager: marketing: But then I think you you user interface: and and he's coming you know , he's really annoyed with this , down , up , down . project manager: marketing: First of all I I think this is not functionality that it is going to be instead of using the buttons . industrial designer: Yeah actually we we can have one switch to like switch on , on and off , this processor and This really , suppose like here we have our main chip which controls power , volume and this part and this D_S_P_s . industrial designer: Again , this to have some interaction like suppose people use D_S_P_ then it particularly sends some information to the chip like in some form , like volume and like this key . industrial designer: So it may not be like very expensive , because since we are only focusing on T_V_ remote control marketing: T_V_ . industrial designer: so and we have only few things here project manager: Sho to to train , okay . user interface: Like , if I want to put volume up I like do I take my remote control do like something like marketing: user interface: roll 'em up industrial designer: this point we didn't consider user interface: or roll 'em down . marketing: Very expensive , industrial designer: because it's it's very expensive marketing: no ? industrial designer: because v our target is only like twelve point five Euros project manager: And well , what about the idea of automatic on off on the button , yeah . user interface: why ? industrial designer: and user interface: That's just industrial designer: Yeah , marketing: And volume control . industrial designer: even automatic on off is also a bit problematic , because it different criteria for different people like so suppose people are really they just they don't touch the remote and y you don't know how much time you need to switch on or switch off marketing: So but industrial designer: and marketing: Sh should we target a a user personalised remote control ? So in in a given room there might be more than one remote control . Yeah that can be possible , especially for power settings , so user can say okay , suppose they're watching a tennis match or something then they can say okay after one hour I marketing: . project manager: Wouldn't that make arguments ? industrial designer: They can make marketing: Yeah , of course . project manager: I want user interface: industrial designer: Yeah we can have marketing: That's no problem , we will sell more . project manager: And we can increase this the strength user interface: We got a really good Market Expert . project manager: y you can buy one with user interface: Let's send more , let's sell more . project manager: industrial designer: project manager: I think , okay , we're just on time . project manager: Then we will work again for thirty minutes individual work , and we will meet again for the next meeting , and in this one want to to be more focused on the individual actions the on the components so you will focus on the component concept industrial designer: Yeah yeah . project manager: of course the U_I_D_ Mark will be focused on the user interface concept industrial designer: Mark will project manager: and our m Market Expert Sammy Benjo on the trend watching . And we have maybe we have to we say , only for T_V_ , not teletext ? marketing: project manager: I think automatic on off control it's not possible . user interface: should it be equipped with the , with speakers ? marketing: Speakers in the remote cont user interface: Like , you want to find it , you shout marketing: Oh yeah . project manager: yeah user interface: control , project manager: that's user interface: and it answers is I'm here ? Or marketing: It just beeps . project manager: yeah ? Think industrial designer: Yeah , especially the power , it really consumes project manager: -huh . industrial designer: because it should be all the time on and project manager: And marketing: Well I I heard of devices where you just whistle them and and they project manager: And it's answered . industrial designer: But it's a good feature I guess yeah we need to think about more how to incorporate it . user interface: Just don't interfere with other devices like 'cause like all these people do that their lights are turning on with clapping . marketing: Oh that's e that already exists user interface: Yeah , I got it at my home , like . Good project manager: So , marketing: we're done ? project manager: yeah , industrial designer: Yeah <doc-sep>First we need to determine the user requirements and the question that we can ask ourselves is what needs and desires are to be fulfilled by this remote control . And then we're going to determine the technical functions , what is the effect of the apparatus , what actually is it supposed to do , what do people pick up the remote and use it for . And then lastly we're going to determine its working design , how exactly will it perform its functions , that's the whole technical side of 'Kay I'll just give you a minute , 'cause it looks like you're making some notes . user interface: project manager: So what I wanna do right now is hear from all three of you , on your research that you just did . do you have a PowerPoint or no ? user interface: Yeah , it's in the should be in the m Project . marketing: Do you want us to do our PowerPoints now or user interface: You know you could you could do it yourself actually . well , the function of a remote control , as what we've been informed , is basically to send messages to the television set , for example , switch it on , switch it off , go to this channel , go to channel nine , turn the volume up , etcetera . some of the considerations is just for example the what it needs to include it's the numbers , you know , zero to nine , so you can move to a channel , the power button on slash off , the channel going up and down , volume going up and down , and then mute , a mute function . And then functions for V_H_S_ , D_V_D_ , for example , play , rewind , fast-forward , stop , pause , enter . And then other menus for D_V_ as well as T_V_ , whether that means like we can go and decide the brightness of the screen , things like that , all the more complicated functions of menus . project manager: user interface: And we can decide if that's what we want , if we want to include that on the remote , if that's something that would stay on the T_V_ itself , for example . and you can see on the left , it's got a lot more buttons , project manager: user interface: and I don't know if you can read it , but it says , step , go to , freeze , slow , repeat , program , mute , and so those are some of the buttons and so it gives you an idea of s one example . And then on the right , it's a lot more simpler , it's got volume , it's got the play the like circle set , which is play , rewind , but it's also what is fast-forward is also like next on a menu . user interface: And you have a mute button and then the numbers and the eject , and the power button . user interface: And then lastly , it's just the questions that we want to consider like what functions do we want it to include , and how simple , complex it should be ? And what functions it needs to complete . , what are needed to complete insulation process , 'cause , you know , that's something that also has to be considered and it's gonna be hopefully a one-time thing , when you set it up it should be set to go , but we have to include the functions that can allow it to set up i in the first place . Who would like to follow that one up ? Now , that we've discussed marketing: I can go . marketing: Yes , okay so we tested a hundred subjects in our lab , and we just we watched them and we also made them fill out a questionnaire , and we found that the users are not typically happy with current remote controls . Eighty percent want they've are willing to spend more , which is good news for us if we make it look fancier , and basically w we just need something that really there's some other points up there , but they it needs to be snazzy and it but yet simple . So user interface: And that meaning what ? marketing: Like They like I guess use the buttons a lot . project manager: What do you mean by the current remote controls do not match well with the operating behaviour of the user , like they have to press the buttons . marketing: whereas like the engineering she showed that the engineering ones are more complex project manager: Oh , right . marketing: and users don't really need all of the buttons that are contained on there , because they only use ten percent of the buttons really . And so people say that they typically lose it , as you yourself know , because you probably lose your remote control all the time , project manager: . marketing: and they we need something simple , because most people , well thirty four percent say that it's just too much time to learn how to use a new one , and we don't want to go we don't want to vary too far from the normal standard remote , user interface: S marketing: but they do need to be able to identify it , and R_S_I_ , I'm not very sure what that is . project manager: user interface: Wait , is that like your ergonomics like your hand movements or something ? marketing: Sh project manager: Could be , yeah . industrial designer: Do we really need t to provide more information on what R_S_I_ is ? user interface: Like project manager: Oh . marketing: yeah , that's what my web site said , I user interface: Channel , volume , power . user interface: It's like if you're holding it marketing: I think we're supposed to know it as remote control experts . marketing: But also s so the channel , the volume and the power buttons are the most important on our company website you can find like the specific statistics concerning to how much each button is used , but those are the definitely the top ones . And so personally I think that we need a modern eye-catching design , but it it really needs to be simple . So saying from y your slide , your presentation , the engineering versus the user-specified remotes , I think that we should go with something that's more user-friendly . marketing: Where the engineering ones , the boxes , tend to make it look more complicated than it really is . the functionality of the product really needs to be considered as to like what type of buttons do we really need on it . And it needs to be open to a wide range of consumers , so even though we need a small number of buttons , we also need to take in like are most people going to be using it for a D_V_D_ player , a TiVo , what what exactly are we using it for , as well as the age range . user interface: marketing: And also we found our team found that speech recognition is it's like an up-and-coming thing they really consumers are really interested in it , and since our findings found that people are willing to pay more money for a remote for it to be more high-class we could consider it . project manager: And so just to just to clarify by speech recognition you mean they would say , channel five , and the thing would go to channel five ? marketing: I guess so , yeah . marketing: Yeah , I guess we can interpret it like , we can just try out different types of speech recognition within our remote programme . project manager: Didn't they didn't our rival companies manufacture a remote that you would press the button on the T_V_ and it would the remote would beep so if you have lost it user interface: It's kinda like what the remote phone used to do . Are we ready for our last presentation , Amber ? industrial designer: Yeah , I'm just trying to move it . I didn't get a chance to complete this one , 'cause some of the tools that I was given were frustrating . industrial designer: okay , so method method of our design , I think I just start listing th some of the things that we actually need to put into this . industrial designer: We need a power source , we're gonna need a smart chip if we're gonna make it multi-functional . user interface: marketing: What exactly is a smart chip ? industrial designer: Usually a smart chip is just a chip that's been programmed and designed so that it can complete a fair range of functions . user interface: Well , how much extra would the additional chip be ? Is that gonna push us over our production costs ? industrial designer: I wouldn't think so , 'cause we could probably get it from like , in bulk , from a a newer company . user interface: industrial designer: power source , I figured , batteries , 'cause they're easily available . user interface: industrial designer: a large on-off button , demographically we're moving towards an older generation of people , so a large on-off button would probably be good . industrial designer: Selection button for various entertainment devices , so you want something that will permit you to select the D_V_D_ player or the T_V_ or the stereo system . smart chip that perverts that permits , sorry , universal application again , something that'll allow us to skip over between devices , and that's kinda it . We're gonna have a switch obviously between the power source and the rest of it , and you're gonna need the switch . extra bulb could just be for flashiness , subcomponent which would be like a way of diverting the power to different parts of the the device . the chip and of course the infra-red bulb , so it can communicate with the various devices that it needs to talk to . marketing: So what exactly we are looking at , is this like the front of the remote ? industrial designer: This is just like a rough schematic . project manager: So the red would be the front of the remote though , right ? marketing: Oh okay . user interface: Yeah , that's gonna be what's communicating with the T_V_ , but the other bulb , I think , is good to just to indicate , I'm doing something , it's sort of like a reassurance . project manager: The l the light up kind of industrial designer: Yeah , so you don't have to stare at that infra-red , marketing: Like that we know the battery's working . industrial designer: 'cause you know when the battery starts dying in your remote currently , you have to actually stare at that bulb and go , okay , when I push this button , is it working ? project manager: . project manager: Anything you wanna add for personal preferences though , you f you said already that we needed a large on-off button , you think . Anything else ? industrial designer: I think that that's a good idea , because you know that's one of the most important buttons . user interface: Well , should it be larger buttons in general , you know like the examples that I had , they were swi quite small . So should we try and go for something that has l larger buttons ? marketing: I think we should . I think we should definitely go with buttons that don't look like a normal remote , 'cause most remotes have small square buttons , project manager: . Okay , let's talk about all of our We'll come to decision later about all the components that we need to include , let's wrap up this one , and I'm gonna go back to my PowerPoint , 'cause we need to discuss the new project requirements which you might've already seen flashed up on the screen a bit earlier . And we th need to promote our company more , so we need to somehow include our colour and our company slogan on the remote . project manager: in States we don't have it , but it's like they just have this channel where just has news and weather , kind of sports , user interface: I know . marketing: What is it ? user interface: project manager: it's very bland looking , it's just text on the screen , user interface: Yeah , project manager: not even user interface: it's like black , black and white kind of project manager: Yeah , just black with just text . industrial designer: You can also get the kind of the T_V_ guide so user interface: It'll give you the sports . marketing: Wait , is it like the Weather Channel where it's got like the ticker running on the bottom or something ? project manager: Kind of . project manager: So anyway user interface: You can pick sports , you can pick the news , you entertainment , industrial designer: Seemingly . marketing: So it's like a separate channel from like what you're watching ? project manager: Right . project manager: Nobody needs to go to the teletext channel to check the news , and we have twenty four hour news channels now too , so Those are our new product requirements . industrial designer: So , do we have to include the company colour within that ? project manager: Yes . project manager: What we're going to do right now is come to some decisions , definitive that we can all agree on , about the target group and the functions and just definite things that we need to do and then we'll close up the meeting . So our target group is You mentioned older people ? Would it just be universal for everyone , you think ? user interface: project manager: Because I think even if something has large buttons , as long as they are not childishly large , like even technically user interface: It's gonna make it nicer . they want something user-friendly , so industrial designer: well , even if we kept the regular standard size of remote , if we reduced the buttons down to the ones that people are saying that they use the most often and a couple extra , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: 'cause they're saying they only use ten per cent of them , project manager: Yeah . project manager: Okay , so we want for our target group would we say , young and old , all age ranges , all , not kids obviously , right ? Or kids ? marketing: No , kids need to know how to use a remote , I would think . project manager: Okay , so we're going to go anywhere from kids to adult in the age range marketing: Yeah , I think we need it all . project manager: what about technic technical specifications , like how how technically literate are these people who are going to be using our remote ? industrial designer: marketing: I would say we should say dumber than the average person . industrial designer: how 'bout little to no , because there is no way that you are gonna be able to make it no . And we also need to determine the specific functions of this , just to get it all out on paper . So we said it needs to send messages to the T_V_ , needs to change the channel , turn on and off , just basic simple stuff like this . And we wanna keep I'll make a note here that we wanna keep the number of buttons down . industrial designer: Do we want this thing to be able to be found easily ? user interface: project manager: I think so . user interface: project manager: A finding kind of device or industrial designer: And marketing: I need we we need a like homing device . industrial designer: like if this is gonna get lost underneath the coach , how are we going to accommodate the quick ability to find it ? user interface: Oh right yeah okay . industrial designer: What if we gave it a charger ? And on the charger , just like a phone , like you get a portable phone and it's got a charger , and if you d leave your phone somewhere , you push the button to find it , and it finds th the phone beeps for you . marketing: Do you think people'll really go for that though ? industrial designer: It's useful for the remote phone . project manager: Would that add to our costs at all , I wonder ? marketing: I would think so , because you'd have to develop a base . user interface: Well , if you have the base , you could start putting in a charger and then you have a different kind of battery . Is it going to have a charger , or is it going to be run strictly off batteries ? And we also need to deal with the issue you mentioned of speech recognition , if we want that . user interface: Well , then we could marketing: Do w user interface: If we have the speech recognition then we can start aiming at a like another kind of more handicapped disabled demo demographic . marketing: Well , th there's the people who desire speech recognition , there's the different demog demographics have different desires , I don't know if you guys ge project manager: You could we could hook it up . marketing: It wouldn't copy onto the the thing 'cause it's black , project manager: Oh . marketing: They're the ones that get addicted to soap operas and industrial designer: project manager: And if and if we introduced it when they're this age , they're going to probably always buy a remote that has user interface: Well marketing: just sitcoms and stuff . user interface: Well , then then do you put the voice recognition do you put the r like receiver on the actual television , in the base , or in the actual remote , marketing: So user interface: 'cause then you've already got remote in your hand , why you just gonna speak to the remote , project manager: Right . user interface: whereas if you just speak in general and you don't have to have the remote in your hand and like talk at it . Well , do we wanna include the numbers like zero through nine ? Can we conceive of leaving them out ? project manager: . marketing: Wait , on the remote itself ? project manager: user interface: Yeah , like you have one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , zero . user interface: Well , I don't know , if you can like well project manager: Unless you could say the channel . user interface: I don't know , if there's just a way of leaving them out ? industrial designer: I think people would find that too foreign . project manager: And also remember that in this day in age we need , you know , like a hundred button , too . marketing: You definitely need project manager: I used to have a remote that did not even go up past like fifty . So I couldn't whenever I got cable , I had to get a new T_V_ . I guess , we're gonna discuss the project financing later , making sure that we can fit all of the stuff that we want to on our budget . industrial designer: Yeah , 'cause I don't have any material pricing information available to me at the moment , so project manager: 'Kay . user interface: And how do we marketing: I feel like a ye I feel like a yellow one would be too garish . project manager: We could just have the logo in yellow , user interface: Can't make it entirely project manager: or maybe a yellow light for the keys . If you have this sort of strip kind of down at the bottom the base of it , just like yellow with the R_R_ . So we've simplified , we don't need all those play , fast-forward , rewind , user interface: Right , yeah . project manager: So we've pretty much pared it down to on-off , volume , mute , channel up and down , the numbers Yeah . project manager: can we go back to I'm gonna look really quickly back at those user interface: Two examples . project manager: Which one is yours , technical functions or functional requirement ? user interface: Oh , it's a Yeah . marketing: Yeah , audi audio settings and screen settings , we need those like audio settings mono , stereo , pitch , screen settings like brightness , colour , or do we just want that accessed accessed from the television itself ? project manager: The T_V_ . how often does the average user need to do that kind of stuff ? user interface: Well , the other option is sort of like down at the bottom , like farther away , you just have this sort of box inset where it's like the buttons that you don't use as much , but occasionally you will use . user interface: and so it's like marketing: Yeah , 'cause we need to we definitely need to have buttons for like sub-titles and things like that . It's 'cause the foreign film market is expanding and stuff , and like on television like I know f k living in Los Angeles it's tons of Spanish network television if it has English sub-titles it's definitely helpful . project manager: Couldn't we do that all through one button , something , a menu button , that pops up with a menu on the T_V_ that says , you know , audio , video , whatever , language , user interface: I don't well , I don't know . user interface: Well , that could be No you could just double up with like the channel or the volume buttons . marketing: Such as , yeah , the one the one over there on the left the engineering centred one . project manager: That one ? user interface: So we just have it like add a menu button then for the various things needed , project manager: Right . user interface: including v voice recognition if we have any like settings for voice recognition now project manager: In the middle perhaps . Anybody have anything else they'd like to bring up in this meeting ? industrial designer: I had something , but I forgot . After this meeting we're gonna be sent a questionnaire and summary again which we need to reply to that e-mail . I'm gonna put the minutes I put the minutes for the first meeting already in the project documents folder , if you'd like to review them . The I_D_ is going to work on the components concept , U_I_D_ the user interface concept , and you're going to do some trend watching . And if anybody has anything they would like to add ? No ? Okay , well , this meeting is officially over <doc-sep>So basically we've got three things , and we've got forty minutes in which to for this meeting to to discuss the various options . industrial designer: We have a I guess we have a presentation each , 'cause I've got one . so do we want to do the presentation first , or do we want to W I I got or or three things basically , relating to the remote being only for T_V_ . project manager: So in fact it actually f we won't be forestalled in a sense . user interface: What is it ? industrial designer: I'm not quite sure how it user interface: I think you've got to do control F_ eight . user interface: Ah there , marketing: Oh hang on , user interface: it's doing something . I've just got three sections , first is the research I made on the on the remote control itself . And then also the methods in which these components interact together for the remote to actually do what you want it to do and how it connects with the television . industrial designer: We then have the user interface , which is basically the like the the buttons on the actual remote . And then the sender , which is usually , I've found , an infra-red device which sends a signal to the actual television . and the last part is receiver which is important in the system but is not actually part of the remote itself , because that's obviously found in the television . I'm gonna have to actually draw on the board because it was a little tricky on PowerPoint to get this working , so . S do we have a cloth to wipe this down with , or ? Oh I'll j project manager: there's the rubber on the right , I think . Okay , so we start off with a battery suppl no , a power supply which we'd probably get it's probably gonna be the battery . we then have a particular button , which may be that's obviously there's lots and lots of different buttons . that sends after you press that that sends the message to the chip , which then sends It sort of interprets which button you've pressed and then sends the appropriate message to the sender . That's the remote in itself , that's the components of the remote and how they work together . this is the chip itself , which then , and that's the that's the infra-red sender . going on to personal preferences , I've said that battery seems the best option for the actual remote , just because of the size . You don't want a a cable attached to the remote otherwise it's not it's not really a remote . and then the sender , marketing: industrial designer: and infra-red has been used quite successfully . so the m basic method of this is to send a signal from the remote to the television set , so that a desired function is performed . an example of the function could be to change the volume up or down , so obviously you need two different buttons for that . by the look of it they both have kind of play and fast forward , rewind functions , so I think they incorporate a kind of video function which we won't have to worry about . So , it's got nice big buttons , it's got a very limited number of buttons . I like the use of the kind of symbols like the triangles and the squares and the arrows as well as the words on the kind of play functions and all that . user interface: Will you be presenting that in a bit ? project manager: But I got I got an email that basically said to make sure that whatever device we come up with at the end of the day had to incorporate the corporate colour and slogan . So I'm guessing that I notice on the bottom there it's got what's that ? A_P_O_G_E_E_ that might be the corporate colour scheme , although the only the only colour I can see in that is the red . industrial designer: Would you be able to get rid of the the extra buttons here , the the sort of circular section , because that seems to be for a video as well . So we could dispense with that little bit as well and just get it down to just the numbers and the volume . Possibly ? user interface: What do you mean by the circular section ? industrial designer: J yeah yeah yeah j yeah user interface: Like all of that bottom bit ? project manager: industrial designer: just this little bit is that I think that's still a video remote part , user interface: Yeah . project manager: Well b w user interface: how often do you use seven , eight and nine ? I think just one to six and then channel up and down should be enough . project manager: Well th the on the user interface: Like how often do you hit nine ? project manager: Well for for general television purposes obviously you have channels one to five at this point in time , marketing: But but industrial designer: It's just people are used to seeing that , so if we didn't have them then they might think it's project manager: But , well possibly but the the other thing is that with the current expansion of channels in the process of taking place , certainly the button up and down , but how many channels do we have to actual television channels do we have to prepare for ? I would have thought that it's forever expanding and at the moment we've got although you've onl you've got the five standard , you've got the B_B_C_ have come up with a further six industrial designer: project manager: and there's I don't know exactly how many channels there are on when you take into account Sky and various other various others . project manager: So I would've thought that we wouldn't , you know , rather user interface: . project manager: Okay , if the time of flicking from one to other , but presumably it'll take a second user interface: project manager: 'cause you have to be able to stop it . Maybe you could have a fast forward on the on the channels that w and then you could dispense with more otherwise . industrial designer: user interface: some remotes have kind of favourite options where if you always flick from channel one to channel six , if that's a favourite you just like by-pass two to five . industrial designer: project manager: Yeah , I s I suppose in a sense you could have if you've got a hundred channels then if you had sort of an easy way of getting rather than having to go one to a hundred , you could go one to one to ten , ten to twenty industrial designer: user interface: . project manager: and then have a second button to get you to the actual channel you want marketing: user interface: But I think a lot of like Cable and Sky and stuff , that would be tuned to one channel , and then you'd have another remote for all of those channels . industrial designer: I suppose with nine you've got the the like the last one which makes the tenth means you it's like multiples you can put them together so you can make any number . industrial designer: So with that we'd kind of by-pass any problems with project manager: Yeah Well that's true , yeah , industrial designer: Yeah . I think that's just for a video , so we wouldn't need any of that at all . industrial designer: So we could get it down to what ? project manager: If it's just for T_V_ , which is what it is at the moment . industrial designer: So we get to How many buttons have we got ? We've just got ten , eleven twelve th We got fourteen that we need . Well we've we've got that it's remote for T_V_ only otherwise project would become too complex with which would endanger the time to market was one of the considerations . project manager: I'm I don't know d did you have that information behind the marketing , marketing: project manager: or was I meant to give you that information ? marketing: I'm not sure . project manager: Right , okay , so basically time to market seems to be important , therefore speed of delivery . industrial designer: user interface: marketing: user interface: Okay , so is everyone happy with that ? industrial designer: Ah yes yes , that seems good . industrial designer: marketing: Right , we've done some research into the functional requirements that people want out of their remote control . And first off we should state that th the remote control's for controlling the T_V_ and how do people use it ? We asked them sort of which buttons were useful for them . how d how does a remote control look and feel for them , and what improvements would would they like to remote control . And we did that by sort of giving them a questionnaire that we'd prepared and asking them to fill in the answers . And three quarters of them found that remote controls are ugly and that a sort of even higher proportion would spend more for a sort of s a fancier remote control And that of all the buttons on the remote control , the sort of setting buttons for sort of the picture picture and brightness and the audio settings , they weren't used very often at all . And young people were quite receptive to this , but as soon as we got sort of over about into a thirty five to forty age forty five age group and older , people people weren't quite so keen on speech recognition . There's a lot more th there's a lot lot more older people who didn't know whether they wanted it or not as well . we also asked what frustrated people about remote controls and the number one frustration was that the remote was lost somewhere else in the room and that they couldn't find it . And the second second biggest frustration what that if they got a new remote control , it was difficult to learn all the buttons and all the functions , and to find your way around it . Okay , so My personal preferences from the marketing is that we need to come up with some sort of sleek sort of good looking high high-tech A design which looks high-tech , basically . and that we should come up with fewer buttons than most of the controls on the market , and we should sort of concentrate on the channels and sort of power , and also volume and that sort of thing , as as Louisa said . we could maybe come up with a menu , a sort of a an L_C_D_ menu for other functions on the remote control . and maybe we could think about speech recognition as well , because sort of young people are perhaps the ones that are gonna buy buy our new product if we aim it at sort of you know sort of a high-tech design . And we could maybe think about using speech recogniti recognition as a way to find the remote control if it's lost in a room , rather than sort of having it to speech recognition to change the channels . 'Cause there's a problem with that in that the television makes noise , so it could end up talking to itself and changing its channel . project manager: What was that last wee bit there ? user interface: Do a lot of marketing: about speech recognition ? project manager: Speech recognition , user interface: marketing: Yeah . marketing: Youn young people pref Yeah , they s they said that they'd be interested in a remote control which offered that possibility and as you go up through the age groups , people got less and less interested in sort of a a remote control that you could talk to , so . industrial designer: No what I maybe think is it seems the technology would be quite advanced for that and they might end up costing more than our twelve fifty budget for for the speech recognition . industrial designer: And possibly the thing about the about the remote being lost we could have You know with your mobile phone , you lose that and you can ring it . Maybe we can have some kind of sensor which is kept somewhere where you can some kind of buzzer system between the two . Yeah , we'd have t that would mean we'd have to put two products together as well , industrial designer: That is true , yes . user interface: There's key rings that you kind of whistle at or clap at , I can't remember , and then they whistle back , or something like that . So industrial designer: So I guess it'd be something we could like attach to the or like the same technology could be put inside the inside the remote . project manager: Well if you're trying to avoid having a second product 'cause obviously you could have a second product that gave you the right pitch which would set the remote off to say here I am sort of thing , you know without sound recognition . I dunno talking about vo obviously if you've got voice recognition then you can do it in that way because it'll recognise the voice and you can give it a command , a set command whatever that happened to be . project manager: But you've then got the point if if you're not going with voice recognition then industrial designer: you could have an option to turn it off . industrial designer: So that would solve the problems with the T_V_ kind of speaking to the remote and changing its own channels . marketing: project manager: So Any sugges Well , any conclusions ? marketing: would it take quite a while to sort of develop the speech recognition software in the remote control ? user interface: project manager: Well if it does then we can't . project manager: because we've got th th three primary requisites from from and email that was sent to me whereby we had The design logo was one , which we've already mentioned . We've got the remote was only for the television and not for because that would make it too complex and we have to get it market quickly . project manager: And the third thing was that teletext as far as the management is concerned , is becoming dated due to the popularity of the internet . project manager: So we're being focused effectively directly at a television and it seems to me that the management is wanting us to go down a narrow path and not opening out . project manager: So anything that is to be added , such as voice recognition et cetera has to be very simple and has to be very quick industrial designer: Has to be simple enough to project manager: because time to market is is critical . S industrial designer: I suppose if we could get something in which was quite quick and simple that would give us an advantage over the other remotes . project manager: Added extras would be nice , but the primary consideration is to get the project finished within this short time window , which effectively now is sort of four hours . d d I think I think first and foremost we've gotta get to the end and then get to the end with added extras if possible . project manager: and how we were planning to proceed so that at the next meeting each person that's got a a a task to do is clear from this meeting what that task is . And then we can report back at the next meeting and say right okay yes , we've achieved this or we haven't achieved this , this is how far we've progressed . project manager: So we have to come effectively to the decision on the remote functions so that you can decide what you're gonna be doing . And if dur between the time of this meeting finishing and the next meeting starting , if you get any additional information that only you have at that point in time you'd think would be relevant to other people in terms of their des decision making process , then we should communicate that as quickly as possible and not wait until the next meeting . project manager: so that rather than coming you know If you get the information just before the next meeting that's fine . Come along with it in the next meeting , we can discuss it then and take whatever action is appropriate . project manager: But if you get it well before the next meeting , let everybody else know 'cause that might have an impact on their on what they come up with effectively at the next meeting . project manager: Right , is there marketing: So do we need to decide on the functions now ? S project manager: I would guess so . user interface: Well I think it'd be really easy and it'd be a big advantage if we did have some sort of kind of whistle back kind of function . marketing: Yeah and Yeah and that was that was the number one sort of frustration that people said , so . user interface: marketing: I don't think there's anything else on the market that does that , so . project manager: I w well i industrial designer: Maybe we should concentrate just on the whistle back function at the moment , project manager: Something simple . if if our primary consideration is to get it there in time , time's short , industrial designer: and if something comes back project manager: you want something to meet the major concerns of the consumer so that we can have that as a selling point for the product , user interface: user interface: And that wouldn't put off the kind of older generation either , 'cause everyone can whistle or clap , and they wouldn't have to be kind of scared of this new technology . project manager: On the basis that if we've got if we're catering to the whole age range , you want something that's easy to do , industrial designer: project manager: now something that doesn't like whis marketing: No not everyone can whistle , can they , though ? project manager: Well I I I don't know . Well If you think that more people can whistle than clap then that's fine , then go for that option , user interface: project manager: but if I would have thought that more people could clap rather than whistle , marketing: No , industrial designer: I'd go more marketing: clapping , I think clapping , industrial designer: Yeah , f more for clap . user interface: 'Kay we've already decided that we don't need a teletext button , haven't we ? project manager: . Ef effectively that's what the that's what they're saying , user interface: Is that one of the project manager: that if if people are now using the internet then you don't need teletext , user interface: . industrial designer: and then the the little digit next to it which kind of enabled you to put them together . I think nowadays you can just get ones where it gives you a sort of a second or two to press another number , project manager: Yeah . industrial designer: Okay , ten numbers user interface: industrial designer: and then some kind of device to allow marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: Did we decide anything about the other functions ? As in setting the audio and tuning it and stuff like that ? You had an had an idea about the menu ? marketing: we could possibly put an L_ a sort of a L_C_D_ menu in , but that again is probably an expense that industrial designer: But just thinking people probably you don't have you only have to probably tune in the T_V_ once , but you have to be able to tune it that once . industrial designer: So and if finally the T_V_ breaks , you get a new one , you're gonna have to be able to tune it . project manager: But the but that's relying on the television market changing to an automatic industrial designer: So that'll be in marketing: Yeah . But at the moment it's not , so it seems to me that you have to have a device that caters , 'cause otherwise it would make it your device would become inoperable , or only operable in certain circumstances industrial designer: Yeah . project manager: And it's also m it's the the product we've got is something that's at the I would have said the lower end of the s of the cost scale , so we're not really going for something that's terribly high-tech . I s I suppose if people are buying remotes , then they're probably buying it to replace another remote project manager: Possibly . marketing: we're maybe talking about replacing remotes for slightly older televisions , so we maybe need to keep the the tuning function in . industrial designer: Would you maybe have like one menu button , then you'd use the other buttons , maybe the number buttons to actually do the separate functions . user interface: and it was too dark , so I had to go through it and turn the brightness up . industrial designer: and then a menu function and maybe sort of a slightly more advanced instruction booklet to come with it , to guide Presu I think it'd be quite hard just for people to grasp just off like the menu use different buttons you maybe have to have like some better instructions of how that would actually work . marketing: I'm not sure whether the sort of having people have a booklet 'cause one the second most annoying thing that people found was having to learn the new one . marketing: So maybe next to each of the buttons , you know each of them could have a number and then also a function written next to it , so you're basically pressing industrial designer: that also goes back to the original design when we saw those two , and there was the one on the left hand side which had all like the double functions and stuff which kind of looked too busy and had too much on it , so . user interface: Well , if we're trying to keep it slee sleek and sexy as well , have you seen those remotes where kind of the bottom bit slides down , so there's kind of everything else revealed ? marketing: Okay . user interface: So you don't use it that much , you don't have to see it all the time . project manager: Right we've got five minutes before we wind up this meeting , so I've been told . And that'll be better for the older generation as well 'cause , well my dad doesn't like anything that you've got to kinda flick through a menu , project manager: Ah . industrial designer: So we're gonna have to have to work out what's gonna be on these other functions as as well . marketing: sorta project manager: That's right so we're dis So you've got which ones are gonna be on the front and which ones are gonna be on the back . industrial designer: So sh Should we decide in the next couple of minutes , and then marketing: user interface: I know it's probably like not an issue to raise here , but the whole thing about not using your standby because of the like waste of electricity . Have you seen the adverts ? Like if you boil the kettle that's full that's a waste . user interface: If you leave your telly on standby it powers Blackpool for a certain amount of time . project manager: So so are you having the stand-by on the front , then ? marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: We can send out a flier with the device saying that you shouldn't leave it on stand-by . industrial designer: are we gonna have the channel up and down as well as the number buttons ? marketing: 'cause yeah the market research said there is quite a lot of people do just zap around and flick , so . industrial designer: So we've got ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen there ? project manager: Channel up and down . project manager: What else have we got ? What was that , sixteen ? marketing: Numbers is ten , volume is twelve , project manager: Volume button . industrial designer: Maybe if we're gonna run out of time , one of us should come up with a list of these and then get back at the next meeting just at the start and say what they're gonna be . project manager: anything else ? You're also gonna have the channel tuner , as it were . marketing: And then maybe sort of an enter button for sort of s you know , saying that you want that particular thing tuned in . So you go up and down and then it pick it finds something and then you wanna press enter to select it , yeah . We don't really need any other audio funct functions because it's just volume up , volume down . user interface: So I think there's quite a lot of like Dolby surround studio , surround sort of things . industrial designer: Do they have their own do they have their own controls on their actual products , then , marketing: Yeah . industrial designer: or do you have to do it via the remote ? user interface: I think they've got their own controls in this kind of like hidden panel . industrial designer: Yeah I suppose if we've got their if they've got their own controls then we can avoid it for ours just to keep it simple . user interface: Oh no , like there's kind of individual buttons for them , like on the T_V_ remote . industrial designer: Maybe unless something comes up then we should I think project manager: Well you might get some research

The new remote design should incorporate a lost-and-found function for easy retrieval, as well as a modern and eye-catching design to differentiate it from standard remotes. Additionally, speech recognition should be included to allow users to control their devices through voice commands. However, the industrial designer expressed concerns about the cost of implementing advanced technology like speech recognition. The idea of automatic power control was also discussed, but ultimately abandoned due to price issues. Instead, the proposal to design a personalized product with customizable settings was accepted. The remote should be lightweight and feature fewer, larger buttons that are rubberized and bleep when pressed. A LED indicator and affordable materials like plastic were suggested, and compatibility with existing products on the company's website was emphasized. The remote should also be battery-saving. While the idea of a wheel was deemed too expensive, the inclusion of a backlight on the push buttons was considered novel enough. Motion-activated backlighting was suggested as a useful feature that wouldn't add significant cost.